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Latin America - part I

Mexico city, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, Mayan Riviera

Hector Yague
2005-10-11 10:17:44

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Mexico city

The 10th of December 2004, after a tiring string of plane commuting and airport waiting lounge downtimes, I arrived late night to Mexico D.F. from the Cook Islands via L.A.

I spent a total of four days in Mexico city. In a way, it reminds of my own home town Madrid, only in a frenzied, out-of-whack fashion. Not only it's enormous (the largest city in the world), but also its streets are so busy, so alive. Pedestrian pavements are invaded by street vendors with their colorful stalls. The entire city appears like a massive flea market and an important percentage of the population makes a living out of street selling. There is this polemic character called Alejandra Barrios who's sort of the Godfather (Godmother, actually) of the street commerce guild. Right now she is in jail, but people consider her a political prisioner rather than a criminal and signs of "Free Alejandra Barrios" can be seen everywhere. And, of course, there are countless of taquerias, small tacos-serving stalls. Locals here eat them constantly. From what I have seen, they are keen of eating a taco every few hours in stead of the classical three lunch sets a day. It's more a social custom rather than a self-feeding action. It's kind of a social custom rather than a self-feeding action, just like Thai people. But whereas Thai food is hardly fattening, Mexican food is indeed, so most of the adults both male and female carry rather rounded-shapes. Talking about food, Mexican food is awesome, but the hype is true: everything contains chilly or some hot spices on it. Mind you, not to the outrageous extent of Asian cuisines like Thai, Lao, Korean or rural Mandarin Chinese.

Mexican culture is extremely populist. As opposed to the Spanish society which is dominated by the predominant middle class, here in Mexico the lower classes are then ones ticking the country's pulse, and I don't restrictively ...