Mexico: History & Churros

18/03/2015

Last Saturday I took a walk through the historic centre of Mexico City with Florence, a friend of the family. I really like this part of town — the enormous Zócalo square is genuinely worth the detour. Then we went to the San Juan market. I love markets, all the more so here, where the sheer variety of locally grown produce is striking: everything from grapes to mangoes. It can put you in mind of French markets, where a good number of the exotic products come from Mexico. This country really does have a lot of riches.

Then we stopped at "El Moro" :), a place that specialises in chocolate and churros. I can already see certain readers' eyes lighting up... yes, it's as good as it looks. At first glance you might think the churros + hot chocolate combination would be sickly. Not at all! There were several kinds of chocolate; I chose the "Mexico" (the least sweet) and took 4 large churros with it.... I still haven't got over it, I've thought about it every day since :-D . You can count on me going back soon! Now, at this point in my blog you must be thinking: "this is impossible, the guy only thinks about stuffing his face!" :-) . That's not entirely untrue ;-) , but I have discovered other interests.

Indeed, the rest of the walk took us back towards the historic centre. First we went to the finance ministry, which holds various works left behind by artists. I was lucky to make this visit with Florence — she knows a great deal about Mexican history, so I got live commentary on the impressive Diego Rivera murals that trace the stages of Mexico's history. They're really well done. I admit I'd only ever taken an interest in Diego Rivera through his wife Frida Kahlo, and I'm going to fix that quickly: his works are genuinely vast, literally and figuratively, and they made me want to go back and revise the history sections of my Mexico guidebooks.

We then walked behind the Zócalo (relative to the city hall), into the slightly more working-class corner of the district, and stopped in an enormous sweet shop (yes, food again, but it's not my fault :-D ), where parents stock up to fill their piñatas. Here, even the sweets are spiced... no wonder Mexican stomachs are so robust.