Puebla, Mexico

My Mother has just departed after a 3 week trip and I miss her already! We treated Mum to a trip down to Savannah, GA where we spent our honeymoon ad she had a blast, we took on her on a ghost tour, to the beach and even for some real Southern Home Cooking! Yum!

I also treated mum to quite an eventful bicycle ride back from the CLE winery (a favourite from her last trip) right here in Cleveland Heights. It started well when it turned out we had arrived at the winery just in time for closing so after a couple of quick gulps it was back to the bicycles for the fun to begin! I hopped on the bike and started to peddle - straight into a bush. I had thrown the Lock around the handlebars which had managed to position itself in such a way as to jam the steering hard to the right sending me straight into the shrubbery. At least it was a comfy bush and not a holly bush or a car I cycled into this time! With this incident fresh in the memory I was taking it easy and was stunned to see a deer rear up un front of me, nearly taking me down before ot ran off over the road! It was happily munching on some tasty flowers in someones garden when I rudely interrupted it, startling it and sending it flying across the road! Mum must have been wondering what would happen next..... Well Mum didn't have much time to wonder as just around the next corner I got some branches tangled up in mum's rucksack which I was kindly carrying for her, I kept going hoping to yank the branches free which is exactly what happened, sending them pinging back straight into poor mum's face!!!! Just like a catapult!!! Needless to say we didn't cycle anywhere else after that, although we did get to go back to the winery to collect mum's sunglasses which had slipped out of the rucksack when I took my tumble! Not bad for a 2 mile ride!

A deer in our garden, I wonder if it is the same deer that I managed to scare?

Well enough of my antics with mum, this blog is about Puebla, Mexico - One of my favourite! 

Puebla is a wealthy provincial city with a huge historical quarter, the largest cathedral in the Americas, the finest food in all of Mexico and its famed colourful talavera pottery everywhere! Puebla is also full of old VW Beatles and Campers, literally every other car is a old VW, probably because Puebla is home to the worlds biggest VW car plant. It really adds to the charm of the place - Not the car plant but the old VWs!

VW Camper

VW Beatle and Puebla's pretty coloured streets.

We stayed at the Casa De La Palma, a fine colonial building constructed to house the Spaniards when they came over to Mexico but before they could find work, a little like a homeless shelter today I guess! It was a beautiful hotel with a little central courtyard, lots of flowers everywhere and really high ceilings in the rooms to keep it nice and cool. Not bad for 25 dollars a night!

Inside the Casa De Las Palmas

Puebla has a lot to offer the tourist and was a fantastic welcome to Mexico, you could spend days wondering the old cobbled streets, especially La Calle de los Dulces or 'the street of candies' for us English folk, It's wonderful, a whole road of nothing but sweet shops selling nothing but delicious homemade candies, my favourite was the fudge for sure! On the subject of food in Puebla you really cant go wrong. Puebla is the home of Mole Polblano, which is chicken served in a rich chili and chocolate sauce and is heavenly good!! 

Mole Poblano!

Contrary to my preconceptions the food in Central Mexico was really not overly spicy, with most dishes giving you a tickle of spice, enough for you to taste but not overwhelming by any means. Before we left Amanda and I had been getting in the mood for our trip by consuming unhealthy amounts of Cholula hot sauce as Cholula was one of the places we were to visit and we wanted to get out stomachs used to the spice. What a waste of time, we didn't see a single bottle of Cholula hot sauce the whole time we were gone!

A Pretty Kitchen

On the subject of Cholula we took a day trip there from Puebla and I have to say it didn't get off to the best of starts. Puebla may be 'small' compared to Mexico City but it still has a population of almost 6 million inhabitants meaning it is twice the size of Chicago, in fact in the US only New York would be bigger. All these people made navigating the city a bit of a challenge, We opted to take the local bus to Cholula and explore the famous pyramid there on our own as it was the only option for us except a Spanish language tour. The journey started out well enough as we found and boarded the right bus and discovered a ticket was about 10 cents, it went a bit downhill after that however as we somehow managed to miss the stop for Central Cholula and ended up at the end of the line at a bus stop in a not so desirable part of town with nothing but stray dogs and tumbleweed for company, the bus then chucked us off and left us there all alone. 

All Alone in Cholula Bus Station.

