A Tour of the Night Life

Well, last night was great fun. I started off the night with Cassandra and Elan at La Fuente, a bar near La Tapatía. It’s been there since 1922 and you can tell it has a lot of history and tradition around it. I got there at 6 on the dot and a man came up and asked me if I was waiting for anyone. I said I was and he said “There are two foreigners at a table just inside” (only in Spanish) and he pointed me toward their table. The bar was packed with tables and chairs mostly taken up by middle aged businessmen, blowing off steam after work. There was a little stage in the middle of the room with a man playing a very old looking piano accompanied by a violinist. The best part about the music they played was that everyone in the bar knew the songs and sang along boisterously. Cassandra said the songs were popular songs from the ‘40s and ‘50s from old movies that everyone knows. While we were there Cassandra introduced me to my new favorite beer: Victoria. Victoria and I got to know each other very well last night.

We finished at La Fuente around 8 and Cassandra gave us a ride to Bananas on Chipultapec where we were supposed to meet a bunch of CEPE people at 9. I got a cheeseburger while we waited for everyone else.

Once everyone else got there Bananas was bananas! There were somewhere around 20 people there from CEPE, plus one girl brought her Mexican friends since she’s been here for a while already.

After Bananas we piled into taxis five at a time and drove to Wall Street, a club downtown. It was cheesy and tropical themed but the music was great. There was a live band that played mostly covers of American artists (The Killers, Kings of Leon, Bon Jovi, even Kady Perry and Pink) and they were awesome! They came on around midnight and did a set and did another set around 2am (I waited around to see them play their second set just because they were so much fun). I ended up getting home around 3am.

After breakfast the next morning I took another nap/reading time and when I came out of my room around 2pm Tere, Mani, Rosa, and Jesse were all in the kitchen cooking. I went in and immediately got set to work chopping tomatoes for the salad for lunch. Everyone was chopping something and the wonderful smell of garlic was in the air along with the stinging power of chopped onions. My host sister Gabi (older than Rosa but younger than Patti I think) brought out a bowl of catfish or something and started hacking off the heads and tails, but apparently she wasn’t doing it right so Tere came over and really went at them while Gabi and I made scared faces at each other. I’m not sure what the fish is for but I would still be a little scared even if I hadn’t seen them getting chopped up.

Saturday lunch is apparently a big deal here because everyone was sitting around the table come 3:00, eating the salad I helped make (tomatoes, onions, cilantro, potatoes, shredded chicken, and olive oil) and slurping on soup. Even Gabi’s husband and older son came down to eat.

I’m not sure what I want to do today. I might just hang around the house and read some more. I have a bunch of free weekends between now and May so I’m going to read through my Mexico travel guide (thanks Greer Careys!) and see if there’s anything I can organize a trip to with my classmates.

PS: It was freakishly cold last night. In Bananas we could see our breath and on the way to Wall Street our taxi driver said it hadn’t been this cold in over a decade. I came to Mexico to escape bad winter weather in Seattle, WTF?!