Pammie resigns the blog

Sigh. I have totally lost interest in my blog. I haven't got the strength to keep it up. It was a fun thing to do during the winter when I didn't have much to do. But now I have other things to keep me busy, so I am going to put it on hold for a while. Thanks for all of your visits and your comments, I really enjoyed them!

Teotihuacán

Avenida de Muertos at Teotihuacán

The first day of the tour we went to the two pyramids of the Sun and the Moon at Teotihuacán, the first city established in the Americas and the beginning of Mexican civilisation, home to 250,000 people back in it's day. The Aztecs rediscovered the ruins and believed the structures lining the Calzada de los Muertos, or Avenue of the Dead, to be tombs, but in fact they were residences of the elite. There were other areas designated to artisans, merchants, and labourers.

My roommate climbing the Temple of the Moon

The pyramids there are the second tallest in the world, after Egypt’s. The Temple of the Sun is 222m by 70 m, with 248 steps, and built in 100 AD from 3 million tonnes of stone, brick, and rubble, without the use of pack animals, metal, or the wheel. So we walked to the top of both of them. They actually don’t know much about the history behind the pyramids so all they could tell us were theories. The entire complex was burnt sometime in the seventh century AD, possibly looted, and then completely abandoned before being rediscovered by the Aztecs.

The Temple of the Sun

They were completely buried over by river soil and vegetation before they were rediscovered again in modern times. The president at the time of the latest rediscovery wanted to get them cleaned up and excavated for the Mexican Centennial celebrations and the archaeologists were falling behind schedule. So he told them, I don’t care what means you use, get those things cleaned in time for the celebrations. So amazingly for archaeologists, they used dynamite and blew up the top part of the temple of the sun. Amazing that people would be so destructive to their own national archaeological treasures. Then they get all annoyed that there are pieces of their history held in museums around the world rather than displayed in Mexico. But what the heck, if they are going to blow up their own stuff and allow the remainder to get stolen by their own citizens for their private collections, then perhaps the French and the Germans ought to look after it for them until they can demonstrate that they are responsible enough to mind them themselves.

On the way to the pyramids we stopped at the cathedral of Guadalupe (where I picked up the annoying habit of saying constantly, wadda, wadda… wadda lupe!!), built on the site where the peasant Juan Diego had a vision of the virgin on Dec 9th, 1531. The church wasn’t particularly interesting to me, I don’t like Mexican churches, they all look tacky and cheap (the new thing is neon signs on the altar). It’s amazing how much blood they depict in the images of Jesus, he is dripping with the stuff and it’s all very gory and he looks like a victim of a spectacular axe murder horror flick. Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico and people travel from all over the country to worship at this church. It is specially designed so that the giant cross above the altar extends to a lower level room below the level where the services are held, so that the masses can get as close to the cross as possible without interrupting a service. To maintain the flow of traffic they have installed a moving sidewalk to take the pilgrims across the foot of the cross and then another moving sidewalk back again, so they can do two laps and get funnelled back out again. The person designing the walkway asked the architect how long and fast the walkway should run, and he said, enough so that a person can do one Hail Mary each way. Never seen anything like it.

We passed by Tlatelolco, where around 400 students were massacred by police during a student demonstration just before the Olympics held in Mexico City in 1968. Not only did they fire onto the unarmed students in the plaza, they also took up positions in the surrounding buildings and sniped down onto them, chasing the students into nearby dormitory buildings to hunt down the fleeing ones and shoot them in their rooms. We asked if anyone boycotted the Olympics because of this, but the local guide didn’t know, he probably wasn’t even born then.

Pammie meets Antonio and Gala from Egypt while in Mexico

After our orientation meeting I met up with Antonio and Gala, two Mexican theatre students I met in Egypt while they were on holiday from working in London at the time. They came to my hotel. In Johannesburg on the way to Tanzania my flight had been delayed by about 4 hours so I spent the time looking through the airport and thought an ostrich egg would make a great gift for Gala. So I had hauled this huge fragile thing around with me in my back pack (it took all the space) from JNB-DAR-BULY-DAR-JNB-NYC-MIA-MEX, gingerly placing it under each air line seat, making sure it didn’t get crushed and thus ultimately wind up giving her a package full of smashed egg shell fragments. I triumphantly gave Gala the ostrich egg, relieved to finally be rid of the dreaded thing, which was wrapped in like 20 metres of bubble wrap. She unwrapped it and immediately ignored the egg and began popping the bubbles. Antonio, who looks a little like Salvador Dali with bleached hair and the same moustache, stared at the ostrich egg, observed it with a trained eye while held at a distance with outstretched arm, then brought it back close up, shook it, put his eye to the hole where they had extracted the egg, and when they finally guessed what it was, they said, but...why? And put it in their backpack without a word. Gala is a vegetarian and doesn’t seem pleased at the idea that I killed a baby ostrich so she could have a present. I can’t believe I tiptoed across the planet with that naffen thing and they aren’t thrilled with it. I would have been stoked. But what the heck, they're actors, what do they know.

