My arrival in Mexico City wasn’t exactly smooth. The immigration officer looked at me with irritation while stamping my passport. Another woman in uniform pulled me aside just as I was pushing my baggage trolley towards the exit and asked to see my baggage tags. My husband, meanwhile, moved unencumbered towards the ‘Nothing to Declare’ sign. The airport hummed with chaos. Maneuvering through the confusion, just as I wheeled the trolley towards customs, yet another officer doing random checks sent me to the baggage scanner. At this point I lost my patience and wondered if coming to Mexico was such a good idea after all.
Our long drive to the hotel swept past scenes of tangled wires overhead, weathered low-rise buildings, and hawkers weaving through traffic signals, just like in India. Everyday workhorses –Volkswagens, Chevrolets, Nissans, and MGs — crawled along the road into the city. But the landscape changed as we entered the tree-lined Avenue of Reforma, and by the time we stepped into our luxurious hotel, it felt like we’d arrived in a different world altogether.
At the hotel restaurant, tables with crisp linens held salt-baked sea bass plated like art while waitstaff glided around. In Mexico City (also known as CDMX), luxury and struggle share the same sidewalk as its past and present. Nowhere is it more evident than on the road to Teotihuacan on the outskirts of the city. A modern highway takes you to these ancient pyramids. Hills dotted with a cluster of tiny white homes packed together like tiny lego pieces rise in the distance on your way there. An eerily quiet archaeological site today, Teotihuacan’s was once a thriving metropolis that predates the Aztecs and the Mayans. It is evident from the ruins that this was a meticulously laid out city once. While it continues to be an enigma to archaeologists because its inhabitants left no written records, time hasn’t entirely stripped it of its grandeur.
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