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We spent the day exploring the lively city, we stumbled into the Historic Centre of Mexico, with the Mexico city Metropolitan Cathedral, Templo Mayor ruins and surrounding monuments. The Metropolitan Cathedral was luckily open to public, and free! With its gothic flare you can wonder in to see numerous statues, columns, large alters and a sacristy and on the outside to large bell towers and glass flooring where you can make out slight underlying ruins of the former standing Aztec Precinct.
We have stepped down on Mexican turf, the capital of Mexico. With an easy flight but painful wait through customs we make it out the airport for our first Spanish speaking task or should I say waving, pointing and mainly looking confused!?
Feeling quite cautious of these notorious corrupt taxi's we book one from the airport for a sure to be safe ride to the city centre to our booked hostel, Hostel Amigo. Costing us $238 peso this was a good deal, equivalents to just under a tenner for a 20 minutes ride (25 Peso to every £1) grasping the currency may take a few days.
The hostel in a perfect centro location with helpful staff, bright green and red Mexican decor and our room was huuuuge and clean. So we ditch our bags and have a mini jaunt up the street before it got dark (mugging time) and were happy to crash after what seemed a long day of travel.
Cuidad de Mexico....is one over populated city! There's barely room on the pavement, getting from one block to the next without a head on collision or a complete wipe-out is a task in itself let alone paying attention to where your actually trying to get to. We dive in to a little street cafe for a late breakfast and being that 'hot cakes' was the only thing on the menu we could translate, that is what we had. Ordering with the waitresses is even quite amusing, she just giggled and hid behind her order pad, from that point on we realised we have got to learn at least the basics. Hot cakes and melon juice costing 60 pesos (£2ish) hot cakes just being fat fluffy pancakes with maple syrup, can live on these for three months if my Spanish abilities fail me.
The locals we are meeting seem naturally willing to help when they can, kind and friendly, although, still feeling the need to be quite alert of what's happening around us, the dodgy characters are there and by the plenty. Paul gets the stared and shouted at when he points around looking lost and keeps his wallet in his back pocket, I have been reading forums freaking myself out for weeks trying to get a slight heads up for what we were in for here and how to not appear 'the target for crime'. Somewhere like this I guess you can never be too cautious.
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lee learn spanish
Kim Ha! Ok. We have learnt a few important phrases already but we are doing our best x