MEXICO - Mexico City, San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato
We touched down in
Mexico City and immediately the difference was obvious. The airport
was full of currency exchange places, rather than just the one. On
the way to our apartment, familiar sights like Starbucks, McDonalds
and 7-Eleven were all over the place. We’re back in the land of
choice..!
Well that's quite the greeting!
We arrived at our
apartment after taking an Uber that cost something silly like £1.50
for a half an hour drive. We had been given instructions that it was
next to a cyber cafe, and they’d have the keys. Well, sure enough
it was, and they handed a set of keys to a lady who showed us how to
get in. No less than 4 different locks to be opened until we
eventually found our way into the fort we’d be staying in for the
next couple of nights. We ventured out to find food and didn’t have
to go too far before we found a taco stand. Life is glorious again.
Our first day we
took a wander into the centre of the old city. Pedestrian streets
lined with shops, food, convenience stores. It felt crazy compared to
the Cuban streets of very little, but it was almost a relief to be
back to something we considered ‘normal’. Diana then realised she
could top up on clothes, shoes, make up and god knows what else, so
that was… Fine.
We had found a free
walking tour for the afternoon, so decided to take the day to work
out the basics of when we arrive in a new place (change up some old
currency, find out the best ATMs to use so we aren’t hit with huge
charges etc). Turns out that we’d missed our chance to change up
the rest of our Brazilian Real, only airports accept them, so we’ll
have to keep an eye out for that..!
Lunch consisted of
more amazing food, and, despite Diana’s initial reluctance, I
ordered two of the more popular drinks that seem to be everywhere.
‘Agua de Jamaica’, and ‘Agua de Horchata’. Turns out, that’s
hibiscus water, and a type of rice drink. Jamaica (pronounced
ham-eye-ka, not jam-ayy-ka) is like a weak, sweet juice, sometimes
with the actual hibiscus flowers in them, and Horchata is now
something Diana orders whenever available, so it pays to take a
chance every now and then!
Tasty food at last!
We realised we were
a good 3km away from the start of the walking tour, so headed back
into the city to begin. After introducing ourselves, it became clear
in a few minutes that it would be a private tour for the pair of us,
which although I’m sure sounds good, it’s actually pretty
awkward, especially on a tour where they expect payment in just tips.
Much easier when you can share that burden and meet others!
We were showed the
nearby ruins, and he explained that the area was considered the
centre of Mexico (literally meaning bellybutton of
the moon in Nahuatl, a native language). He also told
us the story that the natives were expecting some type of sign from
their gods, and when the Spanish showed up, they believe this to be
it. In doing so, they sent very expensive gifts, animal hides and so
forth, to try and appease them. Apparently, all this achieved was to
make the Spanish believe that the area of Mexico City was a lot more
affluent than it actually was, and so decided to conquer it.
Charming.
It also turns out
that the city is built on the remnants of a huge lake. This means
that an awful lot of the city of sinking, and, combined with
earthquakes, means that a lot of restructuring has occurred,
especially in the main cathedral of the city. A large pendulum is
hung from the ceiling so they can see how much has moved, and walking
through parts of it and the rest of the city you can see parts
leaning, brickwork misaligned and sloped floors. And we hadn’t even
started on the tequila yet.
That building used to be straight, but now leaning almost over the road
We had originally
only booked a couple of nights in the city, as everyone says how it’s
so unsafe and ‘just another city’. Well, the area we were in
certainly didn’t feel like that, it seemed to have a huge amount of
things to do and even though our area wasn’t particularly safe
feeling, it certainly didn’t feel like we were in any trouble. The
street we were staying on had a few gay clubs along them, the
bouncers all wearing bulletproof vests and in some cases carrying
guns, so that was questionable. Otherwise though, we decided to
extend our stay an extra night, and change our plans to see more to
the west, where we’d stop here again on our way back.
Pig biscuits!
Fancy post office
Unusual sculpture in the post office (it's now part post office, part art installation)
The next day we
headed to a museum of anthropology. Once we’d established how to
use the bus/metro system anyway, which, similar to London, was
cashless. We hopped on the bus, found out we couldn’t pay, were
dropped off at the next station and luckily could buy a card from the
machines there. By the time we’d worked all this out and arrived,
it was about 11am. Plenty of time you might think.
