Dae Effae

This is not Latin and I am therefore not as intellectual as you were probably thinking for a minute there. "Dae Effae" is the phonetic Spanish pronunciation of DF, which stands for Districto Federal. As I mentioned before in Vamos a la Playa, The country, the state, and the city are all referred to as "México" and DF is used to try and clear up some of this confusion when referencing the city. It´s more o less the equivalent of saying DC instead of Washington (although apparently the population living east of the Rockies forgets that there is a state with the same name and I always ask ¨Seattle or Spokane?¨ and am always disappointed by the ¨neither¨ answer). Annnyways, we went to DF/Mexico/La Ciudad de México this weekend. Fun facts: Mexico City is the world´s 3^rd largest metropolitan area by population according to Wikipedia (my favorite reputable source) and is Latin America´s largest city. I´m going to channel Sam for a minute and share a fun history fact: Mexico City is built on top of the ruins of México-Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital. The central part of the city sits in the dried lake bed of Lake Texcoco and is slowly sinking and shifting.

I purposely didn´t advertise this little adventure to the folks back home for a few reasons: 1) it´s Mexico City 2) I´ve never been to a city larger than Chicago 3) we were traveling without a male escort. Mom, aren´t you glad you didn´t have to worry all weekend? The thing is that although Mexico City is ridiculously huge and it definitely has some bad neighborhoods and fair share of security problems, so does any big city. Being in the midst of it all doesn´t feel that different than any other big city, there´s just the knowledge in the back of your head that it keeps on going. And going. And going. As for the security issue, we stayed in a reputably safe neighborhood, got off the streets before dark, and traveled in a pack of 10+ people. Which tended to draw quite a bit of attention, but that's better than attention of the "look at me, I'm a solo, wandering gringa" variety.

Now than I'm done with excuses for why this was a good idea, let's do this thang. We rolled out early Saturday morning, bussed to the Puebla transportation station and took a bus to Mexico City. Mexico City happens to be famous for its amazing metro system and we took full advantage. Each metro line is color coded and each station has a clip art picture associated with it. The line transfer points are so clearly marked with huge colorful signs that it's nearly impossible to get lost. Also, it costs about $0.25 per ride. You can't beat that deal. Courtesy of my travel guidebook (shoutout #2 to HP) we found a very nice little Youth Hostel in a quite suburb and 3 blocks away from a metro stop. After dumping out bags we headed to the Museo Nacional de Antropología which is supposed to be one of the best-arranged museums in the world. After our visit, I would believe that statistic. One could literally spend an entire weekend in that museum and not see everything. Best bargain of the day: the museum is free for students. I don´t have any pictures because I didn´t want to risk carrying a camera, but there were some amazing dioramas and more pre-Hispanic artifacts than you can count. I also got what was probably the best horchata that I have ever EVER tasted from a shanty little stand outside the museum. Horchata is ricewater with cinnamon, sugar and sometimes other spices and has a milky consistency. The museum ate up most of our day and we were all ready to call it quits by dinnertime and watched the ND-BC football game instead of playing in the streets of Mexico City at night. Win-Win-Win (because we won. Finally.)

Today, after eating the free hostel breakfast, we packed up our bags and hopped on the metro to visit The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We had been told by several people that we shouldn´t make the trek out there because it´s so far from everything else, would be too crowded and that we should just go another time, but I am glad x´s 10 that we disregarded this advice. It was a beautiful, clear morning, there was almost no one around and we arrived just in time to attend mass. (This was not as magical planning as I´m making it out to be because there´s a mass every 45 minutes.) The Guad Basilica is actually a complex consisting of a new Basilica, the original Basilica, a museum, several chapels and statues galore featuring Juan Diego and Pope JP II. Apparently this basilica receives more visitors annually than the one in Vatican City. Add one more to the list because I have been there, seen that. The whole time we were there I was struggling to wrap my mind around the fact that we were in fact THERE. I imagine that it´s a similar feeling to visiting Paris or Machu Picchu; the feeling of living in a history book.

The best part of this trip for me was probably the self-efficiency aspect. We didn´t take a single cab, we didn´t stay in a hotel, and we didn´t have everything perfectly planned. We became very good friends with the metro map and lost all fear of asking random vendors on the street for directions. A close second for favorite was the girl time. At least half the trip, before we acquired one of the ND boys, was a grand adventure for the 10 ND girls. Once again, I´m going to credit divine intervention for the great group of ND people into which I was thrown. Everyone has their moments of course, but we all get along in general and have a great time traveling, joking about professors, comparing people we know from school and openly sharing all sorts of digestion-related details. This last bit is maybe more of a pre-med thing (sorry Pat Beard) than a friendship thing, but we´ll take it.
For anyone who´s counting, I have officially been in Mexico for 2 months and 1 day and next weekend will mark the halfway point (enter the Bon Jovi soundtrack of our lives). I have that surreal mixed feeling of having just arrived and having spent a lifetime here. I´ll let you know if I decide which is more accurate.
PS: Pictures are on the way, the Internet is not agreeable at the moment.