Day 33

Its now Thursday 28 and I have been in Mexico City, I believe, since last Friday. The original purpose of traveling here was to pick up a care package that my folks sent me last week. The package was due to arrive either Thursday or Friday of last week. The package has not yet arrived and I am beginning to feel alot like Humfrey Bogart in Casablanca. Every morning I harass the Fedex people with calls and e-mails. Every day some sort of fresh injustice occurs. Yesterdays injustice was the fact that the Mexican customs decided not to clear the package because they did not have a copy of my plane ticket to leave the country, despite the fact that earlier in the week I had faxed them a copy of my tourist visa that clearly says "mode of transportation: motor bike" and was stamped by an official at the Mexican border.

I guess the upside to being trapped here is having more time to see this huge beautiful city, to meet interesting people in the city, and to hang out with some interesting people at the hostel. On Sunday as I walked around the historic center of the city I came across a Museum of Economics and decided to go on a tour. Since it is a newer interactive type museum, I enjoyed the company of my tour guide Oscar, a university student in Mexico City. We had such a good time during the tour that we got a beer and something to eat afterwords with a friend of his, Lizeth. We had a good time and they offered to give me a personal tour of a few parts of Mexico city after classes on Monday. I gladly accepted and here are some pictures I took.


La Villa de Guadalupe, or the Cathedral of the Virgin of Guadalupe. While the Catedral Metropolitan constructed in the Mexico City Zocalo (town square, incidentally, directly above the old Aztec pyramid and temple complex) the may be considered the largest and most historic Cathedral of Latin America, La Villa de Guadalupe is the spiritual home of Mexican Catholics. The new cathedral that we see on the right is the sight of yearly pilgrimages for many people, some who crawl the length of Calla de Guadalupe as an act of penance (think of crawling down Rainier Ave from downtown to Columbia city to get an idea of what this might be like). When the pope visits Mexico City he gives mass from a balcony of the cathedral. They even have a popemobile that is sort of an exhibit off to the side of the cathedral.


This is a picture south from the Latin American Tower in the downtown center of Mexico City. My GPS clocked the elevation as 7450 ft.


This is a picture of the three amigos. As we were trying to capture some of the lights in the background, the lighting isn´t so great for the rest of us. Oscar is on the left with Lizeth in the middle.