On the ride in from the airport, I immediately saw my first Mexican thing: a hunched fellow pedaling a bicycle loaded down with a five-foot-wide pallet of cookies and pork skins. On the freeway. Inches from traffic. We entered a tunnel, and I saw my second Mexican thing: a line of pedestrians shambling toward the Basílica, also inches from traffic. When we emerged from the tunnel, I saw my third Mexican thing: an enormous movie theater complex giving top marquee space to Johnny English.
Outside the Museo Nacional de Antropología, a thirteen-year-old girl with her dad and brother in tow stopped us and asked if we had time to give an interview. She had to interview people in English for school, and what better place to do that than on the steps of the most foreigner-attracting instutition in the city? She asked all the standard questions about where we live, if we’ve visited Mexico before, our favorite thing about Mexico (the food), and if we believe all the media heat about Mexico’s violence (nah). But then she asked the most inadvertently incisive question of all: ¨Did you come to relax, or to know Mexico?¨
I hadn’t seen many Asian people around until arriving at the museum. We pulled over one group of girls, asked them if they were Japanese, and explained that, no, we weren’t Mexican. Madelaine asked them how they liked Mexico, which drew a collective shrug. The one from Osaka got a little more excited (but only a little) upon hearing that we’re going to Osaka next year.
(Still haven’t spotted any black people, though.)
This evening, I recorded a Marketplace of Ideas interview with David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, one of the main books I read to prepare myself for Mexico City. The others included Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City (I interviewed him about his book earlier) and John Ross’ El Monstruo, which I’m finishing here. We had a post-interview drink of mezcal, which Madelaine very accurately described as a ¨liquid cigar.¨ For whatever reason, I desire few things in life more than a drink that tastes like a smoke.
Waiting to fly out of LAX, I saw a banner emblazoned with the face of Mayor Villaraigosa and the words, ¨Welcome to Los Angeles: the City That’s a World in Itself¨ (or something like that). This sounds on one level like garden-variety meaningless civic boosterism, but on another level, it’s the entire reason I moved there! Mexico City has an impressive internationalism — I plan to visit its equivalent of my L.A. neighborhood, Koreatown, soon — but even here, you don’t get the experience of traveling from country to country every few blocks.
One mid-twentysomething Mexican to another mid-twentysomething Mexican walking alongside him: ¨¿Eres feliz, bro?¨
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