Mexican ODD-yssey: Three days, two flights and one attack by the dread Candiru 

Dedication: For James, who insisted

To be in Mexico is to be in a third world country that uneasily resembles what Canada will look like in some few dozen years. We're going in opposite directions but we're converging on a globalized mean that is three parts bland globalized product placement, one part local colour and one part uttter shithole.

But that's the globalized world we've bought into. And there's no question that the Mexico City of today, of NAFTA, of international trade has a lot more neon running shoes at international prices than it did some 20 years ago, Or 25 which is when I was last here.  Of course, back then it was still recovering from an earthquake, which might have something to do with it. But the historic center, the old Aztec city of Tenochtitlán  upon which Cortes's successors built their grand churches and palaces, is spectacular in its architecture and street life but but but the street level storefronts are being filled in with the same shops, the same brands, the same institutional decor as any other major city in the world. Here's the Benetton, there's the Converse, the Florsheim, the 7-11s and Circle Ks on every other corner. 

Oh, there's more than enough domestic enterprise to go around and it can be enchanting and wonderful but why is it that the future we aspire for on behalf of the third world too often resembles our present? And our future seems to be heading towards their present? 

I see a future of Canadian main streets full of boarded up dollar stores and the populace out selling those remnant crappy Chinese products from hover car to hover car along the toll roads of the leisured class. 

But that's stark and it's not what's going to happen. Oh, we'll certainly bankrupt each other looking for foreign bargains and drive homegrown talent either into the ground or into foreign fields, but we've been doing that for a while already, Don't read me ramble on about how liberal democracy needs a good swift kick in its neo-liberal pants; others do a much better job. I'm a second-rate hack and fifth-rate activist parroting my betters. 

After all, I'm benefitting from this cheap flight over some thousands of kilometres of intervening scrubland. And if I have to endure the screams of infants through wax earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones, so be it. And if I have to suffer through the kicks on the back of my chair of a child who ought to be smacked and put to rights, that's the ticket for admission to privilege. And if the grown man (both the adjective and noun I use unwillingly) in the chair in front insists on being fully reclined and bouncing forward and back, well, that's the democracy we've been morphing into for 35 years or more. Heck probably my lifetime. Although I like to think that some idealism remained into my youth I am probably the Damian of the marketplace, or more likely a wretched John the Baptist to the Ancient Old One who is to come after. 

Enough! Why complain that food and drink must be bought even on international Air Canada flights now? All of that got us to Mexico City in some 5.5 hours of flight time, into an efficient airport and the hands of the bandit taxi companies who ignore my pleas for a "say-dan" and put us into an SUV for three times the price, but at midnight who wants to argue especially because Mexico is supposed to be so inexpensive. Ha! maybe some twenty five years ago but prices have largely converged for anything resembling home and that's the point isn't it? We want to travel and have the comforts of home and we must pay for such. 

Ah, but Mexico City is grand. It's a remarkable, lovely, lively, intelligent place. The best time to drive its streets are late at night or early in the morning, to go whizzing along its arteries and veins and tracing out its musculature at speed for it is a city of many streets, of iridescent neighbourhoods, of delightful surprises. 

But i am getting ahead of myself. Our hotel, deep in the historic center has the exterior charm of (to a North American) antiquity and the modern comforts of a Hampton Inn and Suites. The central courtyard is glassed over in stained glass and it is possible to feel how the hotel evolved over the past 100 years or so. I think I most enjoyed the remnant fact that the stairwell, which no one takes, preferring the glass elevators in the courtyard, winds around what was once the elevator shaft for a metal cage that probably rattled and shook with a wizened dwarf of an operator calling out the floors. 

Breakfast lacks, however, as it always does at the Hampton (the Hilton's hotel for servants), with huevos revueltos which, I am not going to be the first to observe really are revolting eggs, and a waffle maker. But tortillas, stewed chicken and chilis made for a decent start to the first day and off we whizz-banged to the Anthropological Museum, a good start to any trip to Mexico. 

The Anthropology Museum is the closest I'll come to staying in a palace. It is packed with staff whose only job is to follow museum-goers around with rag brooms, sweeping up the remnant footprints we might leave behind. And to ensure we don't pocket any three-tonne Olmec heads. 

