First steps in Mexico City

 

Our sons have described Mexico City as very cosmopolitan and somewhat reminiscent of Europe but at first glance the similarities were offset by a third world feel (somewhat like in South Africa).

There are streets with apartment buildings all adjoined, between three to five floors high.  

This does feel distinctly European.  Most of these buildings have a roll down door that allows cars into the ground floor parking place - in some cases a car elevator to take cars down to a lower ground floor as well.  In many cases these open garages have been converted into small shops that are brightly lit at night offering street food and any number of services from motor repair to upholstery, pedicures and veterinary care.  

This makes for fairly lively main roads teaming with people for most of the day.

 

Our AirBnb has a small narrow balcony out of a large window wide enough to stand and barely wide enough for a chair.  Wooden stairs take you up to an empty concrete roof that Anne has been using to soak up the warm winter sun.

 

 Most of the apartments have access to a flat concrete roof for hanging out on, entertaining and for hanging clothes out to dry.

The third world-feel comes from peeling paint and graffiti on the walls and from sidewalks that are designed to trip you up as soon as you look down at your phone to see the map.  

There are many  trees in Mexico City.  Great big old trees that have heaved the sidewalk asphalt and cement up in blocks that you have to watch out for.  

Apartment entrances have also contributed to the uneven sidewalk with driveways almost a foot above the sidewalk that force pedestrians to step up to cross them.

There is a distinct smell in the streets during the day.  I think it comes from the corn that is cooked in various forms in the small shops along the street.  Corn in the USA is pretty singular - a sweet corn from what we knew as “mielies” in South Africa - small yellow kernels.  The corn in Mexico is more varied in color and size, and with more distinctive tastes and smells.  
Tortillas - the flat wraps for a lot of street food - are made from corn rather than wheat flour here.  A delicacy is a corn that has a fungus that grows on it - think of it as corn mushroom - that my conservative tastes won’t allow me to try.

The Spanish speaking experience has been unsettling for me.  I was a little cocky after our experience in Spain and I found on the second day how out of depth I was with a short conversation at the reception desk of our apartment block when I tried to ask if they could give us a spare key.

I had rehearsed my question fairly carefully:

     “Tiene usted otra llave para nuestra apartamento” (do you have another key for our apartment, sir)

He didn’t hesitate and said something that sounded to me like:

     “Anwe oirah jak oilklp pwaa aklfl adkflj ppiiw epixaf el airbnb”

I said: “¿Que?” and he repeated the sentence slowly enough for me to catch the “AirBnb” - realizing at that moment how lost I was but at the same time I knew what he was telling me to do about the spare key.  So with a “Gracias” I slinked away to lick my wounds and to tell Anne to contact the AirBnb to ask about a spare key.

 

Two days later I was standing in a shopfront store nor really willing to ask the shop attendant a question in case I had a repeat of the previous experience.  All I wanted to do was to buy a coke!  It naturally turned out to be pretty easy.  I even guessed that the shop assistant had said the price was …. well, somewhere between 20 and 30 pesos!  20 pesos = $1 US at the moment.

I have realized that getting really comfortable speaking the language will come slowly through regular repetition of day-to-day things like greetings and ordering food or shopping for household things - later we might start to practice small talk but that feels a long way away.

Our sons are both so fluent it is scary.  I asked them to try not to help us and they too have waited patiently for us to form sentences with butchered tenses and nouns and then left them hanging there for the waitress to work out with us.

We are a few days in, fumbling our way through making ourselves understood.  So far the people we’ve met have been patient with it.  Some speaking English but respecting our continued attempts to reply in Spanish.   The areas we have been in (Condesa, Roma and Escandon) are very cosmopolitan and the people appear to be accepting of people with different lifestyles - and we’ve been treated with good humor.