I started the day with a couple of pics of the local denizens in front of the hotel.
We wanted to give Paul and Sue an overview of the city’s neighborhoods, so we hopped on a tourist bus. Well, OK, hopped on is a lie. The entire area around the Zocalo was altered by a massive demonstration, with street closures and an oppressive police and army presence. A guy from the bus company led us several blocks on foot before waiting for our bus on a distant street corner.
First stop was at the Monument to the Mexican Revolution. The museum of the Mexican Revolution is definitely on our list of to-do’s.
The bus route runs down the Paseo de la Reforma, the boulevard that has become the showcase for modern Mexico City. We entered at the Angel of Independence, a column with a bronze winged victory covered in gold leaf at its summit. The monument was constructed by Porfirio Diaz in 1910 on the centenary of Mexican independence from Spain.
A number of the new buildings are rather beautiful.
As we were in the middle of the gentrifying Juarez neighborhood, full of colonial mansions, we jumped off the bus and into an Uber…almost literally. We were soon walking into our favorite restaurant in Mexico City (as the poet Hölderlin qualified, “of those we know”), Nicos. They had remodeled the restaurant since we were here a year ago; the rather formal setting (white walls, tables with cloths) has been replaced by a more modern, informal look.
The food hasn’t changed, though: it is still memorable. We started with table-side guacamole and fresh tortillas, then shared a couple of plates: the house signature sopa seca de natas (not really a dry soup, but a very delicate stack of crepes with a subtle tomato/Chile sauce) and probably the best taco ever, pork belly. Sue has sea bass, Paul a fried chicken, and I had Carne en su jugo, beef in a soupy bean sauce that was just great. We shared a flan and an espresso to polish off a great meal.
Our bus tickets were good for the whole day, so we had an Uber driver take us to a stop on the “green route” that goes deep into the southern part of the city. After literally running in circles around a statue in the center of the Paseo Reforma, we finally found the stop. We had been to Coyoacan, a gorgeous colonial neighborhood miles south of the center, several times, but always on the metro; the bus runs along the Avenida de los Insurgentes, the longest street in Mexico (it runs 29 km from north to south). Much of the avenue between Condesa and the university district is enormously wealthy, very green, and probably pretty interesting.
At the heart of this district is an enormous complex called the World Trade Center.
Nearby is a cultural center named for the (Stalinist) muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Next stop was Coyoacan, the village where Cortez stayed in 1521 and 1522 while the capital was being built from the rubble of Tenochtitlan. The neighborhood has a distinctly rural feel, with brightly colored colonial houses. The heart of the district is the church of San Juan Batista: an astonishingly grand and ornate edifice for so small a place.
To the west of the church is the Jardin Centenario, a deeply shaded grove centered on the Fuente des Coyotes –the name Coyoacan probably comes from Nahuatl and means “place of coyotes.”
The garden is ringed with cafes, and we paused for some mineral water–one forgets that the altitude (7200 feet) conspires with the heat to induce dehydration!
On the side of the church is the Jardin Hidalgo, much stonier and less inviting. The light on the steeple was lovely, though.
So lovely, in fact, that it made my wife sing!
The square is closed off by the eighteenth century Casa de Cortez (a plaque claims, falsely, that Cortez stayed here).
There was no question of dinner after lunch at Nicos, but we shared some appetizers and drinks at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant and went to bed happy.