It´s been a week now and I've seen quite a bit more of Mexico City. The centre is very impressive, especially the main boulevard (Paseo de la Reforma) which is modelled on the Champs Elysees and so is very wide with many modern high-rise buildings and trees along the pavements, and it certainly wouldn't look out of place in any major European capital. I also visited the Templo Mayor, which was the main Aztec temple in Tenochtitlan (the ancient Aztec capital on whose foundations Mexico City was built) and was, for them, literally the centre of the universe. Only the foundations remain as the building blocks were used by the Spanish to build their own buildings, which is a pity as it must have been a sight to behold. I'm also glad I've kept my old student card as it allowed me to get in for free (at the Templo Mayor as well as the fine arts gallery) even though I haven't been a student for more than 2 years, but hey, you've got to milk it for all it's worth.
Yesterday my cousin Kamiar invited me to a restaurant where they had live mariachi music, which was an exciting experience. Although what probably impressed me most was the food, or more precisely how they cook it: it's called barbacoa (where our word barbecue comes from) and they wrap the meat in maguey (agave) leaves and place them into ovens dug into the ground ... and then leave them slowly cooking there overnight. This makes the meat really really tender (although unfortunately I wasn't feeling too hot so couldn't eat much) and tasty. That definitely has to be something that has been a revelation: Mexican food is much more diverse and interesting than what we are peddled as being authentic Mexican fare back in Britain (where it's basically enchiladas, tortillas, burritos and the ubiquitous chile con carne; none of which, apart from the tortillas, I've actually seen here). Instead here you have delicious tacos (corn tortillas wrapped around some sort of stuffing), my favourite being al pastor - with pork (just don't ask which part), coriander, onions and plenty of lime; or tortas, which are very filling sandwiches that can be served with an almost infinite number of fillings (all of which seem to contain jalapeno peppers); tamales, which are patties of corn paste mixed with meat and chilis, wrapped in corn husks and steamed; and my favourite of all, elotes. Elotes are basically corn on the cob, usually lathered with mayonnaise, sprinkled with cheese and perhaps a dash of chili powder. Nothing special perhaps, but the corn here in Mexico is the most delicious I have ever tasted, and no wonder because it originated here. But best of all is that the food is everywhere: on every street corner you can find a stall selling some tasty morsel at bargain basement prices.
Other things on my "to do" list included visiting the city's main university (UNAM) with a friend of my cousin (thank you very much Ana Paula) who studies psychology there. As universities go it is absolutely enormous, with about 300,000 students it totally dwarfs all the London universities put together. It also has a very strange mandate as the police are not allowed to enter into the grounds of the university and it is completely independent from the government, which means that it is full of lefties and commies. A few years ago this led to a mass strike that shut down the whole university for a whole year, just because they wanted to increase fees from 50p to less than 4 pounds! You certainly wouldn't get that from our apathetic students back in the UK whose only worry is that the beer at the union is sufficiently cheap.
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