About 2 and a half
hours later, we’d covered almost 50% of the museum. It covered
everything, literally from the dawn of humanity, up to the current
day Mexican culture. From how humans in the area evolved, to how they
survived the different climates and hostile environments, to the gods
they worshipped, to the carvings and jewellery they created… It
goes on. By this point we were starving and looked at the sheer
expanse of what we still hadn’t covered. Oh, and my brain starts to
shut off a little after reading a few too many posters explaining
rocks, so for me it was mostly just looking at the items and
retaining zero knowledge. We decided to head to lunch and assume we’d
seen the best bits. Just too much museum for me!
Xochipilli, god of flowers and stuff in Aztec mythology
Little un-evolved us
Rawr!!!
Babies were a very similar process, but tickets were sold to spectators
Muuuuuum.... Are we evolving yet??
CAUGHT THE BASTARD
Quick! Make a mammoth circle!
Yaaay we're more hooman
Back in the old days, people would have had chocolate buttons for eyes
That afternoon we
had a wander around a market. Someone was doing the classic trick
where you have three coasters, one had a good symbol and two bad, and
he flicked them around the table. Guess where the good one was and
you doubled your money, the bads, you lose. Thing is, I’ve watched
‘The Real Hustle’ enough to know that A) You won’t win these
things, and B) 90% of the people involved are in on it. Sure enough,
one guy threw in 1000 pesos, doubled his money, Guy off the street
joins in, he’s offered triple his money, loses. Some guy notices me
watching and asked me to put my finger on the one he thought it was
whilst he got his wallet out to put a wager on. At this point I’m
hyper aware of pickpockets, but did it anyway. Sure enough, it was a
win. The guy told me that I’d get paid too for helping. At that
point I wasn’t getting suckered in, so I just walked off. By the
time we walked back a few minutes later, they’d gone, so I can only
assume they were worried about refunds…
The market was a
little odd, with a majority of it being action figures and comic
books. I don’t know if it was a daily affair or just because we’d
turned up on the weekend, but suddenly it felt like we’d appeared
back in Japan. A bluesy rock band were playing to a fairly large
crowd, so we hung around there a while, as an odd aromatic
combination of Mexican food (or as it’s called here, food) and weed
filled the air.
As we walked back
through a park, we spotted a gazebo by the huge ‘Palacio de Bellas
Artes’ (Palace of fine arts) advertising music that evening, so we
made a note to head back there after dinner. Dinner was tacos for me
and quesadillas for Diana. Win. The music however, was a little
disappointing. It was live music, but it was on a screen. It was
someone, someone old, playing the piano. Now, compared to my ability
of playing the piano, it was absolutely incredible. Any ability of
playing the piano is absolutely incredible if rivalling myself.
However, it was exceptionally repetitive, so after a few minutes we
decided we weren’t cultured enough for this malarky. We weren’t
the only ones.
Our plan from here
was to head to the nearby town of San Miguel de Allende. Whilst it
wasn’t full of major attractions, the town itself was apparently
beautiful, consisting of little narrow streets and a few different
plazas as well as an artisanal art scene. We arrived, eventually
found our hostel (it had 3 locations on the map, and the first two
were wrong) and had en explore.
We immediately found
the streets of stalls containing all different types of art. We knew
that Mexico has a culture of celebrating the dead (hence el dia del
muerte, and the well known colourful painted skull designs). However,
it seemed to be absolutely everywhere, with hand painted skulls,
little skeleton figurines carrying out normal day to day activities
with their skeleton families and their little pet skelepup. If we’d
had room in our bags and no fear of breaking anything, there’s a
heck of a lot of cool looking things here, even I admitted which is
fairly unlike me to care about.
'Need a space? Call us... Please don't park on top of other cars...'
The town had a few
fancy plazas, complete with a church/Disney castle. They did have
some sort of cultural dancing and singing show on that evening, but
unfortunately the weather had other ideas, so instead we ran off to
find shelter.
Pleased to meet you and your lovely door apple.
Tiny entertainment
The following day,
we took a trip to a toy museum. This was all very interesting,
although unfortunately we weren’t allowed to play with any of them
which was mightily unfair. The afternoon was less exciting, my brain
decided to do it’s usual minor explosion trick, rendering me fairly
useless.
The cafe owner just loved the guy
Mr Miguel de Allende in statue form,
Andale andale!
