Mexico City: Naked Protests, Pyramids and Dia de Muertos

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Arriving in Mexico City, we were ever so slightly alarmed. Mexico had not been part of our original round the world agenda, but we had decided to go there after reviewing our dreadful finances in an Auckland McDonalds. When we were first making plans, we were going to spend the last four weeks of our trip driving from the west coast of the States to the east, before flying home from New York. However, due to our meagre monetary state, we realised we would probably not make it further than Utah on our grand road trip, before having to sell our kidneys in order to make it the rest of the way home. Hence the plan was hatched to spend two of those weeks in Mexico, where our backpacker buck would stretch much further, and if we did need to sell an organ or two they would be much easier to sell on the black market.

We knew virtually nothing about the country until about the day before we flew there. It was then that we panicked after realising that we were going to a country whose first language was not, in fact, English; that we knew nothing of the culture; and Mexico was quite far off the clearly defined backpacker trail we had been strictly following thus far. At this point, I still thought it was actually part of South America, not North; and if asked to say the first things that popped into my head when I thought of Mexico, I would say piñatas, tequila and Spring Break in Tijuana (not mine unfortunately, the ones on the OC). Franny had been to Mexico previously, but we decided that her experiences on her all-expenses-paid trip to a luxury Cancun resort may not give a lot of insight into the inner workings of Mexican culture. Instead we were to rely on information from others and that from our small guidebook of the country. The information gained led us to our slightly alarmed state on arriving in Mexico City, with us being sure that we were going to be robbed and kidnapped the minute after stepping off the plane.

Taking some sage advice, we took a pre-paid taxi to our pre-booked hostel in the historic centre of Mexico City in the Zocalo. The traffic was manic, and we peeked through our fingers as our fearless taxi driver and the rest of the city’s motorists changed lanes with reckless abandon. Extreme sports I enjoy, but you could not pay me enough to make me drive in Mexico City. After settling into our hostel we went off in search of food. In a city with more than 600 restaurants, you would think this would be easy, but all we could find were shoe shops, dress shops and pharmacies mile after mile. We eventually stumbled upon a small shopping centre where we thought there was bound to be a food court. We found one and ‘experienced’ the oddest meal either of us had ever been served; comprising of soup with tortilla floaters, a small plate of spaghetti with runny cheese, then a solitary chicken drumstick on a dinner plate with a dollop of bean curd. We passed on desert but were quite proud of our attempts at ordering in Spanish.

After an early night catching up on lost sleep, Franny discovered she had tonsillitis, but needing sustenance, we had lunch in Mexico Viejo: a restaurant right next to our hostel that we managed to completely miss the previous day. By this point we were discovering that hardly anyone spoke English. I am not so arrogant to believe that everyone should do so, but having not expected to come to a Spanish speaking country on our trip, I had not had a chance to brush up on my language skills. We were, however, managing to get by on my high school Spanish and some dodgy hand gestures, and I began to teach Franny some of the little that I knew. At lunch she asked where the bathrooms were, and then buoyed by her success decided to ask the waiter about desert, and said “Donde esta the chocolate?” in her perfect Scottish accent. The waiters already thought we were a bit funny but it got her what she wanted, and she ate chocolate torte for pudding.

In the afternoon we bought some more layers. Having mistakenly thought Mexico would be hot, we had brought minimal warm clothes and only flip-flops. It turned out to be quite cold indeed so we bought some cheap trainers and some excellently priced clothes in the uber-fashionable C&A. Staying in a city with so much culture, we decided we should really find some, so after stumbling upon the Fine Arts Museum, we went in to get cultured, innit. I discovered some amazing paintings by Orozco, Meza, Velasco and Siqueiros, as well as discovering the fact that art kind of bored Franny. On the walk back to the hostel we tried our best not to look like tourists, as we had been told that pick-pocketing was rife, and even the locals wore their bags around the front of their bodies. There were many different kinds of police and they really were everywhere. We were not sure if this was normal or if more police officers had been posted on the streets because of the Dia De Muertos festival that was starting that night. It turned out that the Zocalo was an excellent place to be for the festival, and the whole square was filled with colorful shrines, stages and statues.

