Mexico City 2009

 Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 6:26 PM

Today I went to Coyoacan, a small city south of Mexico City, but now a suburb thanks to urban sprawl.  The name is Aztec for Place of the Coyotes They can have ours too.  Apart from the relentless traffic from the autopista it's a beautiful town.  The autopistas, or freeways cross  Mexico City all over the place.  The traffic gridlock is incredible and one can wait for five minutes or longer before being able to cross the street alive in some places because traffic lights do  not favour pedestrians, are often hard to see or read for pedestrians and drivers often ignore red lights and walk signals and always ignore crosswalks.  A visitor here is more likely to get run over than to be a crime victim. This is where the artist Frida Kahlo  lived  and Leon Trotsky. Her house has been converted into a museum featuring some of her paintings as well as a few works by Diego Rivera, to whom she  was married twice and another artist.  Some of the rooms have been restored to look exactly as  they  did when she lived there.  There is also  a large and attractively planted courtyard garden with seating and a small photo exhibit and three wary cats.  From  there I wandered around and got lost.  For me getting lost is an important part of travelling.  I don't know why, but as I mentioned before, I think this is part of the process of remapping my brain.  Rather like walking a labyrinth writ large.  I stumbled across the central market which was quite a surreal experience with everything and everyone crammed in there (it's huge).  I also wandered across a  couple of parks and found the main city square where there was a vocal demonstration of local merchants who have been put out of work by bad city planning.  I went into the church, la Parroquia San Juan el Bautista which is huge and ornate and very beautiful.  My guess is it dates back to the early Baroque (1600's)  Again a  lot of gold covering and embellishing things.  I want to go back, because seeing it once is not enough.  Afterward I came across Los Viveros de Coyoacan, which is a tree nursery that serves also as a public park.  The space is enormous, maybe half the size of Stanley Park, with paths going everywhere and trees growing everywhere.  This is another place I want to return to. I have a similar problem with museums that I have with zoos.  No matter how authentically they restore something for public viewing it is still only an imitation of life.    Seeing Frida´s perfectly arranged bedroom I could only try to imagine how it must have really looked while she lived there.  How the bed looked with her sleeping in it, or with husband Diego in it, or Trotsky with whom  she was lovers.  Likewise the kitchen.  How did it look when food was being prepared in it and things being chopped, dropped and spilled?  On the other hand the market was teeming with life and movement and colour and sound, and I think that Frida's house while she lived there would have  had more in common with the market than the lifeless and pretty museum they have made to honour her. I am only beginning to learn the subway system here.  It is easy to get lost, the trains are usually packed with standing room only.  I am still struck by the rudeness and lack of courtesy in this city, though one on one I have found the Chilangos to be nice and courteous.  On the crowded car going back an elderly woman had to stand while very ignorant looking young people occupied the courtesy seats.  I tried to ask them, por favor la da su asiento a la anciana? (please give your seat to this elderly woman?) They pretended not to hear me and I  knew they could hear me because another fellow standing there looked on with ironical sympathy.  Es ridículo, I said to him and he nodded in agreement. You also see on the  subways, as I have already mentioned, a lot of evidence of the poverty that people are still trapped in here, and their different ways of managing it.  There are often beggars outside the Metro stations, in many cases  indigenous women and old women with children and grandchildren.  On the train going out to Coyoacan two musicians came on board playing Andean music.  They were very good.  On the way back there was yet another young dumbass hawking CD´s while serenading us with loud and awful classic rock.