Umble-ing in the D.F.

I realize that this post is terribly late but nevertheless, Happy New Year!

We were very lucky for the holidays this year because we had my parents visiting for Christmas and then our very dear friend, Eric Umble, here for New Years. Eric’s sister Kate recently married Raúl, who is from Mexico City. Eric, Kate, their parents, and Raúl came to visit Raúl’s family for the week between Christmas and New Years. Very nicely, they invited us to hang out with them on New Years Day and Eve. We started by taking Eric and Kate to Bellas Artes and then the Zócalo.

All of us with...Predator?

As always when visiting the Zócalo, it is absolutely necessary to go inside for a look at the Catedral Metropolitana. I had never seen this before but apparently, there is a pendulum that hangs from the (very high!) ceiling of the church to the floor. It marks the motion of the building on a piece of paper. Though you can’t actually feel it, the pendulum shows that the earth underneath this catedral is moving a lot!

Pendulum

Once outside of the Catedral, we took a moment to watch the dancers that are always located in the Zócalo. They dress in traditional Aztec attire and perform traditional Aztec dances.

The blue guy looks like he's from the movie Avatar

After our tour through the Zócalo, we returned to Raúl’s family’s house to hang out for the rest of the day. His family was incredibly welcoming and we had a great time. It was very interesting for us because though we have been invited to people’s homes before here in México, this was the first multi-generational house that we have visited. It is even more interesting because that is very traditional here. At any rate, I’m not sure exactly how many people live in the house but apparently when the family bought it, they just continued to add another section to it as the family grew. We must have met at least twenty family members that night. The ladies of the house cooked a wonderful dinner for everyone and we took shifts eating since there were too many people for one table.

Dinner with the Umbles

In addition to having champagne, the tradition in Mexico at the New Year is apparently to eat 12 grapes–one wish for each month of the upcoming year.

You are supposed to eat these pretty quickly, which was harder to do that I would have thought--they are hard to chew fast!

Everyone gave toasts

The toasting was especially nice because each adult gave one. Raúl had not seen his family in ten years, so each of the family members expressed how happy they were to see him again and how wonderful it was to meet Kate and her family. It was really lovely to see two families–very different in culture and language–coming together to celebrate like that. We were very happy to be a part of it!

Aww 🙂

Parents in Mexico!

As previously mentioned, my parents traveled to México for the holidays. We had a great time and Jeff and I were super excited to show visitors around now that we actually (usually) know what we are doing!

The first stop was Coyoacán. If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that going to the centro of Coyoacán is one of our favorite things to do. So, we walked around the centro and admired the decorations still up from Christmas; toured the local church; and of course sampled lots of food! We visited Café El Jarocho, the most famous coffee in town; Sanborns for lunch where my parents had chilaquiles and enchiladas suizas; and finally, churros for dessert.

The ginormous tinsel tree in the centro. (The bookshelf and set up that is also in the picture is information for Occupy Mexico.)

There was a large nativity scene set up in the centro's gazebo.

First churros!

Our next stop was the local mercado that comes every Tuesday morning to our barrio. My parents really enjoyed the incredible variety of fruits, vegetables, meats, and other items that you can not only buy but sample beforehand as well.

A stall selling greens and just-diced veggies to make salsa.

Fresh chicken anyone?

We also decided to visit the Museo Nacional de Antropología, a first for Jeff and me as well as for my parents. The museum is considered the best in Latin America and one of the best in the world. We stayed there for over three hours and literally only saw a quarter of what they have to offer.

The front of the Museo.

One of my favorite pieces at the museum-a sculpture of a contortionist!

A wall from the Temple of the Feathered Serpent

A depiction of the buriel grounds that were found in the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The skeletons were found with their hands still tied behind their backs.

El juego de pelota (the game of ball) was invented by the Aztecs. The ball had to be hit through a goal like this and the players hit the ball with their hip. Can you imagine aiming a ball through a hoop like this from your hip?!

The Aztec room was the last one we visited. It was massive and absolutely full of artifacts.

My mom and me under the largest artifact in the Aztec room. This has been misidentified as a Mayan calendar, but was actually an altar about the sacrifices of war.