With only two days left in Mexico City, the next day we cheated a bit and got on a tour bus. We discovered that buses apparently worked on ‘Fiji time’ and the promised 15 minutes until the next bus turned into more than an hour. We were given some entertainment however, in the form of a protest by indigenous Mexicans in the Zocalo, who were shouting and holding placards and who were also completely naked. Eventually the bus arrived, and we were driven through the CBD, and as we drove past them we were told about the Monumento a la Revolucion, the Monumento a la Independencia, the Statue of Diana that had an ass to rival Beyoncé, Chapultepec Park and the areas of Condesa and Polanco. We got off the bus to visit the Anthropology Museum half way through the tour, which was very interesting in its information on the past civilizations in Mexico. After getting back on the bus, there was still more than two hours of the tour still to sit through. The first hour of the tour before the museum had been good, but waiting in the infamous Mexico City traffic for another two hours afterwards was a bit too much to take.

The following day we were picked up for the tour from our hostel, and driven in the minibus by our tour guide Adrian. It was only a short drive to our first stop at Tlatelolco, where we were told about this ancient ceremonial centre and the hieroglyphs on the buildings’ remains. There was no room in Mexico City for the Aztecs when they first arrived, so they built on the islands in the central lake and then proceeded to conquer all the peoples around them. This created such bad feeling that when the Spanish arrived in the 1600’s, those conquered peoples rose up with the Spanish to defeat the Aztecs. The Spanish then tore down all the Aztec temples and built cathedrals in their place, which would help to undermine the beliefs of the original settlers and instill Catholicism as the main religion of the population.

The Tlatelolco site was also where 300 protesting students were murdered by the government shortly before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. There was a mass cover-up so that the world would not find out. The site is now commemorated to all those who lost their lives that day.

Next we drove to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the catholic symbol most worshipped by Mexicans. Thirty years after the Spanish conquered Mexico, Catholicism still needed to be solidified as the religion of the masses. There are two versions given on how the Shrine came into being: The Myth and The Miracle. The Miracle purports the idea that a man named Juan Diego was visited by vision of Guadalupe, who told him she needed a shrine to be built in her honor. The priests at the abbey did not believe Juan Diego and asked for proof. Guadalupe told Diego to gather flowers and take them to the priests, so he gathered some Castillian roses and put them in his tilma (cape). When he arrived at the abbey, he opened his cape to find the flowers had miraculously imprinted themselves on the inside to form the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Myth is that the Catholic Church needed a miracle to encourage the faith of the population, and fabricated the story as well as the image on the cape. Whatever the real version of events, people still travel from all over the world to see the shrine and pay homage to Guadalupe.

From the Shrine temple, we drove out of the city to a Teotihuacan reserve, where we were taught some of the ways the indigenous people live. We were shown how some of the handicrafts were made and also given shots of mescal and agave, from which tequila is made. After a traditional Mexican lunch, we headed up to the Teotihuacan pyramids. The Spanish had allowed the pyramids to remain in Mexico, as the Teotihuacan people had long since disappeared and held no threat to the Spanish conquering of the country. The pyramids are essentially temples, but very little is known by archaeologists about Teotihuacan civilization. Franny got a bit of vertigo climbing up the steps of the Sun Temple, so I climbed to the top on my own. The view was incredible, and it was such a clear day I was able to see for miles around.

As much as I loved Mexico City and even though there was so much still to see there, we had to move on to see more of the country. Franny was not that enamored by the city and said she often felt in danger. I think, given more time, one would get used to Mexico City, with its noise and pollution and busyness. There are so many things left to see there, that I have put it on the long list of places I need to go back to. However, next we take the bus north to see more of small town Mexico, with the first stop in a little place called Guanajuato.

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