Upon My Past Week of Discontent: In Which I Bitch Fulsomely about Mexico City

I wrote most of this when I was in Mexico City as a therapeutic act.  That place really got to me, and I wanted to purge..

I've since arrived here,

Playa Principal, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico.

however, in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.  This has radically altered my frame of mind for the better.

Still, I thought I'd share this anyway.  I've blogged much less than I could, and I'll try to put a bit of the backlog of pictures (at least, if not a few stories) up this coming few days or so.  I'll definitely post more about this place I'm at now, here..


Which will make very clear that I do in fact (and for the record) that I really do love this country.  Immensely.


But there are minor irritants and discontents.  This past week in Mexico City they intensified and proliferated, attacking me all at once.


Mexico City is Mexico on steroids, and the greater part of the things I dislike here are both more common, and usually more acute. It's over-stimulating, and so everything is felt more harshly.  Like I say, it reminded me of Cairo, which is even more of a Third World megalopolis hell-hole, only one overrun by fellahin..  Who, while fascinating to encounter, are far more "retrograde" and alien to us than Mexican campesinos, who really are great people on the whole, just difficult to handle when nine million of them attempt to simultaneously jam themselves into a valley over a mile high in the mountains, and you happen to be stuck in the scrum with them..

Which is merely to note that while not quite as chaotic or grubby as border towns like Tiajuana, Mexico City is still a great sprawling urban morass. The streets are generally narrow, traffic is bad, and there are hoardes of people everywhere.  It also has several apparent centers, and so seemed to lack coherence to me.  Admittedly, one week is not anywhere near enough to learn such a vast place, but most cities seem to make more sense too me, at once. Cairo, for example, while a great jumble, is a great jumble around the Nile.  Guadalajara has much more focus, a well defined center with almost everything of consequence there, and a few suburbs with things of interest clustered about it..  Easy, no stress navigation there.  Not so Ciudad Mexico: there are several centers, and many things are scattered about it in a cloud.. Furthermore, the streets in Mexico City are also much narrower on average than say Guadalajara, and there were few obvious landmarks that can be widely seen and orientate oneself by, making it feel like a great chaotic maze.

And though the smog was no where near as bad as I bet it was in the past, it was still bad.  Mexico City is in a great valley surrounded by mountains, and like in L.A. the mountains trap the pollution.  The buildings are all begrimed with soot from decades of smog and exhaust, indeed everything's besmirched and blackened on account of this ambient pollution.. And while I was able to see the mountains when I got above the buildings (a sight I've heard was rare until very recently. Things are improving - government regulations and the catalytic converter are working wonders), there was still quite a lot of haze, and you can smell and feel the pollution in the air.

This is a view across the Valley of Mexico City from the hill of the apparition at the Shrine of Guadalupe.  From the north of the city facing south.  It was the only time the week that I was there that I was able to see anything beyond the buildings immediately about me.  Notice that you can see the far mountains indistinctly through the haze of smog..

hazy sunset over Valle de Mexico..

One minor saving grace of Cd. Mexico is that there is an extensive, well run subway system.  It's a bit aesthetically muddled, in the lines are designated dull pastel institutional colors that I thought ugly, and then numbered or lettered by whether the train ran on rubber tires or rails (I think.. It was a bit unclear why both letters and numbers are used..)  It was all a bit indistinct and understated, anyway.  

I like urban transport that makes clear, bold statements, designating lines by (say) primary colors "Red Line" "Green Line" "Blue Line" and such, not "pastel rose line known by a number" then "puke institutional green line known by a letter, just to confuse things."

I will credit them this: one nifty aspect of Cd. Mexico's metro is that it has a icon system where each station is assigned it's own unique iconic image.  The images are ugly and crude, but they all correspond in some way to the stations' names.  Probably devised due to high illiteracy, I'd guess.  It worked pretty well for me when I was trying to keep track of where I was going.  It was one of the few things other than the Shrine at Guadalupe that I liked about the city.


Anyway, herewith a bulleted list of things that I dislike in Mexico, made more annoying by being strained and overwhelmed by Mexico City:


1.) There are very few free public bathrooms in Mexico.  You usually have to pay three or four pesos (20 cents or so) for the pleasure of using an uncouth toilet, usually without soap at the wash basin, which is one more reason why I always carry a small bottle of sanitizer.  This public toilet situation is very, very annoying, especially since most restrooms in places like bus or metro stations have turnstiles where you have to deposit coins.  There's often an attendant inside (cheap Mexican labor) who dispenses (rations) a few sheets of toilet paper.  Again, I carry more with me, either a pack of tissues or small roll of my own.

If you are traveling alone with bags turnstiles at the bathroom entrance makes going to the restroom at the station into a strategic logistical endeavor. I'm at the bus station now, waiting  a few hours for my bus to Oaxaca, and I needed to go.  I had to ask a shoe shine guy to watch my two larger bags (which would definitely not fit past the turnstile).  I carried my camera and laptop with me, and the bag got stuck in the turnstile, and I was caught there for a few seconds.  The shoeshine guy (coincidentally?) let loose a huge yapping guffaw at that very instant.


2.) Which leads me to my second major annoyance:  Mexicans tend to stare.  They meet your gaze, and do not look away.  Walking through a crowd, you turn your head, and there's often a few people there just gawking at you.

