D.F. - Distinctly Fascinating (Mexico City)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Mexico City
Date:	26/06/09 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I've NEVER been ANYWHERE like it

Disadvantages: Read and find out

There are many detailed reviews on specific attractions in Mexico City, listed separately on this site, so what I would like to do is to give you an overview of what day to day life is like in this city, to prepare you should you ever choose to visit.

I arrived in Mexico City also called DF (Federal District) in July last year and was immediately inducted into the wonder that is the rainy season. My new flatmate took me to the supermarket, we stocked up and, the minute we stepped back outside the monsoon started. Every day for the next two months, like clockwork, it rained from about 2pm for an hour or so. And then it stopped. Autumn arrived, and with it, the dry season. Things were looking up.

I love Mexican supermarkets. The thing I often miss most when abroad is Tesco, because so many other countries simply have no passable equivalent, but Mexico does. Even in the city centre, you never have to travel hard to find a WalMart, a Mega or a Soriana. These are supplemented by various smaller versions, which the locals rather exasperatingly insist on calling "Mini Supers" when any sensible person would call them "Mini Markets". Even smaller still are the Abarrotes, or tiny grocers, which often operate from behind steel bars in rather charming way. The large supermarkets also have smaller, more expensive counterparts, with Superama being the nearest to my house. It is owned by WalMart, which of course now also owns Asda. Imagine my hysterical surprise/delight on popping in shortly after I arrived and finding a rather bizarre selection of Asda Extra Special goodies on offer - from shortbread to tea. I love the idea of the super rich among the Mexicans going and stocking up on what they think are swish, expensive products but are essentially a bog standard own brand from a cheapie supermarket.

Transport in Mexico City is an adventure in itself. Your main choices are the Metro, the Metrobus or a Pesero. The Metro is your typical underground system, and covers the majority of the city including the 4 bus terminals and the airport. It is cheap to ride - just 2 pesos or 10p per go - and comes with free 'entertainment' whether you like it or not. Some people's entire income comes from selling on the Metro, a profession controlled by a mini mafia. Most trips of more than a few stops will see you being given the opportunity to buy everything from chocolate to Kleenex to CDs - and to sell the latter, they stun you into silence by blasting the music out of portable CD players strapped to their bodies. At 10 pesos / 50p per CD of dozens or hundreds of tracks, it's not actually that bad an idea. Some suprisingly dour people even sell "Happiness" on the trains, the local name for a seed bar thing. "Happiness, 50p, 3 for £1" Who wouldn't be swayed by that? The larger Metro stations themselves also provide shopping opportunities, but the weirdest thing has to be the monopoly Domino's has over food service, selling hot individual pizzas for 15 pesos each, though often with no oven or even microwave in sight.

The Metro is also the 'hot' place for courting couple to congregate. Many a time I have seen teens and 20-somethings smooching on the platforms, something I guess is due to them having nowhere else to go and of course still living with their parents (I have 35 year old students who still do). It always seemed odd to me, as it's hardly a romantic or even clean place, but naturally as soon as I hooked up with The Ex, making out on the Metro became top of my list of things to do, even about pulling a student (don't worry - mine are all adults).

The Metrobus is also known as the Grope Bus for obvious reasons. This is a bus that originally ran along only one street (Insurgentes - handily the one I live on) though there are now new routes too. It is a large, single level bus and though it costs more than double the Metro (5 pesos per trip) it is popular for many people. Too many people. My first month I was crushed in there on a trip home after an evening class when I engaged in what I now fondly (or not) call inadvertent Metrobus sex. I would have moved out of the way, but there was literally nowhere to go. A year in, I would now turn and thump the guy if it happened again (snogging on the Metro, yes, shagging on the Metrobus, no), but back then, a naive little thing in the city, I did have to wonder whether it was just part of life here. Plus, y'know, it was the most action I'd had in a while. For info: it's not normal, nor acceptable, but it does happen more than it should.

Peseros are mini busses which run along semi-regular routes, often where the Metro doesn't go or where a Metro trip would require a lot of changes. My first pesero trip was also memorable. Roomie and I wanted to go out to Santa Fe (the business district) since she had a class there and had no idea how to get there. We found the pesero quite easily, and asked the price. The answer, 15 pesos / 75p, seemed reasonable, so we climbed aboard. The same journey on the way back cost the correct price - 5 pesos (25p). Useful to know: never ask the price, it marks you out as a tourist who wants to be ripped off. Just look at the official label on the window behind the driver's seat. And if there isn't one, hand over maybe a 10 peso coin and look like you belong there. The maximum cost for any trip is 5 pesos, but most cost 3 pesos or 3.50 pesos.

