It’s my last day and be warned: I’m disgruntled.
10am: The day begins like every other day here in DF – cold and overcast. Whatever, we’re too busy enjoying our free breakfast at our hostel, which happens to sit right on the main zocalo, the second-largest public space in the world after Moscow’s Red Square. We look out the window and simultaneously see the cathedral, the presidential palace and the random assortment of hobos, vendors and tourist trappers that drift around the area looking for an easy mark. (Sidenote: our hostel has offered us free breakfast AND dinner, AND an extra free night – who said nothing good ever came from an economic downturn in the epicenter of a potential global pandemic?)
11am: We have a lot planned, and set off to the Museum of Fine Arts to get a bit of culture in us. Mexico City, incidentally, is ridiculously nice. I pictured a traffic-choked, acid-raining hotbed of crime and depravity, all dirty and sprawling and grey, and instead it is clean, orderly (in parts), and very European (who said nothing good ever came from Spanish conquest and brutality?). The streets in the historical centre are cobbled and lined with colonial buildings that are older than Australia.
11.30am: We arrive at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Suspiciously, entry is free. We soon realize that this is due to every single exhibition room being either inexplicably closed or empty. Of course! We do, however, see some cool murals. Mexican muralists were world-renowned back in the day, and the piece de resistance is Diego Rivera’s Man At The Crossroads which was commissioned for Rockerfeller in New York in the 1930s. Rivera painted, in the foyer of one of Rockerfeller’s buildings – in the belly of the beast – a mural deriding capitalism, applauding communism, and featuring Lenin in a prime position of glory. When ordered to change it he refused and Rockerfeller destroyed the whole thing. Fun fact! There’s plenty more where that came from! But the mural was re-commissioned by the Mexican government and is pretty damn thrilling, even if that whole communism thing turned out to be a failure.
The other highlight of this museum is its grotesque red marbled interior which resembles nothing so much as a slab of raw Wagyu beef. Ew.
12pm: Outside the museum is set up a little health tent where people are being handed free face masks and pamphlets on hygiene and flu avoiding. Aren’t we past this? Pig flu is so last week, as Luke Punzet says. Still, we aren’t ones to say no to free anything, especially not surgical masks, so we happily take them and descend into the metro.
12.30pm: We pop out at the Bosque de Chapultepec, the lung of Mexico City. It is swarming with squirrels, which are fascinating to a pair of Aussies. They scamper photogenically all over the place and wave their fluffy little rodent tails around and we are utterly enchanted. Lange feeds one a chili-powdered chip. Because it is a Mexican squirrel, it loves it. We have an argument over who owes whom 1 peso or 1.50. (Perspective: that is equivalent to 10-15 cents). We storm up the hill to the castle in a huff, not speaking.
1pm: Castillo de Chapultepec. The only film that I can visually recall as being filmed in Mexico City is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (which has been my favourite since I was eleven. Don’t judge. It’s great.). I have been keeping an eye out for city landmarks from the movie and the Castillo was used for the party scene. I completely nerd out and wander around blissfully quoting key dialogue to myself while snapping pictures. (“My only love sprung from my only hate. Too early seen unknown and known too late. Prodigious birth of love it is to me, that I must love a loathed enemy.” Juliet on the balcony. The balcony right in front of me! Other tourists give me weird looks. I could care less.) The Castillo is famous for many reasons, being the Versailles of Mexico, but I am too busy muttering Shakespeare to myself to pay much attention to exhibits on French royalty, the Mexican-American war, and where the Presidents of Mexico slept. (But I do check out the bathroom because I am always interested in knowing where the high and mighty poop.)
2.30pm: We find a stall that offers to write your name on a grain of rice. I have wanted one of these since Year Three when Jody in my jazz-dancing class had one. I stared at it longingly every Saturday morning wishing for the same. Today is the day of childhood wish-fulfillment, it seems. It costs 20 pesos. Lange tells the guy that he paid 150 pesos for the same thing as a gift for his Mexican woman at Sayulita Beach. The guy tries not to laugh. “You were robbed, wey,” he says. That’s not even the best part: after he was robbed, he lost it. The guy really does laugh and Lange tries to strangle me. Ah, friendship. I am learning how to say “I am about to squeeze your neck til you die right now” in Cambodian. Key phrase for future travel. “Uhn gebaht gekor hayn ngoup aleuhay.” Tell your friends! The man clearly thinks we’re freaks as we walk off trying to headlock each other. (I win because I am a foot taller.)
3.30pm: Lange and I have lunch at a pitiful little café with plastic chairs and tables and huddle to get away from the sudden downpour. The food is good ($3 schnitzel sandwiches) but somehow fails to live up to our lunch experience of the previous day in Taxco. We climbed up to a tiny apartment that was set up like a restaurant with a few tables and chairs in the living room, and ate a delicious lunch served by a family of cross-dressers. The men all had long hair, waxed legs, subtle makeup (a rarity in Mexico) and distinctly feminine mannerisms. To say that this would be unusual in ultra-Catholic Mexico would be an understatement. But today’s lunch has no such delights in store, only a surly waitress with over-plucked eyebrows.
