Couch Crash in Mexico City

I headed back to Mexico City a third time to participate in the Couch Crash during the long weekend thanks to the public holiday "Natalicio de Benito Juárez". The Couchsurfing community of Mexico City organized a lot of events during these days, furthermore I made further exploration tours within the city with my host Diana and other Couchsurfers I met.

I started the Couch Crash officially with a walking tour in the neighbourhood of "La Roma" at the square "Glorieta de los Insurgentes". The dome of the metro station has exceptional acoustics which make you feel powerful or strange when you speak with your friends there. The neighbourhood La Roma was established at the beginning of the 20th century as a place of residence for the middle class and grew almost simultaneously with the neighbouring Colonia Condesa. The two neighbourhoods Roma Norte and Roma Sur developed differently. The Colonia Roma Norte is considered hip and is home to a large number of bars and restaurants. In contrast, Colonia Roma Sur is more of a typical residential area where many immigrants have settled.

We also passed the Casa de Tepeji 21, originally the home of the family of Alfonso Cuarón, the director of the Mexican movie "Roma" (2018), which gained attention internationally. Set in the early 1970s, the film is a fiction based on Cuarón's childhood memories of the Roma neighbourhood and narrates the life of a middle-class family and Cleo, their domestic worker. I'm probably one of the few people here in the country who haven't seen the film yet and have discussed it extensively. However, we met the current owner of the house (-> photo) where also a scene of the movie was filmed and had a little chat with her.

We had pizza for dinner at Pixza, which is not only a simple pizzeria but also a social empowerment movement where everyone gives and everyone receives. Each slice promotes, feeds, recognizes, empowers, dignifies and integrates people with food shortages in Mexico. Pixza started with selling just one type, with a topping of chapulines (grasshoppers) and now offers a variety of very typical Mexican dishes as toppings, the dough is made from blue corn and the ingredients are a 100% Mexican. For every five slices of pixza sold one slice is destined to a person in profile of social abandonment. That is, young people from 18 to 25 years of age who have family abandonment, educational backwardness, criminal history, history of drug dependence and who have lived on the street. These people are furthermore offered to get to know the process of Pixza and learn how to make pixzas. After some months of working at Pixza they are motivated and supported to search for new jobs and structure their life newly.

At night we went to see Lucha Libre in the Arena Mexico, considered the Cathedral of Mexican wrestling. Approximately two and a half hours of entertainment passed with spectacular jumps, funny characters and a whole bunch of crude Mexican insults. After the show had finished we went to the night club Patrick Miller which was close to the arena.

On Saturday there were a lot of different tours within different neighbourhoods of the city offered for the hundreds of Couchsurfers who came to visit the city this weekend. I joined the photography walking tour where we were divided into small teams and got different tasks to fulfill. Like a scavenger hunt every team was sent to different places and we got a clue to the next destination after sending a series of artistic photos to the organizers. One stop was at the "Mercado de San Juan", one of the oldest and most traditional markets of Mexico City. It offers all kinds of edible small animals like beetles and scorpions. Furthermore the variety of fresh fruits is incredible. For me it was the first time there to try the jackfruit, a fruit which originates in India but can be grown in all tropical countries over the world. Besides we visited the Churrería El Moro. Churros are an Iberian fatty pastry. The oblong doughnuts with a star-shaped cross section are fried in hot oil and sprinkled with sugar. Here in Mexico it is also very typical to fill them with liquid chocholate or cream.

After the walking tour we joined a taco tour where we visited five different places to eat tacos within the city centre. The most famous ones, created in a taqueria in Mexico City in the 1970s, are the tacos al pastor. It probably developed from the Arabic meat court Schawarma, which was once brought to Mexico by Lebanese immigrants. The name of this dish is Spanish and means translated as "shepherd type taco". The pork is placed in a marinade of dried chilli and annote for one to two days and then cooked on a spit like a kebab with an open flame. The upper end of this skewer is usually peppered with fresh onions and pineapple. The meat is placed in small corn tortillas and garnished with finely chopped onions, coriander and pineapple. Depending on the taste, the taco al pastor is then seasoned with lime juice and chilli sauce.

On Sunday, March 17th, I visited the parade on the occasion of the memorial day of the Irish bishop Patrick, who probably lived in the 5th century and is regarded as the first Christian missionary in Ireland. The parade didn't last long so we went inside an Irish pub afterwards.

