Moving through Mexico City
Muévete means ‘move yourself’ and it’s the name of the Mexican City project that sees 55km of roads closed to traffic every Sunday.
On a lovely sunny morning a bike ride on closed roads was an opportunity not to be missed. So we all signed up for the app and got bikes from the, rather excellent, Mexico City ride share scheme. All the main roads in the centre were closed to traffic and filed with people cycling, running. skating, walking. It was a joy just being amongst everyone, but it was also a lovely way to see the heart of Mexico City in a calm way. The contrast with a normal day filled with tooting, revving, cars is extreme.
We rode down to Bosque de Chapultepec where we had a coffee by the boating lake watching herons use the water as a landing strip. Al and Trine then went on to visit the nearby Castle while I went to the Museum of modern art. The other thing Mexico City does on Sundays is make their museums free. I was especially pleased with that at the Museum because it was quite small and so not a big visit. Lot of people there though, as it houses Frida Kahlo’s most famous work.
I walked about the park for a while afterwards. The main pathway through the park is lined with stalls selling food, souvenirs and clothing. It was great fun watching the sellers shout out their wares. The emblematic souvenir is a Changuito Mono or Little Monkey. It’s a wiry monkey toy that you wear on your head and it has a little handheld pump that allows you to squirt water out of its tail onto others. Probably a third of the crowd had them so it’s quite a look.
We rode back to the centre of town, popped into the Palacio de Bellas Artes and then had lunch in a taqueria – which meant a lot of meat and a small amount of guacamole to count as greens.
This evening we had a mezcal tasting in a rather cool bar up a stairwell hidden at the back of a garage. It was good to get a better sense of mezcal, but it isn’t going to be my favorite tipple. Then dinner at a restaurant in an amazingly cool building with an excellent mariachi band – often they seem strident, but this one was lovely.
Now feeling very full in every sense and only too aware that we have an early start tomorrow to catch a plane to the South.