Mexico City

Mexico City was the best of times (tacos al pastor) and the worst of times (the flu [M] and a terrible migraine [L] and getting separated and lost in the giant mercado). We stayed in a hotel we liked well enough at the edge of the Reforma neighborhood. Our room faced the courtyard, which the guy behind the desk tried to spin as "great!" but groups of people hung out there and ate loud, noisy dinner one night with endless bursts of big laughter, so the location didn't really feel all that great to us. But it was within a very easy walk to plenty to see and do.

I'll start with the good (then move to some bad, and then return to the good). Mexico City is such a gorgeous city. Everyone knows how huge it is, filling the Valley of Mexico -- sometimes known as the Basin of Mexico -- paving itself up the sides of the surrounding hills and mountains. It's built on ground that was formerly Lake Texcoco, which was drained beginning in the 17th century. So it's not mysterious that earthquakes are common and that the consequences can be pretty devastating. In 1985 there was an 8.1 earthquake in Mexico City, and a 7 in September 2017. Since 21.2 million people live in Mexico City, yikes, that's a lot of risk. It's the definition of the word sprawling; when we were driving to Cuernavaca, and then back from Tepoztlan, it just went on and on, climbing up hillsides and climbing back down.

The Angel of Independence, completed in September, 1910. It was built to commemorate
the centenary of Mexican Independence from Spain. 

The Angel of Independence is lovely at every time of day, and a fantastic landmark.

OK, let's talk about tacos al pastor. These didn't have the smoky chipotle sauce
schmear underneath, but they did have pineapple, which was lovely.
We ate at a little fast food taco place around the corner from our hotel,
and that's the only place I wanted to eat. Tacos al pastor for the WIN.

More tacos al pastor, por favor

Well, I needed to eat them again. I could eat one every single day. I could eat them to the end
of my days and never get tired of them. Marc finally veered off the al pastor course to try a
chorizo taco, which he said was also good. I only had eyes for tacos al pastor. MMMMM.

There are a number of markets in Mexico City, including the biggest wholesale market in the world (in the world!), but we decided to see Mercado de la Merced. Says Lonely Planet: "the city’s original wholesale market and a place where Spaniards and Mexicans once traded side-by-side. Today, the market is divided into seven specific zones, each dedicated to a different product or foodstuff. In one you’ll find vendor after vendor selling nothing but mountains of nopal (cactus), carefully balanced piles of chicharrón (deep fried pork skin) or huitlacoche (the corn fungus popular in Mexican cooking). In another zone, shelves are piled high with baptism and wedding decorations or stocked with plastic boxes of Technicolor candy. There’s an area for artificial flowers, rows dedicated to cooking equipment, and stalls selling nothing but enormous polythene bags stuffed full of potato chips. Note that the market is also well known for prostitution and can be dangerous at night – visit during the day."

We navigated our way there via the subway system, congratulating ourselves because no one selling subway tickets could speak English. Go, us! We have a tendency to get lost and disoriented, and I have a tendency to get super overwhelmed by the closeness and chaos of those markets -- especially in the butchery sections -- so we were smart and both dropped a pin on our phone maps and said that's where we would meet if we got separated. Cool. Look at us, being proactive and giving ourselves the best option. And sure enough, I got overwhelmed right off the bat (and had worn absolutely the wrong shoes, flip-flops, for a place with crowded aisles and standing water). So we'd find me a place to sit and people-watch (my favorite thing to do) and Marc would wander in and come back out to me, and then we'd move along to a different area. That really works for us both, because I really love watching everyone bustling around and doing their regular shopping thing, and he gets to poke around without worrying about me -- win-win.

My last waiting spot before things took a bad turn. Dulceria SHALOM?? 

Marc bought mole from this woman

So much meat!

So much mole!

So much......?????......offal I guess. Awful.

No idea what prensado is but the prices sure vary!

That genius mixed chopped vegetable -- everyone was buying it. A real timesaver!

So I guess we learned the hard way that Google maps only allows you to drop one pin at a time, because Marc had dropped one for my sitting location but then got disoriented (the easiest place in the world to get disoriented I am not kidding even a little) and couldn't find me, and I guess that pin took the place of our meeting-place pin. Usually he pokes around for 10-15 minutes before he comes back, but he didn't come back and he didn't come back and when I had waited nearly an hour (why hadn't we set a time limit?!), I decided to go to our "we're lost" meeting place. No Marc. No Marc. No Marc. The vendors all around me were concerned as time passed and I was just standing there, and kept asking me things I couldn't understand. I remembered enough to say Mi esposo es perdido, my husband is lost, and despite my saying lo siento, no habla espanol, everyone kept trying to help me, in Spanish. Lo siento, no habla espanol. Finally one woman left to find someone with a cell phone, and she called a friend who could speak a little English. I told her what was going on, and she told the kind woman, who then summoned the police to help me. Of course they didn't speak English either, but the policeman I was working with was very very kind and helpful. I think he was assuring me that they'd find Marc. He sent other police out into the market, and one of the vendors got others to fan out with her, calling out Marc's name. I figured out how to describe him well enough -- the color of his hair, the color of his shirt, his height -- and out they went. My policeman kept talking on the radio to others who were spread through the market.

