October 30, 2013, Mexico City: The second day of my trip got off to a late start when I apparently missed my wake-up call (I was wearing earplugs and didn’t realize that the phone’s ringer was set to low). I awoke to someone from the staff knocking lightly on my door to try and wake me—I have no idea how long he had been knocking—that’ll teach me to check the ringer level on my phone. I quickly got ready and headed down to breakfast with about five minutes to shove some food down my throat and get outside for my pickup.
A driver arrived and took me to a garage near the center of the city, where I waited for my tour to begin. Since I was the only person waiting for a tour, I must confess to a fleeting bout of uneasiness over waiting by myself in this dark garage with a bunch of strangers. Of course I knew this was completely irrational, but human fear is rarely rational, like when you’re downstairs in your house by yourself and you shut the lights out to go to bed—you know there’s nothing hiding in the dark but you still hop upstairs a little faster into the safety of the light. 😉
Eventually my guide showed up and we were off in a little sedan. As the only person on this tour, I had my own private driver and guide for the day—one of the advantages to traveling outside of peak season. For our first stop, the guide claimed he was taking me to a silver museum not listed on the itinerary that the average tourist doesn’t get to see. In actuality, it was a tiny silver shop in a part of the city that, according to the guide, you don’t want to walk around at night. He took me into the back where a jeweler briefly showed me how he makes silver jewelry. Afterward, the guide walked me around the shop and it quickly became clear that this entire detour was nothing more than a ploy to get me to buy something here. Given how much time we would later spend sitting in traffic, I could really have done without this stop taking time away from the tour for which I had actually paid.
When they realized I wasn’t going to buy anything, we got back in the car and headed out. Our next stop was the Olympic Stadium for a quick photo.
We then headed for Xochimilco on the other side of the city, where we were scheduled to go for a boat ride on the Floating Gardens. Traffic was horrendous; it took us about two hours to drive roughly 18 miles. There was a raised expressway for a large portion of this drive, but according to the guide, nobody uses it because the tolls are too expensive—I should have offered to pay the tolls myself to avoid that mess. 🙂
We finally arrived and embarked on one of the boats, which are called trajineras.
As with the car ride, I had the boat to myself along with my guide and the boatman.
There are tons of these boats on the canals, but there weren’t too many in operation on this day, so it was a nice relaxing ride, though I imagine that during peak season and on weekends the canals must be absolutely crammed with boats. As I floated down the canal, I thought of Apocalypse Now and began to hear The Doors’ The End in my head.
At one point a guy from another boat hopped onto ours with a case full of jewelry. I politely declined to purchase anything and he eventually hopped on to another boat. After that, some food merchants attached their boat to ours and cooked us lunch. I ordered quesadillas and they threw in rice, tasty hot salsa, and guacamole (I’m not a big guac guy, but I had some and gave the rest to my guide). The quesadillas were not the grilled cheesy kind to which we are accustomed in the U.S.; these were essentially fried tacos. I ordered pork quesadillas, but only one of them was pork. The second was some sort of dark vegetable (which I think might have been cactus, though it could have been mushroom), and the third was just cheese (fresh and melted). The pork and cheese ones were good, and since I was hungry, I devoured the dark vegetable one as quickly as I could before I had a chance to taste it too much—I’m not the most adventurous of eaters but I have gotten better as I’ve traveled more.
Among the other boats in the water was a party boat with a Mariachi band, boats full of the orange flowers for Day of the Dead festivities, and people cooking various food items such as corn.
At one point we passed by a creepy display of dolls hanging from trees that reminded me of a sequence from a horror show that was on TV last year called The River. The dolls were hung by a resident named Julián Santana Barrera, supposedly to keep away evil spirits and appease the spirit of a girl who had drowned nearby. According to legend the dolls come alive at night.
After the Floating Gardens we made our way back toward the center of the city for a visit to the Museum of Anthropology.
It was very cool to see all of the ancient Aztec artifacts (and those of other civilizations). You could spend an entire day in that museum and not see everything. I won’t bore you with too many photos because I know that photos of museum artifacts don’t exactly have the same impact as seeing them live, but here are a few:
Even the Mesoamericans worshiped his films. 😉
The tour was also supposed to include a visit to the historic center of Mexico City, but there were protests going on and my guide claimed that traffic was not being allowed through, so they ended up dropping me back at my hotel a couple of hours early around 4 p.m. I knew this would be my last chance to see the city center because my entire day tomorrow would be spent at the pyramids of Teotihuacan and then I’d have to pack for my flight to Merida, and I would have kicked myself if I left Mexico City without visiting the excavation site of the Templo Mayor, the great dual pyramid of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, so I decided to make the long walk.
However, this post is getting a little on the long side, so I will be following in the footsteps of Tarantino by splitting it in two, a la Kill Bill. Stay tuned for the next installment, which will cover my journey to the Templo Mayor as well as my first encounter with Day of the Dead festivities. Until then…
View more of my photos from Mexico
Related Posts:
- Down in Mexico, Day 1: Getting Acquainted with Mexico City
- Mexico Panoramas
- Down in Mexico: The Movie
The inner courtyard of the anthropological museum.
Michael Rappa 