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.
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