my ears are bleeding

how quickly love turns to indifference. or maybe something stronger. All that talk of loving this city and speaking Spanish and all the history. what a day we`ve had in Mexico City. I`m writing this from the youth hostel round the corner from our hotel and there is a band playing hardcore, thrash/death/hellfire and damnation metal so loudly I can feel the base in my belly. i`m not sure if I can think properly. I can`t hear anything but a short mexican guy screaming from the depths of his poor tortured and surely doomed soul. It`s a fitting end to our third, and hopefully last day in Mexico City.

It`s not that we haven`t had fun, seen many wonderful things and eaten some good food. It`s just the low level irritations of walking in the late afternoon downpours in slippery flipflops, never knowing where you`re going and hating looking at your map in public, being on constant pickpocket watch or bandidos watch, rationalised the advice of hysterical, paranoid American tourists we meet, and most irritatingly, ignoring the incessant calls of guapa, chica, linda, bonita and all the leering and pushing and groping that goes with it. The guide books say you should never stay for too long here. You need to come up for air every now and then. And I am looking forward to catching that bus to Oaxaca tomorrow morning because I am sick of being stared at because I am blonde, and only because I`m blonde and this fact making me every man`s property. The friend we are with is even more blonde than me and the attention she is getting, from everyone, even the policemen, is quite impressive. I knew it would be like this, but come on! The most well-dressed, respectable metro passenger turns into a disrespectful animal in a full carriage. What would their mothers, their sisters and their daughters say?

Tomorrow will be a better day no doubt. Not that today hasn`t had its good moments. We`ve been to the Anthropology museum, a megolithic temple to mesoamerican history. The collection is stunning, the interpretation comprehensive, even for non-Spanish speakers. We went to the ancient city of Teotihuacan yesterday, so today`s trip was appropriate. And the museum itself was pretty handsome. The waitress in the cafe was a surly miss but we`ll overlook that. It was a brilliant way to spend an afternoon and I could now tell the difference between a Mayan and an Aztec in the unlikely event of meeting one. Also got a taste of the temple visits to come.

We also had a good taco outside before the mammouth four-hour visit. We`d ski`pped lunch yesterday and there was nearly a Dan mutiny, so the taco was a winning move today. Changing our tickets at American Airlines this morning was also painless and free, although we managed to get a dinner invitation too from a very amourous fellow customer just by standing in the queue. Dan`s presence doesn`t seem to dissuade the attention. You`ve got to admire some of these men for their audacity and their doggedness.

According to a very friendly policeman we met today, Oaxaca is perfectly safe to visit now, despite the advice of an American teacher at our hotel who said it would be peligroso despite any concrete evidence of this. This teacher led a group of his teenager students into a red light district yesterday evening and was surprised to find a bit of bother there. I`m not sure about his powers of judgement. He spends a lot of time smoking in the hotel lobby in a dodgy cowboy hat.

So, bye bye big bad city.