I’d love to write a blog post about every day we have spent here. But that’s probably a little much, even for the most loyal of fans. So I figured the best way to do it was to show you some pictures we took, and try to tell you a little bit about them as if we were just chatting and having coffee. So sit back and enjoy our coffee date!
Frida Kahlo House / Museum
Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico’s best known artists. I’m not sure if she’s known more for her paintings, or her tragic but fascinating life plagued with illness and injuries, or her famous husband, another Mexican artist, Diego Rivera. Her life is now illustrated in the museum that is the house where she lived most of her life. Indeed, her father built the house and she was not only born there but she died there. Plus her urn is located in the house, too. We got all kinds of great advice on TripAdvisor about skipping the line and buying tickets ahead of time. So we were able to get in quickly, and they had the very logical system of being able to scan tickets directly from the email on our phone (a printer does not fit in a suitcase!) and soon we were renting the audio guides for the tour. The audio guides were very well done. They were iPod-like touch screen devices in hard cases, with a neck strap and earphones. You could choose your language, choose the room you want to hear about, go there and press play! Each little explanation snippet was about a minute or two, sometimes it included additional pictures, and then you move on to another part of the room or house and play that explanation. It allowed you to go at your own pace through the house, but best of all it was a quiet experience. It avoided having to listen to tours in three languages from a heavily-accented tour guide who means well but frankly takes a lot of energy to understand. Zoe especially tends to tune out with those.
Anyone who knows our family remembers we are split 50/50 among the extroverts and introverts. Zoe and I fall into the former category. I’m am happy to listen to an audio tour but Zoe did not like the solitary nature of the activity. So she grabbed my iPod and we would press “play” at the same time so we could listen to the tour together. It was cute and a very nice bonding moment with The Zo Zo. She liked it a lot and I was able to process the info by talking about it with her. We loved the Barroco museum in Puebla, but this museum was more Zoe’s style. Here are a few visuals for you…
Chapultepec Park
I mentioned this park in my first blog post on Mexico City but it deserves more press. We spent two separate days there and still only visited one section, out of three. We met up some fellow Worldschoolers from Argentina that we met in Playa del Carmen and enjoyed spending the day with them. They have lived in Mexico City for quite awhile and their kids are very educated in Mexican history, so we were treated to a very nice tour of the castle, which used to house the governmental leaders of Mexico as well as a military school.. It is now a museum and was a small look into Mexican history.
Another day the girls and I went back to explore some more. We got sidetracked for about an hour with the tame squirrels, but sometimes you just have to relax and feed squirrels. The museums can wait. But after the squirrels gorged on the nuts, we wandered into the zoo, which was free. We normally aren’t big fans of animals in captivity (an argument I used to successfully avoid the underground aquarium in Mexico City) but this time it was free so we justified that we weren’t really supporting them. The zoo was mildly interesting but after awhile we realized it wasn’t too much that we hadn’t seen before, so we moved along. Exploring large parks can be exhausting. When Haley started whispering “Mom, I actually think I’m dying of exhaustion” I decided we should go back to the leaning flat and relax. Well, as much as you can relax in a leaning flat in an earthquake zone. Yeah, I’m still thinking about that.
Hop On Hop Off Bus
We did this kind of bus in Puebla too, and we affectionately call it “Hop On, then Hop Off and Call Uber” bus. It sounds so good on paper: “We will get the day pass and we can tour the entire city for the whole day! Yay!” Well, in reality it’s a slow method of travel, there’s a lot of waiting at bus stops and in traffic and when it starts to rain it’s just not so fun on that top deck. But for the few hours we did it, it was interesting. Here are a few scenes from the day.
Did you notice the title of this post says “Part 1”? Yeah, that means there will be more. But I thought this was enough for you today. So stay tuned, we’ll make another coffee date again soon and it’ll be bueno.