Dateline: Mexico City, Saturday, September 10.
I’m reclining on my hotel bed after a long, exhausting day exploring the Historic District of Mexico City. I’m staying in a hotel far south of the touristy areas, a beautiful Holiday Inn nestled next to a Wal-Mart and a mall with every type of American chain restaurant I could ask for. This morning I got all of my gear sorted out, packed a bag with water and snacks, and wrote down a few key phrases, all starting with I’m sorry, […] because I don’t have enough Spanish. This has been working relatively well so far. Getting to my destination was handled through Uber, and within about 20 minutes I was standing in the Plaza de la Constitucion, looking at workers erecting seating for the 15th of September celebration next week.
I skirted the plaza and walked into the Cathedral Metropolitana, which was as old and as beautiful inside as I hoped. It’s a traditional layout but the central nave is surrounded by chapels of different kinds, some open and some closed. I was there in time for a morning mass, and so a lovely baritone filled the building. Walking around the central altar, I spied a litter of kittens playing in the darkened Chapel of San Pedro and stopped to shoot their picture.
At the back, the Altar of the Kings is an immense baroque structure dating back to the early 1700’s, and it was so large it didn’t fit in my camera frame (I only brought a 35mm lens, dammit).
Exiting the Cathedral, I attempted to follow Lonely Planet’s walking tour of the Historic District but found that I was thwarted by a lousy tour and a lack of signage. Seriously, there is no signage in that district at all. I found the main avenues pretty easily but once the tour had me off the main streets I was on my own. I followed the pedestrian Avenue Madero west towards the Latinamericana Tower, which had been the tallest building in Mexico City until 1985. The Avenue was relatively busy (this was nothing, as I would later discover) with people shopping and groups of vendors hawking stores at every intersection. I stopped into a Starbucks to grab coffee, use the bathroom, and hop on wi-fi when I found out that lots of Starbucks in Mexico City don’t have public wi-fi. This made me a little nervous, as this was my only way of using Uber for a ride home. I spent the next couple of hours looking for a good wi-fi signal anywhere (outside of hotels, cafés, and other Starbucks) but never found one.
Reaching the Latinamericana Tower, I found my way inside, paid 90 pesos and crammed into an elevator with 10 other people and rode it to the observation deck. Mexico City is a huge, sprawling place, filling the basin it sits in all the way to the mountains. The air is pretty clear, but I could just barely see the edges in the distance. Beneath me the Palace of Fine Arts spread out to the west and beyond that the Alameda.
Back out on the street, the crowds had grown, and it took about 10 minutes to cross the street to the museum. Inside there was a long snaking line at the ticket counter so I bailed on the exhibits and continued west into the park. There are lovely fountains and benches throughout the grounds, and I found a shady spot to get my bearings. Supposedly there is free public wi-fi in certain areas, but I wasn’t able to connect after multiple tries. I stopped and asked a friendly fellow at an information booth, and he seemed embarrassed to tell me it was broken.
At the far end of the park was a marketplace full of handcrafts, and I debated on an embroidered Mexican peasant blouse for my ladies but I couldn’t find a blue one in teh right size for Finn. I also paused at the stand with luchador masks but I knew Finn would never wear it.
At this point the Lonely Planet guide had me walking down side streets to find a cantina for a cerveza (I could have used a cerveza), a food market, and another craft market, but I could not find the street, the cantina, or the markets. Instead I found myself in a barrio specializing in appliance repair, plumbing supplies, and later, car stereo installation. I backtracked in an effort to get my bearings and found myself in the Barrio Chino, a small outpost of Asian shops and restaurants, but never found what I was looking for. So I looked east for the Latinamericana Tower and followed that back to the Avenue Madero. At this point it was jammed with people out for the day, probably five times the number I’d seen in the morning, and it was slower going. I threaded the crowds back to the Plaza and walked south to Avenue 20 de Novembre and followed that south for a few blocks. Along the way I detoured and found the Museum of Mexico City, which was beautiful, and stayed until my stomach started rumbling. Out on the Avenue again, I found a cab and rode back to the hotel for a little quiet time before dinner.