After a very, very long while of that, I turned on my phone (turned off to preserve my dying battery) and received a text from Marc, who hadn't been able to locate our meeting place without that pin, and had returned to the hotel assuming I would do the same. I thanked the police and everyone who helped me, navigated my way to a subway station and got a ticket, and got on a train going the wrong direction. Got out, bought another ticket, tried again, and finally made it to the hotel. It was a complete and total nightmare, and I'll never forget it, ever. One of the two worst travel experiences of my life.

The next day Marc had a flu, with fever, and I'd had a really terrible migraine all through the night, so we took that day really slowly. Eventually we made our way to the National Museum of Anthropology, which Marnie had recommended, and it was really wonderful. I took lots of photos but will just include some of my favorites:

Chacmool, a pre-Columbian figure. That flat area on its stomach was for supporting a bowl or a disk. 
These figures possibly symbolized slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods; the bowl was used to hold 
sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers and incense. 
In an Aztec example, the bowls held sacrificed human hearts. 

The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and
the northern Yucatán Peninsula.(Oh, and oh! I saw one beautiful replica of something and the card said
that the original was in a museum in New York City which made me laugh.)

Stela! Stela! I love a good stela, although this isn't one, I think. But what gorgeous bas-relief carvings, right?

THIS GUY. If you're trying to scare me, dude, it worked.

Jaguar -- which I now only pronounce in my head as jag-you-are after watching my weight
in British detective shows.

I just love this. So so much. I love it. So much.

Yeah, these too. Love them.

We weren't feeling great -- Marc still post-flu shaky, me post-migraine fragile -- so we didn't stay all that long but I'm really glad we went. We got an Uber, the way to travel in Mexico, and headed back to our hotel. We'd rest a bit and wander out, rest a bit and wander out. Repeat.

El Churrero, near our hotel -- hot churros!

It's been around since 1935, which accounts for the great art deco vibe.

You can watch them making churros, which might turn you off of churros.

Marc in line, figuring out what to get us.

Making churros -- the ones we got were greasy and kind of burned

Lots of Dia de los Muertos stuff around!

Maybe the only picture I got of us together? This was at the museum, so we were both tentative and shaky

We changed our plans regarding Teotihuacan; we'd originally planned to spend a night in a tiny town that would let us walk to Teotihuacan very easily, but decided instead to just spend that extra night in Mexico City, and take a half-day trip out to Teotihuacan. I felt very ready to see the place after wandering through the museum. We Ubered our way there and back.

People climbing to the top of the Temple of the Sun, which I felt too still-shaky to do. But I liked watching them!

Me and RBG (and a rando dog) on the site. Temple of the Sun behind me to the right.

So that's the Temple of the Moon, which anchors the other end of the large, long plaza. There's something
very neat about it. As you walk closer, the front occludes the back, in stages, until....

....you're this close, and all you see is the stairs. Isn't that cool?

Of course the Temple of the Sun is larger, that's so Sun, isn't it.

It was a bright [bright], bright sunshiney day. And a perfect temperature, too.

Painted murals uncovered at the site. This is a jaguar, such a powerful symbol.

a partial view of the site; panorama view panning to the distant right would bring in the Temple of the Moon

stonework -- so beautiful with the small pebbles in between

Ah! Another one of us! 

The only other story to remember about Mexico City is a restaurant story. For lunch on the day we arrived, we ate those tacos al pastor (yummmm) but wanted to try them at a different place, so we identified a well-reviewed place for dinner and walked there, happily anticipating another delicious version of those lovely tacos. It looked like a cafeteria in an old hospital, but OK (we walked past the next day and the line was down the block, waiting for them to open, what???). The food was just terrible! Really, really terrible. Now we can't even remember what we got, but we do remember that it was terrible. Terrible. Awful. (But we were able to swallow it at least, unlike the food at Los Colorines in Tepoztlan.) It made us just want to keep eating at the little taqueria near our hotel, the one with amazing tacos. Ugh. So bad. It's a local chain, we gather, and the place was full of Mexicans! Who know how great Mexican food is! And who can get it easily! Mexicans! What was wrong with you!

