14Dec13
Today was what some might call a “tourism fail.”
First, we set out to UNAM — Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. It’s one of the oldest and largest Latin American universities, with more than 300,000 students. It’s also known for beautiful murals and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We thought we could just walk off the metro onto the campus and revel in its beauty, but instead we ended up at the campus grocery store totally lost with lots of unimpressive buildings in sight.
So we cut our losses and said hey, let’s do our homework and then come back another day. The place is huge and we could spend hours trying to figure out where to go.
We hopped back onto the metro to Coyoacán and took a walk over to the Frida Kahlo Museum. Because it’s Saturday, and that’s a day when major museums would be open, right?
Wrong. Just ask these other sad souls who got there and saw the sign on the door saying the museum would be closed on December 14.
“Que triste,” said another young patron. Sí, te acuerdo.
By this point, we were more upset because we really, really needed to use the bathroom and were looking forward to nice museum bathrooms. So we wandered around into a Burger King of all places, because of course they’ll have bathrooms.
Except that there was someone standing in front of the bathrooms demanding to see my receipt. It was an emergency, I tell you, so I stooped to playing stupid American. “Huh? I don’t understand.” After a minute of me shrugging, the woman waved me in, frustrated because she was just trying to do her job. I was not proud, but I was relieved.
Now that Chris and I were able to think about anything else besides finding a bathroom, we set out to find some churros — only to accidentally order twice the number we planned on eating. The guy had already prepared them and it was our fault.
They’re filled with chocolate sauce, in case you’re wondering. And yes, we went ahead and ate them all. So then, to walk off all the fried dough, we wandered around Coyoacán and enjoyed the sights.
And then we came home to our dog. Still enjoyed ourselves, and we’ll try again another day.
