So, after our 16 hour wait in Madrid airport we finally boarded our plane to Mexico, complete with an army of Russian athletes! Claire was hugely unimpressed with the lack of good movies, so much moaning and twelve hours later we touched down on Mexican soil, crumpled and some of us covered in coffee (she gets mean when she´s angry).
We braved the metro into the Zocalo (centre), it was hot, crowded and full of men with bags full of speakers selling mariachi music.. needless to say we didn´t buy any. The central square is awesome, it´s made up of huge colonial buildings and a beautiful cathedral. The police presence was huge as apparently a priest was killed recently (bad for him, good for us), so we sought our our hostel with help from a kindly policeman! Our hostel is clean, lively and incredibly central, so we took a quick shower (cue Charlotte moment as I swallowed Mexican water for the first time and expected the worst -- not yet luckily) and headed back out to explore. The countdown to the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence is in full sway, which meant there were traditional dancers grouped around the four corners of the cathedral -- weirdly similar to Morris dancers!
Our hostel has an amazing view over the Zocalo so we bedded down with beer and a new American aquaintance to cover cliched topics such as accents, facebook and ´the state of the world´. We also discovered that Claire is a marriage prepper!
After an amaaazing nights sleep (new earplugs best investment ever) we had a breakfast of watermelon and refried beans (not together) before setting out for a full day of exploration. The Spanish colonial influence is really obvious here; the streets are really wide and lined with trees and the architecture is beautiful. We saw the Presidential Palace with Diego Rivera´s harrowing murals and the main Park and art gallery in the morning, and on our way back to check out the Aztec archeological site we met a little man called Leo who sold us a sob story of being deported from California and trying to get back to his family.. we struck up a friendship and he showed us around the beautiful goldplated post office and naval centre, then invited us to come stay with him in Cancun!
We´re looking for spanish courses now, and then we´ll move on to oaxaca before travelling further east to the coast.
