We managed to find an hotel a couple of blocks out from the zocalo for 130p a night which was just great. Amazingly the zocalo was blocked off from all traffic over christmas so we didn´t have any bother getting about and we think that tons of Mexicans had headed out of the city for christmas and so the crowds were not as huge as we expected.
In the zocalo they had set up a huge iceskating rink and also had a place for the kids to build a snowman and to slid down an ice slide. They had huge amazing sets of christmas lights all over the buildings around the zocalo. At christmas they celebrate Christ's birth but do not give presents, present giving day is January 6th and it is a special day for giving presents to children.
We got to see lots of museums here and they have a huge park called Bosque de Chapultepec that has a huge free zoo and also one of the worlds best museums of Anthropology. We went to both and walked our feet off. We discovered that Kent is able to get into places for free because he is an 'incapacitado', nice to have a positive for missing a leg at last. We discovered 'gigantic tortas' in the park so for 15 pesos had a burger type thing that was as big as 2 huge burgers, yum!
Kent walked thru the Templo Mayor which is a pyramid of the Aztecs that stood on the site that the current cathedral now stands on. It was only discovered when they went to run some new amenities for the city in the area.
Lots of things were closed when we arrived, we went to look for food at about 8pm the night we arrived and everything was closing up so we had to go and have (shock horror!) McDonalds as it was the only foodery open late that night (christmas eve). The next few days we were there the city seemed to be operating on half the usual shops and stalls etc.
The last day we left at night so packed up and left our packs with reception and headed off to the Museo de Antroplogical and spent the day there. It is a HUGE museum and very very interesting, we went all over it in a day but it really needs longer. At mid afternoon Carol had reached saturation point but the exhibits were great just to look at without trying to absord anything.
We took the metro again to the bus station with our big packs and all was good. Considering how worried we were about coming to this big city it has been just great!
