Teotihuacan

I have to give my brother credit- after more than five hours on busses Sunday, he gamely was up and out the door before 9 to get back to the bus station for the ride to Teotihuacan. He was kind of surprised by all the salespeople which boarded the bus and rode for awhile, selling thier wares and music. Teotihuacan is a short ride, and we walked in from where the bus dropped us.

Not as packed as when I'd been there before on the weekend. The tourists seemed more European than American. Probably Europeans characterize Mexico more as The Exotic New World, versus the typical American view of Mexico as divided into Beaches + Margaritas and The Place My Housecleaner is From.

We'd skipped breakfast so after wandering the grounds for an hour or two, and climbing the pyramid of the sun, we headed out to La Gruta, the restaurant in a cave. When I was here several months ago on the weekend, we had to wait to get a table, even though the place easily seats a few hundred diners. Peering into the dim cavern, I wasn´t even sure they were open. I saw some waiters, so I shouted down "¿Estas Abierto???" and they shouted back up "¡Si!"

We had to dodge the front upside down exclamation marks because we weren't expecting them.

There were actually a few diners, but they were sitting on the mouth of the cave terrace, with more light and in a smaller area. Tay decided that if we were going to eat in a cave, we might as well go full cave, and not mess around with this mouth of the cave business, so the waiter walked us down the stairs to the cave floor and gestured to pick any of the open tables we canted in the deserted cavern. It was very surreal, actually, eating in an empty cave. Food was not bad, a bit pricy, but amazing tortilla chips and salsa. Tay got some kind of unremarkable barbacoa and nopales and I got a soup which was pretty tasty and then I helped tay on the barbacoa and nopales.

After lunch, we walked through the museum and hit the pyramid of the moon and the palace of Quetzalcoatl. By then we were pretty tired of the pyramids and we wanted to avoid the rain which looked like it was approaching, so we hiked out of entrance 2 and picked up a bus back to the capital. I'm still amazed by how accesible places are here. Try to imagine getting to landmarks 30 miles outside the city in the US. You are pretty much doomed to renting a car wherever you go unless its a very select few cities on the east coast.

We hopped off early and rode the faster metro back to the center of city from the periphery. Back in town, we ended up grabbing a bite to eat at a taco restaurant a few blocks from my apartment and called it an early night.