Mexico City (days 1,2&3)
Hello, everyone. Today has been kind of stressful, but we’ll get there. I’ve had a lot go on, so strap in.
DAY 1
My Mother, Zoe, Rainey, and I awoke, in Houston, Texas, very early Friday morning to catch our flight to Mexico City. When we arrived to Mexico, we took a cab to our hotel. Our hotel was so beautiful! We stayed at the St. Regis, a five star gorgeous hotel. The rooms were wonderful, the food was delicious.
That afternoon we attended the orientation meeting where we were given a rundown of the rules. We also met the other teams. I quite like several of the teams and hope I get to do some scavenges with them. We were dismissed to get ready for our opening dinner.
At dinner, we were served some really fantastic food and even better dessert. We also all made our guesses for where we would go. They gave us a sheet and we wrote down eleven countries that we thought we would go. Bill Chalmers, the director of this event, later announced to us that the winner got only two countries correct. But we won’t find out who the winner is until the end.
DAY 2
We got up the next morning and attended the opening of the leg meeting at 8:30am. He gave us our scavenge book, and we were off!
The first place my mom and I went was the Anthropology Museum. For the scavenge, we had to find five things and stay at the museum for at least 90 minutes. We found everything in about fifteen minutes and then sat down in the museum and planed out the rest of our day. I think this was the wisest thing we did. While at the Museum, we bought a postcard for a different scavenge in which we had to buy two stamps and send a postcard to Bill Chalmers’ son’s fifth grade class. By the way, the son is on the trip with us, and he’s a pretty cool little dude. I also bought a bracelet for the travel collection. I have to collect one kind of item from each country. We left there and went downtown to the Zocalo area. We had lunch on a rooftop. My mom taste-tested three Mexican beers, and I taste-tested traditional hot chocolate. We went to the Metropolitan cathedral, the Templo Mayor, and the Palacia Nacional. None were particularly interesting, but we got a lot of help at the Palacia Nacional where we mailed out post card. Also there, we got a recommendation and headed over to an old style retrain where we got three desserts. We had to eat them at another restaurant that we found out used to be and actual opera house. Then we got and ice cream bar on a stick to do the food on a stick challenge (we have to eat food on a stick in every country). We also went to a shrine for Santa Muerta. No joke it looked like a statue of Jesus with a unicorn horn. My mom is collecting earrings, so she got those. Next we went to the Palacio De Bellas Artes to find Diego Rivera’s famous mural. After we ran over to the Latin American tower and went all the way up to the top. My mom (who’s afraid of heights) was kind of dying. We then rushed as fast as we could to get in one last avenge at the Museo Franz Mayor. This was amazing. We ran in hoping to just do a quick in-n-out. But when we walked in, there was a garden with a trickling fountain, and trees providing shade and beautiful classical music playing in the background, and the birds were singing. They had a little café that we utilized. Then right before we left, all the trees at once started to drop their leaves like they were weeping for us. It was raining beauty.
We got back to the hotel where my Aunt Zoe invited us to go to lucha libre wrestling (it was a scavenge too). While we waited for Chloe, Savannah, Chris, and Bop to arrive we finally found a picture of the president, and my mom and I put on wresting masks for another scavenge. Lastly, two minutes before we went in for wresting, we saw a woman making tortillas. (It was a scavenge to make tortillas) So she let me and Bop each make one. Wresting was great too, very theatrical.
DAY 3
I don’t know if it’s really fair to write about this day yet, because it’s not over. This morning we got on a bus and headed to the airport. It wasn’t until ii was sitting at my gate that I realized my phone was gone… on the bus… that was now gone forever. So that’s pretty great. Write now I’m sitting on a plane headed to LAX. For those of you who don’t know, that mean Los Angeles, California. We have a layover there. So after our layover we will board a plane headed to……. TOKYO, JAPAN!!!!
Despite all my troubles so far, I’m so excited for Japan. I also found out that my limited knowledge of Spanish comes in really handy sometimes, but probably not in Japan.
Until next time,
Gigi <3
