Saturday, October 2, 2010 Morelia, Mexico City nightlife

I had to wake up before the asscrack of dawn to catch the bus to Morelia, the capital of Michoacan state. I was there by 11am, and it really pissed me off because there was an overflow of free taxis, but they weren´t allowed to take me because I didn´t retain my bus ticket. So you can sit in the back of a truck but you can´t pay a taxi from the bus station to the city center. So I had to take a bus, which had a section "reservado por la gente fina y educada" = "Reserved for the beautiful and educated people". Too bad for the cripples, pregnant women, and elderly; Mexico is on a mission to protect their high-value economic resources. That would be pretty sweet if the US instituted that policy, except that no beautiful and educated people take the bus. Morelia was a big colonial town, in the colonial highlands, surrounded by your typical malls, car dealerships, auto shops, food wholesalers, and machinery shops. I started out at the big market, selling pretty much everything from shoes to DVD´s to apples to cow´s heads. I walked around the main plaza and the cathedrals and little cafes filled with rich Michoacanans eating their Saturday brunch. Lonely Planet loves Morelia; to me, it was just okay. I had gazpacho, a regional treat consisting of cut up fruit, but ruined because they put cheese and hot sauce on it. I really tried to give it a chance, but it´s just really exactly like it sounds. I walked around some more and had 3 lunches at a deserted mall. I made friends with the funny owners of this restaurant, which had a bunch of different and good foods. I headed over to the bus station after getting bored of the monotony of colonial town, plaza, restaurant, market. I caught the bus to the one and only Mexico City, el Gran Tenochtitlan! I was so excited to get into the biggest city in North America, how exciting! Driving into the city was unreal; urban sprawl for miles and miles, and not even in the Lake Basin yet. Lights for as far as you could see (through the haze), climbing up mountains in every direction. That´s what happens when 21 million people co-habitate one urban area, arguably the world´s most populated urban area depending on how good the Census is and how it is measured. I was dropped off at the North bus station, which was freaking enormous. Oh, don´t worry, it´s just one of FOUR main bus terminals. It was bigger than many international airports! I had the option of getting dropped at the Western terminal, but honestly it kind of weirded me out because the station was at the "Observatory". Hmmm, an observatory in Mexico City, winner of the most polluted cities award for the past 40 years and in a oversprawled metropolis where streetlights never end? The bus station had tons of restaurants and even more bus companies. If you wanted, they could even book you a ticket from here to CHICAGO. I can´t imagine they get many return tickets? The station was conveniently adjoined to the Metro subway system, which I took to the Zocalo area. The Metro was great! So easy to use, even though it was in Spanish. Every station even had a cartoon icon, and tons of people take it at all hours, and it goes literally everywhere you´d need to go in Mexico City. It´s not dirty, and it´s well surveilled, as well. I got to the deserted Zocalo, the main square in the city and therefore the entire country. It was dirty because today there was a memorial for the students who were massacred on 10-2-1968 by the Mexican army before the Olympic Games. I checked into the Catedral Hostal, which was pretty busy (a change). I changed and made a beeline to the the club zone. Lots of Lady Gaga, Enrique Iglesias, Daddy Yankee, Pitbull, which was funny because no one knew the exact English words they were syncing. I went bar hopping to a bunch of places, drinking muchas cervezas. Everyone thought I was a Mexican when they saw me. I guess that comes in handy traveling through Mexico so I don´t look so much like a gringo, and since I speak broken Spanish, it works, enough.