Archive for the 'About Mexico' Category
December 3rd, 2008 by Solomon
The last day I spent in Mexico City wasn’t actually in Mexico City. We went to Toluca, a town about an hour west of DF. Its all really the same place, from a foreigner’s point of view. Just different bus stations. The draw to go to Toluca was the Cosmovitral, a stained glass greenhouse that is home to a botanical garden. There is a pretty cool history associated with the Cosmovitral, but you can Wikipedia that. I don’t have a lot to say about Toluca, I was impressed by the Cosmovitral but Toluca was nothing special. I think the pictures speak for themselves:
So, the Cosmovitral was amazing. Really. Spectacular. I would really advise seeing it to anyone who is a Mexico buff. I would also advise making it a day trip.
December 2nd, 2008 by Solomon
The next day of the trip was probably the most fun, I like active challenging attractions, Tepoztlan is definitely that. This is a cute little city just outside of Cuernavaca, about an hour and a half from Mexico City. The main attraction of this pueblo is the pyramid on top of the hill just north of the town itself. After a long walk up the hill, LONG WALK UP THE HILL, we finally reached the entrance to the pyramid.
Not all the steps are this nice...
Keep on stepping...
At the entrance, thousands of steps up a mountain, there was a refreshment stand and a little restaurant. It made me wonder if maybe there is an alternate route up this thing. Or an elevator. All around the refreshment people are enjoying their waters and deepfried bits, being harassed by “Tajones” as they are called in Mexico, though I believe the correct name for them is “Coati”. I have seen them before in Playa Del Carmen but usually they are timid and run away when they see you, not these: The Tepoztlan coatis attack like puppies. I watched as they tried to eat a small child and the snack he was holding, I should have stepped in and saved him but he seemed to be enjoying it.
They sell tickets to the pyramid at the top of the hill. At the bottom of the hill you don’t see any signs thatsay “Pyramid $40 pesos” or anything like that, so my common-sense brain brought up the question of “How many people leave there wallet at the bottom?” Anyway, we got up to the pyramid and had a little rest, it was a beautiful view, but I was starting to get hungry and I had heard that the market place in Tepoztlan has an amazing selection of food.
The view from the pyramid...
So, we hiked back down the hill and made our way to the market. We found a nice little place with quesadillas of various things. I like food, I am what you would call a huge fan. I really like food that I have never tried before, so I got a few dishes. I have been meaning to try “Flor de Calabaza” for a long time, sure I have had the canned Cambell’s Crema de Flor de Calabaza soup, but am sure it is not the same thing. So, I tried a quesadilla made with Flor de Calabaza(which is chopped up pumpkin flowers, by the way). Excellent. I also had to try a chile relleno, I have had them before but I was told that the chiles here were excellent. Another wonderful choice! So, the next thing that was more ordered for me than was a “Taco de Chapulines”, if you speak spanish you already know…I do, so I knew right away. Why not though? Its a traditional food and I should be trying these traditional foods, right? What you ask are “Chapulines”? See photos:
That is a grasshopper
...And that is a grasshopper taco.
So, I managed to take a bite of my grasshopper taco. That was it. I chewed it and chewed it and thought hard about how it was food, not bait…I managed to get down one mouthful, actually swallowed it. That was it, I couldn’t put any more in my mouth. I kept thinking about getting little legs in my teeth…eww. Anyway, I can say that I ate grasshoppers. Probably won’t have to do it again either.
After eating we wandered a little more in the village, I was looking for little souvenirs from Tepoztlan, nothing really moved me though. I was moved by the famous Tepoztlan ice cream, I had to try a few different flavors. They had “Mil Flores”, which means “a thousand flowers”, which sounded interesting so I tried it. It contained the Jamaica flowers and roses and some others but I forget, it was very good. I also tried various flavors of chile and fruit icecreams, also good, but I am not so sure about the sweet/hot/sour combination. I also had to try a traditional coconut ice cream, which is my favorite mexican icecream flavor, but I must say the Merida coco sorbet is much better than that of Tepoztlan. Overall, I like icecream, so this was good.