Another option? A taxi! We are all warned, on arrival, never to take a cool, vintage green VW Beetle taxi, and to go to the sitios (ranks) instead. And we do, at first. But then we get lazy and/or poor (sitios cost a lot more) and, well, let's just say I am now familiar with the inside of many a street-hailed Beetle. I don't mean to be flippant about the dangers, but I think within reason (say, only during daylight hours, only when you know where you're going) they're not as bad as they seem. Nothing ever is. (NB: I would never take a taxi, of any kind, around 11.55pm if I can help it, as express kidnappings peak at this hour, when they can get 2 days' withdrawal limit out of you if they get you to an ATM quickly enough).

In lieu of any of these fun modes of transport, I usually choose to walk to my classes whenever possible, as one thing that constantly surprises me about the city is just how green it is, with parks on every corner, and nice parks too, with fountains and landscaping and, at a particular one near me, a daily doggy obedience school. Another reason I love to walk is because I constantly get whistled at. That's not me bragging - they'll literally whistle at anything in a skirt here -but since I don't get the same treatment in Manchester I still think it's a compliment. I even changed one of my routes to walk past that old staple, the building site, on days when I needed a calorie-free pick me up. Perhaps more alarming here is the way they go beyond whistles. The odd 'guapa!' I can cope with, but it is a little discerning when someone walks past you, and, close enough for you to tell what they had for breakfasts, mutters a breathy "Wow" right into your face. I always wonder what response they expect - a "Ooh, what a compliment. Since you're clearly a gentleman, let's go make out on the Metro right now", perhaps?

Walking is not a favoured past time of the locals, however, and I am often given funny looks when I mention how I have just arrived at a class. This is perhaps a contributing factor to the massive level of obesity in the city and the country as a whole (it's one of the fattest, if not the fattest, nations currently). My gym is crowded but not for the reasons you might think - it's because they just don't have very many of the places. People actually travel a significant distance to get to the place I go, though my 'commute' is only a block and a half. I wouldn't travel any further, because quite frankly they are a bunch of thieving whatevers. This isn't a rant about that one gym - it's a comment on Mexico mentality in general. I came into the changing rooms one day to discover my locker padlock had been cut off in the 12 hours since I was last there. Apparently they had a new 'no overnight lockers' policy. I asked for my stuff and was given a bag of it, which was noticeably lacking my (quasi-expensive) moisturiser and my new shampoo (ditto), though contained all the other hotel toiletries junk I'd had in there. Since I'd left the gym when it closed the night before, and returned just after it opened the following day, there is no one who could have taken these things apart from a member of staff, though they made no apology when I complained.

It's not just gym staff either - it is pretty much accepted here that if you see a policeman you should just keep going, because stand still long enough and they will fine you for something. Because their salaries are low, this is seen as 'acceptable', and it's even called a 'bite' not a fine, as if that somehow makes it less offensive. I have been fined only once in a year - when my removal van parked somewhere it shouldn't, which was technically not my fault - and I am considered lucky because of this. Sometimes being a tourist helps you get off any fines while other times your status as 'foreigner with money' just makes things worse. Generally speaking, I try to blend in here and not mark myself out as foreign, since it just makes life easier. Obviously speaking Spanish and being dark help. Corruption in general is rife here, and the government has a rather laissez-faire attitude towards it (and/or is the source of it). This is the same government that has a city full of millions of people living below the poverty line, yet thinks what we all need is for them to spend money on (free) fake beaches in summer and ice rinks in winter. Ho hum.

Another area that could really do with improving? The postal service. I should have seen the signs - I took in my mother's birthday card to be weighed and the woman used her hands, not a scale, to assign my postage. Miraculously, it did get there, albeit a month later. Stuff coming to DF is a different story. I am still waiting for birthday presents from last August. I say 'waiting' but really I'm not. They're not coming. The clothes are probably being sported by the postman's wife, the chocolate will be long gone, and the English language books are probably propping up a wonky table somewhere if they weren't ceremoniously binned (sob).

The streets of Mexico City are strewn with rubbish, because they haven't really thought out the whole collecting-from-apartment-blocks thing. The bin men come round 6 days per week, but often during the day, ringing their bell for you to bring out your trash, if you're at home that is. An alternative is to dump your bags on the street corner and assume (correctly) that they will be collected either by said bin men or by the street cleaners who come round several times a day. This is what everyone does, but is of course illegal, and you'll get one of those lovely fines if you're caught. When I first arrived, we would sneak the rubbish out in the midst of night, as subtly as you can be while wearing a hoodie (my darkest item) that proudly proclaims your membership to a certain university's trampoline club. How times change. Now I take a bag out with me any time I leave my apartment, dump it on the corner and keep walking. It's not nice, but everyone does it.