Dreadful thoughts of our impending doom were going through our minds when thank goodness another bus showed up heading back the way we had come. I have never been so happy to see a bus in all my life, even if the old thing made our school Metro-bus look like a Rolls Royce! Despite the fact the bus saved us from a grizzly fate I was still a bit grumpy that I had to pay another 10 cents for another ticket :(

Cholula is a suburb of Puebla that is home to the worlds largest pyramid, far larger than the pyramids in Giza. The pyramid in Cholula is just a huge mound of earth now, thanks to Cortez's wish to destroy anything Aztec, in fact after destroying the aztec pyramid he went ahead and built a Church on top of it! Some parts of the original pyramid have been excavated giving a sneak peak at what must have been an awe inspiring structure, Now you can walk up to the top of it where according to all the postcards you have a incredible view of the smoking Popocatapetyl volcano (remember from the Mexico City blog?) looming over you but what we saw was a lot of haze have with the volcano just barely visible in the distance!

Can you see 'El Popo'?

Spanish church atop the old Aztec Pyramid.

We were lucky that the next night our hotel receptionist pointed us in the direction of Arena Puebla, home of the Lucho Libre! It is Mexican masked wrestling and it is a lot of fun, they were quite a diverse group of wrestlers the night we went, we got to see Sauron from Lord of the Rings, A Policeman as well as a tiger and of course a jaguar all with costumes to match! They all wear fancy capes, skimpy shorts and masks to hide their faces, I really enjoyed it, there was a fun atmosphere in the arena with everyone howling with laughter as the policeman started spanking the jaguars ass before slamming him to the ground with such force the whole arena shook.

Nacho Libre!

Lucha Libre!

Of course no trip to a new city is complete without paying homage to the local football team. Amanda was really excited when we discovered that Lobos BUAP were drawn at home in the Copa MX against Juarez the weekend we just happened to be in Puebla. Puebla has two teams in the top tier of Mexican football with Puebla FC dominating the local and fan base and Lobos being by far the less prestigious of the two but with an incredible story to tell. Lobos are a small university team that last year came from nowhere to win promotion to the Primera division, taking everybody including themselves by surprise. It was so unexpected that the team had done no preparation for this possibility, had to bring in about 10 players on loan and were still searching for a tv deal when we watched them 7 games into the season. They started the season brilliantly and found themselves in 3rd place after a few games, they have tapered off a bit since but it is still a bit of a fairy tale story that we were delighted to witness.

Amanda enjoying a brew before the game.

In September 2017 the state of Puebla suffered a devastating earthquake, toppling buildings and killing scores of people. You can see the evidence of it all around, we got to visit Biblioteca Palafoxiana - The oldest library in the new world which had only just reopened after it had taken them 5 months to restore it after the earthquake. A lot of the old churches had also suffered as you can see from these pictures.

Damage from a devastating earthquake in 2017

The Oldest Library in the New World.

Puebla Cathederal - The tallest in Latin America

Artist showing off some of his incredible Talavera Pottery.

I don't think my blog or pictures really do Puebla justice, you'll just have to go there to see it for yourself :)

Music City USA

Hello from my front porch, the sun has finally arrived in Cleveland so I get to sit outside to type my blog!

Our trip down to Nashville, Tennessee started brilliantly! A couple of days before we left I proudly announced to Amanda that after a long spell out due to injury I was going to play football again! I was so excited and so was a little taken aback by Amanda's reaction "Are you sure you should, you better not hurt your knee again and end up limping so badly that we can't do anything in Nashville,  like when you played football before our trip to Pittsburgh". My Mum displayed a similar sentiment "you stupid child, you know it makes your knee swell up". Of course I played football anyway and was mortified the next morning when I noticed my knee had swollen up to the size of a beach ball and I could hardly walk. Amanda was not best pleased, thank goodness it healed quickly.

A Horrible storm we drove through outside Nashville.

Bright and early and knee permitting on Friday morning we left for Nashville and almost immediately hit bumper to bumper traffic in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnatti and Louisville before a thunderstorm of epic proportions just outside Nashville nearly washed us away for good. This all contrived to turn a nice 8 hour road trip into a 12 hour marathon. I guess it could have been worse, At least I didnt have a boil on my bum! Road trips are romanticized in so many books and movies they really do seem exciting - Setting out onto the open road with all the world as your oyster, at least that is till you actually set off on one and realise the reality of it is you're going to be sitting in endless traffic jams on endless, monotonous highways harrassed by truck drivers and driven loopy by the speed limits....  If only I could have a dime for every Macdonalds we drove by. Or even every Trump and NRA bumper sticker for that matter :) 

Our cute little Air BnB!

