a lot of walking saturday

 

I took the metro from Chapultapec to the edge of the historic center. Floods of pedestrians, like I havn’t seen since Tokyo. I was searching for a recommended place to get coffee and churros, the Churroria del Moro, which was somewhere along the street. It started to rain, so I abandoned my search and ducked into a taco restaurant. I squeezed in to an empty spot and ordered three tacos de suadero (pork (I think)) and a pepsi.

The difficulty with trying to avoid drinking the water directly is that it tends to push me towards sugary soft drinks. I need to learn to ask for bottled water.

Tacos were good, a bit fatty though. Quick quick quick. By the time I was done, the rain had passed and I continued on north along Eje (major axis street) 1. Walking along through some less picturesque parts of the city, I passed a bunch of Mariachis standing around. And then another group of Mariachis. There were mariachis eating food from carts and Mariachis talking and walking, and then there was a break in the urban wall and I was silver-spangled hip deep in Mariachis. I had made it, I realized, to plaza Garibaldi.

Plaza Garibaldi is a large plaza on the periphery of the historic center surrounded by cantinas and filled with pavilions and roving bands of Mariachis. They are there for hire, to either play for tourists who wander by, for all the bars around the square, or to be solicited directly for gigs elsewhere by motorists passing by the square. I roamed the square for awhile, trying simultaneously to take photos and listen but not make myself an attractive target for an entire band of mariachis to come play.

Sometime I want to go back and just take pictures of the Mariachi costume, which were fantastic.

Walking back though the historic center, I was drawn to drumming and I came across a huge square with people formed into massive concentric dancing circles with drummers at the center. The dancers were mixed in age, dress, gender, but almost all of them wore a red sash around their waists, and wore anklets of rattles that rang when they stepped. I’m not sure if they represented a particular tribe, a religious sect (they were dancing with a pendant of the virgin of Guadalupe) or what. The dance was very interesting. It looked like the there were a few set steps that were frequently repeated, and the entire group just watched each other to see what the circle was doing.

Sometimes, the dancing would peter out and they would shuffle to the beat and a few individuals would simultaneously start to do a set of movements, and very quickly one of them would be picked up and the entire group would be dancing again, almost in a distributed hive-like fashion.