Weekend Trip #3 - Mexico City!

Well, well, well, people of the world. It's that time again. Time to re-cap the weekend! Get super-psyched up because you get 3 days of fun packed into one (long) blog! (Aaaaand the crowd is going wild.) So let's do this in a logical manner because I'm a logical girl. We're gonna start with Friday, and then move to Saturday and finish up with Sunday. Ready? Go. (Sidenote: Pictures to follow once I have them.)

FRIDAY OCT 7
Woke up at 5am after sleeping for only like 2 hours thanks to all the fucking noise in my dorm. (I hope you all become deaf and mute and never wear high heeled shoes on the tile floors.) My roommates were still awake and drunk because they had just gotten home from the club at like 415am. They harassed me (in Spanish) for being awake and sober and then I went take what started off to be a freezing cold shower but then turned to super hot. I got ready blah blah blah, and at 620 I was standing outside in a parking lot waiting to get on a bus headed to the Customs Agency of the Mexico City Airport as a field trip for my Regulations of International Commerce class from hell. (let me take a moment to clarify here, customs, in this instance, is not that line you wait in when coming back into the country so they can stamp your visa. customs here is the customs that deals with importation/exportation of goods. its like way off to the side of where the planes take off.)

On 2 hour bus ride from Puebla to Mexico City (more fondly referred to from here on out as DF - Distrito Federal) I watched the movie "Walking Tall" dubbed in Spanish...movies are stupid when they're dubbed, by the way. So then we got a lovely tour of the Customs facilities of the Airport -- Mexican style. By this I mean, we (30 students) pretty much just barged into Customs in the middle of their work day and a few different people paraded us around and explained what people were doing and why. So yeah this tour is in Spanish by the way, and afterl 20 minutes I gave up trying to listen and understand. But I'd like to share with you the things I learned: NOTHING. just kidding. I actually learned that before being put on a cargo plane, all export shipments pass thru this huge gamma ray unit thing. Couldn't tell you why they go thru gamma rays, by they do. And also, the tour included a stop inside the largest walk-in refrigerator in all of Latin America. I was just wearing a tshirt and jeans. I assure you all that it is very large and very cold. (I can sense that everyone is getting insanely jealous that I've been inside this huge fridge and you all haven't. Sorry folks, "that's the way the cookie crumbles." ---Speaking of that phrase, we watched Bruce Almighty on the way from Customs to Xochimilco. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the excitement of Customs.) So not only did we get to experience extra-large "chill" inside Customs, we also had the pleasure of experiencing 360 degree "grill". And by this I mean, at any given moment there were Mexican men all around (hence the 360 degrees) hardcore staring (like stop their work, mouths open staring) at us and all I could imagine was them thinking "me see Gringa! me like Gringa! maybe if i stare at Gringa, Gringa like me too!" and Liz and I decided that we never wish to be grilled like that again. So after 3 divine hours in Customs, it was time to head to our recreation location.

Xochimilco. It was about an hour away from Customs with all the Mexican traffic, so they put on that movie Bruce Almighty and everyone was cracking up, even me, even though I hate that movie. Then randomly we stopped at an OXXO, and just about everyone got off the bus and went into the store to buy booze (which initally confused me, but then made sense later on). So this place turned out to be this series of interconnected waterways with all these gaudy Mexican wooden party boats that are powered by men with long sticks who push the boats along. And in the middle of each boat, there is a long table with about 20 chairs around it. So our classmates all pile onto 2 boats, and then I realize why they bought/brought the booze. Cuz this place is pretty much a "BYOB-ooze cruise". So at first, it sucked. Hardcore sucked. Just sat there and didn't say a word cuz we were on the lame boat and everyone else was on the cool fun boat. Then we made a pitstop like a half-hour into it so the other boat could get more mixers, and this one girl was like "hey you guys come over here and take shots with us." so we did, and then just ended up staying on the fun boat, and then it was lots of fun.

