Mexico City Sunday April 27th - Food Tour & Weird Things

Breakfast

Today was the food tour.  We met Louis, our guide, very close to our hotel.  He apparently spent 10 years living in Vancouver and spoke perfect English.  The first thing we ate was a breakfast tamale which is warm corn bread with pork.  We walked through fruit markets and butcher shops and flower shops.  We tried pork tacos and various slices of fruit that aren't available in Vancouver.  We mostly ate all this walking around but finally got to sit down in a little food court and had corn bread, re-fried bean mixture with cactus.  Cactus tastes a bit like salty green beans.  

 In addition to being a food tour, Louis also promised to expose us to the weirder side of Mexico's culture. Millions of Mexicans apparently practice voodoo and witchcraft in their everyday lives.  Louis claims to have a certain expertise in this area due to growing up with a "Witch Mom".  We enter the Senora market which is dedicated exclusively to voodoo magic, healers and fortune tellers.  Louis claims to be agnostic, so he apparently takes it all with a grain of salt, but still likes to have his palm read occasionally.  The Senora market tour begins by visiting all the live animals that are sold with the intention of being sacrificed in some ritual. Apparently, if you're seeking some kind of supernatural assistance, it's a good idea to slit the throat of some poor defenseless creature in order to increase the chances of a favorable reply.  I saw puppies, bunnies, mice, chickens all crammed into cages waiting to have their souls donated to some deity.  We walked through quickly, and my appetite for sampling Mexican food diminished significantly.  We couldn't take pictures of all this stuff since it's considered somewhat red light.  There were strange dolls and odd looking statues of various saints that people here like to worship, not necessarily sanctioned by the Catholic Church.  Mexican folk beliefs have blended with catholic traditions to form something real strange.  It's big business and this market provides a seemingly endless supply of hokey pokey paraphernalia, be it animal, plant, weird statue, or mystery ointments. 

Louis had us stop at one particular palm reader who was happy to read all our palms for 150 pesos each.  Catherine and I passed on this generous offer, but the rest of our group decided to do it, perhaps just for fun.  We all crammed into a tiny corridor that served as a storage space for all the multi coloured magic elixirs (liquid soap) and tiny ceramic sculls available for sale and were witness to a truly unexplainable (unverifiable) reading of the palms.  Each person had to rub some magical fluid (liquid soap) on their hands and breath in 3 times.  The woman would ask some basic questions like age, marital status and then proceed to tell the person why they are so screwed up.  She told one woman she would never find a long term partner.  Lulu needed to reverse her energy and one of the Aussies girls needed to buy some additional...uh..liquid soap to wash themselves.  I kind of phased out at some point, but I've never seen a weirder scene in my life. 

After sufficiently removing my appetite, our trusted guide continued our food tour.  Mexicans do things a bit differently, but everything looks really fresh and the fruit is always perfectly ripe.  They also have a thing for flowers.  We ended up at this warehouse sized building adjacent to our food market stuffed to the ceiling with zillions of flowers in bloom.  Flowers are super cheap.  A full bouquet of fresh flowers is like 2 or 3 bucks.  So basically, to sum things up, Mexicans eat a ton of fatty salty sugary foods that no doubt end up sending many to an early grave.  But flowers are cheap. 

More crickets

To end the tour, Louis took us to a groovy hostel next to the metropolitan cathedral, which is close to our hotel. This place has a roof top bar with a great view.  We had a drink and asked Louis a bunch of dumb questions and then went back to our hotel for a chill out session before dinner.  The twins decided to take me out again, this time to Azul Historical.  Traditional Mexican cuisine tucked away in a wonderful courtyard setting.  I had the incredible tortilla soup and Cochinita Pibil, pulled pork and black beans w tortillas.  Washed it down w a couple Victoria cerveza.  This restaurant's espresso was the first coffee I really enjoyed in Mexico.  According to Louis, Mexico grows a lot of coffee beans, but they don't really know what to do with them, lamenting the lack of qualified baristas in his country.  He recalls coffee in Vancouver being so much better.  Tomorrow another busy day.  Apparently a private tour of caves that Louis says smell like bat shit.