Belly-button of the moon

We have now been in Mexico City for three days. It is alive and far more temperate than Texas with daily half-hour downpours just in time to rush to the bar. Arriving on Sunday, the day of rest took a while to register. The streets were full of peaceful leftist election protesters all clad in yellow. There tents have been redirecting traffic for three weeks. In search of some where quieter we headed for the canals of Xochimilco - originally a farming area conquered by the Aztecs. Quiet it was not but the colours we more varied. Vibrant punts clogged the waterways while mariachis drew up to serenade and, in the words of Tom Lehrer, would not shut up ´til they were paid. On our way back in to town we caught the persistent, syncopated chants of second half of a pre-season friendly at the futbol stadium and, though not accounting for all twenty million of them, we gain a pretty good idea of a day off in the city.

Yesterday, it turned out, was when many places actually closed and any attempt to sweep through all the museums within walking distance was fruitless. The streets were clearer but tents, of course, remained and were a constant background through the streets of subsiding churches pitching at all angles on the dubious drained lake of a foundation; a scruffy skyscraper from whose summit the full city spread of crimson roofs and clogged highways stretching to the mountains could be seen; a glinting palace of a post office fit for kings to collect their pension (or whatever the place was used for since, almost equally amazingly, it lacked queues.) and a foreign correspondent’s spot in a rooftop hotel bar looking onto the main plaza to watch the left contender Obrador speak to the depleting masses as the rain came in.

Today has been spent at Teotihuacan; the vast mysterious and reverential city of the gods with its pyramids rivalling Egypt.