tortillas for an army

Monday was a national holiday to celebrate Independance, so instead of going into work, I donned my giant sombrero fiesta and trucked out to Reforma for the big military parade.

I joined huge crowds along the parade route, and grabbed a spot on top of the ecobici rack so I could sit and then stand (precariously) when the parade started. Almost everyone there had a green baseball cap that was being handed out by young volunteers, so it was a sea of green hats. I wondered mildly why not red or white, and remembered that red hats were the colors of the strikers, and white hats would be too boring. Green goes better with the Mexican football team's jerseys anyway.

The parade started about an hour after I arrived. It was a massive parade, mostly consisting of endless regiments of marching soldiers. My roomate K joking said that it was the parade of the entire Mexican armed forces. There were probably 50,000 troops who marched by. The most interesting parts of the parade were

• the horseback mounted actors portraying figures from independance, mostly focusing on the revolutionaries- Madero, Carranza, Zapata, Villa.
• the "environmental protection" division which drove by several trucks with engineers in hard hats and planting tools, and two big trucks with stacked plantings of sapplings and plantings, probably for soil stabilization after natural distasters. Or just after military manuevers destroy local ground cover.
• the giant tortilladora trailer following the cooking truck. I can't even imagine how many tortillas the Mexican army consumes.
• the parade of international forces- my guess is the military detachments from each embassy. That was really fun to see the different uniforms for all the different nations. The US was represented by marines in dress grays. They all looked really young. 

And the soldiers kept coming. I left after the second hour and grabbed a bite at my favorite enchilada place near insurgentes before coming home to beat the increasingly strong rain.