The Last Word on Mexico: Safety

I normally end these blogging sessions with a photo gallery, but it seems appropriate to close my Mexico travelogue with a word about safety and security.

No doubt you're familiar with stories about the country's horrific drug wars. I checked before we booked the trip and was assured that the drug violence had not reached either Mexico City or Oaxaca -- at the moment it seems most prevalent along the U.S. border and in Acapulco and Veracruz; there are also fears for Guadalajara.

Indeed, we felt perfectly safe and secure our whole trip, including walking home from the nightclub at 2 in the morning. The biggest danger was probably pickpockets in the subway, but we were careful.

Mexico City, in particular, is overrun with police and paramilitary officers, from several different agencies; some carry bulletproof vests and AK-47s, while others seem more like ordinary cops. One isn't always sure, of course, whether Mexican police officers are there to protect you or prey on you; but we had no troubles, and probably, all told, felt safer having so many of them around.

For obvious reasons this isn't something I was able to illustrate in photographs; but the heavy law-enforcement presence is real.

So if you do want to go to Mexico, don't worry. But do check first for the latest news from your destination.

And with that, thanks for reading, and I'll see you again after the next trip!

La Vida Gay in the World's Largest City

On our first afternoon in Mexico City, three things happened in quick succession: We stumbled upon a plaque commemorating homosexuals attacked by the police on that spot in 1901; at the local equivalent of Carnegie Hall we were handed a flyer for a gay ballet performance; and we saw two cute-young-boy couples holding hands on the streets.

Mexico may still be, in many areas, a conservative, Catholic and macho place. But its capital tells a much different story. The city legalized same-sex marriage some time ago, and at least among the young, seems to be an accepting, open place. And we had quite a bit of fun at night.

We started in the Zona Rosa, the city's traditional nightlife zone. People who had been there before spoke of it disparagingly, and indeed it is surpassingly tacky, like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus on steroids. But the gay street -- Calle Amberes -- is actually fun. The block of Amberes starting at Paseo de la Reforma (Mexico City's showplace boulevard) is basically lined end to end with gay bars. Most of them are identical and interchangeable: smallish places with very competent DJs that attract a 20-something crowd, mostly men but (in a few cases) a significant number of lesbians as well. (In fact, this mix of lesbians and gay men in the same bars is something I've never seen before except in the smallest of towns.)

Admission to these places is free, beer is cheap (typically around US$1.50) and the crowd is friendly and flirty. Cute, if you like the look. (And, by the way, this trip proved again what I first noticed on the Atlantis Mexican cruise years ago. Only Americans order margaritas in Mexico. Mexicans drink beer. Buckets and buckets of beer, the way straight guys do at sports bars in the U.S.)

I could give you a list of names of bars, but it doesn't really matter. If you ever go, just walk up and down the street and look for the happening places. All these bars have huge plate glass windows so you can pick the one(s) that look best. And the party spills out into the street on weekend evenings as well.

After awhile, we decided to go look for something different. At first we thought it might be Lipstick, a club on the Amberes strip that had been recommended by several people. But I didn't care for it at all. It's an interesting space -- the second floor of a building with two outdoor terraces, a small dance floor and several comfortable lounge rooms, it feels like it used to be some rich person's house -- but it's the kind of place where the doormen create a line outside even when it's half-empty inside, and the crowd on the night we went was very mixed and there only to have drinks with their friends. Not worth the $11 cover, not even close.

The other club that had been recommended to us was called Living, and the writeups I saw said that it had moved to a somewhat out-of-the-way location and had lost a bit of its mojo in the process. But "out of the way" turned out to be four blocks from our hotel (though half an hour's walk from the Zona Rosa, and in a distinctly different, quiet neighborhood), so I went to check it out.

And found what has got to be the best weekly gay club left in North America, at least that I'm aware of.

It has two rooms. As you enter, to your right is a smaller (but still bigger than Club 57's main room) room done up in a sort of modernist/cubist style playing U.S. Top 40 music. To the left is a Twilo-size, double-height room with an amazing light show ...