Oh I like those Olmecs. And the Toltecs and the Xichimichilengos and the Quetxachui'tls and any number of other combinations of consonants. Which reminds me that some 'scientists' have had computers at work for a decade or more, generating random sequences of letters, trying to see if an infinite number of monkeys with tyepwriters could generate the works of Shakespeare. So far, hundreds of millions of pages later they've managed to get no more than the odd coherent but ungrammatical and inarticulate sentence. Which only proves that infinity is big. 

It's a great museum. I'm least fond of the Aztecs just because their style is so bombastic, so loud. It's like Roman architecture or American pop culture: it's overwhelming in scale as if to say: you dandified, effete Greeks/ Europeans/ Quizchitzls may produce a good thing or two but we can do it BIG! You have an intricately carved, beautiful snake? We've got a snake that's forty feet long and we suffocated eighteen children with the dust from the carving of it. Calendars? You want a calendar? Here's one that's six tonnes! Can I hang it on the wall? Fuck you, I can use it as an altar top and sacrifice your ass on it.

I'm quite fond of the toilets in the museum. Much improved over the last quarter century. 

Then away to meet M.'s friend B.J. and her daughter Ollie. We taxied over to Coyoacan, a trendy neighbourhood full of vibrancy and light, only a bit of which we saw before the heavens opened and the rain was bouncing four inches up off the tarmac. We did what the guidebooks said never to do and hailed a cab on the street, ten or fifteen minutes of moisture rising to our brains but no matter, no worries ... or so ...

Because, you see, there is no 'Knowledge' in Mexico City, nor why would there be given that in a city of some 30-odd million not only are the streets as numerous as can be but they change name every few blocks or so, so a Santa Veracruz becomes Donceles becomes Justo Sierra becomes Mixcalco becomes Alarcon in the space of a dozen blocks. And, also thus, our hotel on "5th of February street" is near impossible for a cabbie to find without going in a death spiral around the old plaza "el Zocalo." We just wait until the circuit comes closest to the hotel and jump out into traffic, throwing a fistful of dollars at the cabbie. 

I do like my naps on the weekend. Almost everyday, in fact. I would like to travel with a lightweight frame and hammock to set up camp anywhere I go. It would save M. from my petulant zombie shuffle through the early afternoon. Failing that, a nap at the hotel sufficed and we wandered through the last of the light, up and down the pedestrian streets with its crippled music box grinders and disturbingly overwhelming police presence, its riot of shoe stores, paperies, bakeries, jewellers, all arranged in their own neighbourhoods, around and about the streets to smell and see and hear the Saturday night drumming near to the old senate in Plaza Manuel Tolsa of feathered and painted dancers sweating to the real oldies, for themselves, not for tourists, but in sacred ceremonies of incense and rhythm and deep booming beats and that sound carried through the night as we dined at Los Girasoles on tortillas, minced grasshoppers, ants eggs, and manguey worms. Because we do that sort of thing. In retrospect I'd have been happier with almost anything else on the menu but as insects go, these ones were pretty nicely prepared and it's likely to be the future protein source for us when Canada goes to ruin because the baby boomers sucked it dry and sent its life force overseas in search of a greater marginal return on their overstuffed retirement funds. Viva la revolución!

But I digress. 150g of bug protein is the sort of thing that boggles the mind and quizzifies the stomach. Not that we were sick, mind! Great food and good health all around (at least until thirty-two minutes before landing back in Vancouver but that's a further digression). How can I, who flies across continents for weekends be anything but a hypocrite for attacking the wastrel baby boomers? Let he who is without sin etc. Well, I cast that mother, and hope it hits a few other hypocrites on its way. I'm content in the knowledge of my hypocrisy. 

