Posts
Nothing is perfect in this world including mine. We took off from the house for the airport around 12:30. Taxis are super expensive now. From our house the price has gone up to 2000 pesos. We can take the bus from our house to Walmart and then take an Uber for 700 pesos That said, we can park at the airport for the week and it is 1400 pesos.
Can you take an Uber from the airport in Monterrey to the city? Sure you can. There is a caveat. Get this, straight from the horse's mouth. Ubers are not allowed to exit the airport. Many won't even take you to the airport. So how does it work? The Uber driver has to pay the Guardia Nacional partrol 600 pesos per week and the driver will receive a password. The Uber driver will get stopped for sure. The Guardia Nacional make it very clear it will happen. What next? The Uber driver says he has a password which he gives to the GN. The GN calls it in to his coworkers and he is cleared to go.
Corruption is worse now than ever. Unbelievable. Blantant and more open than in my previous 40 years.
At the airport we left the car and boarded the shuttle. Our driver was an Uber driver up until three months ago. He told us the story about the corruption, pay off, and the reasons he quit and took the shuttle job.
Aeromexico is very easy to use. We weren't happy with their inflight service to London but the business side of the airline works well. You don't need to show any identification, you don't have your carry on weighed or measured. 30 seconds at the ticket counter only because we don't pay for seats. She put us together in row 39. We're happy with that. Aeromexico does seem to cheat a bit on their on time records. The flight was scheduled for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Please. It's an hour and 5 minutes and we always get there five minutes early. The capitan announced, "as always, on time or we arrive early!".
The metro is a nightmare. We hit rush hour and there is construction throughout the system. The floors are broken up for retiling which makes it hard to walk. No signage on rail changes and the air is thick with dust. They do have a policeman at each station but not enough to handle the thousands of people moving around the city. We missed one station because people wouldn't let us off even though we pushed and shoved and were called some pretty rotten names. The city has changed quite a bit over the last seven years. A lot of very unhappy people. It took us over two hours to get to our housesit in Cuatehmoc Delegation 10 minutes from the Garibaldi Square. We taking an Uber back to the airport when we go home. We can do it and we can handle it but life is too short to go through all that bullshit for $10.
Our housesit is very nice. It turns out she's Canadian and has lived in Mexico City for 12 years. She has a nice apartment but the neighborhood is a bit shady. We had only been there about 30 minutes when across the street there was a fight in a house. They kicked the guy out, put all his furniture on the street, and beat the bloody pulp out of him. The guards in our buiding called the police and they arrived right away.
We spent yesterday walking the neighborhood and we did a tour of the Guerrero Market. Very nice. From the outside it looks shady, I'll be using that word a lot it seems. Inside, very clean, good produce, which we bought what we need for the week. A lot of the small restaurant stalls have remodeled their space fronts so that they look very fashional and modern. We'll be going there for breakfast on Sunday. We bought some chicken to make a salad for dinner last night. The butcher cut out a breast, cut it into small trozos (pieces) and charged us 63 pesos for half a kilo or one pound.
The walk was a bit depressing. A lot of drug addicts selling used things on the street, old and broken furniture and trash and graffiti everywhere. Sad to see this happening. Friends who live here in CDMX say it's changing for the worst and quickly.
The garbage truck comes by daily. They collect the containers and bring them to the truck where they take everything apart and separate into recyclables. The materials they recycle become their income. You can see that they collect quite a bit. I'm sure they also receive a small salary as well. We need to treat them better. Spain is a good example. After the trash truck passes another comes by and washes the barrels and containers.
Well, tomorrow's post will be better. We had a great day riding trolley buses up and down the Reforma. We visited the Chapultepec Castle and it was amazing.
