I've been off form with the old blogging thing. Travelling, working, feeling the weight of grief, but Easter with all its denotation has got to me not to mention reading more real books, enjoying the use of language and having a skip. Yes, physical decluttering helps with sloughing off some of the rubbish floating around in my head, as well.
The back story. I went to Mexico. It's a long way. I barely made the flight and the journey began with the kind of tension where you know three hours before the flight leaves that you are probably not going to make it. It involved a cancelled domestic flight and the niggling feeling that they probably should have put you on the earlier flight and not the later one and the growing certainty as that flight gets progressively delayed. Gone are the days when a stewardness met you at the gate and rushed you across the airport waiving all obstacles aside. There was an instruction to run (which helps nothing when you have to wait for the bus to move you between terminals). It was more helpful to phone your friend you is already sitting on the international flight texting "where are you?" and ask her to negotiate on your behalf with the cabin crew not to close the doors. As it turned out they had some engineering fiddling around to do so were running late themselves and she is an excellent negotiator.
I knew my bag wouldn't make it and the $150 in cash Qantas gave me was ok given I knew I had 36 hours in LA and there were at least 5 other flights arriving in that time which would have my bag on it. The ensuing 4 days and 30 phone calls I had with Qantas baggage, the litany of misdirected bags and promises it would be there in 30 minutes is too tedious to relate. Enough that I kept putting off buying spare work clothes thinking the bag's arrival was imminent. As it was I felt like a contestant in one of a game show whose role it was to buy a complete outfit suitable for an interview in 20 minutes before the shops closed in a mall in Mexico City when you don't speak spanish. Thank god for the ubiquity of Zara and H&M and a friend with a credit card who did the queuing and paying once I had done the choosing.
No matter, in LA I shopped Sepphora and had breakfast with a person of great charm
Anyway, Mexico City. How come everyone who flocks to Europe for its art and culture from N America is not hot footing it there? The layers of culture, the street life, the food. All amazing. I am so privileged to get to visit these places. On the Friday we hired a car and guide. I'd never done this before but with a lot of traffic and limited time to get to the airport on a Friday afternoon it made perfect sense. Somewhere to keep the bags and someone to give us the back story. Adrianna took us to the Museum of Anthropology. Apart from being a beautiful piece of 60s architecture with an umbrella roof suspended by a single (enormous) column, it is packed with fascinating rooms on Mexican history - Mayan, Aztec, the conquest. I managed to acquire a rapid overview of the Aztec city which orientated the rest of the tour. Sadly, the National Palace was closed to the public for an event so we were unable to see the Diego Rivera murals but she took us round the back to show us some Aztec ruins and the school where Diego and Frida Kahlo met.
I was trying to describe the kind of place we wanted to go for lunch, typical, not too touristic and she took us to a beautiful restaurant that was a converted convent. The food was fine but better was that it was full of families, white coated waiters and beautiful painted frescos on the walls.
Mexico. You should go there.
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