The trip back to Mexico City was again uneventful, I have to praise the merits of a good public transportation system, I love bus travel. It is so comfortable and I think some of the best sleep I get is on the luxury buses.
December 1st, 2008 by Solomon
So, the next day in Mexico City I went to Six Flags Mexico. Honestly, it is not something I would have chosen for myself, but the friend that I was visiting thought that it would be something fun to do. So we made our way to the huge amusement park, after riding the subway and light train and two changes of taxi, we arrived in the park. I thought it was interesting that it took us about 10 minutes to find a place to buy tickets, there were lots of ticket windows, just none that were open.
We eventually found our way in, they were offering a two-for-one deal if you bring in a box of “Bang” brand juice to donate, so we went and found a box of juice, then returned to enter the park.
We started out with a river raft ride, I should have known better when I saw the signs that said that this ride would make us “empapado”. Let me tell you about “empapado”, I have always heard this word used as “damp” or “sweaty”, like after a run. So I am thinking, no problem, a few splashes of water is no big deal. I had my camera, wallet, and cell-phone with me, but I figured I would be ok.
Now, let me explain about river-raft physics: The rafts hold six people, you sit around on a big circular bench, so the weight is technically spread around evenly and the raft sits flat in the water. Technically. I am almost 200 pounds, so when loaded onto this raft with five average sized Mexicans, the raft tended to sort of droop in the water on my side. I also am over six feet tall, so much of my body sticks up past the edge of the raft. So, the raft’s rotation is completely random, usually with the even weight displacement the raft spins normally while the raft travels down the rapids and everyone gets a little splash of water every now and then. It seems that with the lopsided raft, the lower weight always rides on the downriver side, therefore making a nice plow for every rapid and wave that we met.
After the first 100 gallons of water splashed over the edge onto me I decided I had to do something about the phone and camera, so I removed them from my pockets and wrapped them tightly in my shirt, hoping that they would stay dry. I got out of that ride, dripping wet. Everything I was wearing was soaked to the skin. Damp! Ha! Luckily, the wrapping the camera and phone in the shirt seemed to work out. Unfortunately, I got to enjoy the rest of the day “damp”.
Next, we decided to do the “Superman” themed roller coaster, which had quite a large line and was a very impressive loop of big red-yellow-and-blue steel tubes. So, we waited for about half an hour and finally got on the ride. It quickly zoomed high above the Mexico City skyline and even more quickly, dropped like a rock and did a cute little half spin on its rails leaving us upside down. After the first dip and turn I was already thinking terrible little things like “I am gonna die”, “I want off this thing”, “I wonder when the last scheduled maintenance was”, etc.
Fortunately for me and my readers, I made it off this ride alive, but thinking that I might have to rethink the amusement park thing. I thought about it for a little while, decided I had to change my attitude about the whole thing and made a conscious decision to have a good time. At that time I also happened to walk by a plaque talking about how Six Flags Mexico had been awarded the 2007 world amusement park of the year award. This made me feel a little better, you probably can’t get an award like that by killing tourists.
In front of the Batman roller coaster...
The rest of the rides were rather uneventful, lots of screaming and all that. I was able to have fun for the rest of the park, I finally dried off, everything went well. A day of roller coasters and the like really can be fun, I guess, but I am not sure if I ever have to do it again. The last thing we did was a nice ride on the ferris-wheel to watch the sunsetting over Mexico City, this was much more my speed.
November 18th, 2008 by Solomon
I have been out of town for the last week, I took a little trip to Mexico City to kind of alleviate the Playa Del Carmen blah before high season kicks into full swing. I had a great time, got to see a lot of stuff, and took a ton of pictures. I am pretty backed up with work after being gone for a week, but I will try to put this trip report together in lots of small parts.
I arrived in Mexico City at 2pm and went to the hotel in the “Reforma” district. It was a nice enough hotel and really close to everything. After taking a few minutes to relax and get comfortable after my trip I decided to go to see the Zocolo, the main plaza where all the federal government buildings are located.
