In Mexico City right now ("DF", as it's known) making last use of the free internet before heading down to Oaxaca on the night bus. This city is pretty amazing and not at all how I expected. I think someone told me that it's huge, sprawling and in a basin, so I was braced for gridlock, pollution and shanty towns. But while it is definitely a bit mental (crazy street markets, grinding poverty and everything is slightly falling down) it also feels like a proper old European city. High end shops with high end prices, amazing Baroque architecture, and some beautiful (spotless) suburbs. I've heard Mexico described as at the crossroads between the rich and poor worlds and nowhere does this seem more true than here.
On the one hand it's pretty chaotic - there's a lot of under-employment (subsistence farmers outside the cities, hawkers inside them), poverty (I think many are Guatamalan immigrants dating from their civil war), and you can't drink the water. But for all that the standard of living is high, infrastructure is sound and it feels much safer than I expected. But then I think I was expecting something more like Lagos... Cities like Guanajato and Zacatecas, where I was at before here, could almost (with a squint, in the right light) be southern Spain.
The other thing that's been really striking, especially compared with the US, is how important indigenous history is here. The Spanish are the national villains while the big indigenous civilisations (Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, Chichimec, Maya and so on...) are mythologised. I was lucky enough to have been apprehended by a talkative Mexican farmer/ builder on my first day who summed it up, "You'll love Mexico. You'll see lots of Spanish stuff and lots of Indian stuff because that's what we are. We're Spanish and Indian." But in another typical Mexican contradiction, while the Spanish are the bad guys and the Indians the good, skin tone seems to be a pretty explicit indicator of social status here. Nearly every face on TV or billboards is white, but you'll hardly see a white face in real life, unless they're tourists or you're walking through a business district or upmarket suburb.
The old ruins are amazing, as expected (I went to one lot called La Quemada from about 600-900AD and another called Teotihuacan, which is a whole city from around 100-750AD). But unfortunately the best stuff, from the Aztec period, is mostly destroyed or underground - cos as soon as the Spanish won they ripped everything down and built their own stuff on top. So the cathedral is where the temples used to be, the National Palace where something else was. This also explains why a lot of the historic centre is noticably crooked and falling over - it was literally built on the rubble of the Aztec empire.
1 comment:
Tony, this is getting more and more fun to read. T
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