Pammie sharing a sheesha pipe with Gala and Antonio in Egypt

Anyway they took me on the metro and then a pesero (a small fat and bubbly cartoon-like bus bouncing along on small tires called a fish bowl because of the huge windows displaying many more people smashed into it than there should be) to a bar and we had a few drinks, I had margaritas, and we ate some little Mexican snacks, sopes, for dinner. Not to be confused with sopas, which is soup. Sopes are little tortillas spread with refried beans with salsa and cheese on top.

Mexicans only really eat two meals a day, one big breakfast in the morning around 8 or 9 am, then their main meal at around 2 or 3 pm, and then a snack in the evening. Not a bad set up, and good for me too when I travel alone. I tend not to eat dinner when I travel because I don’t like being out and about at night, but, the meals must be evenly spaced and snacks can be critical to the success of avoiding a cranky pammie. So we talked in the bar for a while, then they took me back home. We took the metro which is very efficient and just as good as the one in Paris, with trains running every few minutes and the network of lines spider webbing throughout the city. It is much cheaper to use than the Paris metro, and a ticket will take you anywhere you want, without zone restrictions. I think the tickets were only about 10 cents each. Like the Paris metros (the trains are made in France, too), they are packed with people including encamped homeless people and travelling musicians playing for handouts. The metros here also have vendors walking from carriage to carriage hollering out that they are selling pens, candy, pirate CD’s, etc.

Gala and Antonio wanted to meet up again the next evening to walk around the Zocalo or main plaza so we could eat street food there, but it was raining the next evening, so I never called. I cannot stand to use the telephone and it took me two days to get the nerve to call Antonio the first time. Gala also loves food and wanted to take me especially to the little street food stalls. It was amazing how much weight she had lost since I’d seen her in Egypt 9 months ago, and when I commented on it, she said she’d had to lose weight because she couldn’t get any theatre roles unless she was skinny. In Egypt she was normal sized, if not with a bit of puppy fat, from stealing food from the restaurant in London where she worked, she said. She was very good looking then, and wore no makeup. Now she was very thin with lots of make up and she looked terrible, like a witch. Guess that's the theatre!

Pammie meets her travel mates in Mexico City

That night we met our tour guide, Jessica, who is a Mexican girl who looks all of 14 years old but was actually 23 I think, she had just finished her BA last year in fine arts, majoring in painting. Predictably unemployed as fine arts graduates tend to be, this was her first time working as a tour guide but she has been to all the towns we were visiting and seems pretty competent, very conscientious, and well organised. One thing though, she doesn’t ask us for our travel insurance details (which is good on the one hand since I didn’t get any and the brochure threatens to leave you behind if you don’t get insurance, so I was hoping to pass my medical insurance off as travel insurance. On the other hand this is also bad in case all of us are engulfed in a giant fiery bus accident, then no one at the tour company has our insurance details….). In addition to Jessica, we have local guides at each place we visit so it is no tragedy if she doesn’t know all her facts and figures. She also loves food and enjoys translating all the menus for me and if she is not certain about the details she asks the waiter for us. She indulges my choices for restaurants and seeks out the very best for me, or looks at my recommendations. This is good because the restaurants I want to go to are a little more on the expensive side, but no one else ever realises the difference since Jess and I make all the restaurant decisions (it’s always wise to leave it to the experts). I’m pleased with this because often people take budget travel to the extreme and live on discarded scraps of food, but are quite happy to fork out endless supplies of money for cigarettes, drugs, and beer. I have my priorities….Anyways Jessica is great, very conscientious and with so many people asking questions and translations she gets a bit flustered sometimes and speaks in Spanish to us and English to the wait staff.

Our guide Jessica. Too cute.

There are 10 of us on the two week tour including the Jessica. Unusually enough there are two South African women, one a Chinese lady and the other an Indian lady, but both in their 50’s and born in South Africa, and both overweight. The Chinese lady is built like a walrus and her tiny feet can barely support her weight, and if she gets her upper bulk out of balance with her lower half then her tiny feet have to scurry to catch up with the momentum of her mass until they are in equilibrium. Their accents are funny...they don’t speak Afrikaans as first choice although they know it, but they have an unusual accent. They are both from Port Elizabeth, the Indian lady will later be referred to as the pizzatarian.


Then there's an Australian boy who works as a psychiatric nurse and is a bit of a hippie spaced out druggie love child (he smokes pot and does magic mushrooms the whole time we are there. Another thing our guide forgot to do was tell us the rules about no drugs, etc) and carries his guitar every where and sings songs to match every situation we are in. It seems we have quite a few singers in the group so the Australians sing along with him, and also sing Australian national songs, which I enjoy listening to. He doesn’t drink, which is a plus, since Australian male drinkers can be a bit of a problem sometimes. He is on the trip because he is following the Australian cricket team on their tour of the West Indies and was in the neighbourhood. He's also cut his own hair and ran out of energy or forgot to do the back, so he has this weird clump of hair sticking out of the back of his head.

