Tuesday, April 8, 2008

mucho traffico

We’ve been in enormous Mexico City for a week, and I think that the honeymoon stage of being in Mexico may wear off soon. Not that MXC is a bad place—I was actually surprised at how clean the city is! I know the pollution is something else, but the streets are pretty clean and there is a lot of beautiful architecture in the colonial old town.

The only downside of Mexico City is the amount of time we spend in traffic. We sit for hours—literally hours and hours every day. For example, last week I went to an environmental preserve called Xochitla, which was aways across town from where I live. I left my house at 6:45am. We arrived at the park by 9:30am. We left a little after 5:00pm, and I wasn’t home again until almost 9:00pm!! If you do the math, that is 6 hours on the bus to be at the park for 7.5 hours. That’s the extreme… fun days, and lots of time to nap on the bus, but exhausting all the same.

We've also learned a little about the rivalry between the north and south-- its kindof like that between Minneapolis & St Paul- everybody thinks their part of town is way better, and that caused more than one debate between our advance team members who were split between being natives of north or south. We've learned for future visits to MXC how not to do it! Next time UWP will focus their energy around one area of town. Live and learn!


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