Flying into a city at night affords those by the window a wonderful schematic view of the town as described by its lights. Generally speaking, all cities look similar from the air: small, isolated pools of amber light from the outlying villages become larger and more frequent until they eventually join together to form the central city. If you look into the distance you can usually see the edge of the central sprawl as it dissipates back into blackness.
Coming into Mexico City was not like this. People always tell you that Mexico city is “huuuge” or “absolutely massive” but it wasn’t until we’d descended low enough to see the lights that the vastness became truly apparent. At the stage where you can see the city, you are already inside it. The city extends as far as you can see in any direction and appears as a huge duvet of lights over a body of mountains. Every now and again we observed large dark areas and tried to establish what they were. Were they lakes ? Parks ? Holes ?
It was only once we’d descended lower still that we realised they were huge, self-contained, mountains poking through the duvet. There you go; it’s so big that it has mountains in it! Ten minutes of flying and we were still over the city and still we couldn’t see the edges. Suddenly I realised why I didn’t understand the maps we were sent in preparation: it’s just too big to grok at street-map level.
We’ve been here for nearly a week now and we’re only just getting our heads around the geography.
I’d planned to write a long rambling blog detailing the minutiae of the trip thus far, but apart from the fact that you wouldn’t read it, I can’t be arsed. So here is our trip to Mexico City in pictures together with wedding pictures. Animal lovers (bird lovers especially) may also like to see our pictures of Mexico City Zoo.
Michele and Tony really went all out to learn Spanish and I’m so proud of them. Tony now speaks so well he managed to have full understanding with Catalina, the friend of Alex he’s staying with. Michele speaks well enough to converse with cab drivers rabbiting at full speed. Even I’ve gone from knowing nothing to being able to order food and drinks, ask directions, and comprehend cab drivers when they’re trying to persuade Michele that they’d make better husbands than me 🙂
Seeing Alex again has been wonderful. I was filling up at the wedding.
More to come…
