The wait is finally over blog-fans (all 3 of you,) its new-blog time...woohoo!

So I arrived in Mexico City and on my way out of the airport, immediately stumbled into a heated discussion between a group of locals who couldn´t agree on which was better...soft or hard taco´s. The argument continued until a small boy had the great idea of having both soft and hard, thus eliminating any need for conflict. Everyone at once agreed this would be a good solution for everyone and celebrated by picking him up and carrying him around the square.

...As you may have already guessed, this didn´t actually happen and is in fact a complete rip off from an Old El Paso advert. However, though the details are more than a tad fictitious the fact is, I may as well have got off the plane and straight into an Old El Paso advert, it was that stereotypically Mexican. Within 2 hours of landing I´d seen nothing but taco´s, sombreros, tequilla and before I´d reached my hostel I had been approached to buy some cactus paddles and managed to get guacamole down my T-shirt.

I only spent 3 days in Mexico City but could have easily stayed a lot longer. Without a doubt it is the most colourful place I have ever seen. Even from the plane you could see nothing but red, blue, purple, pink houses (dare I say, almost like a rainbow mum...woah!) and wherever you go in town you cant escape the constant Latin music blaring out of every shop and passing car.

It centre of the city is beautiful, with every turn leading to yet another massive Church or plaza. In the central square, next to (and underneath) the cathedral and palace is Templo Mayor, an old Aztec temple that was only re-discovered in 1978. The reason why this huge temple complex was forgotten for so long is due to the rather concerning problem that the entire city is slowly sinking.

The city was only built where it is because the first Aztec settlers saw an eagle with a snake in its mouth land on a cactus (hence the Mexican flag) and, for some reason, took this as a sign to build a city. I guess the eagle had flunked out of town planning class however, because the entire place is sinking lower into the soft foundations. It´s a pretty serious problem, though the uneven surface did give me a good excuse for being off my pool-game, every cloud and all that!

In the 3 days in the city I got into a nice little routine; after stocking up on my free scrambled eggs to almost bursting point at the hostel I packed in a full day of sight-seeing, the highlights including Diego Rivera´s murals, the Trotsky museum and the Basilica of Guadalupe (where Mary appeared to St Juan Diego.) In the evening I regrouped at the hostel with my roomates (Heidi, Mike and Chris) for some cultural tequilla-sampling and pool.

After 3 days of hectic city life I was hankering for something a little quieter. As you´d expect from the 2nd most populous city on earth, it was utterly mental, and nowhere more so than the metro. There are over 18million people in Mexico City, and I swear, at least half of them are constantly in the metro. There´s no waiting for fellow passengers to get off, whenever the doors open, the pack of people push on like wild animals. In true British fashion I spent the entire journey saying ´disculpe´ (excuse me) as my elbows were pushed into the faces of old women and sandwiched a blind man against a metal pole. As the metro started pulling away, without fail there would be a moan from a commuter who didnt manage to get to the door in time for their stop.

3 days of such mentalness later and I decided to slow the pace at Teotihucan, the site of some massive Aztec Pyramids.

James