Central de Abasto

The Central de Abasto de la Ciudad de México is a huge wholesale market in the eastern part of Mexico City. When it first opened in the ´80s, nearly 80% of all the food consumed in Mexico passed through the market. These days it is down to about 20-30% due in no small part to the presence of Walmart in Mexico.

I went yesterday with two others, Lily and Vincent. I met Lily, a student at University of Chicago, when she showed up at Alpina wanting to see if there was any room, and ran into again randomly in a teashop in the center of San Angel. Vincent is from France and is staying in the same guesthouse Lily is living in for a couple of weeks.

We started in the seafood section, two longs passages filled with every type of seafood you can image, from fishes of all sizes to octopus to crabs and every part in between. We were overcome by the desire to take pictures, and so we became the strange tourists wandering around a market, a role I think is not often fulfilled. But it was a lot of fun asking the fish sellers if we could take their picture, holding up whatever ware they were selling. At the end of the line we split an octopus empanada, fried goodness with no quite enough octopus.

We wandered over to the other section of the market, probably hundreds of times larger. They sell everything from fruits and vegetables wholesale, to those who sell to normal people (not just by the crate) to meat, to "abarrotes" or stuff basically, and many other things we probably didn't see. We didn't get to the market until about 12pm so we missed the wholesale rush which is said to take place in the early mornings, but the place was still quite overwhelming.

On the way from the fish market to the rest, we stopped at a stand with several fruits we had never seen before. I still don't remember the names, but the woman who owned the stand offered to let us taste one that is kind of like a passionfruit, but small and green, and a root that reminds me of manioc, but likely is not.

In the market, in aisle M, we found $1 peso watermelon for sale. Deciding to buy some, and of course putting chili on top as the Mexicans do (quite good actually...), we struck up a conversation with some of the guys working at the stall. After some pictures, some translation and another free piece of watermelon, we made friends with Enrique, the sandiero (watermelon salesman). So let me know if you ever have a need to buy watermelon in bulk.

We wandered for another hour or so, encountered people selling fruit in bulk, people selling fruit to normal people (instead of by crate, they sell it by kilogram), bought some squash blossoms, smooth avocados, granadas and various types of garlic. We saw pig heads, intestines and other things, got agua frescas (I got passionfruit and strawberry--amazing combination!) and split a huareche with squash blossoms and "corn mushrooms" (huitlacoches), which was great.

We missed the craziness that would be early morning shopping for restaurants, food stands and everyone else, but we still experienced the vastness of the market and had a lot of fun exploring the area. Not many people visit Central de Abasto, but I would highly recommend it. It's fun being the only tourists in a place!

IHTFP- I Have Truly Found Paradise

IHTFP is a phrase from my MIT roots, but I choose to use the secondary meaning in the case. I'll let you know what I mean in a couple of paragraphs.


A couple weeks into my work this summer, I had a meeting with my supervisor and she informed me that the university goes on vacation for the first 3 weeks of July, and that during the middle week, everyone would be taking the week off. Because the price of plane tickets was prohibitively high for anyone to come and visit, I decided to explore a part of Mexico that I have never been to before.

It turned out that the majority of people I work with are actually taking three weeks of vacation, I am working the first and third weeks, and in the middle, I went to Chiapas, a state in the south of Mexico, just north of Guatemala.

I looked into several different transportation options to get to San Cristobal de Las Casas but in the end, I decided to travel the Mexican way, taking a bus from Mexico City to San Cristobal. It is about a 13 hour bus ride, unexpected events aside. Buses are by far the most popular way to travel in Mexico. Go to the bus station and you will see families of all sizes preparing to take buses all over the country, likely to go and visit family they left behind when they came to Mexico City. Mexico City to a huge place with people from everywhere. Very few are truly "Chilangos", but come to Mexico City to find new opportunities.


The bus ride was better than expected- I think all my plane rides last summer (Holland, England, Uganda, Tennessee, Colorado) taught me how to get some semi-decent sleep on moving transportation. The bus ride started out with a film--it ended up being Nim's Island. All the movies on Mexican buses are dubbed, sometimes a bit strange and not always appropriate. The movies I saw on buses ranged from children's films to horror films to strange talking animals. We made a pit stop at about 2am somewhere in Veracruz and getting off the bus was like walking into a sauna. The highs in Mexico City have been around 75 F with rain every afternoon.