My travel mates. From the bottom left we have the pizzatarian, the walrus, the comb-over, the drug-boy obscuring my roomate, the Irish builder and his wife to the left, the annoying Argentinian, and Jessica.

Then there's another Australian, a guy who works in the complaints department of a phone company despite having a degree and an extensive background knowledge in politics and history and is an exact reincarnation of one of the engineers at work (Moonie): same pale translucent moon-like skin, same manner of speaking, delivering abrupt definitive statements brooking no argument whatsoever in a piercing voice that could penetrate one end of an in flight 747 to the other, but about 50 kg overweight and thinning greasy unwashed hair with the dreaded comb over. A major know it all, like Moonie, but blessed with more accuracy and breadth of information which makes it more bearable.

Then there's an Australian girl, a lesbian, also overweight, who works in a hardware store. It turns out that she is my roommate and she is quite reasonable, and easy to get along with. She’s a diabetic though and suffers from the infrequent and oddly spaced meal times, and gets a bit aggressive if her insulin schedule gets out of whack.

The worst one of the group is an Argentinean girl who moved to Australia as a child, she speaks Spanish which is handy for translations but not good when talking with Mexicans, because nearly all Latin Americans dislike Argentineans for being arrogant. She is one of those non-stop rapid-fire talkers, laughs hysterically at every comment to the point of physically collapsing on the nearest supporting victim, and monopolises the guide in Spanish with urgent and lengthy complaints about the unsophisticated Mexican service.

Then there's another overweight Australian girl who is on her honeymoon with an overweight giant of an Irishman also living in Australia, a builder, who is nearly impossible to understand, with such a thick accent. All in all, a pleasant enough if slow moving and out of shape group of porkchops, although I think the Argentinean will be the pain in the ass.

Hanging around Mexico City

Since it was a Monday, the day of closure for museums world-wide, there wasn’t much else to do but go to see all the famous neighbourhoods. William Burroughs and several of his Beat Generation friends lived in Mexico City for a while and this is where he played William Tell in a bar with a glass on his wife’s head, only to have her raise up on her tip toes at the last minute and cop the bullet in the forehead (or so he reckons. She was a drug addled mess, addicted to Benzedrine, and could hear people whispering at the other end of a street block in New York City. He is an interesting character, a Harvard graduate and lifelong heroin addict and heir to the Burroughs adding machine family. He used to line up his wife's Benzedrine bottles on the mantlepiece and shoot them off with an air rifle while sitting in an armchair. He also used to make art by putting a spray can in front of a piece of white cardboard, then shooting the spray paint can to see what designs it would make on the paper). He only went to jail for a few days for this. I could have visited the house where Trotsky and his wife hid under their bed to avoid an assassin’s bullets, but decided not to (he was later successfully assassinated by a fanatic posing as his assistant who hammered him in the skull with the business end of an ice axe).

I walked through the Zona Rosa, formerly the hippest neighbourhood in town, and perhaps I didn’t go to the right places but it looked pretty ordinary to me, which perhaps explains why it is now described as the formerly hip area. So I went back to the historic center around my hotel, and had a look at a shop called Casa de Azulejos, built in 1596 and covered with pretty blue tiles (no doubt hence the name Azulejos, as azul means blue. I might be incorrect but I believe the word for tiles is azulejos, perhaps because tiles were commonly blue back in the old days) shipped from China on Spanish galleons and now has a Sanborn’s department store inside. I was going to go to San Angel Inn, which is a famous Mexican restaurant and supposedly has the best margaritas in town, and also to Café L’Opera, where you can still see a bullet hole Pancho Villa shot into the ceiling, but I ran out of energy (Pancho Villa is a former cattle rustler turned leader of the Mexican revolution, who was particularly well known to Americans because he signed a movie contract to film his battles. He even organised to have his prisoners of war executed during the best lighting conditions).

The Casa de Azulejos in Mexico City

For lunch I went to Los Girasoles, one of the trendiest new restaurants in town. I tried huitlacoche, which is a black fungus that grows on corn, sounds terrible, but was served in little tortilla purses. I’d forgotten that quesadillas in Mexico City are not as I know them: two flat thin flour tortillas grilled with cheese and maybe chopped chiles in the middle. The ones in Mexico City are made from corn dough called masa (which also makes the flat corn tortillas), but are much thicker and heavier textured, and formed in the shape of empanadas. The ones I ordered were made of blue corn. In fact flour tortillas are expensive and not common in Mexico City, they favour the corn ones. Flour tortillas are generally a northern Mexico thing, while they prefer the corn ones sin the south. Just as well for me because overseas you can only buy the flour tortillas (although in sold packages with a one year shelf life, scary!!), not the corn ones. A Brazilian guy sitting at the next table introduced himself to me, and was also interested in food, so we traded restaurant names and dishes to try.