Well we didn't give in and eventually arrived. We met up with Sheila and Ken (Amandas Mother and Step Father) who had found a great little house for us all on airbnb - It was in a place called Murfreesboro, a 'suburb' of Nashville that was actually a good hours drive from the city. Due to the huge, sprawling cities and massive amounts of space it is not unusual for somewhere an hour away from the city center to still be considered a part of it. Murfreesboro was lovely, with a quaint old fashioned high street and lots of little shops to get breakfast, coffee and ice cream, the latter being a neccessity with the mercury almost hitting 100 degrees and enough humidity in the air to drown a dolphin. We plumped for the city Cafe for our breakfast, a delightful little spot with Southern accents filling the air and some things on the menu I had never seen before including Grits, biscuits and gravy and Fried Bologna. The biscuits and gravy were the best of the bunch, it is nothing like an English biscuit, basically it is a scone with some gravy poured on top, Yum! The fried Bologna was interesting, it is not pronounced like the Italian city but as Bal-Oh-Knee and turned out to basically be a piece of fried spam which was nice when compared to the grit - best described as pieces of dirt picked up from the side of the road, mixed with some goo and thrown in a bowl, I have heard that it tastes nice with sugar but I am not so sure about that.

Grits on the left, Gravy at the top, Bologna on the right and the buscuits at the bottom!

 After a good breakfast you have to head into Nashville, the home of country music! There wasn't a lot of love for Nashville among our Cleveland contingent from the wedding, it was too hot, noisy, busy, and tacky. It may have had an element of all of these things but I personally loved it! They have a street nestled right in the center among the skyscrapers called the Honky Tonk, full of packed bars and restaurants with each one boasting a live band and as much country music as your ears can lap up. We visited on a saturday and combined with the 90 degree heat and all the people it was certainly an assault on the senses! The appeal to the Honky Tonk lies in it's history, For a while Nashville boasted one of the largest radio towers in the nation and the biggest by far in the South thus attracting Country Stars and wannabees to Nashville to enable them to reach the biggest audience possible on this new fangled thing - Radio! The radio may have been overtaken by more modern technologies such as Youtube and the like but Nashville has maintained it's place as the capital of Country Music.

Looking up the Honky Tonk. 

A kiss by the Cumberland River.

The Honky Tonk with all the Skyscrapers in the background.

In keeping with the Country spirit we visited the hatch show print company, A Nashville institution that has produced posters for almost all the country stars over the years. The shop has been going since 1879 and it was fun to hear some of the stories related to their posters. One that made me chuckle was a poster they made for Elvis which travelled around the world thanks to a photographer for life magazine and a conservative preacher. The pastor was holding up the poster while preaching about the evils of 'pop music' with the Elvis Poster in his hand, got snapped in the act by the photographer and made the front page of Life, reaching a global audience as a result. I wanted to include a picture of the Elvis poster here but sadly I neglected to take one!

A printing press at Hatch Show Print, the shelves in the background contain all the old carved letters they use to make the posters, some of them date back to 1879!

This is me making my own poster!

While in Nashville it is also very important that you visit the GooGoo chocolate shop, the original chocolate goo goo is the best, but if you are going to buy some to take home can I also suggest not leaving them in the car on a 100 degree day or you may return to a very sticky mess!

You must go to Goo Goos but do not leave the chocolate in the car!

In the evening we took a trip to see another Nashville institution - The Grand Ole Opry - This is the worlds longest running live radio show and showcases Country Music every Saturday night. I really enjoyed it and I think it is a must see for anyone, regardless of your opinion of country music. It is wonderful that all of the current stars of Country seem to respect and relish playing at the Opry, there seems to sense of prestige about playing on the same stage as the old greats such as Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. Even Bob Dylan has performed on the famous stage! Something that is neat is that when the Opry moved into it's purpose built stage in the 70s they cut a circle out from the middle of the old stage and carried it to the new venue so the performers today get to stand on the same stage as the legends from the past. A highlight of the show for Amanda and I was Charlie Nagatomo, A Japanese country singer famous for bringing country music to Japan and even opening up a nightclub over there that plays nothing but Country Music, he had a Southern accent as well, it made me chuckle!

The stage at the Grand Ole Opry! Can you spot the circle?