Then we got back on the bus like an hour and a half later. This nice boy overheard our conversation about how to meet up with Daniel and Ivan, and said he would help us out, so somehow he told the driver where to stop the bus, we got out, got into cabs and a few minutes later we met up with the boys in front of some mall. So after the traditional "kiss and say hello" bullshit Mexico is all about, we drive to this taco place to eat cuz we're starving, we eat, and then they're like well instead of staying with my brother, we got you girls a hotel room, which we thought was kind of sketchy but ok. So then we go to drive to the hotel....and sit in Mexico City traffic for about 2 hours. This is normal daily traffic too. More people should definitely carpool in that city! Its ridiculous. Anyway, so we get to this hotel eventually, and we're just in the Porno Suite, no biggie. HAHA. The boys leave and let us chill out for a bit and shower up and get beautiful and whatnot, and then they come back for us at like 10 or something and take us to this awesome club called ROOTS. It was just so much fun, such a cool place, not too packed, good music mix. I'd definitely like to go back sometime. So yeah, eventually we left the club (but not after Ivan bought Liz a Mexican VooDoo Love Rose outside of the club) they brought us back to the hotel, where we proceeded to panic because the room service was closed and we were starving. So what do starving drunk girls do when they're in a hotel in a strange city? They go find the security guard and make him walk with them to find food at 4am, of course! Then we binge ate chips in bed while watching some of the Playboy channel and cracking up before passing out.

SATURDAY OCT 8
Woke up a few hours later, showered up, and Daniel picked us up for lunch at like noon or something, and on the way past the huge mall called Mundo E, we saw a sign for a Rainforest Cafe and freaked out and made him take us there to eat. Food was pretty good, and then we walked around the mall to kill some time (plus there was a Nine West there so I had hope I might have been able to find shoes, but no dice) and in our wandering we came across the Diesel store and Liz is like "Hey I want new jeans" so we went in to browse, and it just so happens that Diesel Mexico is a blessing from god because I bought 2 pairs of authentic jeans for like 958 pesos...so about $90. Thats just unheard of! Thank you Diesel, thank you! I'm now trendy and didn't spend a fortune!! So then we met up with Ivan, and headed into downtown MC because we're were going to take the Touribus around the city. And it turned out to be pretty sweet (albeit cold up on top of the double decker bus in tshirts) and 3 hours long but worth it because I learned all these fun facts about Mexico City. Wouldn't mind doing that again either. So after the bus, we went into this part of the city called Condessa, its like a neighborhood, they just name them in MC, kind of like they do in Boston actually. So we had wine and dinner (actually more like Tappas but they were damn tasty) at this cute trendy place, and then we just had them take us back to our Porn Star Suite cuz we were tired. So we ordered ice cream from room service in some flavor we're still not sure what it was, and watched/critiqued more Playboy channel and just went to bed early because on Sunday we had a early day.

SUNDAY OCT 9
So at 7am on Sunday, Daniel picked us up and took us into downtown to meet up with our professor from Northeastern who was in the city for a week with a group of MBA students he also teaches. So we met up with Prof. Lane at 715 in his spiffy expensive hotel, and he (by he I mean NU) treated us to this amazing breakfast buffet (I regret not eating more) and we chatting with him and another NU professor Andy Rome I think his name is. It was lovely. For a fleeting moment I thought some of the other hotel guests might think that we were like these old guys' gringa weekend whores cuz we were all dressed up nice and made up, and having breakfast at 745am with these (presumably wealthy) older men, but then I realized probably no one thought that. Anyway, moving on. After breakfast we went down to the Palacio de Bellas Artes (fine arts palace) and meandered around for a bit before catching the 9:30am Balet Folklorico. It was excellent. All different types of traditional Mexican dances from the different regions of the country. Well worth it, since it was kind of expensive but NU paid for it also! Then afterwards we meandered around the mural exhibition in the Palacio, and then walked a few blocks to some restaurant for lunch (also covered by NU). Food was decent, very traditional blah blah blah. So then we took a cab back to Prof Lane's hotel, got our bags from the conceirge, and NU paid for us to take a ($26) cab to the airport so we could take the bus back to Puebla.

And pretty much thats the weekend in a nutshell. Hope you had as much fun reading about it as I did doing it! Stay tuned for the next weekend viaje coming soon.