All in all it was a really good trip, and I'm so glad we went. We've been to several places in Mexico -- a spot on the Yucatan peninsula, Oaxaca, Mazunte, and before we married we'd each been to Merida and Chichen Itza, and I'd been to Isle Mujeres. As I think about all those places, it just might be true for me that Tepoztlan is my favorite. I wish we'd gotten better food in that little town, but the place has just settled inside me; maybe it's those mountains surrounding it. Looking back, I wish we'd eaten more tacos (tacos! tacos! tacos!), since I can't get them in the mountains and shoot, you can't even really get them in New York City. Viva Mexico, and to hell with the president who calls Mexicans bad hombres and wants to build a wall to keep them out. Viva Mexico.

Tepoztlan

Where Cuernavaca was a real city, and had a European feel, to me, Tepoztlan felt exactly how you'd think a small town in Mexico would feel. And it had great mountains surrounding it (for some silly reason I kept expecting Butch Cassidy to clop into town), so it was also just very beautiful. There was a main street with the market at the end, and another large street at the perpendicular end, so it was very wander-able (although our first night we got lost trying to walk back to the hotel, and now I can't even imagine how we did that).

We stayed at a place called Mocca Hotel (silly name, built by a Dutch man named Rocco who really tried too hard to be cool as he interacted with us), but it was such a lovely place. We really like this place.

The hotel is the white set of buildings on the left. That's a fire pit in the center, and there is a small
pool to the left, not visible. To get to the center of town, we walked up the road, turned right, and kept
walking until we hit the main road. Easy for rambling.

One rare thing I disliked about Mexico is that breakfast (either at the hotel, or at places in town) always started later than I'd like -- because I want my morning coffee ritual! Often, I couldn't get any coffee until 9am, and by then I'd been up a couple of hours so I felt like I'd missed the window. I was already dressed and we were rambling around, so by then it felt like I was just drinking some coffee and not starting my day with that routine. Unlike in Southeast Asia, where tea kettles are always available in the rooms, there were none anywhere in Mexico -- a coffee culture, unlike the tea culture in Asia, I presume that's the difference -- so I couldn't even make myself a cup to linger with before we headed out. Breakfast (and coffee) started at 9, here at Mocca, and many of the cafes in town didn't open until 10, which seemed so strange to me.

Mainly what we did during our stay in Tepoztlan was wander around, haunt the market, and eat. (This is always what we do wherever we are, actually.) We arrived in town on Monday, Nov 5, the day before my birthday, and we'd planned to have my birthday meal at a restaurant called Los Colorines—highly reviewed online, and Rocco agreed it was the best place in town. Since breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, and since Los Colorines serves breakfast, that was our original plan: birthday breakfast the next day at Los Colorines! Done! We decided to eat there Monday night for dinner, just to check it out ahead of time, and I'm so glad we did. Because it sucked. I think it was one of the worst meals either of us had ever tried to eat. Ever. (Except maybe that thing Marc ate in Hue, in 2005, that he still can't bear to think about.)

The dining area was certainly colorful. 

This area, just off the kitchen, was meant to be an "open kitchen" type feature, I think, so that people
eating can watch the goings-on. There were big pots of stews and sauces being kept hot on burners
to the left, and large bowls of stuff the servers ladled into bowls and plates. That woman in pink
was FURIOUS. She scowled and huffed and whoo boy was she foul! We sat at the table
nearest this area and her energy was pretty awful.

I took a photo of the food, but as bad as it looked (just so greasy, and such stringy, gristly meat), the photo made it look better than it was because it's impossible to capture just how bad the meat was. We ordered something called a barbecue plate, which was just a pile of a variety of mystery meats glistening with grease. Marc has a high tolerance and enjoyment of greasy meat, but this was a whole other thing. I shudder just remembering it. The pieces were too big to eat and they were so impossible to chew and swallow that Marc finally -- after a long, heroic effort -- just had to spit out what he was trying to eat. We still can't figure out how they could even get the guacamole to be such a pastel, pale shade of green. How? How? Avocados are a deeper green than that all on their own! It had no flavor, but at least we could swallow it. Ugh. As bad as that meal was, I was very glad we'd tried it ahead of my birthday so we wouldn't ruin my day with that place.

Again: UGH.

I know I'm silly about my birthday. I've always been silly about it, and when it's a "big" birthday like 60, it carries even more weight. Turning 60 was surprisingly hard, and I grieved ahead of it. I had some kind of feeling like the tide had shifted and I had much less time ahead of me now, too little to do anything, really, and what had I done with all those years? Why hadn't I focused, done something important? The card Marc gave me for my birthday was exactly right for moving me along through that. He said something about all the traveling we have ahead of us and that was just the idea I needed.