All went well until we were about 2 hours from San Cristobal, and a tire blew. There was much running around and people from the bus company hopping in random cars to go and get tools, but after about a half an hour all they had succeeded in doing was picking up giant rocks and driving the blown out tire onto them. A bus came by on its way to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the first stop the bus was supposed to make and took the majority of the passengers who were only going that far. The rest of us had to wait it out. After very little information and much observing, I figured out that the bus that stopped was going to San Cristobal and if you wanted to get on, you just kind of had to go (the bus people didn't say anything....). So other than the breakdown, I managed to get to San Cristobal roughly on time.

San Cristobal de las Casas is a medium-sized, very colorful and quite colonial town. There are a lot of tourists there, which was a big change from Mexico City, but this also meant lots of opportunities to have different kinds of foods. I had the best falafel I have ever had in my life (though I have yet to visit Israel), as well as lots of other good foods.

I managed to find a place to watch the final of the World Cup among many fans from Holland and Spain. It was a great expereience, watching in a bar packed full of people, with the cheers alternating between the Spanish and Dutch fans.

I managed to take a couple of day trips away from San Cristobal, and went to Canon del Sumidero, Oventic (a very interesting autonomous zapatista village-- more on this later) and Palenque. El Canon del Sumidero was a nice canyon about 2 hours from San Cristobal. We saw crocodiles (which the little French kids behind me were very excited about) and some nice waterfalls. Oventic was fascinating and definitely one of the most interesting things I've done. Palenque had some beautiful ruins, but I wish I had more time to explore. Unfortunately on that trip it was me and a Mexican family of 14 in our van, and they were more interested in the two waterfalls we visited before the ruins than the ruins itself.

The beauty that is Chiapas is breathtaking-- the mountains and valleys are all covered with lush green forest (making it the perfect spot for the rebel zapatistas), and the color is gorgeous. Every time I left San Cristobal, I was amazed at the beauty of the region.

3 years back

So today is the three year anniversary of my flight back to the US from the Czech Republic. It is amazing to think that it has been that long, and what has happened in the time since then.

Going on exchange and going to the Czech Republic taught me so much. I can't fathom what my life would be like if I hadn't gone. I don't think I would be at MIT; I definitely wouldn't be the person I am today. It was the most difficult thing I have done in my life, and I'm not sure I could do it again based on what I have learned since then and who I have become, but I am eternally grateful that I went and did have the experiences I did, even if it was a "perfect" exchange.

When I came back, I wanted to see the world, and thanks to MIT, I have had great opportunities to do so. I have been to Holland, England, Brazil, Uganda and Mexico and each experience has taught me something different. I still want to see the world, and go to places where most people don't have an opportunity to go, but working here in Mexico, however, I'm starting to realize that I think I would like to work based in the US, which isn't something I had really thought I wanted before.

The work environment is very different, and the language barrier is evident. Even though I can get around in Spanish, understand about 50% of the presentations that are given, and communicate with my co-workers in Spanish, I still am not comfortable. I know time helps with language, but it is more than that. I think I value a very diverse environment, and a place where people are very open to different opinions and voicing them. I'm not sure that is the case here. It has been a great experience, and I like the project I am working on, but I don't think I would want to immerse myself in one culture forever.

I'm also realizing that in the past 4 years, I have only lived one year at home in Colorado. I have realized this before, but now it is really hitting me that I can't really call Colorado my home anymore. It is my home in the fact that the house I grew up in is there, and my parents are there, but I don't know when, if ever, I will really live there again. I have spent, I think, a grand total of 5-6 weeks at home since I started college about 96 weeks ago. I love MIT, but being here in Mexico, away from all the people I know well and who know me well, has led me on this train of thought again.

I have no idea what the future will bring. Recently I have been accepting that I do not want to be an engineer, something that has been hard to accept. I have always thought I wanted to do engineering since I was little, but I'm realizing that although I like learning about engineering and how things work, I do not want to be the one designing things, or focusing my sights on only on project, a small part of a larger system. It is not where my talents will be best used, and I don't think I would be happy working on a technical system.