... and a compelling vocal-house sound different than I've ever heard before. (Though they did weave in a bit of Banda Sonora Guitarra G at one point, a song clearly still fondly cherished in its home country.)

The crowd was quite a mix. A few of the cute young things from Amberes St. showed up (though not many; the $18 cover charge and $3.50 beer are probably a bit steep for most of that crowd), along with men of many different types, and a number of straight women. This crowd looks and dresses more like Europeans than like American circuit boys; the men typically wear either nice button-downs or designer T-shirts, but not tank tops, and there is little trace of a gym culture. By 2 a.m. when I left, only a few shirts had come off, but it seemed that more might soon. I saw no overt sexuality (bumping/grinding, etc.) at all and did not find this crowd flirty; it was definitely a Serious Dancing crowd.

I got there around 12:15a and danced pretty much constantly until 2, when the beer and the altitude (Mexico City is at about 7300 feet above sea level) caught up with me and it was time to go. But it looked like the type of party that could go all night.

Don't Let Us Rush You, But ...

In the suburbs of Mexico City is one of the world's major Catholic pilgrimage shrines, the Basilica of Guadelupe. It is said that the Virgin Mary appeared to an Aztec Indian soon after the Spanish conquest, and when the priest didn't believe him, kept coming back and finally imprinted her image on his cloak to prove herself.

There are now seven churches scattered around the site of this apparition. The cloak is in the most recent, a huge round 1970s structure that looks more like a U.S. Protestant megachurch than like any Catholic basilica I've ever seen:

They've set up a viewing area behind the church's altar where you can see the cloak, but to make sure you don't linger too long, make you get on a moving sidewalk that whisks you past the thing and out:

Apparently this comes in especially handy on her feast day, Dec. 12, when more than 100,000 people all try to see the cloak at the same time.

Working for a Living

One public park in Mexico City was, at the time of our visit, entirely occupied by dog trainers and their charges:


There appeared to be several different "grades" of classes, with some dogs operating at a higher, more independent level than others, each taught by a separate teacher.

This is both good for the dogs (one assumes) and an example of a vibrant entrepreneurialism we noticed throughout Mexico.

We saw very few abject beggars there, but a lot of people trying to scrape out a living in one way or another, if only by selling trinkets or home-cooked food in the park or on the street. (Or on the subway, where the good of choice seems to be pirated CDs, advertised by young men wearing boomboxes on their backs. Typically there will be one such vendor in each car, which makes for a deafening ride.)

In fact, signs prohibiting "walking vendors" in public places are quite common, even though the vendors are not typically aggressive (except for the boombox guys).

Mexicans may consider them annoying, but I found it a sign of a healthy society.

Where Did He Learn That?

The person who cleaned our hotel room in Oaxaca seems to have learned his or her craft on a cruise ship:


I'm just sayin' ...

Timber!

Devoted readers of this blog know that I'm not one for blogging random tourist sights, although I do get dragged to them from time to time. But this one has to be seen to be believed.

A few miles outside Oaxaca is what is claimed to be the world's largest tree. And, yes, it's a very big tree:



This cypress tree is also claimed to be more than 2,000 years old. And given its size, it just might be.

Which leads to a thought: if the claim is true, it implies that the climate in this part of Mexico must not have changed much in all that time.

Wonder how much longer that can last?

... But There May Be a Problem ...

All these interesting buildings are potentially threatened by one thing: Mexico City is sinking into the mire.

The city is built on what was, in Aztec days, a large shallow lake. Most of it has dried up, except for the Xochimilco canals in the far south, now polluted and used mainly for tourist boat rides:


But while the water may be gone, it left behind soft, mucky soil into which buildings are now sinking. All over you see things that look a little bit askew, like these churches whose steeples seem to be leaning into each other:



Or this street, just off the main square, where no two buildings seem to be pointing the same way:


This has been a problem for many years, but if anyone has come up with an answer, I haven't heard about it yet. Very sad, and a bit scary for the people there.