Mexico City 1978

After I finished my year as a high school foreign exchange student in Dallas, Texas in 1977, I was accepted at TCU in Fort Worth, and started there as a freshman in the fall of that year. The following year, I met a girl  outside the student cafeteria, who became a good friend,and she invited me and my brother, who had started classes at TCU in 1978, to spend the month long Christmas break with her and her family in her native Mexico. As luck would have it, she and her family lived in Mexico City. It is one of my most favorite trips I can recall, because it exposed me for the very first time to a culture so very different from the US, even though it was, so to speak, right next door. Being a college student in Texas was the main reason that I decided to become a double major: History and Spanish. I wanted to learn all I could about the world next to Texas, and felt that knowing the main language of the culture was a great way to truly appreciate and understand it. I fell in love with Mexico City. The people were very friendly to me, considering the huge metropolis they lived in. It did not come across as a cold, rude city, on the contrary, I always looked forward to go into downtown and be submerged in the crowds. I tried every food available sold by the street vendors, delighted in the big outdoor markets, the musicality of the language, even the hectic traffic and honking of horns, the music of the many outdoor cafes, the fashion of the women, the flirting men, who mad me feel like my blond hair and clear eyes was something special, the bright colors everywhere, the upbeat rhythm of a city pulsating with energy,life. The weather was hot, humid, and because of the altitude we felt light headed the first few days we were there, but that all added to the excitement of being in one of the largest metropolises on the planet. The family of my friend was wonderful, the mother was a great cook, and I found out I absolutely loved Mexican cuisine. It was truly the first time I felt like I could have stayed a lifetime, it felt like home. I saw, of course some of the wonders of Mecixo City, like the Museo Nacional, and the Zocalo. We missed visiting the Aztec pyramids, I still do not know why, but I got to see Chitzen Itza in Cozumel with my brother and mother in 1980, so I do not feel completely cheated, and of course the temples in Chitzen Itza are Mayan. I saw of course, and this for the first time in my life, the big problems of a huge city. I saw slums perched on the hill tops next to the huge villas of the wealthy, I saw smog on the freeways surrounding the giant sprawling metropolis, but that did not diminish my fascination with the place or the feeling I had just been introduced to one of the major cities of a major culture on our planet and that the experience had just increased by a tenfold my life experience.