I’m writing about my Mexican Christmas in April but dated January. Keep this in mind. 😛 Also, note this is a multiple (11) page blog post, the numbers at the bottom allow you to navigate to the following page.
My Mexican Christmas
For the past 5 weeks, I’ve had my mum visit me. It’s been since April last year that I haven’t seen her, and with the time difference it has been somewhat tricky being in touch, part of the time while I was travelling it was near on impossible to coincide. Therefore, it was nice having her here with me for the Mexican Christmas experience. From the outset she was very clear that she wanted to do some fun stuff while here and wanted to get her teeth into some travelling.
I’m not sure about you, but me, I have a terrible time trying to be decent to someone when you spend 24/7 with them. Which probably explains I have never had a long-term relationship. I say this, as after 8 months of not seeing my mum, it wasn’t long before I got a little snappy. I didn’t want to be that way, but just so you know mum, it wasn’t personal. I did my best to recognise and adjust but frankly it was really difficult.
However, I will say we had a great time, we saw heaps of things and frankly, despite me having my head up you-know-what we still managed to have the best time together!
So let’s back up a little, mum’s flight arrived at 5am or there abouts, I can’t recall now, but I know it was super early and I had to drag myself out of bed hardly having slept from a late night before.
Naturally, her having been on a plane for more than ten hours and also having hardly slept plus time-zone adjustment wasn’t feeling wonderful. Then factor in that Mexico City is at >2,100m above sea level, for her it was quite an adjustment. After arriving at the house, settling in and unpacking and presenting me all the wonderful amazon orders I’d had sent to her. We decided to go for a walk, initially, I had the idea of walking round the corner, find a coffee shop, catch up on almost a year of not seeing each other and let’s be done with it. Mum had different ideas, we started walking and then got to Parque Mexico (which is only 3 blocks away), then carried on she didn’t want to stop, so on to Parque España which too isn’t much further from the previous park. Still striving for more we pushed on another 10 blocks further to try and get to Parque Cuatemoc, in which you have to take a pedestrian bridge over a 12 lane road through Mexico City, now I wont point fingers here and say, having not slept in 36 hours, or that we’d just walked 4 miles in an urban environment, or that the pollution of this filthy city was the cause, I’ll just say it’s altitude and those stairs leading up the foot-bridge certainly took it out of mum. It was there, I’d say was also where I hit my wall, we carried on into the park and tried to build up energies to go and walk through the zoo in the park. But frankly I was done, my lack of sleep wasn’t helping either, we still had another 4 miles to walk back.
What I was trying to explain in that previous paragraph is that my mother is very ambitious and isn’t always aware of her limits. I love her all the same but sometimes even as her child I have to set authority and say when things are enough or over ambitious.
We spent the following week between many things seeing sights in the city, visiting friends and trying to book a rental car to do our road trip. On one of these said outings a girl I had dated (Rosa) prior to mum’s arrival was in touch and wanted to take us in her car to see a few sights (like the Frida Kharlo Museum and Xochimilco). It was very kind of her and we felt obliged. Was very kind of her and mum and her got along nicely. Personally, I’m not in the business of introducing dates to my mum until I know things are serious, however, mum’s fairly relaxed and not huge judgements were cast, despite it being a tad awkward.
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