Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted on September 22, 2006.
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Who turned off the sun?
When my wife and I moved to Mexico City in May, we had no idea we were actually moving to Seattle.
OK, so that may be an exaggeration, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a rainier place than Mexico City in the summer. At times it feels as if we are trapped in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” (It rained for five straight years in the village of Macondo.)
We have learned to take an umbrella with us almost everywhere, and it can go days without an appearance from the sun; a hard crust of clouds keeps temperatures in the 50s and 60s.
Friends and family back in the States have a hard time absorbing this information. Well, it’s summer and it’s Mexico, they reason, so it must be sweltering! Visiting friends and relatives have packed suitcases full of T-shirts and been crestfallen when we tell them they need sweaters and raincoats.
We’ve been caught in dozens of torrential downpours, none worse than a hellish hailstorm that trapped us as we tried to make our way to a party in the Condesa neighborhood. The hail was so bad that it beat the leaves from the trees, clogging the drains. The results were lakes where the streets used to be and clumps of freezing hail floating like mini-icebergs.
Our taxi got stuck in the mess but not after an hour in traffic with the meter going. It took all our cash to pay the fare and the power was out throughout the neighborhood so we couldn’t go to an ATM.
We got out of the taxi and tried to walk it, but we weren’t about to cross icy, waist-deep water. Meanwhile, motorists were abandoning their cars in the road, wandering the flooded streets in a daze, like urban refugees. What finally saved us was a bus-card in my wallet, the kind you charge up with money. We got home, shivering, at 2 a.m.: no party, no food and no drinks.
Not that I’m complaining, especially when I saw the record temperatures in Austin this summer. Raw, chilly mornings and flooded streets still beat 100 degrees at rush hour.