I'm 60. Sixty years old. How did this come so fast?

Brunch in the market -- happy birthday to me!

We didn't really see tourists who looked like us in any way, even in Cuernavaca where we'd expect to see them. But in Tepoztlan? Definitely nope .... until we sat down in that market for my birthday brunch. Sitting to Marc's right was an adorable young man from Montreal. His family had always come to Tepoztlan when he was growing up, and now he has a daughter who lives there, and he'd moved there to open a bar. We had such a lovely conversation with him. He asked how we thought the election would go, which led us into a conversation about politics and how awful our country has become. When we were leaving, he offered to show us a little place that served the best tacos in town. It was on a small street, and it was unmarked, and I gather you just show up around 8pm and the door opens and you exchange pesos for tacos? As we said goodbye to him, he seemed to want to linger, and I had a feeling he wanted to hug us. He was so very sweet.

With Los Colorines off the table, we scrambled to find another place for dinner since we weren't sure we'd want to be wandering out for potential tacos at 8pm, so we found a place that looked possibly good but found conflicting information about what time it closed. 5pm? 6pm? 7pm? Different times on different websites. Marc found them on OpenTable and made a reservation, so we felt solid about it, until we got there at 6 and it was just closing. A humorless man closed the door in our faces.

Hmph. I sat in the zocalo (Fool on a Hill was playing on a loudspeaker, which felt disorienting but happy) while Marc rambled around the streets around the square, looking for a restaurant that was open and that looked halfway decent. Tepoztlan is really open for business only on the weekends, so being there on Monday and Tuesday severely limited our options. The place we ate was good enough, enjoyable enough, but not really memorable. I think Marc got mole. I think I got tacos. Good enough.

Since what we really did was wander around the zocalo area of town, including the market, this post will end with photos:

This large mural was handmade entirely by seeds and grains -- No tocar! the sign warned. I really loved it.

detail

Hand placed. 

The church near the zocalo and market was quite dramatic at night. I didn't amp up the saturation or anything,
my phone just captured that fuschia in the bell tower like that -- but it's not far off, at all.

Pretty dramatic from the other angle too, with those wonderful mountains all around. Even though the town
is reputed to be the birthplace of Queztlcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god, the thing to do here is to climb one of
the mountains to an Aztec temple built in homage to Tepoztecatl, the god of pulque (Mexico's oldest
alcoholic beverage made from the pulp of the maguey cactus -- a worthy god I suppose!)

(oh, and sidebar, speaking of things to do in Tepoztlan: "eat ice cream," everyone says. Lots of ice cream shops,
all the same company except one. We tried to get ice cream the first night, studied the menu, and
tried to order but the kid behind the counter kept asking us some question about alcohol and
we finally just picked something simple. I got chocolate and vanilla, since Mexican chocolate and vanilla
are their own good thing. Marc got vanilla and coconut. Our verdict? A giant meh. Grainy.
Not interesting enough to go back the second night. Back to the church......)

The standard colorful and shrineful interior of the church.

Outside the church was this smaller shrine with the Virgin Mary and candles. I still think the beautiful
mountains are the proper place to worship.

the streets could be narrow

And crowded. Regalo de Dios means "gift from god." God, I'd like a studio please.

The streets were all cobbled -- not great if you're shaky on your pins, or if you have narrow, easily-turned ankles,
or if you're not looking where you're going. But I really loved them.

Our last morning we stopped in this charming little cafe for a coffee (me) and hot chocolate (Marc). He got the Aztec
chocolate with a bit of chili heat. So frothy.

Marc doing one of his very favorite activities: studying menus. When he wanders around by himself,
that's his primary activity. He worries that I get too bored and so he doesn't do it as much with me,
but I actually love seeing him do it.

in the little hot chocolate shop. We sat facing an open door, so we had a narrow view of the sidewalk.

We walked to the foot of that mountain that people climb to see the temple. I love all the color.

I'll always remember how colorful Tepoztlan was, with brightly colored homes and so many huge bougainvilleas.

Bougainvillea draped over every flat surface

ummm.....aren't we in Mexico already? [we decided that green sign must mean Mexico City. We saw it elsewhere too.]

those beautiful mountains are visible at the end of all the streets.

a Dia de los Muertos remnant in the zocalo, we presume

Tepoztlan at dusk was just so beautiful.

I think Tepoztlan was my favorite place we visited in Mexico, even though we got the worst food, and at best the food we ate was not memorable. But it had such charm, and held such a feeling, and was so beautiful. And I turned 60 years old there too. Off to Mexico City.....