The Best Seat in the House--A ride on the Metro of Mexico City

Mexico City, Mexico
30 de Octubre de 2009

¨Cinco pesos. Pagame cinco pesos.¨
¨Five pesos. Pay be five pesos.

The item for sale is a cheesy yellow and white plastic key chain cum flashlight/magnifying glass.

There are no takers.

A minute later: A blind man sings a capelllo:

¨La Zona Rosa en un lugar de dolor.¨ The Red Zone is a place of sorrow.¨

He wends his way through the dense crowd, white cane leading the way, a styrofoam cup begging for coins. People drop in a peso or two in.

It´s late morning, late October. I´m riding Mexico City´s impossibly efficient, enormously entertaining metro system from Revolucion, the stop near my hotel, to Tasqueña, south of town, a mere 20 minute ride, where I´ll connect to another train system to get me to my final destination, the Dolores Patiño Olmed Museum.

For me, riding this subway is one of the best shows in town. In twenty minutes it snakes its way below urban sprawl, cutting the city to pieces as it burrrows through the soft, loamy soup of bedrock that Mexico City was built on. It zigzags from one station to the next, crisscrossing the city; ocassionally it resurrects itself above ground. The city whizzes by.

The train is a sinuously long shopping mall. In all, I count 14 vendors in this 20 minute ride. Four are blind. They´re carrying specially designed day packs that carry a CD player. They´re hawking pirated CD´s for 10 pesos--less than a buck. I´ve bought before, but how can I pass up a collection of 50 jazz cuts?

¨Veinte ocho boleros. Diez pesos. Un regalo bueno.¨
¨Tweny eight boleros. Ten pesos. Makes a great gift.¨

I´m so tempted, but just how many of these CD´s do I buy? I´ve got scores of them back home.

Money´s tight in Mexico City and there´s no law prohibiting anyone from selling anything on the metro, street or anywhere.

Another man is selling kleenex, another a credt card wallet. Bags of candy. Tic Tacs. Gum. All 5 pesos. I buy a box of Tic Tacs and two books of Day of the Dead poetry.

I´m the only tourist on the train. There aren´t many of us. I´m loving the crunch of people, the controlled chaos. It´s not just the ¨metro as shopping mall¨ that excites me. Ocassionally the metro pulls up from underground and we speed past urban sprawl, past small city gardens. People live here. It´s home. Poinsietta trees are in bloom. It´s the right time of year. (The last time I saw these trees in bloom was six months ago, in Peru, in its antipodal autumn. Sometimes I get a little confused. OK. I´m in Mexico. I´m in the Northern Hemisphere. It´s late October.)

All around me locals seem impervious to the vendors. Few buy. It´s hard to make ends meet for almost all Mexicans these days. There´s not much extra money around for this sort of stuff. Tough times for the vendors.

I´m wholly alert, watching, listening, taking in everything, constantly jotting thing down in my writer´s notebook. A week from now I´ll be happy to leave it, but for now it´s fun.

It´s a great ride. Skinny Mexican boys are making out with their girlfriends. In a city of 25,000,000 privacy is where you find it. Groups of high school kids, dressed in their school uniforms, hop on and off, their animated laughter a nice contrast to the drab looks I see on too many faces. This ride could get tough day after day.

I´m buzzed. Twenty minutes for this kind of show hardly seems enough. I arrive at my destination, catch the Tren Ligero, my connector train, to my final destination where I´ll enjoy a quiet day at the museum; I´ll repeat this trip later in the afternoon at rush hour. It just won´t be the same. The best spectacle is at off-peak hours.

And for all this? How much did I pay for all this?
Two pesos. 15 cents.
Fifteen cents for the best seat in town!
Performance art at bargain prices!

Mexico: Fall 2009

Mexico City, Mexico
30 de Octubre, de 2009

Sometimes, the hardest part of a vacation is just getting out of town. I did, I´m glad, but it wasn´t easy. After a very tenuous start, I dropped down into Mexico City two nights ago--the 28th of October. I was exhausted, feeling more like a zombie than a human being. Three hours sleep the night before was not a good way to start this trip.

Still, when I got to my hotel the urge to get out onto the streets was too much. So, in search of a caffeine free Diet Coke, I set out. It was still early. The street stalls were still active. All my favorites: tropical fruit fresh from the lowlands; ice cream shops selling paletas de coco--coconut popsicles; the smells of Mexican fast food: empanadas, tacos, enchiladas. In five minutes I was in a sensual, urban overload. It was great to be back.

Then! Could it be? Could it be that the Universe conspired to put me in the same exact spot as a parade working its way down the steet! It had. I heard the music first--a wild frenzy of Aztec rhythms. A contingent of indigenous, dressed in full Aztez clothing, were dancing in unison, playing their drums, chanting something I couldn´t understand. And then, behind them...a larger group of people, most carrying statues of a saint. Kids dressed in robes that matched the honored saint. I´d arrived for the monthly Saint Jude Thaddeus feast day. What a way to start the real stay in Mexico.

I´d planned this trip to Mexico over a year ago. I wanted it to coincide with the 
country´s celebration of the the Day of the Dead--el dia de los muertos--which is traditionally observed on November 1st and 2nd. A year ago, however, I had the good fortune to be teaching Spanish at Plattsburgh High School, so this trip got postponed until now.

This posting is not about my observations of the celebration. That will come later. This is but a prelude to let you know that I´ll be in Mexico for 27 days, with the first week in a city I have a great passion for--its capital, Mexico City. From here, I´ll had down to the coast, spend a few days in Acapulco, then head north to Ixtapa and back to Mexico City in mid November. On the 16th I fly to Cancun where I´ll reunite with local friends in Playa del Carmen and wrap up the trip with a long weeked on the beach in Tulum. I´ll return home just in time for Thanksgiving.

Life is good!

This has not been a good year for Mexico or its people. The global international financial crisis hit this country particularly hard. Drug cartels have been in the international press for months. Then, in April, Swine Flu put Mexico in the world´s hot seat. No one was coming. People canceled vacations. The capital shut down for two weeks. People were laid off. Things have only begun to improve ever so slightly.

Summer, which is usually the rainy season, was dry with no rain. Mexico City´s reservoir is at 30% and there are signs all over the place that ask for conservation. Speculation is that the city may be out of water by February, 2010. Couple all that with an increase in taxes and you´ve got a populace on the edge.

So, it´s a toss up. I could easily have given in to all the fears I heard from people or take advantage of few tourists, lower prices and a cool beans festival. Of course I chose the later!

Viva Mexico!