Mexico City es muy bueno. Me gusta.

On top a hill overlooking the city you begin to realise it's expanse. Huge doesn't even cover it. It goes on and on into the brown haze covering the skyline. This is most likely pollution from the very heavy traffic that doesn't really clear in the heat of the day. The roads are wide and packed and everyone seems to give it death all the time, crossing in the busiest sections can take some time. There's also sky scrapers and large monuments littered with the green, white and red of the Mexican flag.
On the hill I'm looking over the city from is a large castle/palace, the Castillo de Chapultepec. It's been used for both over the years but mainly dignitaries and royalty have resided here. It's a huge place. We take a good few hours to look round the many sprawling rooms containing works of art, panels with bits of history on and rooms returned to their original state. Lavish is an understatement, not my taste but fair impressive.
What really is impressive is the mural downstairs. This has to be one of the best works of art I've ever seen. Murals are a Mexican speciality and boy do they know what they're doing. These paintings are massive and many buildings within the city have a mural or two. This castle now is the museum of history so includes a seriously huge mural detailing the history of Mexico. It's tremendous no doubt. If you know Rage Against the Machine's music or have seen their DVD cover then it suddenly appears where they took it from.

Right here in Mexico City. Another name drop would be the fact that the 1996 Romeo and Juliet was partly shot in this castle and it's no surprise.


All the above photos are from the same mural and are outstanding. It also shows the side to Mexican life that is most evident on the streets. Colour. Everything about the place is colourful and alive. It's hard to believe that just one city has over 150 museums and in the 6 days we were here we only glimpsed at a few of what the whole place has to offer.
Typically, to prove something is always going on here we go straight from the castle to a Human Rights festival going on in the huge Plaza in the centre. This seems like another excuse to cram tacos into your face and listen to live music. A Mexican all girl grunge band were on first and later we saw a more typical Mexican band playing great tunes with a bit of foot stamping thrown in. This was all held against the backdrop of the huge Cathedral and government buildings along with the first outdoor ice rink, all free, built for Christmas, and many a food stand.
We walk past other sunken buildings, Mexico City is slowly sinking into the ground and taking and twisting buildings along with it. We're heading to a wrestling stadium. One of the Kiwi's had wanted to go to see some Mexican wrestling and I originally thought this would be crap but came round to the idea and went along. It turned out we'd gone to the wrong stadium but another one was a metro ride away. We arrived at the even bigger stadium with an hour gone of the wrestling already. I haggled with a tout outside for £3 tickets each for 3 rows from the front.
What we see is not only comedy it's actually quite impressive. The Mexicans love a good wrestling farce and this is a cracker. Fake wrestling it maybe but agile these masked guys really are. The crowd really get into it and I'm surprised they abuse the wrestlers with things like, 'Puto'(a bit like poofter) in front of kids. The wrestlers fly all over the place and all over the crowd at some points. A camera crew film the action and the crowd and it's also shown on a big screen. Obviously we got on camera and my obligatory rock and roll tongue out face was plastered in front of the few thousand in attendance, you've got to haven't you?
Gabrielle and Braden, the two Kiwi's we'd spent the last few days with, moved on from Mexico City to explore the rest of the country for 6 weeks. I was jealous. I know we were off to North America for 6 months soon but Mexico was soo cool. Not literally though because it was pretty damn warm, and this is December! I didn't want to let go of Latin America. We still had a couple of days left before leaving though.
First, my Birthday present had to be bought, clearly. We go to a part of town that is absolutely rammed with music shops, mainly guitar. I wanted a classical Spanish guitar from Mexico. After a day of looking in various shops and asking questions that I pretty much couldn't understand the answer to we find a guitar. My Spanish ain't bad by this point but asking technical guitar questions is a bit of a stretch!
The day after was my birthday. A weird scenario. The 11th of December and it's boiling hot and I'm in Mexico City. It was strange not being home. This was also our last day in Mexico City so we check out a few things before leaving. A dire modern art museum in the morning and a fantastic arts building in the afternoon. Before all that the owner of our hostel sings Happy Birthday to me in Spanish and Israeli and gets out the special birthday cereal for breakfast. In other words, the multi-coloured Cheerios!
The Palacio Bellas Artes, the Palace of Fine Arts. was a tremendous building with a cracking Diego Rivera exhibition inside. This guy was one of the best Mexican Muralists of all time and was commissioned by to do Murals in important Mexican buildings as well as moving to America to do the famous Rockefeller Center in New York, as well as the Museum of Modern Art there, Detroit motor industry murals, one in San Francisco among others throughout the continent both North and South. Diego was also husband of Mexican favourite Frida Kahlo. Anyway, the fabulous building in Mexico City shows off his work as well as the building itself. It's total art deco stuff and it feels like walking back in time into an American 20's gangster movie. It's actually the opera house and must be a grand place to watch one, if you like that kind of thing.
After a cash injection, thanks Karen, for my birthday we go out to a recommended restaurant in yet another upscale area. A busy place serves us up great food and drink but I do make a mistake in the wine ordering. For once I didn't bother asking the price of the wine, the waiter brought a few bottles to the table and I chose one. I figured that it'd be cheap either way, as Mexico is on the whole very cheap. It turned out that the wine cost us £20. Not over the top really but for Mexico this was a film star style blow out. No wonder the waiter looked soo happy, he'd get a very decent tip. It turned out we didn't have enough cash to pay, thanks credit card. Either way it was a great way to end a great visit to one of the greatest cities in the world.