The wedding was wonderful, it was a real Southern affair with Waffles and Chicken served for dinner, absolutely delicious! The temperature was 100 degrees and it was a outside ceremony so it was lucky we arrived fashionably 'almost' late so we didn't have to wait outside for long before the ceremony started, I got extremely sweaty in my suit! The reason we were 'almost' late was thanks to the horrendous Sunday traffic in Nashville, apparently the locals call it 'church traffic' as it is in the bible belt after all! I must wish Reid and Rachel all the best for your lives together, and enjoy your honeymoon in St Lucia! Maybe you'll get to cool off a bit there! Lucky Devils!

Congratulations Rachel and Reid!

Our journey home was much better than our journey there, we hit no traffic at all and even better we stopped off at the Jim Beam bourbon distillery for a tour! Neither Amanda or myself really drink spirits but it was really nice getting to know about bourbon and of course getting to try some nice bourbon at the end! Our distillery tour guide was really good and informative, He told us that the longest a barrel of bourbon can be stored for is 15 years because if you leave it any longer than that so much of the whiskey would have evaporated it wouldn't really be worth opening the barrel, they call the missing bourbon the 'Angels Share'! Something else which is quite interesting is that a lot of the buildings at the distillery are a black colour, this is because when the whiskey is being stored and the angels are taking their share a black fungus is created by the evaporation, covering the warehouses and even the tree bark with what looks like a think black paint!

The Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont, Kentucky.

It takes 14 Square feet of corn to make one bourbon bottle.

This picture epitomises the South,The Baptist Church surrounded by the Distillery warehouses! Note the black colour of the buildings and the tree bark.

A great breakfast on our last morning, you can't go wrong with pancakes!

Getting Chased by a storm on our way home, look at the contrast of the sky behind us and the sky ahead of us!

I must also put a shout out to our next door neighbour Mark who very kindly looked after Luna the Cat while we were gone! Thank You :)

And you thought your commute was bad?

It started out as a bit of a laugh, the time was 6pm at Tacubaya metro station, Mexico City. It is amazing watching the platform fill up from front to back every 2 minutes before the next train comes along. I figured this would all be done and things would return to normal by half 6 or so, we'll just wait at the back of the platform.... Haha... No.... By half 6 it wasn't just the platform filling up but the elevators and the stairs leading to it as well, we were at the first stop so the trains were arriving empty and departing full. Every two minutes. Without barely making a dent into the sweaty heaving mass of people waiting.

Maybe it was just line 2 we thought, so off we went to try our luck on line 7, heading parallel to the city this one was not bad at all, we even got a seat! It was a shame it was headed away from our destination but it'll take us to line 3 and as it is past 7 now surely it won't be so bad! Well here we are... Oh s***! We can't even see the platform here. We definitely can't get back from here. Shall we go back to Tacubaya? Shall we just wait here till things calm down? Maybe we could go out and grab a drink or two? The trouble is if we leave the station we don't know where we are and we'll have to buy another ticket! No... We'll just wait it out here...

Okay. This isn't working. If only I had a decent map and we could walk it.. I wonder if it is still raining? No No Lets go back to Tacubaya.... We can't hang around here all night, maybe from there we can try that line 12 to Zapata and change there to get to Coyoacan and our hotel! Oh my god we have to do something! I am busting for the loo and there is no toilet here at Tacuba! Its a quarter to 8 now, it must have quietened down somewhat! What I would do to be a woman right now and get onto one of those ladies only carriages, they don't look half so bad!

The ladies only carriages, taken on a quieter day!

 Okay Okay! The trains on this line are still busy but not that busy! Lets go for it! Yes Yes Yes We have just about squeezed on and we are moving off in the right direction! Next stop and oh god... it is getting really busy now... Amanda is squished up against me... hopefully I don't smell so bad, but then everyone else on here is sweaty as well I guess it doesn't matter. Just 3 stops to Zapata, I must look up a bit about Zapata when we get back as I am sure I have heard his name before, or maybe that was just a fooball player. I know about the Zapata mustache of course, if only mine looked that good... Zapata! Here we are! And there is a toilet! YES! We just have to change trains now and then one stop to Coyoacan. It isn't busy at all. Coyoacan. Finally. It only took us about 3 hours to travel 10 kilometers! I am never catching the metro in the rush hour(s) again!

I love these 4 pictures, they define the metro perfectly. Watch the guy on the far left as he get more and more squished by the men trying to board the train!

Help me he says.

Pretty Please!

Oh. Blast.

A well deserved drink!

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!