Mexico City
The following accounts are a series of events which took place in between my third and seventh day in Mexico City. They are events and experiences that I was able to learn something from and that I feel may provide some insight to westerners who plan on travelling to this part of the world in the near future.
The tourists' curse in many parts of the world is that they as a population are staples of the economies in the countries that they travel in. The locals in any of these areas are highly aware that the majority of foreigners that they will come across have bank accounts, ATM cards and a mental resignation to the inevitability of spending money in situations foreign to them. It is a sure thing that ignorance is a kind of aphrodisiac for exploitation, often coupled with circumstance and passive attitudes, a traveller on any kind of budget is bound to be faced with a foreigner fee being placed on any kind of non-advertised price. I found this to be the case on numerous occasions during those first few days in Mexico City.
Any kind of market shop owner, street vender or taxi driver are likely candidates as practitioners of this and the value of being aware of an items real worth in a place is likely to save you a good deal of money. The importance of being aware that the person wants to sell something to you and that the only reason the price has been doubled or tripled is that they have gotten away with it before, it is for this reason that haggling is still allowed. It has seemed to me like a delicate and tedious process that is normally good for saving about a meals worth of pesos. A skill that is surely worth developing and thinking about. It is very easy to see the face of a local drop when they can see that you want to argue about money and even easier to see them cracking a face-wide grin when you ask them ¿Cuanta cuesta? while pulling out your wallet.
Another aspect that I was all too happy to have had organized before travel were the anti-biotics and medications for the most common travel-related afflictions of Mexico. After 5 days or so in D.F I had fallen victim to what I have come to know as 'Montezuma's Revenge', known more commonly across the world as travellers diarrhea. This was a putrid and foul experience by all means. a gut-wrenching shit-storm of delirium, vomiting, stomach cramps, nausea and dehydration. The intimate details of this illness is a gruesome thing that perhaps isn’t suitable here for description. My particular case lasted for two days before I was lamely able to function as a human being again with a steady but slow decline in the side-effects; half doubled over and travelling on the Mexico City metro to my next hostel. But I can only think of how much longer it would have lasted without the medication and knowledge of what to do in the case of that illness. A fellow traveller that I have met here in Mexico told me of his first real trip at 18 to India where he fell ill with a similar kind of thing, left it untreated, continuing to consume the stuff that was making him sick. He lost 26kg in 3 weeks, was hospitalized in India and then again when he returned home. A strong suggestion to learn your medicines and common illnesses.
During that first week in Mexico City I had been staying in a hostel one block away from the Central Zocalo. My sickness during that time had curbed me from the clutter of centro and at the suggestion of my original Mexico City helpers I switched to a hostel in an area called Copilco, known to be quite a way south of the centre. It was owned by an old Canadian woman who had relocated to Mexico some years ago for reasons I was never able to discover. The hostel doubled as a bar/restaurant and seemed to be a favorite haunt of the local university population who used it extensively for midday, evening and night drinking.
In this kind of environment I was able to learn from some of the Mexicans their attitudes towards the unspoken laws of the social worlds they lived in. One evening I was sitting around a table while sharing a plate of nachos and a bucket full of beer when one of them remarked to me "The guy here, he always pays. Always. The girls, they either leave before the bill or they say that they have no money". It was explained to me that any female present would normally have money, however if they were ever forced to use it they would not be very happy with their company for the evening. So of course, many people being as they are, oblige to this custom. I never got around to asking any of the women there if that was actually how they felt. To be sure, this only came from some university students in a hetero-social sense. I had one other major instance where the influence of the female sex came strongly into play on the young social psyche within the night scene of Mexico City.
It was Friday night and I had begun the evening at the Copilco hostel bar with my original Mexican helper along with a few more of his ilk. They were all keen to go along to some nightclub that evening and not being one to reject a Mexican social invitation, I decided to join them. When we left the Copilco bar there were 4 of us, all male. My Mexican helper told me that this simply won't do if we are going to go to this place and he spends the next 15 minutes chatting on his mobile phone to someone named Gabrielle that were are going to pick up and bring to the club. We arrived at her house and out comes this tall, thin and busty Mexican girl with a shock of blonde hair on her scalp. The club was a roman themed palace where, normally, there is quite a hefty cover charge. We were ushered through for free and given a prime front table in this orgiastic scene. It was easy to understand what had happened. Since I have been here in Mexico I have come across scenes like this multiple times and still have not come to a conclusion as to my opinion of it. From what I have discussed with others it is common practice throughout Latin America as well. Surely many of my views will change as I gain more perspective in this place but here have been some of my personal accounts doing proper backing travel in both a foreign country and Mexico City.
