Mexico City, The Success

I ventured back to Mexico City this weekend with Regina and Destiny to make up for the previous swine flue induced failure, and what a success it was.

We stayed with some of our friends there in two different really cool neighborhoods one of which, Santo Domingo, is either the biggest or one of the biggest neighborhoods in latin america. It is really colorful, has an interesting history, and has a big student population as it is right next to the biggest university in Mexico City. It reminded me a little bit of some parts of San Francisco, but Regina says its more down to earth and I agree. Our friends took us to a big fiesta in the street that the barrio was having for a quincenera (a girl's 15th bday). Everyone was there from babies to old people just dancing and having a good time; there was a stage set up in the street with a live band, chairs on the sidewalks, and the street was full of people. It was really fun, but I wish I had known how to dance the cumbia as that seemed to be the dance of the evening.

We did so much other cool stuff, too! We went to a giant sculpture park that is nothing like the seattle sculpture park. It is much bigger with tons of huge sculptures and it is way more wild nature and you actually have to hike and climb through it. There is a giant sculpture of a snake that weaves through the other sculptures that you can walk on, too and it is raised about 5-10 feet of the ground depending on the spot. After we went there we hopped the fence into this national reserve desert with a huge soccer field sized abstract volcano sculpture thing. The middle of it is a huge pit/bowl full of actual dried lava that is there from when a volcano really exploded on the area and on the outside there are a series of huge triangles all the way around that form the outside of the volcano.

We also went to an antique market, rented a pedal boat in the gross lake at Chapultepec (Mexico City's version of Central Park), bought food at cool little shops in Santo Domingo, and cooked/mostly ate food that was cooked for us with our friends. Our friends were really good hosts. Two of them are students and the other one recently finished studying and they are in a reggae band together with some other people. It definitely wouldn't have been the same without them (nor would we have saved as much money sleeping for free and cooking). We didn't do very much of the tourist stuff and I still haven't seen any of the art museums, frieda's house, or the pyramids at Teotihuacan, but we never would have gotten to see the things we did if we hadn't been for our friends and we're going back one more time right before we go home so I can see that stuff then. It's really interesting how varied your experience of one place can be, especially somewhere as huge as Mexico City. It has so much to discover!

Well, our one failure was me forgetting my camera on Saturday at our friend's apartment and not being able to get it back until right before we went home since we stayed with our other friend that night and Regina's camera running out of batteries at the beginning of our sculpture park adventure. We have some pictures though, so I'll post them tomorrow.