And quite content in the Sunday art market on Sullivan street. We overslept and blew off a bunch of murals we would quite happily otherwise to have seen. Life's too short to be a tourist all the time. With a digression to ask a group of waiters the direction to a bank machine (derecho! izquierda! derecho! two blocks, three, one, left then right!) we hopped, again deliciously against the advice and wisdom of the guidebooks, into a cab and went to meet B.J. and Olivia at the art market where we played on the sorts of swing sets, roundabouts, teeter-totters and climbing stones that were ripped out of Canadian parks twenty years ago in a fit of hysterics. Some breast-milk-induced mass psychosis. And then wandered through art both good and bad, mostly indifferent, some excellent, all under the trees and a bright sunshiny day with pastel coloured buildings that seemed all welcoming and wonderful but, I understand, become grim at night when the homeless converge on the Monument to the Mother, it being one of the places where they might sleep, trade, avoid being murdered, rob and be robbed, find safety and socialize. But that's 12 hours away! And it is M.'s birthday so Rene and Bruno and wee Zak show up and we three climb into the car with all of them and strollers and car seats and bags and all in joyful flaunting of safety and Canadian convention and tootle across town to Villa Maria for lunch and an impromptu Mariachi chorus of birthday greetings to M. with a perpetual birthday candle stuck into a slice of three-milk cake. 

Food. And craft beers. This attempt of mine to defeat John Barleycorn keeps stumbling over tasty beverages and social stress. 

Oh, don't expect bargains when you come to town. Lives are cheap, cabs are cheap, but Polo Ralph Lauren costs. Anything that a liberal-minded norteamericano would want to hang on a wall will cost. The New Balance, Frida Kahlo loving jet set has to pay. It's the endless reproductions of ancient art that you can get for pennies.     

And, soon, it was time to part again. the days are too short for leisurely siestas. We hopped a cab with a set fare (note: those guys will get you there faster than the metered cabs although they'll cost you 50% more - well worth it) and managed a quick wander through the Zocalo, stopping for yet another cohort of dancers on a side street, painted and befeathered and with those nuts all tied around their calves that rattle and clack as they dance. 

A gap-toothed (really, canyon-toothed) old fellow came up to us ... well, primarily M., because I ain't no mark. Except when I am. Which is frequently. And he sold us a story of his daughter, a singer of traditional music, tried to sell us a story about how the Mayans are responsible for everything modern because they invented binary numbering,  and he also sold us three CDs. It was worth it to hear the song he sang to M about the stars, the moon, the ... well, everything.

A birthday dinner at Azul Historico, a cool restaurant set in a covered courtyard with very fine tortilla soup and mezcal with salted spiced orange slices. Wallowing back to our hotel in a sea of overindulgence and regret we passed the stragglers of a Sunday night at the Zocalo's festival of Mexico City's 400th anniversary. Probably as many stragglers as there were survivors of the bloodbaths of that conquest. Difficult anniversary to feel good about. The Zocalo and the historic centre rest on what was the island city of Tenochtitlán while the rest of the city spreads out over the old lake bed and slowly sinks. A bundle of villages swallowed up by the whole in a network of roads like the scribblings on a telephone pad.

Painful memories of a bursting belly and an attempt to sleep before catching a 7am ride out to Teotihuacan with our archaeologist guide. A certified archaeologist? Who knows? but an affable fellow named Leonardo and a short bus with other tourists pretending an interest in history and, in one case, plumbing. 

The plumbing seems laughable but in fact it is a good indicator of societal development and the function of particular buildings. Humans learn late in our cultures to avoid drinking downriver of where we excrete and to avoid sitting in our own shit. The Aztecs who came to prominence five hundred years after the fall of Teotihuacan (circa 550AD) thought it a city of the gods and that temples for the sun and moon were at one end of a five kilometer Avenue of the Dead. But the dead don't need drainage and toilets. The so-called Temple of the Sun was for some unknown deity) and the Temple of the Moon that of the Great Goddess (of water, fertility and, apparently, huge spider women). Both pyramids are well designed to parallel the mountains behind them so from certain points they completely obscure/replace the mountains. Was that to create a sense that the altars were on top of the mountains? I don't know. I just thought of that.

Interestingly, the Temple of the Moon is one pyramid built on another built on another, up in layers over time. The Temple of the Sun is a monumental single edifice built up in platforms, the top being added some time after the base. It’s the third largest pyramid in the world and it’s enough of a climb for me. And now archaeologists are finding tunnels under the ground, two with rivers of mercury that perhaps, like the River Styx, represent a crossing over point to tombs. It makes for difficult archaeology, requiring the use of Hazmat suits. 

