Friday, June 8, 2018

Mexico City - 2

Some people travel and seek out the comforts of home. Others, to leave those comforts behind. Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong; travel is the best way to relax while also broadening our minds, and far be it from me to define what that means for another person. We spend far to much energy criticizing the way others live their lives, creating that counterpoint humans seem to need to make us feel good about ourselves.

I grew up on those vacations. Myrtle Beach every year, before we discovered Panama City Beach. Those were great trips. Then my dad and I would do these long drives to wherever the hell we wanted to go, as long as it was in Florida, which I never really understood. But while at the time I wanted to go anyplace BUT Florida, now, as a grown man and father, I get it. Dad was blue collar; he didn't want to work on his vacation, but needed to relax and play, and that's what we did.

As a white collar drone, I seek vacations that get me out into the wild. Places where I can disconnect from email and the incessant complaints that it is never enough, whatever it is. One good thing about my job is that I get to travel a lot, though this year that has been cut down drastically; I have tried to explain that travel is the one component of my job that doesn't stress me out. People don't get that, I'm afraid; travel does, in fact, stress people out, much of the time. Not for me. There is a very simple pleasure in getting on a plane, or even standing in the security line, watching people, looking at the process they go through. I love people. I love processes. The mechanics of life, little things, fascinate me.

Our flight was a little after 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday. The day before, our son drove with is friends to Florida. He'll be off at college in the fall, and the Mexico City trip would be the first vacation my wife and I have taken - as a couple - in almost eighteen years. Strange to think about in that way.

It's cheap to fly to Mexico City. Technically late May is the off season. It's the hottest month of the year. Sometime in June the rainy season starts, then the hurricane season, and then in December the high season ramps up. lasting until Easter or mid spring. The flight was uneventful.

Immigration was quick and efficient. Less than a half hour after touching down we were outside the airport waiting for our Uber.

It's a short trip to downtown from the airport, a few miles (give or take, depending on your destination). It's possible to take the train, a bus, taxi, or Uber. All of these options are good. We chose Uber for the simplicity; it's a little cheaper than the taxi, quite a bit more than the bus or subway.

A half hour later we were checking in to our hotel. By four in the afternoon we were walking the streets.

Our hotel was the Hotel Ritz Mexico. The hotel was very affordable. Reading the reviews for hotels in foreign countries is always fun; you can tell which of the writers is an experienced traveler because those that aren't complain about things that you should know about in advance. Like the lack of air conditioning. In much of the world, hotel rooms don't have AC, especially in the mid-range hotels (or lower). And you learn that is the norm in Mexico City after a little research. Yet many people take off a few stars for this, which is unfair.

That afternoon we went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a short ten minute walk from the hotel. The pedestrian street was crowded, and I was annoyingly paranoid about the security of my wife's camera, which I felt she was carrying far too insecurely. (After some very direct commentary from her, I lightened up a bit.) The museum is free on Sunday, though you still have to get a ticket, which was an odd waste of paper; and they told my wife to check her backpack, even though plenty of people were walking around with their backpacks. We were more impressed with the architecture of the museum than with the exhibits, and we were done in a half hour.

And we were hungry.

Food in the old downtown is a fun adventure. There are a thousand choices of places to eat, but most serve basically the same things. After wandering around we opted for The House of Tiles.

You can't miss the building. It is a gorgeous facade of blue and white tiles, spectacular and beautiful. We learned quickly that finding a waiter who speaks English wouldn't always be easy, but with our fumbling Spanish (thanks Dora! Seriously. I think that's where I learned Spanish.) and their fumbling English, combined with Google Translate, we were able to get some food.

As the day wore down to evening, we found ourselves in a very large Sears that faces the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There is a cafe there with a view over the Palacio. It was small and crowded, the coffee was mediocre. But the view cannot be beat. Sometimes in travel you have to simply stop. Cease movement and you notice the movement around you. No longer do you react to that ebb and flow. You become the constant, everything else the variable.

We sought that out on this trip. Not consciously. There was no intent. Not really. Yet there we were, on top of a mega-Sears, drinking shitty coffee while looking North across one of the world's largest cities, with an old palatial building dominating the view. There we were. Just sitting, talking, and enjoying... nothing, really. There wasn't anything particularly great about any of it. Our table didn't even have a view.

But we stopped doing. We stopped caring. We stopped worrying.

We wandered around some after that and wound up at a taco chain restaurant that was hands down the best tacos I've ever had up to that point (that situation improved). Then we wandered to the hotel, took a shower under this shower that came from straight above and shot out in ten directions, mostly down if slightly askance.

I didn't sleep. I never sleep. I want to have more than five hours of sleep a night, and that was my vacation goal. But the world outside our window was loud late into the night.

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