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.

Architecture Through the Ages, Part 6: The Modern Era

Mexico City's interesting architecture continues into the current day:


Especially interesting: the building above is a government office building. What a difference from the United States, where government seemingly tries to be as ugly and inconspicuous as possible.

There are plenty of new private office and apartment buildings around as well:


And odd juxtapositions of eras are common:


Whether they're pleasing to the eye, or jarring, I will leave to you to decide.

Architecture Through the Ages, Part 5: The 1920s

After our food tour, it's time to start walking again, to continue our architectural tour. Mexico City is an Art Deco paradise, especially in the Condesa neighborhood, where we ate so many good meals. Few of the buildings are individually as flamboyant or beautiful as those of South Beach, but there are a great number of them, including small apartment buildings ...


... medium-sized ones ...


... large ones ...


... office buildings ...

... even an abandoned jai alai fronton:


Many of these buildings appear to have been abandoned for years, but don't rush down there expecting to pick something brilliant up for a song: apparently these buildings are often vacant not because no one wants them, but because of tangles in the titles and estate courts.

(And Drink Well, Too)

Mexico has long been known for two alcoholic drinks: beers like Corona and Dos Equis, and tequila. But these days the buzz is about something entirely else.

Tequila's country cousin, mezcal, seems to be getting more attention these days south of the border. This would perhaps be unsurprising in Oaxaca, where much of the stuff is made, and agave or maguey, the plant from which it is made: grows not only in the wild ...


... and in botanical gardens ...

... but even in churchyards:


In Mexico City, too, mezcal seemed to be all over while tequila was laying low. We tasted quite a bit of it over the week, but I honestly can't give you any recommendations: much of the stuff seems to be made by local distilleries that don't have high profiles or international distribution.

I can tell you to look for "reposado" or "anejo" mezcals; these terms indicate that the stuff has been aged for various amounts of time, and therefore has mellowed. Don't buy one with a worm in it (that is a kitschy tourist thing), but do drink your mezcal straight, with orange slices dusted with gusano-worm salt. And if you find one labeled "pechuga," here's what that means: the mezcal was produced with a raw chicken breast suspended over it, which is supposed to subtly alter the taste. And so it did.

(Incidentally, mezcal is made by fermenting the sweet heart of the maguey plant -- after you've chopped off all those spiky leaves -- into a drink called pulque, which is then distilled into liquor. Pulque was considered a sacred drink among the pre-Hispanic peoples of the region, and is still available if you know where to look. It's basically a maguey cider, yeasty and a bit sour.)

The other drink that's all the rage in Mexico now is wine -- local wine. The best come from Baja California, where several wineries have found microclimates in the mountains that work well for grapes ranging from nebbiolo to sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon. These wines are seldom imported into the United States, but if you can find an Ulloa cabernet/petite sirah blend, or a white wine called Silvana, I strongly recommend them.

Why Rich Mexicans Eat Well

Fine dining in Mexico is even more of a gastronomic adventure than the street food; we ate in several restaurants that were truly world class.

In Oaxaca everyone seemed to point us to the same places: Casa Oaxaca, Los Danzantes and La Biznaga, all of which served variations on the same thing: traditional Oaxacan mole-based cooking, done to a high level of elegance using nontraditional ingredients like venison, duck and shrimp.

A real find was Zandunga, which is not in any of the guidebooks we consulted but where we met up with Susana Trilling, a friend of a friend who runs a cooking school near Oaxaca. Zandunga serves food of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the least-visited part of Oaxaca State and the only part that is not mountainous. Its cuisine relies heavily on tropical ingredients like plaintains, completely different from what you find in the rest of Oaxaca.

In Mexico City, we visited three high-end restaurants that each, in my book, were worth a special trip.

Azul, in Condesa, specializes in the food of Veracruz, a port city on the Caribbean that naturally features plenty of seafood, rice and tropical fruits. Everything we had was top quality and inventive; I imagine this restaurant is to standard Veracruzan cuisine as Babbo is to Italian.

Merotoro, also in Condesa, takes a different approach. It professes to serve the food of Baja California, but, at least when we were there, took more of a standard international approach with local ingredients. Thus, a salad might feature beach greens found only in Mexico, or a dish of pork jowl with lentils might be made using an Iberico hog raised locally.

The best restaurant in town is generally considered to be Pujol, in the Polanco neighborhood, which is to Condesa as the Upper East Side is to the Upper West Side: richer, more buttoned up, and separated from it by a park.

Here we had two tasting menus, one of seven courses and the other of nine, that featured such dishes as tacos made with ceviche, suckling lamb and chocolate, margarita-flavored sorbet and turkey breast with bananas. If Azul leaned a bit toward the traditional and Merotoro toward the generic international, Pujol split the difference neatly.

It was the most expensive of our meals in Mexico, but including a bottle of wine we still spent only about $125 apiece for a meal that in New York would easily have cost twice as much.

Why Mexicans Are Overweight

The other thing immediately noticeable about Mexicans as a group is that they tend to be overweight. The reason why is immediately obvious, especially in Mexico City: the abundance and variety of street food available.

It is such a problem that even the Mexico City police force has had to take steps to control officers' weight.