Mexico City didn't once feel dangerous. There's an unbelievable amount to see and do. Atmosphere, colour, food, art, history, music, booze and life. This is a real city. Somewhere like Sydney or Beijing can't even come close. This is somewhere Sydney wishes it could be but is too wrapped up in thinking it's brilliant to realise what really makes a true city. Mexico City is no pretender, it's the real deal.

Hecho en Mexico

Staying up all night is the small price you have to pay sometimes for catching flights. It doesn't make it any less tiring. We arrive at Mexico City at 9am after a 12:30am flight. Check in at most hostels is around 2pm so we hang around the airport for a while, mainly to find the British Airways office to change some flight dates but to no avail. After the incredibly long customs queue and slow check we arrive in a food hall that offers more varieties of fast food I've ever seen anywhere. Is this the first sign that we're a lot closer to America?
We'd heard many a thing about how unsafe Mexico City is, one that stuck in my head was the taxi drivers. The scam goes that if you get in a dodgy taxi they take you round the corner where a friend gets in, with a gun. They then drive you to an ATM and force you to take all your cash out for that day. Then they hold you over night and do the same the following day. Then shoot you. Nice. Apparently, most of the dodgy taxis are the green and white VW Beetles that are all over the place. The truth is that these incidents probably do happen. But I saw no evidence of anything near it in the week I was there. Besides, if there was a chance that this would happen to us it would've surely been the ideal opportunity when we both fell asleep in the taxi on the way to the hostel.
Mexico City is the biggest city in the world. Things of the underhand nature clearly must happen here but I didn't see a jot. The outskirts are supposed to be sketchy but of all the areas that tourists go nothing untoward happens too often......probably. I wasn't entirely looking forward to visiting Mexico City due to how big it was and how supposedly dangerous it is. Huge sprawling cities aren't always the best places to be.
Our hostel was located on an upmarket neighbourhood street. This is one of the best hostels we've stayed in on the trip. Not because of the room or location, it took a fair while to get into the centre, but because of the general relaxed nature of the place and incredibly friendly owners.
We slept most of the day due to the all night travelling. We thought we'd check out a traditional Cantina that evening. A Cantina is basically a bar where mainly men go and drink and eat tacos and watch sport on TV and the such. It was pretty good, although it did seem full of Mexican guys trying to chat up the ageing short skirted waitress. Great tacos though.
At breakfast we got chatting to a New Zealand couple who we end up spending the next couple of days with. Right, let's go and see some pyramids. Like ya do.
Not only is Mexico City the biggest city in the world but it also has a fair amount of history going on all over the shop. Just out of town, an hour or so, is a collection of large pyramids in an ancient city. It takes a couple of trips on the extensive metro system(the cheapest in the world I'll have you know) and a bus ride to get there and it's definitely worth it. These pyramids are huge and in the middle of a dusky landscape surrounded by far off mountains. It's also full of salesman trying to hawk you polished Aztec masks and jewellery. I've never said, 'No, gracias' so much in my life.
Unlike the Incas these guys, the Teotihuacanos civilisation, sacrificed people from other tribes and enemies. This city dates back to 500AD and is pretty big still to this day, granted one of the pyramids is thought to have been reconstructed too high. But still, it's all very impressive.
The bus ride back isn't. Traffic in Mexico City is some of the worst I've seen. 1 hour on the bus to get there, 2 and a half to get back. All this with a constant repeat of Shrek at Christmas, or similar, on TV screens. It's slow and painful.
The main touristy area is the Zona Rosa, the Pink Zone. It's fairly crappy and full of dire bars and crummy shops. But at least there's a better Cantina, that serves up the largest tequilas I've ever seen! Loud music beer and more excellent Mexican food. Cracking.
Walking through on of the cities large parks the next day we stop to watch a bunch of guys dressed like Morris dancers climb a very high pole, tie rope around their legs and dangle themselves head first whilst swinging round back towards the ground. I have no idea what's going on.
We visit Frida Kahlo's house in another flash district. Frida is one of Mexico's most famous artists and a film was made of her lfe fairly recently starring Salma Hiyak. Not bad as it goes. A sprawling house in a cool area of town that has a great market nearby. This now feels like the real Mexico to me. The Mexico I'd seen on TV. Vibrant, colourful, music everywhere and people dressed like Aztecs wafting smoke over people. Okay I hadn't seen that before but it was an interesting sight. A large church had projections of religious scenes on it whilst loud music played, not my thing but it all adds to the flavour of things. More great food helps too. I've gone taco mental. Taco stands are everywhere and people from all walks of life eat at them. One stand near our hostel is a bit more upmarket and is constantly rammed with suited individuals. They all look like they should be fine dining rather than stood on street corners trying to ram quality meat-based tacos into their cake holes while not trying to spill hot hot chilli sauce all over their fine tailoring. Unbelievable good.
Walking around at night feels safe and a far cry from the things we'd heard. The metro is notorious but the only pest we encountered were the hawkers. People get on the train with a portable dvd player showing movies, copied obviously, for sale. There's also guys who have speakers in their bags playing copied Mexican cds very loudly, all also for sale. The woman playing guitar and singing at full pelt whilst a baby slept on her back was the best.