Breathless in Mexico City!

After one of the worst Cleveland winters imaginable with piles of snow, howling gales and quite frankly illegally freezing temperatures we had to get away and as our closest and sunniest option... Mexico won out! I can't believe we have not done this before, we usually go on our holiday during the Cleveland summer which makes no sense as Cleveland is a warm and wonderful place for those middle 6 months of the year. Taking a holiday in February is one of the best moves we have made, especially as it snowed here every day we were gone :)

I tried and failed not to trip

My first encounter with a Xoloitzcuintli or Hairless dog, this picture was rushed as while I was concentrating on photographing the dog on the car I failed to notice the secend xolowhatever hairing (excuse the pun :) toward me with its teeth bared and mouth foaming, needless to say I made a pretty hasty retreat!

Everything about Mexico City is amazing. The food, the arts, the football, the traffic, the noise and the sheer amount of people that call it home give Mexico City such a diverse and energetic feel you can't help to be awe inspired. Anywhere from 20 to 30 million people live in the Greater Mexico City depending on who you believe, I think that at least 500 million people populate the Tacubaya metro station alone on any given rush hour! There is literally something for everyone here, and I hope that my blog gives you just a little insight into this amazing place.

Strolling round Coyoacan

How many peacocks can you count? From the Dolores Olmeda museum.

Our entrance into Mexico City city was spectacular in its own right. We travelled by bus from Puebla (a blog in itself... coming soon!) which is located on other side of Popocatepetl, a 17000 ft high active volcano which made for some great sightseeing from the bus. Unfortunately the bus was as close as we got to Popocatepetl as an eruption 3 days before we left meant a 8km exclusion zone was implemented around the crater. I was actually a little nervous about our trip as I had read that often when Popocatepetl erupts the airport at Puebla closes due to the ash, luckily this wasn't the case for us but it may explain why the flights were so cheap!!

Popocatepetl smoking from the aircraft 

We stayed in Coyoacan, A leafy and trendy suburb about 10km from the center of Mexico city, I thought it might be nice to stay to help keep the noise and congestion at bay and it was certainly a relaxing neighborhood to stay in with lots of greenery and streetside taco and coffee shops. Coyoacan is known for its many famous former residents including the artists and lovers Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I must confess I didn't know much about Frida Kahlo except her unibrow so I was pleased to learn a little more about her by visiting her home the casa Azul which is now a museum celebrating her life and art. Frida made the best of some unfortunate circumstances after being left disabled and unable to bear children from a bus crash where a piece of handrail went through her side. She had to wear uncomfortable corsets to manage the pain and also chose to wear long skirts in order to the hide the fact that one of the legs was longer than the other as a result of polio she contracted when she was six.

The line outside the Casa Azul... on a weekday!

Frida and Diego

Despite all of this Frida became one of Mexico's most celebrated artists and also found time to marry muralist Diego Rivera, they had a turbulent relationship with both having numerous affairs, one of the most notorious being Fridas affair with Diego's friend and Marxist revolutionist Leon Trosky. Frida and Diego were both socialists and so were honored to invite Leon Trotsky to come to live with them however things quickly soured after Frida and Trotsky had an affair leading to Diego banishing Trotsky from the house. Trotsky relocated to a new pad a couple of blocks away where after several failed assassination attempts, including one involving another Mexican muralist David Sequiros (a fascinating story in itself) someone eventually got to him and he was assassinated a couple of years later. You can visit Trotsky's former house as well yet we just didn't have time on this trip. As you can see from the queues to enter Frida's house she is extremely popular in Mexico, you cannot move without seeing her photo, she is even on the 500 peso banknote with Diego Rivera occupying the other side of the note!

Frida on the banknote

Pretty chuffed to see my watch on display at the exhibition on Swiss design at the Museum of Modern Art

Amanda admiring 'The Two Fridas' at the Museum of Modern Art

After our trip to Frida's house we stopped off at the beautiful Palacio de bellas artes before heading over to the main zocalo and Mexico city's sinking cathedral. Mexico city was constructed in a rather unfortunate spot for a large city on top of a dried up lake bed surrounded by volcanoes in a tectonically active area where earthquakes are common and amplified by the the crumbly soil of the old lake bed. Mexico City takes water from aquifers underneath the city at twice the rate it replenishes it, making the crumbly soil on top to fall with the level of the aquifers causing the city to sink. This is particularly visible in the case of the main cathedral 'The Metropolitan Cathederal of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven' which is the largest in the Americas and where its huge weight has exaggerated the sinking and where it's two huge bell towers were tilting to such a degree that emergency repairs had to be made to their foundations in the 90's to prevent them from collapsing altogether! When you walk around inside the cathedral you can see that none of the walls line up correctly and seem to leaning in all sorts of odd directions, I would have included some pictures for you as it looked really weird but unfortunately I got yelled at for getting my camera out and who am I to argue!