4.30pm: I leave Lange to his unbelievably slow-eating sandwich and decide to go all out and get some more culture at the Museum of Modern Art. Too much time spent in galleries usually makes me dizzy but this one is exceptionally good, filled with Mexican prison art installations, Frida Kahlo, and the like. As I leave it starts to rain again (hello, wet season) and I am immensely grateful for my 26 peso umbrella (which has not yet broken, yay!). An imbecile workman directs me downhill onto an eight-lane uncrossable freeway instead of to my metro stop. Am not happy as I trudge back uphill in increasing rain. Return to the art gallery and attempt to cross through it, back into the park to the train. An overly jolly security guard stops me.
“Senorita, this is the Museum of Modern Art, not a metro stop! Aahaha!” I know that, I grit at him. Can’t I just cut through here? “Oh, no no no! You have to go back out and allll the way up the road and then go alllll the way back! Where are you from?” I mishear his question as “Where are you going?” and answer accordingly. He and his security guard friend burst out laughing at me. “Coyoacan!” He giggles. “I don’t think this senorita is from Coyoacan, do you? No, senorita, where are you FROM?” What does that have to do with anything, I wonder, but force a smile and tell him. “Australia! Ah! I am looking, I am thinking, and I am going to tell you my friend that this senorita is from Sydney! Am I right?” Yes, I snap at him. (Should have said Melbourne.) “Ah, you see, senorita, I know that because I can look into the future and see things that have not yet happened!” Fantasise about kicking him in the shins and asking how he possibly didn’t see that coming. Comfort myself with stomping off in the rain. Stupid condescending little man. Stupid metro stop. Stupid park. Stupid rain.
5.30pm: Emerge from the metro on the other side of town to run some errands. The rain begins to really pummel down, having waited expressly for my reemergence above ground. Wonder what the Spanish idiom is for “raining cats and dogs”. My 26 peso umbrella keeps my head dry but the rest of me is soaked to the skin. My jeans are heavy with water and my shoes are sloshing. The weather conditions are akin to the infamous Guadalajara storm that turned the streets to rivers, and whose currents stole my havaianas. I dash into a café, drip all over their floor and proceed to drench their couch. I wait out the storm by drinking chai and reading a travel magazine about everywhere else in the world but where I am.
6.30pm: Squelch towards the metro. It is cold and I am shivering like a whippet. Spot a shopping mall: cue heavenly music. I take refuge inside in the warm and look for replacement havaianas. Cheap foam knockoffs cost $30. WHAT! But then… I spot a Zara. I am thrilled. Shop shop shop. Emerge with new purchases that probably cost me 2 days’ budget. Try not to think in those terms and do some flimsy purchase-justifying. There is no point in having nice clothes on this trip when I am losing every shred of style I might ever have possessed as my entire wardrobe mutates into a cheap, comfortable, dirty, falling-apart facsimile of every travellers’ pack contents. But not to worry – I will never stoop to purchasing either crocs or reefwalkers. The situation will never be that dire. Tell myself that pretty new clothes can be worn in glamorous Sydney. Make note to self to tell Sydney friends to cue up glamorous-type events upon my return to justify said purchases.
7.30pm: Skip to the metro (as much as waterlogged clothes will permit). Discover that for some reason, the metro tonight is only taking women and children under 12. Board a train filled entirely with women. It is surreal. Feel as though I am on a lifeboat leaving the Titanic… or on a train on our way to the gas chambers. Am the tallest person in the carriage. The women-and-children-only rule means that the train is blessedly free of the usual cacophony of people hawking their wares, everything from chewing gum to spelling books. Some vendors have boombox backpacks blaring early 90s music from burned CDs for sale. Sometimes people will sing (usually badly). Forget about sleeping on your commute to work; these people are working the trains all day long. I have only seen one transaction so far though, for a packet of gum. Feel guilty about my capitalist consumerist pig shopping spree. What would Diego Rivera say? Comfort myself with the fact that no one else knows.
8pm: Stagger out of the metro, utterly wiped out (as the Mexico City metro is prone to making one feel). Walk across the zocalo and pass a line of workmen sitting against the cathedral fence. About a metre apart, each one has a hand-painted sign in front of him advertising his trade. Plumber, electrician, glazier. Every day they line up here in the main square, hoping for work. For some reason, the obvious poverty in Mexico affects me more than it has in other countries I have visited. I have fallen so in love with this country and people. Mexican men might look like scowling gangsters from a distance but the minute you speak to them or ask them something their faces light up and they couldn’t be kinder. The women, too (sometimes…). Everyone here is working, selling things, trying to make an honest buck and feed their families. There is very little visible begging here, in this city of 21 million. This economic downturn, coupled with the swine flu hysteria, will surely keep millions of tourists away this year, as I've already seen in the almost-empty hostels with free food and extra night deals. Mexico is already one of the countries hit hardest this year, and all because they have yoked their economy and future to the United States.
I go inside to my free dinner.
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