Mexico City recap

I got back from Mexico City the morning of Friday, October 10. The trip was mostly uneventful.

Arrived Sunday night. There were five of us on the same plane, me and four of my students. Yes, four of the students came from Houston. Makes little sense to me, too. The hotel had sent a van for us, charged to one of the rooms. Beers at the hotel bar and dinner at one of the hotel restaurants was about as much as anyone could stand that night.

Class was ... class. Four days of lectures by me and labs for the students to do. I was fighting off a sinus infection the entire week and mostly right on the edge of losing my voice. That made teaching extra interesting. Seven students from the US, the rest from Mexico and points south. I know there were students from Panama, Brazil, and Argentina. Possibly some other countries.

Meals at lunch were at a mall food court near the office. It was all decent food, better than you'd find in an American mall food court. I have to keep lunch pretty light when I'm teaching. It's one thing if the students drift off after lunch, but entirely different if the teacher gets a nap.

One evening I met up with some of the students and we walked down a street near the hotel with very expensive shops. We had dinner at a place called Garabato's. Good, cheap, and crowded. They had a killer dessert tray but I had filled up on dinner.

Class wrapped up at 4pm on Thursday. The Houston group, including me, had a 7am Friday flight. We decided to ride the double-decker tour bus. One guy in the group spoke a little Spanish so he was tasked with getting directions. Didn't work out so well. We did eventually find the bus. It was only later when the bus stopped across the street from the hotel that we found out how far we had wandered in the process of not being able to understand directions.

Pictures in this post are from the bus tour. We rode it from the hotel to the center of the city, the Zocalo. The line of riot police in the picture with the police are are around the corner from the Zocalo where there was a demonstration going on. That's only a small part of the police presence at that spot. Note the full riot gear. So what do the crazy norte-americanos do? Get off the bus near there, of course. Again with vague directions where to catch the tour at a later stop and even vaguer plans to find somewhere to eat.

To make a long hike into a short story, we wandered for quite a while, maybe close to an hour. Narrow little streets, even narrower little shops and not another gringo face to be seen anywhere. I eventually convinced myself that nobody knew where we were going so called a halt to the march. I pulled up Google Maps on the blackberry. Between that and the mostly useless map from the tour bus, I did get us set off in the right direction. We made it to another bus stop barely in time (with some traffic dodging jay walking).

Dinner ended up being ... back in the hotel, room service while packing for most of us.

Then a 2:45am wakeup to be down at the lobby by 3:30am to be at the airport... 45 minutes before the check-in counter even opened up.

Final image from Mexico City, blue screen of death on one of the monitors at the Delta counter.