As a foreigner and North American, one might have had a bit of trepidation about trying out some of these places, but we were fortunate to have Ruth Alegria, a local food expert, as our guide. Here are some of the things we saw and tasted during a stroll through the upscale Condesa neighborhood one morning:


In many parts of the city you will find a row of stalls like this, selling everything from tortas (a type of grilled sandwich) to fruit, stews, and of course many different types of tacos:


Most of these places are all business, but one place we went, a takeout joint selling "tacos al pastor" (roughly, tacos made from shawarma) even indulged in a little showmanship:

Why Mexicans Have Wild Hair

One thing I noticed immediately about Mexicans was their hair. Mexican men between the ages of 10 and 40 must have the highest per capita consumption of hair gel in the world:





Even the humblest tamale seller in the street will typically be gelled to the nines. They sell it in big tubs at the market:

And yet, older men (even those who haven't gone bald) seem immune to this style; in Oaxaca, men over 40 typically wore a cowboy hat and brush mustache, while in Mexico City, their hair was more likely to be uncovered but nondescript.

Would love to know what accounts for this stark generational difference.

Tackling the World's Largest City

It's time to set the scene a bit for our tour of modern Mexico City, which may be the world's largest city, with a population estimated at anywhere between 23 and 28 million people.

Yet to look at the buildings, you would think it's only about as dense as Los Angeles: aside from a couple of clusters of office buildings and hotels, most of the city doesn't rise much above three or four stories.

Instead it sprawls out, in all directions, subdivisions visible for many minutes before you take off or land:


From the ground, they seem to drape across every bit of flatland and hillside:


Up close, these are basic cinderblock houses, often unpainted and rarely with any obvious amenities:


But in a country where many rural people still live in thatched wooden shacks and ride donkeys, this must seem like a step up, not to mention a chance to be part of the urban economy.

Moving around the vast city is difficult, to say the least. Tourists are advised not to take taxis, for fear of getting robbed or murdered by the driver or his confederates. And in any case, you don't want to be on the roads, where the traffic has to be seen to be believed.

The central neighborhoods where most tourists go are walkable in size, though sidewalks have a habit of cracking or vanishing without warning, and you take your life in your hands whenever you try to cross the street. (True, there are "walk" and "don't walk" lights, but just because you got a "walk" light doesn't mean there isn't a green arrow somewhere directing traffic right into your crosswalk.) And getting from one neighborhood to another is probably more distance than you want to walk in any case.

Fortunately, Mexico City has one of the best public transportation systems I've ever seen in a third world city. The extensive subway system is modern, of 1960s vintage, and uses the same quiet rubber-tired technology as you see in Paris. At the best of times, it looks like this:



At the worst of times, you can't see the floors or most of the trains because of the crowds. (But hey, at 3 pesos or 21 U.S. cents per ride, at least it's a bargain.)

More recently, they've begun putting in busways, dedicated high-speed bus lanes that New York is also experimenting with. Judging from our experience in Mexico City, this has promise. The center lanes of major streets are cordoned off from other traffic and devoted exclusively to buses, which stop at subway-like stations where riders pay their fare before boarding:



This both speeds up boarding and keeps the bus out of traffic, although it still has to wait at red lights for cross streets to clear. As with the subways, though, this system gets insanely crowded at times.

One quirk of the city's public transportation, in fact, stems directly from that crowding: women- and children-only sections. Apparently, women complained of being pushed and molested in the crowds, so now they get their own entrances to the buses and subways:



It may be a sensible solution to a local problem, but as with the sex- and age-specific want ads, it's a reminder that you're definitely not in the United States of America anymore.

The Spanish Conquest: A Postscript and a Verdict

The last battle between Spain and the Aztec empire happened at a place called Tlatelolco, a mile or so north of the Templo Mayor/Cathedral area. Here, in 1521, the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, fell in battle and the Spaniards built a church on top of, and with the very stones of, the ruined Aztec city:


It is tempting to regard the conquistadores as unwanted barbarians who destroyed a great, nature-loving culture, and certainly the Spaniards have many crimes to answer for, not least their wanton destruction of people, buildings, art objects and libraries.

But the Aztecs bear some responsibility for their own downfall. Their religion centered on human sacrifice -- captured warriors from neighboring tribes had their chests cut open with obsidian knives like these below, their hearts ripped out of their living bodies and offered to the sun god:


Needless to say, this practice didn't endear them to the neighbors, and the few hundred Spanish invaders had hundreds of thousands of willing allies in their quest to take down the Aztecs.

The moral complexity of Mexico's birth story is summed up by an inscription at Tlatelolco:


The second paragraph reads, "This [Cortes' defeat of Cuauhtemoc] was neither triumph nor defeat. It was the sad birth of the mestizo people that is the Mexico of today."

Architecture Through the Ages, Part 4: The Aztecs and the Spaniards

Unlike Monte Alban or Teotihuacan, the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, wasn't abandoned to the wild at the end of that empire; instead, the Spaniards razed it and built the present Mexico City on the ruins.

It was originally thought that the city's Catholic cathedral was set directly atop the main Aztec temple, but a number of years ago archeologists discovered the temple just to the cathedral's northeast.

The Spanish destruction left nothing above street level but did make it clear that this pyramid had been expanded many, many times, each successive ruler simply adding a new layer on top to make it both wider and taller:




(That last picture shows "sacrificed" stone statues in between the layers, but yes, in places human sacrifices were also found.)

A nearby museum has modeled what it must have looked like, including the layers and reconstructing it to its full height:


Now, Spaniards have throughout history been quite happy to build extravagantly vulgar churches without any external incentive. But if they ever needed one, it was here; after conquering a civilization capable of building such monuments, they must have felt obliged to outdo it with their own.

As it turned out, the Mexico City cathedral wasn't much larger than the Aztec Templo Mayor, which would have risen up to about the height of the cathedral's roof:


But of course, European building techniques allowed for far grander interiors than any American culture was able to achieve, not to mention the Spanish taste for gold and rococo:



Still, in some ways the cathedral feels like the next step in a sequence rather than a sharp break in it.