I made my way to the Zocolo and when I arrived I found it full of people and television cameras and general chaos. It was possible to walk around in there but quite crowded so I decided to just look around at the federal buildings instead. Apparently, there was some fundraiser going on that involved the stars of some popular Telenovelas, but I didn’t find this out until later that night watching the news.
I made my way around to various historical buildings and saw the pyramid that is right there in the middle of the city, but didn’t go in because it looked a little bit cramped. It was starting to get dark, so I walked back towards my hotel.
After wandering around for a while trying to pinpoint my hotel I started getting hungry, so I stopped for tacos and a juice at a little taco place that was pretty busy. The specialty of the place seemed to be their juices, so I tried the one they recommended, “Lettuce-Cucumber-Lemon”, which was actually really good.
The next day, I went to the “Bosque de Chapultapec”, which is sort of the central park of Mexico City. The park has been part of Mexican history dating back to the Aztecs, but more recently is the location of the presidential residence and the national history museum. Chapultapec is about 3 square miles and has an amusement park, a zoo, miles of trails where vendors set up to sell everything imaginable, and some little waterways where you can rent paddle boats.
Chapultapec means “Grasshopper Hill” in one of the native languages, the hill they are talking about is the 
home to the national art museum. After a 20 minute walk up the hill, you come to the amazing castle that has been used for everything from the Viceroy’s residence to the Military College and then later the home of Emperor Maximilian. The castle is now a museum housing thousands of different articles are Mexican history. Everything from Pancho Villa’s wooden leg to clothing worn by Benito Juarez.
One of the exhibits in the museum is the memorial to the “Niños Heroes” or Child Heroes, military cadets that were killed during the American invasion of Mexico city in the 1830’s. I felt a little uncomfortable as the only American in the room as we watched the video explaining how the American Military surrounded the school and was shooting kids as they tried to jump out a third story window.
The view from the top of the museum is really amazing, it gives you a great perspective of exactly how huge Mexico City really is. I tried to take lots of pictures, but the smog was doing funny things with lighting so not a lot of them turned out how I wanted them to. (After that comment I am going to get comments about how to adjust the settings on my camera to deal with smog.) The city goes on and on as far as you can see, and being in a valley even the horizon is covered with houses.
After the museum I went to the Chapultapec zoo. The zoo had a lot of variety of animals and birds and was pretty busy. The aviary of the zoo is probably the most impressive part, they had huge enclosures with hundreds of different types of raptors. Zoos always have the same feeling about zoos, caged animals are just that, caged animals; once you have seen one elephant you have seen them all. I did, however, get a kick out of the Panda bears, all of which were sleeping or trying to find a comfortable place to sleep.
The last thing I did while in the Bosque de Chapultapec was rent a little pedal boat and ride around in the dayglow green lake for a little while. It was a nice experience, though I was a little concerned about the signs posted up around the place asking that you not get any water on the life jackets.
That is about if for the first part of my trip report, stay tuned for Six Flags Mexico, Tepotzlan, and the Botanical Gardens in Toluca.
September 28th, 2008 by Solomon
So I have been working on getting my FM3 for myself and my business partner, Dave, for the last month or so. I submitted the paperwork on the 27th of August and was told to come back in eight days to pick up the FM3’s, which I knew was wishful thinking but I follow directions well anyway. I have been going back every week or so, but I am pretty sure that the papers won’t be done until the end of August. No big deal, I am in tramite so I am legal to work.
Dave has his other home in Galveston, Texas, so this last week he decided he probably needed to go back to take care of the damages that were caused by Hurricane Ike. He let me know on Sunday that he was going to be leaving on Friday, so I should probably do something with immigration. I told him that probably wasn’t enough time, but I would see what I could do.
Last Monday morning I went in to immigration to ask for a permiso for Dave to leave and enter the country. I wasn’t sure of the process, but I had written a letter asking for permission. When I got to immigration, I was given a list of things I would need, about eight items. I went back home and got the stuff together and was back in immigration in about an hour. I waited in their office for four more hours and finally at about 3:30 I was done with submitting the process and was out of the office.