I have been looking into urban planning over the past few weeks, an area I have always been really interested in (cities are incredible) but never thought would be a viable career option. I am starting to realize that it may be.

The past three years have been an incredibly eye-opening experience, and changed my life the way that people always say college will. I was incredibly stubborn going in, knowing exactly what I wanted to do, but now I feel like I don't really know. I know what I like and what I don't, I am starting to realize what I want out of life, but there are so many options, so many paths and if the experiences I have in the past are any indicator, each thing I do from here will shape my interests and goals. I hope I have started to find a path I can go down and follow from here, but one can never be sure.

Mi Trabajo

So I realize I haven't actually mentioned the reason I'm actually in Mexico yet. The concept of my work is really interesting, but it is coming along at a snail's pace. But at this point, I have produced something I am quite proud of, and so hopefully it will all work out!

I am working in the Institute of Engineering at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. My project is to develop a model to assess the relative vulnerability of the different neighborhoods in Mexico City to climate change. Basically that means I did a lot of reading (in English and Spanish) and now am playing around with MATLAB to be followed by a fair amount of writing.

It has been a bit frustrating so far because Mexicans seem to work on a bit of a different time table, so I have been waiting almost 2 weeks for comments on a two page list of vulnerability indicators I sent to my supervisor and the other woman working on the project. I finally received a reply, but still have no real data.

I have been working on writing the MATLAB code in order to do the vulnerability ranking. Although we learned MATLAB in 1.020 last semester, most of our projects were pretty guided by the examples we did in class. This is the first time I have really had to produce my own code from scratch, and not have anyone to help me debug it. It was a bit daunting at first, but I have learned that if I just think it through, I can figure out where the problem lies.

That is about 1/3 of my code I have so far, nicely commented, and fully functional (at least with a table full of zeros...). Hopefully it will work when I get real data as well, but so far, I've managed to debug it by myself. There's no telling when I will actually be getting the data I need, but I'm pretty happy with what I have been able to do so far, and the fact that it works.

Sock tan gone?

Perhaps, but it has been replaced by something else...

World Cup

Mexico's run in the World Cup ended yesterday, but I'm pretty sure that soccer will still grip the country until the end of the tournament on July 11th.

Nonetheless, the Mexicans put up a good showing of support yesterday in the Zocalo, the main square of Mexico City, where I watched the game with 8 other people I knew and probably 3000+ of our closest friends.

So this was when we were able to get really close to the screen....

To get a better idea of the size of the event, check out this video:

This shows about half of the actual square of the Zocalo, and then there were three additional screens set up outside of the square, on the streets.

Me with some of the other girls from Alpina--(front row from left) Louise (England), Nadhirah (Singapore), Amy (US), Ruth (US)

The approach into the Zocalo

There were people of all ages, from small children to the older folk, cheering on their team, and booing Argentina for each subsequent goal. The first goal, when Argentina was offsides, elicited a group chant of "Puto, puto".

People started leaving at about the 75 minute mark, and I was surprised at the lack of follow through support. But I guess they just wanted to beat the crowds out. I've been told that the scene can amount to rioting when the Mexicans win, so in a way I'm glad they did not, though it would have been fun.

One of the news channels (mic said Fox Sports) started interviewing people around us towards the end of the game. It seems that the more versions of the Mexican flag you are wearing, the greater chance you have to be interviewed. After the game there were also large groups of people congregated around cameras, singing, chanting and jumping in order to get on TV.

Being in Mexico, and watching the Mexico games alongside them, as well as other games that happen to be on during lunch, has left me with a newfound appreciation for the sport of soccer, though a bit baffled at the over-exaggeration of injury.

Always Sunny in Mexico?

So today brought some of the strangest weather I've seen so far. It has been raining pretty consistently at about 6pm for an hour or so for the past week, but today brought something quite strange. Normally the rain starts out light, then goes into downpour and then lets up again for the rest of the night.

Today however brought something different. Hail. For about 10 minutes we had pebble sized hail, followed by pouring rain. This made the street in front of Alpina turn into a river, and knocked the power out for over 2 hours.

I don't think the pictures quite do it justice, but it was pretty intense.

Copa Mundial

So it's official, Mexico is continuing in the World Cup, while South Africa and France have ended their run. I'm excited that Mexico is going on because it means the the country will continue to be in full out World Cup fever, and rooting for their team. It makes for a great game watching experience, and means that every couple of days, fútbol takes precedence over work.