Now, I used to like this on past visits to this country, if I remember rightly.  I felt that it gave me license to stare right back.  Something that was especially fun if the person staring at you happened to be female and cute, as was often then the case.  Now, I guess I've become jaded.  I no longer enjoy being starred at by anyone.   I don't care if you are beautiful and like me, keep your eyes to yourself.

Well, alright.  Maybe if you are female and pretty and really want to.  I guess I could put up with it..

The staring issue was getting to me before I got to Mexico City.. But because there seems to be an inordinate number of crazy crippled bums, people dressed in disturbing costumes (due to this last week being the Feast of All Souls - la Dia de Los Muertos, Halloween - such were very commonly encountered on the streets) and "developmentally diabled"  people (read retards, occasionally spasmodic and drooling) and - I'm not exaggerating here - an unusually large number of midgets, often dressed in bizarre costumes such as Mexican Professional Wrestling masks..

That always seemed to single me out for attention.. Sometimes they smiled, smirked or laughed.. I returned and met their gaze, but they rarely looked away...

Things began to seem a bit uncanny..

I ran into one guy looked like that guy who played the midget sidekick Tatto on Fantasy Island and Nick Nack in the James Bond flick The Man with the Golden Gun (which I just caught on cable here last week, reminding me of him), Hervé Villechaize.. A dead ringer for him, actually, except he wasn't ringing a bell and yelling "zee plane, zee plane," but was instead sitting on the hood of a car murmuring to himself while waving his hands through the air like they were airplanes, and staring straight at me as I passed him in the street..

As I say, I began to have a lingering, inescapable feeling that I was stuck in a surrealist nightmare.  I became a bit paranoid.  Mexico City: a great Fellini-esque performance art production designed just for me.  A gigantic contemporary flash-mob like Satyricon, that I couldn't escape.  Since I hate Fellini, and have learnt to hate hallucinating, this sensation was extremely unpleasant.

Some of this attention seems to me to smack of xenophobia, even racism..  I don't take it all too personally, tit for tat (1836, 1848, and all that) after all. Most especially seeing how I am 6' 2" and very obviously a gringo.  It just becomes exhausting after a while.  Being the focus of objectification and innate impersonal dislike is no fun, and while it's only occasionally openly felt here, I notice it far more often and intensely than anywhere else I've ever been.  Even the Middle East..


3.) Mexicans tend to blare their music with a lot of bass.  From store fronts, cars, taco stands.. Very early in the morning, very late at night.  Techno, Banda..  It can be an assault, one I guess I've grown less tolerant of noise pollution in my old age.  There's a lot of this in the city, and I really hated it.


4.) There are a lot of strong smells, too.  Good and bad.  Frying meat, sewage being very common and two of my least favorite.  You get rotting garbage, fried food and sewage in the same moment, sometimes.  Not cool.   While Mexican street food can be awesome,

10 pesos: that's less than a buck for one big, fat, yummy taco..

it can also be pretty disgusting.  Mexicans eat the entire animal, so you see everything from intestines to brain frying away at stands on the street.  I used not to be annoyed by the smells and sight of stuff like that, but I've become more sensitive..  Something that used to amuse me when I noticed it (look at them eating brain! cool!) now tends to make me queasy.


5.) Public display of affection.. This should be higher on the list. I only just remembered.   This is on par with the staring issue, in that  it's both disturbing and surreal.  And like with staring, I used to enjoy such displays.  Mexico is like Italy, in that when you go to a park or anywhere where people are making "la vuelta," which is to say walking around in public together, you get some serious PDA.  And - I don't know if it's me, or what - but unlike Italians (if my memory serves me) they really don't kiss all that well. They muckle onto one another like lampreys, and just eat one each other's faces.  It  (if you are close enough to hear) sounds like they are slapping one another's faces with raw slabs of  steak or something.

I imagine cartoon bubbles above them making the Cookie Monster sound, "om nom nom nom" because that is what they'd sound like if they were muppets:

Cookies!

As you can see, it's not just teenagers who do it.  The last meal I ate in the city I sat behind a forty-something couple seated facing away at the table opposite mine.  Like they were across from me at my table, but back to me at the table opposite.  Throughout the meal, between courses, they would periodically attack one another, "french" kissing, smacking loudly..  I sat there astonished, and had to look off to the corners and ceiling to avoid watching.  Not out of politeness (anyone who does anything so vulgar forfeits their right not to be gaped at in astonishment) but because it was utterly revolting.


6.) I dislike baroque architecture, and most churches here are baroque.  I'll blog more on this point, later.  I'll just note here that it's an issue, and a good one for me to wrestle with.  I need to make my peace with  the Inquisition, campesinos, and all the church ladies of the world.. Church Ladies like kitsch, and hence so should I..  Herewith resolved, I will force myself to dig rococo..

7.) Mexicans make absolutely terrible coffee.  You might as well just drink hot water, that's how awful it is. I've tried it probably a dozen times so far, and it's always awful.  I ate at a place owned by a German woman, and I thought for sure that she'd guarantee a decent cup, and it was merely mediocre...  Tea sucks here, too.   This isn't a big deal, really, but I've been wanting to finish my meals with a good cup lately, and I keep getting frustrated..


Another reason to get back to Italy someday soon, it seems..


Except that this place may be home.  I like it so much here that I have to give it some time.. We'll see..


So there's the list of my piddling discontents.  Enough with being a gringo feo, I'm off to shower the salt and sand off..  Buenas Noches, todos.



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