They told me to come back on Thursday, I had no faith that on Thursday the paperwork would be ready and I told Dave that he might not be leaving, he assured me that everything would work out.
I went back on Thursday morning at 8:30am and got my number. After waiting for a while, they called our number and Dave and I went to the counter to get the paperwork. I gave the clerk the file number and he looked it up, it was not done yet. The guys at immigration usually have a pretty good attitude, he joked about why would anyone want to go back to the US right now anyway?
He looked through the papers I had brought with me, everything was fine except at some point I had lost the payment receipt for the $260 peso payment to immigration. I had copies, just not the original. He suggested that I go get a new bank payment and he would draw up the paperwork for the permit to exit.
I ran to the HSBC on Juarez but the line was out the door. My next option was Santander, three blocks up. I made it there and despite the small line at Santander I was back in immigration in 15 minutes.
I got back, I made the payment, we got the letter of permission to leave the country(in triplicate), all was good. Its a minor miracle.
June 4th, 2008 by Solomon
Last week, up until Monday afternoon even, we were feeling the effects of Tropical Storm Arthur here in Playa Del Carmen. I wasn’t even aware of the “tropical storm” part of it all until different friends and family from the US started to call me to ask if I was weathering the storm OK. It is funny, I just thought it was typical June weather on the Yucatan Peninsula. Anyway, I figured I would write a little bit about hurricane season and my experience with hurricane preparedness.
I got to Playa Del Carmen about a month after Hurricane Wilma ripped through here so I (thankfully) didn’t get that experience, but I got to hear lots of horror stories about Wilma and got to see the damage that was done that hadn’t been cleaned up yet. I did on the other hand get to be here for Hurricane Dean, which was not much of a hurricane.
When Dean rolled up most people around here expected her to miss us, so a lot of people waited until the last minute to make the hurricane preparations. The weekend before the hurricane was supposed to hit everyone went into frenzy mode of finding plywood and getting it up on. The stores were packed, the prices of plywood doubled, and the “fletes” or rentable pickup trucks were backed up for hours or days. It was a mess, when I finally got the go ahead from all of the owners of the condos I administer the line for plywood was a couple of hours. When I got the plywood and arranged a delivery, through a furniture moving service, the next step was getting guys to help me put it up. At the time, luckily, I was managing a construction in the Ejido and I pulled all of the workers off of there to put up plywood in various different locations. It seems like a small task putting up a few sheets of plywood, but it ended up being a lot of work. We slapped up 50+ boards over the three day period, sometimes having to really get creative because of tight working conditions and some irregular constructions. In some places we couldn’t fit the plywood through the doors or windows so we hauled it to the second and third floors with rope and ladders, some doorways were too big even for 2 sheets of plywood so we had to get creative with a third piece, even some places we only had marble door frames so nails or screws were out of the question.
After two days of getting the plywood put up in various locations we were mostly done, I took a couple of guys with me to my home to get my plywood ready and sent the rest of the crew back to the construction site, where they also lived, so they could make the proper arrangements there as well. My apartment was the most challenging for them because it had a 4meter X 3meter glass wall in a balcony so there was no place to nail to and technique we had used earlier to prop the wood up with 2×4’s wasn’t going to work either. One of the lead guys came up with the idea of building a freestanding wood frame that wedged tightly against the side walls and then covering the wood frame with plywood. It looked like a framed in wall like they use in the US to build houses. After this problem was taken care of the next step was to figure out how to cover the only entrance to my apartment, which was a sliding door. Nailing up plywood wouldn’t work there because then I would not be able to get in and out easily. They came up with another ingenious invention, a sliding door made out of plywood and 2×4’s, using the 2×4’s as tracks for the plywood to slide on, then when it was time to shut the door I could slide it shut and then secure it to the tracks using wire ties like they use on concrete forms.
