Mexico City.. a noisy, colourful place, full of people selling things in little stands by the side of the street... Candy, magazine, trinkets, clothes, games. Everything. (Adobe Suite for $8! Hotel rooms for $5! Shirts for $3!)
People are for the most part, extremely friendly and helpful. (I sound like a writer for Lonely Planet).. Beers are really, really cheap, but only if you buy them at the store or at a servo, where they cost around two Australian dollars for Six.
Clubs however are way more expensive, even more expensive than Sydney. (Pizza Hut and Maccers are more expensive too, go figure)
In my time here I've gone to see the Sun and Moon pyramids in a place called Teotihuacan. The sun pyramid is the second biggest in the world. It's fucking awesome but because I went during hollidays, it was full of tourists and Mexicans. Which is a bit of a hypocritical thing to say, since I am both.
The city has got this whole, old school Spanish vibe to it, and there's ruins and excavation sites scattered all over the place.. next to banks, metro lines, churches etc.. The churches are magnificient, ranging from 600 years old to 200. They're massive.. lined with gold and with ultra detailed pictures of dieties and angels. Everyone here is Catholic... almost everyone, but not in a fundamentailst way. More of a very open and brotherly way, but extremely devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is like the Mexican version of the Virgin, and she's supposedly made a few apparitions here...
The news of the Pope dying were big, people went out to the main centre of town to pray and sing and stuff, and the news have been playing footage of the Pope since it happenned up till now.
The markets are MASSIVE and you can get anything at all. There is a huge range of fruits and vegetables. Mangoes are really really cheap, like two dollars a kilo.. Lemons are limes, tacos are tostadas and burritos are tacos, we got it all backwards. (Avocados are $1 a kilo!)
There's heaps of cool clothes as well. Many are imported from America but they're sweet cuz they're brands we dont have in Australia. Today I saw a great one with a picture of a clown that said 'Rape is no laughing matter. *Clown* Unless you're raping a clown'.
Money talks here, a 4 year old could buy a bottle of tequila as long as he has money...
The city is ginormous, stupidly big, and about as complicated as the political situation. Politics are very important here because to many people, the decisions the politicians make are the deciding factor between a normal life or poverty.
At the moment things are pretty heated about this guy called 'Lopez Obrador' who is like the head honcho of the city, and he built some streets illegally on some private property or something, and now he's meant to go to jail, because four judges found him guilty. But there's a law here that says you can't be found guilty of anything as long as you're a serving politcian. But because he was found guilty so badly, the government has been forced to change the law.. and the people that support him (which is much of the city, because he's a populist) are pretty pissed off and have been protesting. But yeah, he's going to jail now.
As I was saying, the city is massive, it's actually the biggest in the world, and it has the longest highway.
There's a huge, huge, huge range of candy, traditional, imported, packaged, unpackaged, creamy, chocolatey, fruity, bready, chewy, crumbly, hot, spicy.. Everything. They really like their candy.
What sucks is that Nestle has been buying out many of the big candy companies and changing the ingredients to save money, so many things are losing their authentic Mexican tastyness and many people are pissed off but there's nothing they can do. It's also happenning with the banks and the big vendors of anything, in fact, in the last ten years, 80% of Mexican companies have been bought out and are no longer Mexican. Which means the country is getting even poorer.
Another really sad thing is that Paris Hilton graces the front cover of the women's magazines here. Globalization is turning the whole world into one culture and it ain't cool.
However, the Mexican spirit remains. People are always making handicrafts and selling them, and you can go out any night of the week to one of the big parks and find bands playing Jazz, funk, traditional music (like mariachis) or ballads, as well as groups of drummers and there'll be people dancing all around them.
There's so many handicrafts and they's so cheap! Silver is especially cheap. I'm thinking about doing and import/export thing because of all the awesome cool cheap shit that you can get.
Weed is also really really cheap, for $5 you get the equivalent of 3 sticks, or grams. Which aint bad. But it isn't as popular as in Aus.
Ahhh.. well I'm running out of things to say but I've said a lot!
Oh yeah, some girls are really hot, the hot ones anyway, because they've got that Mexican thing going on. I came here thinking the girls would be heaps easy, but theyre not, you have to take them to the movies, look at the stars and meet their family.
So if you are after Sluzzas, youre better off going to Thailand or something.
The end