It was a city with embassies from and to groups stretching down to the Mayans. How and why did the civilization collapse? Internal strife? Outside attack? In the end, the people burnt the wooden altars and temples and destroyed the legends and histories that lined their temples. They ceased to be. Probably sat around drinking mercury and that drove them nuts. Or is that lead? Mercury was what the popes put on their nuts to cure their syphilis. Lead is what supposedly caused the US race riots of the sixties and seventies. Definitely not the systemic racism; must have been all the lead paint the negroes were eating off their walls. Uh huh. 'Cause that's what black people do. Dumb-ass social scientists and armchair phrenologists. 

It's a heck of a place, Teotihuacan. Well worth a visit. I liked the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Largely because it is broken, revealing the previous temples on which it was built. I especially enjoyed eavesdropping on the spurious theorizing of the other people who started showing up as the day progressed: the woman who talked about how the Aztecs built the pyramids on top of the city that was here; the woman talking about how the Vikings were the first to visit and thus the legend of Quetzalcoatl and by the way they built the pyramids because that's what Vikings do when they hit a coastline: they wander for weeks into the interior, battling tribes along the way until they hit a good big city and then they build a bunch of pyramids, just like they did in Egypt. 

Ye gads, it's a good thing human civilization entered its death throes half a century ago even though we're too stupid to realize that we're only catching up to what the planet has known all along: that an ecosystem out of balance requires massive quantities of blood to rectify itself. And we're it, Jack. Pull the handle on the slot machine, get granny, the tots and a shotgun and hole up in the hills eating cabbage and rabbits because the planet's about to tip over. It won't help but at least you'll die slowly in the country not quickly in the city. 

Gods, what's wrong with me? I hang out for a couple of days surrounded by the remnants of dead civilizations in a city with a population larger than most countries, stuffed to its gills with heavily armed paramilitary types and inveterate shoe shoppers and suddenly I Malthusianly ooze speciesist self-loathing, take off my spurs and lie down in bed with my boots on waiting for the long knives to come through the door and ...

... and you see what M. has to contend with? This is me on a good day. I love traveling and seeing other cultures and grooving on their stories and digging their ululations and glottal stops and bouncing on their roads and running my hand over their stones but I can't stop seeing the skull under the face. 

What, ho! That's not me in the moment, that's me with the post-civic-coital cigarette. In the moment, we were let off at the hotel, changed, and went shoe shopping! Oh, yes, the Converse store opposite the Palacio de Bellas Artes called to us stronger than that rococo art nouveau/ art deco temple of wonder. And shoes in hand, we stopped in to the bookstore where I picked up Paco Ignacio Taibo II's 'Dias de Combate," the first of the Hector Belascoaran Shayne novels that for some unfathomable reason has not been translated into English. I think I understand about a dozen words on every page. Enough to be getting on with. 

Books and shoes. And some liquor. And a nasty stone pipe because it was 7 pesos.  

And then, because it was Mexico City we stopped unwittingly at a sushi restaurant for donburi and Caipirinhas. A wise move? With a 3:15am wake-up call to get to the airport it seemed like a good idea at the time. What could go wrong with rice, chicken, seaweed and special sauce?

More on that later.  It suffices to say that we quite like Mexico City. It is a hodgepodge of contradictions and a riot of colour and architecture and overall a little tacky. We could imagine spending a quite happy number of months or years there.

But first we had to get home and there is nothing quite as soulless as an airport duty free shop at 4am. It's all white and gold and 10% off specials and sexually distended models glaring seductively out from perfume posters. And no people. Nobody queueing up to buy the giant Toblerone bars that all airports have. No one hesitatingly reaching for a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue because it is $80 cheaper than at home, so well worth the $220 price tag. None of the people who amusingly and guiltily try to cover up their Bacardi purchase to hide their shame. 