Since I didn't want to spend the whole afternoon muzzling in the pub, the Couchsurfer Armando and I decided to make another tour of the city. We visited a handicraft market and some mural paintings. Thanks to Armando's annual pass to use bicycles in Mexico City I could ride a bike and he went on his skateboard. In the evening we went to the Cineteca National in the neighbourhood of Coyoacán to watch the movie Climax. The collection of the Cineteca Nacional currently comprises over 10,000 movies from all over the world, with a focus on Mexico, including feature films, short films and documentaries. Climax was a French production dealing with the abuse of drugs and its consequences, based on a true story.

Mexico City's subway was the first subway system in the world where each stop is marked with an individual symbol. The intention was to accommodate the still predominantly illiterate population. Almost all trains are equipped with rubber wheels. This variant was chosen because of the geological conditions in Mexico City and the fact that it ensures a less vibration-prone journey. Many of the stations are beautifully designed with artworks like cartoons, paintings or archaeological artefacts. During my time in Mexico City I nearly always used the metro system as it is a very cheap way to get from one place to another and you can easily find your way around the net.

On Monday I went with my host Diana to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a 39-hectare park in the neighbourhood of Coyoacán. After that we visited the Museo Nacional de la Acuarela Alfredo Guati Rojo, the first museum in the world dedicated specifically to watercolour painting. Next to beautiful aquarelles it offers a garden with resting benches and sculptures dedicated to poetry and painting, as well as a cleaning crew that rewards the work of all those working in this sector. Next target was the Parque de la Bombilla in the neighborhood San Ángel where we met with Michelle.

As this was officially the last day of the Couch Crash there was a Goodbye picnic in the afternoon in the 2nd section of the Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico's central park. As it was Monday and many parts of the park were closed it took us some hours to get to the place of the picnic.

Actually I wanted to leave Mexico City with the official end of the Couch Crash. However, the weather forecast for my next destination for the next two days was so bad that I extended my stay by two days. So it came that I met Sinan from Canada and showed him around the neighbourhood of Polanco and the Museo Soumaya, after having some Venezuelan arepas. Actually I was exploring the zone as well as I haven't seen everything in that detail yet. In the evening we met up with some other Couchsurfers to have dinner. Actually the plan would have been to go to the Catfecito, a cafe which is home to a dozen of cats. The money collected by selling the food, the cat beer or souvenirs is used to make possible and improve the life of cats in an animal shelter. In addition all the food served there is decorated with very feline motifs. As everybody arrived to late at the Catfecito we went for some tacos instead. I didn't order a normal taco this time but a costra, a kind of taco in which the envelope consists not of tortilla but of a thin layer of fried cheese. Delicious! After we had finished our dinner, Armando, Sinan, Pedro and I went for a glass of pulque to the Pulquería los Insurgentes.

My last day within the city I got to know Luis via Couchsurfing Hangouts and we spent the afternoon together visiting the Monumento a la Revolución. The Monument to the Revolution is a large building in the centre of the Mexican capital and the grave of some Mexican revolutionaries. Actually my plan for this afternoon would have been to visit some other parts of the city but as so often on this trip, it came spontaneously quite different. The monument was originally planned as a government palace (Palacio Legislativo) with numerous other facilities such as fire brigade. Started with the foundation stone in 1910, the building was finally opened in 1938. In 2010 it was reopened with a huge museum that shows the history and the architecture of the building. The whole monument is nowadays dedicated to the motto "A NON-violent Revolution" showing weapons like rifles without trigger and constructed out of fragile glass. Inside the dome there is also a little cinema as the walking tour through the monument also tells about the beginnings of video recordings and cinemas that came from France to Mexico to accompany and record the Mexican Revolution. In honour of the Mexican revolutionaries Emilio Zapata y Pancho Villa both were depicted as wax figures.

The monument itself is considered to be the tallest triumphal arch in the world, it stands 67 metres in height. It offers magnificent views over the area, even though is by far not the tallest building within Mexico City anymore. We enjoyed a drink in the restaurant and cafe Cha Cha Chá what made it possible for us to see the monument in the sunset. Afterwards we finished the day with some of Luis' family members in an American restaurant in Polanco. Only then did I find out that it was Luis' birthday this day.