I've been in Mexico for a fair bit. Doing some stuff, working, painting, trying to write and failing. The following is copied from a piece of correspondence that I sent back to England. Hmm. I should probably edit out the cursing. Aww forget it, consider this a warning. Also I wrote it mainly aimed at one friend, so somethings are assumed to be afore known and in many parts it is very familiar. I'm not editing it now though.

Well, anyway. Mexico is a badass mother-fucker. 'Cause I was going away for so long I brought three pairs of shoes. My brown loafers, black (loafers?) badass shoes that have been resoled like four times, and running shoes. Now the running shoes have seen a lot of proper use, as my cousin (aunt) is a running machine, she is like as old as my ma, 'cept she runs like 2 marathons a year. She may run kinda slow, but I can't match her in distance. Last Sunday, we went up to this running track in Chapultapec Park, One track is hilly and is a mile long, the other is more flat and is .9 km. My aunt and other cousin had done two or three laps of the .9 one by the time I got there, averaging 6:30 mins. Which was apparently too fast. I ran around with them for about an half an hour on the .9 track, so I guess I ran about 3 miles, then I ran the mile track twice, but I ran much too fast, I burned out man, it hurt real hard, the pounding dry scorching sun, the fucking pebbles in my shoes, my mouth was so dry, I needed a drink bad, but din't have any money for the street vendors. Also my mouth had produced some kind of god-awful mucus that was so thick and gelatinous I couldn't spit it out, because it just stretched right down to the ground, man, that was disgusting. So yeah, I ran like 5 miles in 45 minutes. Kinda slow I know, but I was pacing with them, and they are training for marathons, you know the 26 mile jobs. Right, so I got five miles in, my aunt kept running man, my cousin finished having run for about an hour, but my aunt just kept on going. She ran 12 miles man. 12 miles. Her Gatorade ran out and I had to fetch her water, rising from the seat I thought I could die on, to fetch water; but it was okay, the water was cold, and I had what she couldn't put in her water bottle, about 400 ml. Not much I know, but at that point it tasted like ambrosia, food of the gods.

My brown shoes I got shined in Oaxaca. I was in the city proper with a 16 year old cousin from Chicago. We went to a couple of bars, and I was a fairly bit tipsy; 3 beers, 2 measures of some dark spirit, a shot of Mescal and 2 Zombies will do that to a man. The guy was professional, those are the loafers that I took to China yeah, I've never cleaned the little bastards. Before the shining they were looking so beat up, one of the guys thought that they were actually tan, not brown. I got my Mexican cousin to tell the guy that they were looking better after the shine than when they were new. And it was no exaggeration. It was then that I decided to get the other ones shined too. The black pair had to wait though, for two long weeks in Mexico City I wondered where to find a shoe shine guy, and how I could possibly go anywhere since I hadn't got a key to the house yet. My opportunity came after work last Saturday (that's right, freaking Saturday), I only had to work in the morning so I had the whole afternoon to wander. After eating some fucking awesome Chicken Tacos, I was dropped at the nearest Metro station, and embarked on my exploration of this countries Mass Transit system (the buses don't count as they are so bad and cost more than the Underground). The station was clean and empty, and had like one fucking map, apparently you have to know where you are going in this town or you are fucked. A pass ticket to anywhere costs 2 pesos. That's like 10 pence. Imagine if you could travel anywhere in London for 10 pence. I clutched my 2 peso ticket before the barriers and a tear of joy came to my eye. 10 pence travel. So, so beautiful.

After I went through the barriers and said farewell to my glorious little ticket I got onto the platform where the only map was being hogged by two little shits. Seriously while most Mexicans are really nice and friendly, hell they'll even talk Spanish at you on the tube in a friendly manner, some of them just have no fucking etiquette. I'm about the tallest person in the country, and blatantly not a native so how these two bastards didn't think to move aside a little so I could also use the map, I have no idea. Then the train arrived. It was orange and looked strangely tall. They are about as wide as the Victoria Line trains (not wide) but really, really tall. So much headroom. It was fucking sweet. Until the next stop and I was squashed against the wall like a sardine. Apparently, during the week, at rush hour, the trains get so crowded that they have to separate men and women, to prevent molestation or some shit. The crush was so heavy, the doors only opened for about 5 seconds, and the mother fuckers on the new platforms have never heard an announcement anything like "please let passengers off the train first", so I missed my stop and got off on the next one. This station exited right in the middle of some crazy market. As I've already said, I'm about the tallest person in the country, so a Mexican Market to me, means stoop real low. There are ropes ready and waiting to garrote someone of my height, with the secondary purpose of holding some tarpaulin cover over the store owner.

It took about forty minutes but eventually I reached the outside edge of the market. My astute navigational instincts telling me which way to go to reach the Zocalo, my destination, the main square of Mexico City, a little like Red Square in Moscow, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Seriously those 40 minutes I was going in the right direction, in a straight fucking line, and was still in freaking Market town. I began to get a little worried that maybe I was too far off the beaten track when I noticed the alarming number of working girls standing around. but then again I guess Soho is only one street away from Piccadilly Circus in London. But seriously, the sheer number of women of easy virtue was actually quite shocking. And don't think that I can't recognize a strumpet when I see one. But anyway, to back up my claim there was a sign on a wall that said something along the lines of "Don't sell yo self here bitches" The translation there is liberal, but essentially accurate. So I asked some Fruit Seller where the fuck the Zolcalo was. Dude pointed me pretty much where I had thought, and had already been going, but it was definitely comforting to have a confirmation as I apparently walked along streets of ill repute.

Another 20 minutes or so and I was there. The Zocalo. The 32nd largest City Square in the World. Here I would finally find some god damned postcards, a copy of the Mexican constitution and a shoe shine guy for my black badass shoes. The place had such a good vibe I hung around for almost an hour, maybe more. I checked out the Cathedral. Which is a pretty awesome place, full of little chapels with some elaborate and explicit catholic artwork (it's all about the guilt). Then I walked the perimeter twice, being unable to walk across the middle due to some shitty tent taking up the middle. One amazing thing about the Zocalo is the Templo Mayor. In 1978 some guys from the Electric Company were doing some digging work right next to the Zocalo and they unearthed an eight and a half ton stone disc, from this huge hint archeologists decided that there was a good chance that the great pyramid of Pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan might be under this little square hill. Dudes dug it up, and now there is a god damned pyramid to the heathen gods right next to the Catholic Cathedral and National Palace. Can you see why this place is so badass?

So I dug that place for a while, and although the museum itself wasn't open, you can see the pyramid from outside, it being kind of hard to keep that kind of thing hidden, and a lady from the Department of Tourism was able to give a little talk in broken English about how awesome the Templo Mayor is, and how the Mexicans, over about 300 years made it so god damningly huge, so that when the Spanish turned up they basically shit themselves, and tried their best to destroy the thing so it wouldn't embarrass them all the time since they didn't have the brass ones to build a thing that big and then celebrate having built it by killing 20,000 people, bathing the temple in blood, just to show how awesome it was. But of course the thing is still there over 500 years later for me to check out, again proving the unmanliness of the Spanish Conquistadors in comparison to the ball-bustingly manly Aztecs.

This is where the e-mail drew to a close. I am taking pictures and painting but... my laptop is being a real bastard when it comes to connecting things to it, thus I am uncertain if I shall be able to actually upload any new content before my return, some five weeks from now. So it goes.