A Night/Day on the Town

So last night was my first time going out in the Mexican sense of the term. It was a lot of fun, but definitely not something I am able to/ want to do regularly. Staying out until 3am takes a lot out of you, and although it can be fun sometimes, I like having daylight hours at my disposal more so than night hours.

Anyway, I went out to dinner and then to a concert with Sayel and some of his friends. I met Sayel last weekend when we went to the pyramids. We ended up going to Koreatown near downtown Mexico City. I never would have thought that my first experience with Korean food would be in Mexico, nor that I would be among the only non-Asians in a restaurant in Mexico City.

The food was delicious. Koreans eat a lot of side dishes with their meals. We had upwards of 8 or 9, I think, including kim-chi, eggplant, lettuce, bean sprouts, scallion pancakes and many others. I had a spicy beef noodle soup for dinner, which was great, but wasn't very conducive to being eaten with a spoon and chopsticks, the utensils of choice. We also tried soju, a Korean rice liquor. I'm not a big fan of liquor. The throat burning doesn't really do much for me, but it was interesting to try nonetheless.

After dinner we went to the concert of a band of a cousin of one of Sayel's co-workers, and we picked up a couple of people along the way, so in the end I think we were six. It turned out to be ab0ut 5 high-school aged bands each playing 3 or 4 songs. The venue was cool, a cultural center near the Zocalo, the center of Mexico City.

The problem was the acoustics/sound though. The instruments were way too loud and made it impossible to hear the singers, and when you could, many of them weren't very good. It was fun and I met some new people, but every time I go out, I generally tend to confirm my idea that it can be fun occasionally, but is not something I can do every weekend. It took about 1.5 hours to get home, with a lot of walking and a Metrobus ride.

Today I ended up going to the Zocalo again with 5 people from the house I'm living in. The Zocalo is the main square of Mexico City, and all the buildings that surround it are huge. It is quite a sight to behold. All the buildings around that area are very colonial and many of them house the government offices. There is a model of the area in the metro station "Zocalo" and you can see what the buildings look like. There are some pretty amazing courtyards in some of them.

They also cleared out the entire square and put up a giant screen and area to watch the World Cup. They are showing all the games, and today we caught the tail end of the Germany-Australia game. When I went to the Zocalo before, the entire area was full of tents of protesters, but apparently they agreed to move for the World Cup fandom.

The last place we went was the Palacio de Bellas Artes, or the Palace of Fine Arts, which is a cultural center in the middle of Mexico City. It has a theater, but is also home to a many murals by people such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Siqueiros and Jose Orozco. My favorite though is the mural by Diego Rivera. It is called El Hombre En El Cruce de Caminos (Man at a Crossroads), and was originally commissioned to be done in the Rockefeller Center in New York, where Rivera painted it, but then it was taken down because of its message, but the president of Mexico later asked Rivera to do it again in Bellas Artes.

I took a couple of pictures, but the quality isn't very good because the mural is huge. It is a really interesting piece of work though, showing different social classes and how science has affected them all (my own opinion). I definitely would suggest looking into it.

Teotihuacan

So last weekend I went to Teotihuacan, an archaeological site north of Mexico City with some of the largest pyramids in the world. I ended up going with three people, 2 Americans and 1 Mexican, who work at CTS, the Center for Sustainable Transportation, an NGO in Mexico City. I met them through David, an MIT grad I met through a friend.

We set out quite early in the morning, meeting up at 8am. This was especially by Mexican standards, where the partying doesn't start until after midnight. It did mean that we got to Teotihuacan before the crowds, and the heat.

Teotihuacan is about 25 miles outside of Mexico City, reachable by a 30 peso (<$3) bus from one of the bus stations at the northern edge of the city. There are two major pyramids, the pyramid of the Sun and of the Moon, as well as many, many other structures. Teotihuacan was once the biggest city in the pre-Columbian Americas, and had contact with other civilizations all across the hemisphere. It fell quickly, going from over 200,000 to just a few thousand in a few years.

The Pyramid of the Sun

Crawling through pre-Columbian sewer systems

Observations

So over the past two weeks I have been noticing some things about Mexico and Mexico City, and I thought I would share. I will probably update with more "Observation" posts as the summer goes on.