We then made a run the the grocery store, stocking up on water, tuna, candles, playing cards, etc. I had heard that before Wilma the grocery stores started running out of food, but I didn’t notice that much at walmart. When I went to drop off the guys at their home they had moved all of the portable water containers inside and were filling them with water, this included a big 2500liter tinaco(big black water containers you see on roofs in Mexico) that we had. They had tied the tinaco on the roof down with various cords and ropes so that it would not blow away in the storm. They suggested that I do the same to the tinaco where I lived. Before the storm hit I made sure that the tinacos on the roofs were full and that the cistern was filled as full as I could get it.
At the time my gas tank, as well as the gas tanks from a few other apartments in the building were loose, attached via hose through a hole in the kitchen wall. I disconnected the tanks and stored them so that they would not blow away in case of a storm. I attached a 10-kilo gas tank inside my kitchen so that I could still cook during the storm, though I don’t really suggest this because it can really be unsafe in case of a fire.
I filled up some 5-gallon buckets with water and put them in the shower, so that I would have water to flush and wash with if the tinaco ran out of water. I stored all of my important documents in large ziplock bags and made sure that anything that I didn’t want damaged by water was off the ground.
Then I waited.
That night the wind started to pick up and sometime early that morning the light went out. I remember getting up to go to the bathroom and thinking how absolutely inky dark the house was all boarded up. The wind howled pretty good and the plywood occasionally banged in the wind but overall it held up pretty well. When the wind died down I opened up the sliding plywood door to survey the damage. Playa was pretty much untouched, there were some things scattered around the streets but overall no big deal.
My cell phone wasn’t working so I couldn’t immediately check on the damage in the other buildings, but I had a little bit of work to do in the building I was in. One of the tinacos had drained, one of the toilets was running or something, so the water drained out pretty quick. We dipped water out of the cistern until the power came back on, no big deal really.
Two of my buildings only had hydro-pneumatic water systems, i.e. no tinacos or water storage on top, so without power there was no water in the building. Lomas Mariposas has a pool so the tenants there just dipped pool water out to flush their toilets and wash with. The other building was stuck without water, which in a false alarm hurricane like this is no problem, but after a real disaster a the building would not have water for a while.
The next day I started to take the plywood down, that ended up being the hardest part of the whole ordeal. The excitement of the upcoming hurricane kind of made putting up the plywood tolerable, but the taking it down just seemed to drag on and on. Then we had to patch the wholes left in the cement and repaint everything. Repair from the protection took much longer than putting it up.
Now, what do you do with 50+ pieces of plywood spread out between 3 buildings? In the building where I live we put the plywood on the roof and nailed the pieces together, making a large heavy block of wood that would be available in case of another hurricane. In Mariposas we stacked the pieces and screwed them together, this time in the parking area of the building in an unused parking space. In Las Olas we had a space under the building that we converted into a bodega so we could put everyone’s plywood in there. I guess we are prepared for next time.
This year I recommended to all of the condo owners that they install hurricane shutters. Some of the property managers we work with are telling their clients that if they don’t install hurricane shutters they will be unprotected during the next hurricane. I don’t know how strictly they will adhere to this rule, but for my clients I will still install plywood if it is absolutely necessary. I also suggested to the clients in the buildings that have hydro-pneumatic water systems(no tinacos) that they install a backup type system where possible, a couple of tinacos on the roof will supply a building for a day or so if the tenants are careful with there water consumption.
I live in a different apartment now, it will be less hassle this time to install my own protection. I plan to prefit the plywood to the door and have it predrilled and install anchors in the concrete so there is no drilling or nailing involved, just a few screws and nothing more. We used nails during Dean to hold up the plywood, but when we took the wood down it left gaping holes in the cement. We tried anchorless screws but found out that they were very hard to get to work properly and they also tended to break off when removed, therefore leaving a piece of metal that has to be chipped off later.
Everything else I think will be about the same for the next hurricane, lots of water and lots of food. I really didn’t feel like I lacked for anything during Dean, but I am sure there is something I am missing. I don’t look forward to a hurricane, but I heard so many stories about the comradarie that happened in Playa Del Carmen after Hurricane Wilma, so I am sure that whatever happens everything will be all right. People tell stories about after-hurricane parties where everyone brings something that they stocked up on, sharing what they have with others. Not so bad I guess.