Another must on our list was Bellas Artes. Though the Palacio Nacional houses a larger quantity of Diego Rivera murals, Bellas Artes has several famous ones by Rivera in addition to others by famous Mexican muralists.

Mom in front of Bellas Artes

Mural by Rufin Tamayo in Bellas Artes

Looking at one of the Rivera murals

Another Rivera mural. Can you guess who some of these people are?

All in all, we had a great visit and I think in the end, we have turned my parents into big fans of Mexico 🙂

¡Feliz Navidad!

Merry belated Christmas to all! We hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday. A few days before Christmas, Jeff and I went to the Zócalo, the center of D.F., and snapped some shots of the decorations to share.

Christmas tree in the Zócalo. (No, it's not real, it is made of green tinsel and Pepsi symbol ornaments. Guess we know who sponsored it!)

This center part of the Zócalo usually houses various protests that are happening but this time, it was set up as sort of a Christmas carnival. Just right of center, you can note a blue tent labeled "Real Snow," and indeed, they manufactored real snow so that one could go in and have a snowball fight with friends. After seven years of awful winters in Ohio and Kansas, I found this to be the height of irony.

And of course, no Christmas carnival could be complete without an ice skating rink! I find it a miracle that this even worked given how warm it was outside but they obviously had some high-powered machinery working hard under the ice to keep it frozen. Apparently a few years ago, the mayor of the city came up with the really great idea of putting the ice skating rink in the Zócalo for everyone to enjoy for free during the holidays. We didn’t skate since there was a huge line of people waiting, but it was really fun to see how excited everyone was about this. After all, it never snows here and they barely ever get more than a light frost on the ground on even the coldest days. What do they call this by the way? Why, Rockefeller Center, of course. (No joke, they really do!)

As well as this was able to work, when we took this picture, the workers were definitely cleaning up puddles of water that were forming on the ice. It was close to 80 degrees this day!

My parents arrived to spend the holidays with us on the afternoon of Christmas Eve and we had a really great visit. After they got in, we were able to hang out at home for awhile before heading to the Catedral Metropolitana (also in the Zócalo) to see a Christmas Eve mass.

Catedral Metropolitana, from the late sixteenth century

The mass was supposed to be at 8:00 but we got there a little after 7:00 just to make sure we could get seats. There was actually a shorter service at 7:00, so we stayed for all of that one and part of the 8:00 one, but decided not to stay for the whole thing because it was going to be really long. One of the Cardinals was presiding over the 8:00 mass, so there were a lot of people in attendance. We did get to hear some music before we left though, which was very interesting. The reverb in the church was ridiculous because it is massive and the space where the organ and musicians were was behind us, which created a kind of strange acoustic. And the organ was definitely NOT equal-tempered, so there were some crunchy chords with the brass players but all in all, it was lovely and very different to hear.

Christmas morning, we got up and made coffee and then opened presents.

Christmas morning

Clearly even Schubert was in the Christmas spirit

My Christmas present from Jeff--an awesome new camera that is PURPLE of all things! (Note: all pictures after this one are taken with the new camera. I hope that the quality improves our blog readers' reading experience 🙂

I can’t remember if we have mentioned in our blog our interesting experience with water here in the city but on occasion, we lose water all together. The city is huge and it appears that one of the problems that really haven’t been dealt with completely yet is the water. Because we are in the north of the city, I think sometimes it doesn’t quite get pumped our way. When we first got here, we seemed to lose it for a day or two at a time once every three or four weeks. Of course, we had not lost water at all for six or seven weeks until my parents got here, and then we lost it late Christmas Eve, haha. It really wasn’t so bad on Christmas Day because it did come on again here and there throughout the day, but cooking Christmas dinner without regular running water was an adventure.

Jeff carving the turkey

Green bean casserole with "imported" french fried onions, since we can't find them here in Mexico

These lovely plastic plates were a far cry from my mom's china that usually comes out on Christmas, but hey, we didn't have to wash dishes!

Despite the lack of water, we still had a great day and fun spending time together. More on my parents’ visit to come soon!