Dreaming of colourful skulls
Next day, off to
Guanajuato. Another fairly small little town, which was handy in that
you could walk around it fairly easily. We checked into our Airbnb,
which was a room built on the roof of the couples house, with two
cats for company. Unfortunately no ventilation was provided, so we’d
leave the door wide open, letting both the sight of the views around
in, as well as the several thousand mosquitos. Can’t have it all.
Remember how I said
the dead were somewhat celebrated here? Well what better way to start
our than visiting the local mummy museum. Yep, legitimate dead bodies
that due to the temperatures and conditions of their burials,
remained fairly intact. All on display for us to see.
You should have seen the look on Diana's face when I told her I thought it just moved...
The next day we went
to ‘the alley of the kiss’. Legend is that at one point, a wealthy family lived in one of the buildings
that helped create the alley, and their daughter, whose bedroom
window looked out onto the alley, fell in love with a young man from
the wrong side of the tracks. The young man rented out the room in
the building across from hers with a window that was directly across
from her own as well. Then they would secretly meet and kiss across
the tiny alley. Unfortunately, the girl’s father found out, and in
a fit of rage, stabbed his daughter to death. Most accounts of the
story end it there, but some go a bit further, saying the young man
then threw himself to his death in the alley below. Lovely.
They're pretty close together!
Anyway, we turned up
and there was a Korean woman with her son there. It’s normal for
couples to kiss here, but less normal for family. Either way, the son
asked me to take their picture, whilst he kissed his mother on the
cheek. Whatever floats your boat..! He then asked if we wanted a
photo, so we went and posed in the alley where they did. That wasn’t
good enough for this lady, as she insisted we were kissing. Out the
corner of my eye I spotted she was taking a photo with her own camera
as well. We tried to stop kissing but apparently we weren’t done
yet, and not wanting to face her wrath, we stood there until she
decided it was sufficient. We left reasonably quickly before she
started making any other requests.
Can we stop now please?
Thank you
Next stop was the
museum of Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican painter, and married
(twice…) to the equally-if-not-more-famous Mexican woman, Frieda
Kahlo. Now, there were a few different styles of painting in here,
and I’m not going to lie, none of them were particularly drawing me
in. I think we visited at the same time as an art school arrived, as
they were all extremely fascinated by things that, to me with my
untrained stupid muggle vision, just looked like unfinished drawings.
Either way, they were enthralled. No photos were allowed of his work,
but other painters works were in there and we could take photos of
them. One of them was entirely steampunk style, airships and the
like, and that I found infinitely more impressive. So have some
photos of them.
Sorta discworld'y
Running out of
attractions, we figured we’d check out the ‘haunted house’,
‘Casa de la Tia Aura’ (House of Aunt Tia). This was a good 30
minute trek from one side of the city to the other, but we found it,
and were the only ones there. I suspect we were the only ones there
that day. Anyway, it was interesting, typical haunted house stuff
with jump scares, one way mirrors, taps turning themselves on and
off, ghosts flying along the ceiling, yadda yadda yadda.
Unfortunately, all the stories were told to us in really fast
Spanish, so we caught something about her having nieces who were dead
and haunty, but otherwise, no idea what was going on. Here’s a
ridiculously excited Mexican man to tell you more. In Spanish.
Finally we headed up
to a big viewpoint, where we had a good view over the whole city. Up
here was a statue of Pipila, a local hero. Why? Wikipedia to the
rescue! He became famous for an act of heroism near the very
beginning of the Mexican War of Independence, on 28 September 1810.
The insurrection had begun in the nearby town of Dolores, led by
Miguel Hidalgo, a criollo priest born in Pénjamo. He soon moved to
the city of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, where the Spanish barricaded
themselves–along with plenty of silver and other riches–in a
grain warehouse known as the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. The granary
was a stone fortress with high stone walls, but its wooden door
proved to be a shortcoming.
With a long, flat
stone tied to his back to protect him from the muskets of the Spanish
troops, Pípila carried tar and a torch to the door of the Alhóndiga
and set it on fire. The insurgents–who far outnumbered the Spanish
in the warehouse–stormed inside and killed all the soldiers and the
civil Spanish refugees. Wahey! So now there’s a big version of him
stood here.
And that was the end of that! We
said goodbye to our new cat friends and headed off to our next stop,
Guadalajara.
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