We treated ourselves to an Air BnB when we got to Mexico City, complete with lounge, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. We had a lovely terrace too, although we didn’t get to use it much as it was very rainy for our days there. We stayed in Roma which was a lovely area covered in trees and full of good places to munch. Our first meal was chamorros (big portions of slow-cooked lamb) which set the bar very high. Another highlight was a bougie brunch which again could’ve come right out of Shoreditch!
The traffic in the capital city was as bad as everyone made it out to be with its 25 million residents, and we spent plenty of time waiting around on buses and cramming ourselves onto the metro! In fact, one of the popular metro stations, Auditorio, was decked out as a London tube station, with red phoneboxes and underground signs everywhere. Apparently it was to signify the deep connections between the transport systems in the two cities, but we were happy just listening to Keane and Adele blasting out over the speakers.
Tom became the ultimate bartender with our homemade mojitos (we’ve now moved onto the white rum we bought in Havana and have been lugging around this whole time). Good food just kept coming, from the churros at El Moro to the fancy lunch in the centre of the city at El Cardenal.
A big day of sightseeing took us through the artisan market to Alameda Central and the gorgeous domed Bellas Artes building with its Diego Riviera mural. This was original commissioned for the Rockefeller Building but was rejected for its anti-capitalist themes (see for yourselves below). Riviera then remade it in Mexico City for everyone to see, it was so impressive. There was also a Francisco Icaza exhibition about the seaside which was really captivating but made me quite homesick.
We moved onto the Zocalo (main plaza) which was vast and boasted both the cathedral and the national palace. These buildings were interesting and also gradually sloping due to the soft subsoil that they had been built on. We saw the remains of the Templo Mayor that had been torn down to build the cathedral (Cortés literally used the stones from this Mayan temple to build his Catholic cathedral).
Another day we headed past the Angel of Independence to the Chapultepec park with its huge ‘castle’ where many presidents lived, although it wasn’t disimular to a National Trust house. We wandered through the furnished rooms and courtyards to get a glimpse of what life might have been like for Porfirio Diaz, hero turned dictator. We then ate gorditas (almost welsh cakes without raisins) by the lake and explored the National Museum of Anthropology. Given all the different cultures that have existed in Mexico, this was a very very interesting place with plenty of artefacts and explanations. It was huge so we only did the ‘ancient traditions’ half and had to leave the ‘current ethnography’ section for another time.
Music was great here. We went to a living room concert, where singer-songwriter Belén Cuturi (look her up!) welcomed us into her home and performed her songs for us. She was brilliant and it was such a great atmosphere, us two even ended up performing a song at the end! Another night we were invited to a speakeasy, which we entered through a door behind a restaurant, and after a carpeted corridor arrived at an underground jazz club. It was brilliant (even if the tequilas were the size of a small americano). Despite the rain we had a fabulous time in the capital!
holahola2019 