We made it Mexico City
Trip Start
Dec 07, 2005
1
2
78
Trip End
Apr 10, 2007
Mexico City,
Mexico
Friday, December 9, 2005
have you heard the one about the pope and the mexican bus driver the gates of heaven? in case you haven´t, the gist is that the pope becomes so disconcerted that ol´ St. Peter is paying much more attention to expiditing the bus driver´s case that he has to ask, ¨St. Peter, i have devoted my entire life to god´s work and serving him. surely i warrant some sort of attention here.¨ Ol´ Pete´s reply: ¨this bus driver has scared the hell out of a LOT more people that you ever could have.¨ (thanks to David Pennington for that one, and apologies to David Pennington for ruining the delivery).
We have spent a lot of time going to different places in the city, and most of the time we have been driving
can you find the VW BUG
. Or rather, daniela´s aunt Chelo has been driving (thankfully, she is a very good driver). And I would like to say one or two things about driving in mexico city.I am amazed that pretty much everyone i´ve met here drives. It´s much more of a driving oriented city than, say, new york. Almost every house has at least a small driveway, usually enclosed by 8 foot steel doors. This serves as a kind of atrium to the house, and it´s feature that I like quite a bit. If the space between the house and the gates is very small, the gates might be wrought iron rails that bow outwards to allow a car to be parked in front of the house.
the drivers here seem to regard traffic laws much like legislators in the US regard the constitution, D.O.I., and other fundamental documents meant to convey a general manner of operation: they are a nice idea, but nothing to get stuck on. Drivers here switch lanes (with or without signaling) seemingly randomly and often. Luckily, the first lane on the major roads is especially for turning onto or off of the road and for busses, otherwise pulling onto a roadway would spell almost certain doom. Many drivers seem to regard red lights as an optional accessory to their journey, and the many ¨minibuses¨ parade around the cities with their front and back doors open. While heading to the metro on a minibus, we witnessed two boys (about 10 or 12 years old) simply lean against the steeply angled dashboard of the bus-one with his leg dangling towards the open door and the other kept sliding towards the shift column as the bus lurched and turned.
amazingly, i´ve only seen one or two accidents since we´ve been here. I guess everyone is used to the ´disregard everything but getting where i´m going´ approach, and is always on guard. I`ve noticed quite a few bald tires on both smaller cars and bigger rigs, though, so i´m glad it hasn´t rained since we´ve been here (knock on wood). In any case, i think it´s true: if you can drive here, you can drive anywhere.