News stands without news, just the promise of colourful photo spread advertisements for a richer life among the hundreds of ads promising the same thing. Soap opera digests and technology magazines and obscured copies of Playboy for the half dozen world travelers who read such as they travel, gleefully pointing out the short story by Philip Roth hidden among the rouged nipples and fluffed merkins of Hugh Hefner's "good life." And on top of a stack of candy bars, out in plain sight and forgotten by him, the clerk's box cutter: the symbol of all that is evil and terror-driven in the world. I handed it to him and he was unaware of the irony, probably having only been five years old when eight of such banal items turned human beings into firebombs and brought global capitalism to a stunned halt, saved only by the US President telling the world to go out and spend money. On anything. Just spend. And seven years later all that junky debt, twisted and mutilated out of recognition, caused the Great Recession which made any number of bankers richer than Croesus as they gleefully took their bonuses out of the bail-out money the public provided: bonuses for not losing as much as the next guy. And so on and so forth until now. Now, when we bash labour for trying to move as freely around the world as does capital, preferring to let economic migrants drown or penning them in camps in isolated islands or, as the UK just announced, confiscating their earned wages and sending them "home," a policy that, should there be a Divine Justice, the Queen will refuse to announce in her throne speech lest it stick in her craw and choke her like a rogue fish bone. And there was this orange plastic boxcutter leering at me in the still Mexican morning of Benito Juarez Airport blues. 

The endless hum drum of airport life at five in the morning. Loading. Sleeping. Waking. Thirsty and trapped in my seat by two sleepers. Bursting for a pee. Waiting on it until an alarm goes off (someone smoking in the toilets! But no, she was using aerosol deodorant and that shit'll kill you faster than cigarettes so the alarm is sensitive enough for to klaxon all over it), waking my companions (M. was two rows ahead of me, we both took window seats in pursuit of Little Nemo), vaulting over them and getting into the toilet, realizing my bowels needed easing, acutely aware of the massive queue forming so straining in haste, downing water, returning to the seat, writing up some of this travelogue, eating the cheese and ham airport sandwich and choco biscuits I had picked up earlier, slowly feeling sharper and sharper pains in my guts which erupted into an acute attack of appendicitis or my tapeworm trying to chew its way to freedom, or a rogue Darien-Gap-hopping candiru spiking deep in my bladder or a herniated spleen or ruptured colon from my earlier strain, or just a reaction to too much sun at the pyramids, doubled over in pain, waves of it coming and going but we're descending over Vancouver and I've got to wait 30 minutes to land, 45 until I can find a toilet, feeling better, then losing all sensation in my hands and feet and coming close to blacking out with cramps in three successive waves and we land and the door opens and people are      so     slow     in getting their bags downs and dressing in the aisle, blocking traffic and out we finally get and M. is throwing painkillers into my mouth as I trot along in search of a toilet but the hallways stretch for miles, four travelators later and there's one! and I get in to see some nasty wretched excuse for HG Wells's creatures at the end of the world beat me to the one toilet where he blatantly, door wide open, leisurely opens his bladder and whizzes for hours in direct defiance of my hatred and I finally get in and the floodgates open and hell itself was drained of wrath and torment and pain in those few minutes but I survived and M. chucked some Pepto Bismol into my gullet and we Nexus'ed our way through immigration, found our bags waiting for us and drove  home in the bright Vancouver morning sunshine.

Mind and body. Still, a day and a half later, going through 3am waves where a Mexican Jumping Bean armed with a scythe leaps and twists in my guts to some coked-up narcotroubadour's tune. It makes me pessimistic in my writing and thoughts, as you might have noticed if you've come this far with me.

Yet isn't it the way that when one is feverish light sensitivity grows and visual clarity grows and every leaf looks stunning as though one's neurotransmitters are making up for the hell one is otherwise undergoing? 

And we got home. And Fedex arrived with my new computer assembled in China from parts pieced together by cancer-ridden women in Thailand out of metals mined by children in Africa. Yup. It's good to be a white man nestled deeply in the top 5% of the world's richest people, jetsetting across the continent at whim to buy a book and a pair of shoes, a stone pipe and a painting of lucha libre wrestlers and deities in a mock classical pose called the Triumph of Huitzilopochtli. 

Self loathing bites deep. Blatant shrugging hypocrisy helps. Mission accomplished. 

And that's the way to do Mexico City in three days.  

N.

May 15-21, 2015