Tomorrow I’m going to head northeast and check out the Paseo de la Reforma, east of the Alameda, and maybe the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, which is billed as a world-class institution with Spanish and English displays. Depends on how far I can walk.
I’ve been fighting with the change in altitude by popping Advil in the morning to stave off pounding headaches. It’s enough that I’m seriously winded walking three flights of stairs, which is alarming. This would be a great place to train for a marathon for a couple of months. I’m expecting to land in Baltimore and be positively drunk on oxygen for the first 24 hours.
The weather here has been chilly in the mornings, but by about 11AM the sun heats things up pretty well. Still, if you’re in the shade it’s just cold. So it takes getting used to, and layering is key.
…and all I got was shot in the face with a paintball.
Seriously, there’s much more, but this was the most bizarre retreat I’ve been on. Fun, and with awesome people, but bizarre.
Postscript: Wednesday, September 14
I suppose I should explain what this is all about. My trip to Mexico was meant to help the local program office there transition to a full-fledged WRI office, something that’s been in the works for months now. Along with this transition we’ve been working on updating the brand for that program. We’ve been going in circles over this for a year, as the original brand was not well received by the country offices and visually it was imbalanced.
My job is to intermediary between the D.C. office and the Mexico office, who are spearheading this rebranding exercise on behalf of the other country offices. We were negotiating my travel dates for months, dependent on the external agency’s schedule and our own approval schedule, so what was originally meant for August dragged out into September, and into my teaching schedule. Here is where having class once on Wednesday really screwed me. I booked flights leaving early on Thursday and returning on Tuesday, attempting to get there and back with as much time in country as possible.
What I was not aware of, and was not made clear to me, was what we were actually to be doing on the days I was here. I hoped for two solid days of work and workshops, where the staff could pick my brain as much as possible to help the transition. I hoped to meet the branding agency, so that the voices on the phone were more than voices. And I hoped to shoot video of programs in country so that we’d have new footage to work with.
When I got to the hotel on Thursday, I found out they were all leaving the office to play paintball and do a team-building day. I debated on whether or not to join them, as I didn’t pack any paintball-ready clothes to wear and knew my boss was expecting, um, work to be happening.
Because the trip was coming in the middle of a lot of projects, I got comfortable in the hotel and worked from 3 until about 10, stopping to talk to the girls and go find some dinner. Ultimately, after talking it through with Jen, I decided to go with them and play, bringing a camera and a healthy sense of adventure.
I got to the office at 9 on the nose and met the whole team with a dopey-sounding, “Hola! I’m Bill from D.C.!” I dropped off my camera bag (better for something to happen to it in the office than in my hotel room) and followed everyone outside to the bus, where we boarded for the trip north.
The venue was up in the hills outside the main city between a petting zoo and a cement block factory. We got off the bus and sat in plastic chairs while a nice man explained what we were going to do in Spanish. Then we split up into teams and did some warmup tasks: practicing with a paintball gun, solving a jigsaw puzzle as a team, stacking cans as a dexterity test, and trust falls. Yes, my first trust fall was in a field in Mexico.
Then we suited up for our adventure. The first team to suit simply wore a vest protector and helmets, but our team, who followed them, all collectively saw the wisdom in wearing coveralls, the vest, and a helmet. I got worried when all the teams put their vests on the same way, but smarter heads suggested one team flip them so that black was on the outside. Thus, we were the Manos Negros, or Black Hands. I was a little alarmed to find that our scratched facemasks were only semi-opaque and did not cover the neck. Having played paintball before, where the groom got shot in the Adam’s apple two days before his wedding, I knew this could be dangerous.