1) People here are short (for the most part). I noticed this most when I was in the metro going to check out a bookstore cafe someone recommended to me. During rush hour they have women-and-child only cars in the metro and the metrobus (a bus with a dedicated lane that runs on two of the busiest streets). I was in one of these in the metro, and it was packed, absolutely packed and I was standing up. I was by a head the tallest person in the car, no exception. I have yet to see a Mexican woman who is as tall as I am (not wearing heels). It's not just women either, the majority of men are rarely as tall as I am.

2) The university has a campaign for "igualdad entre hombres y mujeres" which seems to be the unversity's fight against machisimo. It is really interesting to see posters around the campus saying that women can study what they want, and that there should not be violence against women.

3) The previous in a way leads into this observation. There are so many couples here and it is certainly more evident than in the US. Everywhere you go, it is always pairs on benches, lying in the grass, on buses etc. Someone mentioned to me that it is because Mexican girls always want to have a boyfriend, so the boys oblige, but many times are not faithful, which I think is something that stems from machismo. I haven't heard another side of it, but it is interesting to see.

The first (almost) two weeks in Mexico

So I’m writing this sitting in my new residence, the “residencia estudiantil Alpina”, in Colonia San Angel, Mexico City. So far I’ve been in Mexico City for almost two weeks. I arrived last Sunday, having no idea where I was or what I was going to do. I had gone straight to my hostel and was checked in by a very nice woman named Maria. With her I had my first extended conversation in Spanish and showed me that I could actually (kind of) speak in Spanish. Language-wise, things have only been improving since then.

I spent the first couple of days getting to know the area I was in: Coyoacan, a neighborhood in the south of the city that is centered around 2 big plazas. It is a great area with lots of restaurants, shops, parks, and museums, including the Frida Kahlo museum and the Leon Trotsky house. I stayed in a great hostel called Hostal Cuija Coyoacan, run primarily by two women, Maria and Monica. There was a flux of people going in and out, but in the middle of my 8-day stay, 3 other girls arrived. One, Ruth, is a law student who is also working in Mexico City for the summer. The other two girls, Koehler and Emily, were finishing up the last two weeks of a 5-month trip around South America.

I learned about Alpina from Ruth and went to visit it. It is in a different area of Mexico City, about 10 minutes by minibus, but it is a great atmosphere. I moved in on Monday, after my first day of work. There are about 24 students who live in Alpina, from all over the world. Right now is a transition period because a lot of the students who have been here for the semester are about to leave and the summer students are starting to move in. During the school year, there are more Europeans but apparently during the summer it switches to a predominantly North American crowd.

The area of San Angel we are in is not quite as quaint as the part of Coyoacan I was in is, but there are still markets, supermarkets etc. within walking distance. I hope I can spend more time in Coyoacan as the summer goes on, but for now I barely have time after I get back from work.

I have generally been working from 10-5:30 or 6, which means I leave around 9 (It is such a luxury to sleep in) and get back around 6:30 or 7. Then I have been going to the gym, cooking dinner and hanging out for a bit, and then it is time for bed. It is amazing how quickly time goes.

The gym I joined is about 3 doors down from Alpina, even closer than the boathouse. It is quite a funny place. It is run by two older men, Salvador and Ismael. It is basically a body-building gym, with lots of guys who like to lift weights everyday and not do much cardio. There are a bunch of bikes, a couple of treadmills, stair steppers etc., but it is mostly some older women who use them. The guys all lift. It seems like Ismael is the personal trainer of all the people in the gym. The first day I went in, he said “15 minutes on the bike”, and then after fifteen minutes came over and said “4 by 15 sit ups and then 4 by 15 leg lifts”. It will be nice having someone give me a workout occasionally, and I’m glad that it is so close. There isn’t anywhere to run around here because running in the streets is definitely not an option. There are too many cars, and the sidewalks are not quite flat…

I had found a great park a couple of blocks from the hostel, where there are people running every morning, but it is too far from here to go before work. I think I will go on the weekends though. Unfortunately I think this means that I won’t be able to train for the half-marathon I had wanted to do at the end of the summer, but I think I can stay in good shape nonetheless.