The wonky Cathederal from the main Zocalo

You can see how these two parts of the Cathederal do not line up!

The Beautiful Palacio de Bellas Artes

There is really is something for everyone in Mexico City, if you happen to be a animal lover Chapultepec zoo (one of four zoos in the city) boasts 3 giant pandas and if you are a cat lover it has a kitty Cafe!!! They are just the best idea, a Cafe that is full of cute  cats so you can drink your coffee or eat your pizza surrounded by them, just be careful with your cheesecake as it is a favorite with the local felines, I captured one of them red handed taking a huge bite out of this unsuspecting girls cake before the poor cat was whisked away by the waiter and as a punishment thrown into a pot of boiling water to be cooked in preparation for the 'Dia internacional del Gato' or 'international cat day' celebrations, where cat with cheese is a very popular dish. I am joking of course as the cat was in fact just put back down where it could continue its pursuit of cheesecake! The cafe works in conjunction with the local adoption centers and so you can even take a kitty home with you if you like it a lot! Needless to say we visited this cafe every day we were there however we would greatly appreciate it if you don't tell Luna this as we don't want to face her wrath if she were to find out we have been cheating on her!!!!

The cat on the table taking a huge bite out of the cheesecake

Now the same cat is on its way to the cooking pot to be boiled up for dinner!

Amanda and a cat

No trip anywhere should be complete without a football game, and in Mexico City this came courtesy of Cruz Azul. The team started as a non professional outfit with players from the Cemente Cruz Azul factory yet they became so good they turned professional and never looked back, winning multiple Mexican championships in the 70s, they are going through a bit of a barren spell at the moment but are still considered one of the top 4 teams in Mexico along with Chivas Guadalajara, PUMAS and Club America. We saw them play against Necaxa and it seems to me that Pedro Coaxinha has brought his bad luck over from Rangers (where he was sacked after 6 abysmal months) as they played poorly and lost 2-0. I loved the atmosphere at the open topped stadium and was surprised that apart form the ultras who are kept in the pens the crowd was not segregated, I was also quite surprised to see the vendors adding hot sauce to crisps and popcorn - turns out this was a masterstroke as it tastes delicious! Cruz Azul are still sponsored by the cement factory to this day and I included a picture of some neat big inflatable cement bags and a cement truck that were deployed at half time, as you can see from the picture our seats were pretty high up which caused us a little trouble as any time you walk up any type of gradient in Mexico City, even if it is just a few flights of stairs it can cause you to get incredibly breathless, this is thanks to altitude sickness as Mexico City is located at over 7000 feet above sea level!

Check out the cement truck and the cement bags!

A Necaxa fan celebrating directly in front of us after the game.

I also included a couple of pictures at the end here of a mural called 'Man at the crossroads' by Diego Rivera (Fridas hubby) at the Palacio bellas artes, it has an interesting story attached to it as this mural was originally designed to be displayed on the Rockefeller tower in New York City. The Rockafeller's invited Diego to paint a mural on their new skyscraper (a surprising choice considering his known socialist political stance) and having agreed to a specific design Diego went ahead and painted something different including a depiction of Vladimir Lenin. This angered the Rockefeller's who ordered the destruction of the mural even after Diego offered to include Abraham Lincoln in the painting by way of a compromise. Despite all this Diego still ended up collecting his fee of 10 thousand dollars from the Rockafeller family before recreating the mural inside the Palacio Bellas Artes with Lenin included, but not Lincoln!

'A Man at the Crossroads' by Diego Rivera with Amandas head in the foreground.

The offending painting of Vladimir Lenin

The overalls he used to create the 'Man at the Crossroads'

Before we left I heard some say that Mexico City is a dangerous place to visit, well I have good news for you... We spent a while there without getting Murdered, Raped or robbed, I think the main reason for this is that Mexico sends all of its 'bad hombres' to the States meaning Mexico City itself seemed to us to be perfectly safe, we never felt threatened at all!

A friendly squirrel in Chapultepec park

We had a fantastic time in Mexico City but in 5 days feel we barely scratched the surface, I think you could spend years there and still not know the half of it! For the next blog I'll tell you about the worlds worst rush hour, masked fighters, wonderful food and our time in Puebla and Cholula!