Wow! We’ve been in Mexico City for a week and on the one hand the time has flown by, yet at the same time, it feels like longer, like there is a comfortable familiarity as if we’d been here months.
We didn’t have the lazy day mentioned in the previous post but instead we went into the Centro Historico with Lison who showed us around the main shopping streets and the Zocalo, Mexico City’s huge town square. Lison adopted Katie within a few hours as a little sister!
On the way back we stopped for ice-cream which I ordered in Spanish and was complemented on my language skills by a man eating ice-cream just next me at the counter. One thing I noticed very quickly since arriving in Mexico, is just how friendly people are. From the stern looking immigration officer who was quick to break a smile at Katie and I when we said we were here to learn Spanish, to the lady in the taqueria next door who has shown great patience and humility as I have tried to order my way through the entire menu in Spanish so broken you could say it was shattered.
Lison left later that afternoon to do some travelling through Mexico with a friend, not sure when she’ll be back.
On Friday, Katie and I went back to the Zocalo where there was traditional Aztec dancing. There is some uproar about it from the purists who say that the true dances were lost from knowledge many years ago, but the revivalists argue that their interpretation is better than completely letting go of their roots. Whatever, it was highly enjoyable to watch and I started up a conversation with a man sitting next to me. I am not sure if he was homeless or very poor, not that it matters, but it struck me as quite poignant at the time, that two people from different ends of the scale, I must look like a rich gringa to him, were both taking equal pleasure from the performance.
On the way back to get the bus to go home we heard some music and followed our ears to the next street corner where there was a group of students, some with full clown makeup, but all wearing red clown noses, playing the most fantastic songs. I love live music, and the quality was so good, not to mention the randomness of stumbling upon them, that we sat and listened for a few minutes and I contemplated the gloriousness of life over a cup of coffee.
Ana, my landlady, arrived back late Friday evening and we hit it off immediately. We’re the same age and have the same sense of humour; never actually having shared a home with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with or related to, I wondered how sharing the apartment would be, but it’s worked out really well. She has helped me organise lots of things and Katie adores her and inisists on waiting up till Ana returns from work and Ana has endless patience with her.
Since then we’ve been cracking down and learning Spanish. I am making good headway in my coursebook, but now really need to work on remembering all the phrases, this will come through conversation I guess. Tomorrow night, Ana and I are going to the Mexico City Couchsurfing group meeting where I will get a chance to practice and also there are some planned Spanish lessons through CS coming up.
So after not leaving the house since Friday apart from going to do shopping, Katie and I spent an intensive one and a half hours this morning doing Spanish and her schoolwork and then we jumped on a bus to go and explore the Polanco district but ended up getting off sooner when Reforma caught our eye. It’s a pretty midrange shopping area and like last Friday we heard music and followed it to find a market tucked away with a Mariachi band playing. Following on from my update last week where I spoke about dreams I’ve achieved so far, I have wanted for a while to see a Mariachi band perform in Mexico, so I had another giddy moment and filmed some to share with you.
After exploring for a while and then spending a long time trying to find the right bus stop to get back, we’ve just got in. I am going to chill for a while before I have my first student arrive at 7pm to practice conversational English. She offered 80 pesos an hour plus two litres of milk, I don’t know where milk comes into it?! Maybe she is taking the whole English language thing a bit far and expects us to drink lots of tea!! So I asked her to pay 100 pesos an hour and forget the milk, or 80 pesos if she brings a cow! I didn’t know what else to say in response to being paid in milk!
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Tags: Experiences, katie, live music, mariachi, Mexico City, travel