Enough of a rant, now a rave. One of the best things about Mexico City is the wild, random ways you can end up on TV, as I discovered within 4 days of my arrival. We were having brunch in the historic centre when we (ok, my tall, blonde, roommate) were approached by a bizarrely dressed presenter who wanted to interview us (ok, her, but we came as a package deal). We had just been watching an ice sculptor sculpt some ice for no apparent reason, and therefore he wanted us to tell the nice people at home that we'd NEVER seen ANYTHING like it EVER. We did, they filmed it, and a few days later it was on TV. The dubious video is on my Facebook page, and it still makes me smile. Since then I have been approached several times for an interview, but always when I have no time as I'm dashing to a class. Still, it's nice to be wanted. I think the nearest I'd get to that in the UK is if I was in London and happened accidentally to take a walk on Stupid Street.

Living in the city was the first time I've lived in rented accommodation for any period of time, except for my student year in Germany, and this in itself has been an eye opener. From leaking roofs to loony landlords, some of the stuff is probably not unique to Mexico, but some other things certainly are. Take the lack of central gas, for example. Mexico City doesn't do piped gas, it does gas canisters. It's like being on a long camping holiday in France, but unfortunately I'm not much of a camper, and I dislike having to turn on the hot water manually 30 mins before wanting a shower and so on. What's worse, of course, is when the damn stuff runs out, invariably on a Friday with no delivery available until Monday. I have had more cold showers here than an adolescent boy with a new stack of girlie mags. Then there's the electricity, or lack thereof. I cannot remember the last time we went more than 5 days without a power-cut here. Mostly they are only for 30 minutes or so, but still. Apparently the infrastructure is not set up to handle the ever increasing number of Chilangos (DF locals) and therefore rebels. A lot. Places tend not to have back up generators, so even hopping on a treadmill can become a dangerous activity as you never know if the power will cut out mid stride and send you flying backwards. Not to mention the pain of resetting a digital alarm clock every friggin' week. It's got to the point where I no longer reset it until the evening, given the likelihood the power will cut out again that same day.

Water in Mexico City is, apparently, undrinkable. At least that's what my (rich) students say. The (poor) people do drink it, and therefore so do I, since I like to live on the edge and all that. It has never caused me any problems, but then I have guts of steel, unlike the hygiene obsessed locals. We used to have a very specific and satisfying dream about refilling our loony landlord's drinking water bottle with stuff from the tap, just to watch him suffer, because we knew he would. Chilangos are just so over the top with their cleaning. Yes, this is a dirty city, but do they really have to waste loads of water washing the pavements two or three times a day? Who is not going to go into a shop because the path outside looks, well, like a path? I mean, seriously. Swine Flu has only worsened the situation, with antibacterial sprays compulsory at many of the offices I teach in, even all these months later. Clearly no one here abides by the sentiments that a little bit of germiness does you good. No wonder they don't sell febreze here.

Go up any tall building in Mexico City and you will see signs telling you what to do and what not to do in the event of a fire, but also an earthquake. These became compulsory after the 1985 catastrophe, and with good reason as the city is still regularly struck by tremors. There have been half a dozen in the last year that I know of, though most I have not felt (I'm no princess and the pea). The one exception was a few weeks ago, when I was in the middle of teaching a class on, wait for it, earthquakes, when the whole of PWC started shaking. How's that for realia?

My building shakes a lot, but not from earthquakes. It's either from the passing Grope Bus on the street below, or from the sound of the Tamales man who comes around every evening without fail, honking his ultra-loud horn and calling out his goods (hot tamales from Oaxaca, day in day out). I don't know who buys them, but he keeps coming back. Street food either from a fixed puesto (stand) or a travelling man is popular here, though is not something that fits with a vegetarian diet. That said, I do eat out a lot, albeit mainly on ice creams. La Michocana is a method more than a brand, and the franchises that sell this 'natural' product are all over the city. I know the locations of the branches nearest to all my classes, because the stuff is just that good. Though they differ by location, the ice cream is always creamy and fresh, cheap (from 50p - 75p per scoop) and delicious. They have flavours I now wonder how I ever lived without, like Pay de Limon, which is lime ice cream with softened Marias (like Rich Tea) mixed in in chunks. They don't have lemon, though. Mexico doesn't do lemons or lemon juice. Silly place.

I could go on and on about the city, because it is a truly fascinating place, and one I will be sad to leave next week, while of course excited at the prospect of earning pounds not pesos again. My promise to my friends was that I would return home tanned, skinny and fluent in Spanish, and while the fluency is still a little lacking, I've pretty much managed it. I also managed to avoid getting kidnapped (yay!), hit by an earthquake (yay!) or affected by the previously unknown threat of Swine Flu. I don't think that's too bad for a year in this crazy metropolis.

Summary: An insight into a place that is simultaneously foreign and familiar