Final Days in Mexico

Friday, December 29, 2006

Friday was pretty relaxed. We went for brunch with Irene and Alicia, and Irene's daughter Elaine. Keren just hung out and I had enchildas - bad, bad thing as a first meal. Since Kerker was still pretty sickly, we decided to watch a movie. What's the soonest movie in English? Chicas materiales? Ok! Apparently that's a Hillary Duff movie and was horribly painful.

That night, we took a cab to Irene's place in Interlomas, a suburb of Mexico City. We had some tea and played scrabble, had a light dinner and went to bed.


The bathroom window.

Saturday, December 30, 2006
In the morning, Irene took us to the market in downtown, which was pretty cool, it was empty, which I was pretty OK with. We purchased some souvenirs and stuff and headed over to pick up her car.

In the afternoon sometime, we finally made it to the same mall we'd gone to Friday.


This is an outdoor mall with some fancy schmancy stores that we couldn't afford, so we went to Zara, that makes 4 countries I've visited that store, I think.


It's pretty nice though..

Keren did buy this:

It's quite nice when you fix the collar.

Eventually we got some grub...Mexican sushi = deep fried, breaded cheese.


Grace and Elaine, Irene's two daughters.


Jimmy, Grace's husband and Grace. Jimmy was hilarious. He kept telling me things about Mexican Jews (which is exactly what he is).

Then they took us to a CD store.. I forget what it was called, so I could pick up some Spanish CDs for my mom and perhaps some for myself.


Fun?


Everything was just funnier in Spanish.

Saturday night we were eager to go out, so we tagged along with Elaine and her friends, who took us to a hookah bar. I'm not a big hookah fan.

Her friend Elias (?) who drove us walked into the joint like he owned the place and that we all owed him something...he also ignored us for most of the night.


What is this guy?


I'm 5'7" not that tall...but both of them we were wearing stillettos and I was wearing maybe 1" heels. No wonder Irene told Alicia that Keren came with a bodyguard.


That was friend nubmer 3... all her friends are about 30 and she's 22. Ridiculous. She also made arrangements for Keren to go home with a random man and thought Keren was being a baby for not going with the strange Mexican man.

Eventually, we were all rather bored and Elias decided to take us home, but Elaine wanted more beer, which I thought I'd partake in, but didn't end up wanting to drink any more. We were up pretty late that night, talking to Elaine in her room.

Sunday, December 31
Everyone was busy with preparations for New Year's, we decided we'd take the Tourribus around Mexico City with Elaine...it's a double decker bus deal. We had to wait a while but eventually we found it and got on one.


My favourite Keren+Hana pic.


Elaine couldn't sit near us... so let's begin our tour of Mexico City.


Nerd! Not really. We were just sitting super close.


Buses and junk.


We get it, Keren's a better photographer.




Man selling something on the side of the street.




More selling stuff on the street.


Every time we passed one of these or any cable for that matter, there was at least one set of headphones from the tour bus on it.


Selling stuff on the street.


Count-down to the millenium.


Palm trees.


Yummy.


The Angel.




Oh baby.




How crazy is Mexican traffic?


I took this photo because of Ripley's Believe it or not? but my dad pointed out that "Zona Rosa ->" means "Rosa the prostitute ->" in Hebrew. Amazing.












City Hall and the biggest flag there ever was.


Massive.






Selling stuff on the street.






The police.










These people freak me out sooo much, luckily I was safely on the second floor of a tour bus.




HAHAHA.











After the tour, we got off at the fancy schmancy store street and walked back to that really nice mall..and got some food.




We got sushi again. Keren's was really pretty, mine wasn't rolled right around.

After that, Alicia came to pick us up and we hung out at her place until Chaimie, Irene's husband came to get us.

The only photo from New Year's Eve:

Keren and her cousin Leon. There was a family dinner with everyone, which was nice...we were exhausted anyway.

Before bed, Keren asked me if I had fun on the trip and such, I told her it wasn't over and she said "we're just flying tomorrow, what could happen?" Some may call it foreshadowing.

January 1, 2007

Irene, Alicia and Elaine came with us to the airport. We had some coffee and fruit at the restaurant while we waited for it to be a reasonable time for us to go through security. We went through security just fine...even bought a postcard. Then it was getting late...so we went over to the gate and decided we'd be the last to board the plane, at which point I realised I didn't have my passport. I ran to the bathroom and there was a woman in the stall I was in, of course and she wouldn't come out. When did come out, she said there was no passport there.. at which point Keren entered the bathroom freaking out and saying they were closing the gate.. so we ran and got on the plane.. better to be a Canadian in Canada without a passport than a Canadian in Mexico without a passport.

5 hours of agony later...we land in Montreal, late, of course. And we have a flight to catch. We get off the plane and start running...we're running and running and then we get picked up by one of those golf cart carts with the yellow light who drives us to the top of the stairs of customs.. we dart off to customs where the guy is sympathetic and lets me off rather easily (I just tell him stuff about where I live and lived and school, etc.).. we run through baggage - it connects, right? and run out and see the air canada counter where the lady asks us where our bags are.. no apparently they don't connect. we had to run around to the other side and call someone to get our bags for us, in the meantime we're freaking out.. so we eventually get our bags (probably faster than if we had waited for it ourselves), it's 9:15 at this point and boarding starts at 9:25 and we don't know where anything is.. so we're running through the airport searching for an elevator with a button and find one and make it and run over to check in and everything is ok.. and we get through security and run over to the gate where boarding hasn't even started yet. Crazy, no? We made the flight and everything ended up being fine.

Here is us being happy we made it OK:



Sad that we left Mexico.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our trip to Mexico.