The referees went over the rules, the details of which went over my head, but I was already familiar with the basics. They then led us to the field, where multiple obstacles in varying formations separated the two sides, including a hollow wooden helicopter, a downed plane, and a pseudo-storefront. My new friend Miguel, who had been conferring with me on gear selection, explained our team’s strategy to me (shoot the other team) and we scoped out our side of the field to see where the best areas of fire were. We found that every depression held ankle-deep mud, and hoped it wasn’t runoff from the petting zoo.
The game itself was fun. I’ve enjoyed paintball in the past, and even though my gun looked and shot like it had been run over with our tour bus, I took out two of the other team’s players. Most of my time was spent ducking behind obstacles as everyone yelled in Spanish around me; it’s disorienting to be playing a team sport and not be able to communicate with anyone. In hindsight I should have asked Miguel what left, right, forward and back were in Spanish, but I would have forgotten that in two minutes anyway.
Somebody worked up our right side and finally got me on the shoulder and back, so I raised my gun and walked off. Our team lost by two players in the end, but we played a full 10 minutes and I only had about 15 balls left.
Several of our team limped off the field with paintball injuries; two men had been shot in the neck enough to draw blood, one woman was hit on the top of her head, and several others had circular bruises. We recharged our guns, refilled the ammunition, got some water, and then regrouped against another team. The second game was much like the first; this time I took out three of the other team’s players before getting shot square in the center of my mask.
After we returned all of our rental gear we walked up to the roof of the building, which was set up as a patio, and watched as different teams did presentations about WRI’s projects. The idea was for each team to research and develop a 10-minute explanation of the project so that they could familiarize the rest of the office as to what WRI does. They all did an excellent job, and even though my Spanish is weak I knew and could follow almost all of what they were presenting.
After this, we scarfed down some food, then hopped on the bus and headed back. There is a reason the transport program was founded in Mexico 11 years ago; it took us about 45 minutes to crawl back to the office through the traffic.
Once we were there the group invited me to stay for drinks and karaoke, so I popped a the Mexican equivalent of a 40 of Leon and got on their wireless network to call home. We gathered on the roof of the building which overlooks Coyoacan plaza, a beautiful outdoor park, and talked about the day and our experience. In the park, people laughed and played, music from the market and the smell of fried dough wafted up to us, and we enjoyed a cool breeze as the sun set.
I drifted in and out of conversations in English with different groups of people and enjoyed myself listening to them talk in rapid-fire Spanish, picking out words and phrases here and there. It was surprising to me that by the end of the day it was a lot more familiar and I could pick out sentences and phrases that made sense. When I felt myself flagging at about 9:30, I called for an Uber and headed back to the hotel, tired and peckish, and found that the smell of the petting zoo was coming with me.
Our nearsighted zoning council recently approved a modified plan for the Catonsville Promenade, a misguided development project that’s been lurching along since before Finley was born. Details on the project are sketchy at best, but I found an interesting article summing up the developer’s iterations, all of which have me wondering what they’re smoking. The most recent maps show only one point of access and have the entire development squished up against the Beltway, which seems like an unappealing and inaccessible plan for a bunch of hotels and restaurants nobody will visit. It’s obvious the builder is holding out for the state to sell him adjacent land from the Spring Grove complex, so that he can continue the plan northward, add more buildings, and link up to Frederick Road. Which will clog our traffic pattern tighter than a heart attack.
The final date has been a long time coming, but I’m going to be packing this weekend for a trip to Mexico City. This one is on a lot shorter notice than the others, and I’m going to be doing a lot of winging it while I’m there, but due to my teaching schedule I’ll have two days in Mexico City on the company’s dime (wish that could have been London, honestly). This month’s schedule looks absolutely bonkers, actually–I teach next Wednesday, fly out Thursday morning, fly back out Tuesday evening, work from home Wednesday, and teach Wednesday evening. There are a lot of logistical issues to work out (gotta book my flight, for example) but this is going to be interesting.
After comparing rates and details with three different lenders, we’ve got a lender lined up to refi the house. Now I’ve got to get the ball rolling before I leave the country…