Mexicool

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Forget walking in a straight line. In Mexico, you slalom between oblivious passersby, parked cars on sidewalks, trees, construction sites, restaurant terraces and security guards. There’s no controlling the vertical either: Sidewalks go up and down without warning, from low walkways to raised driveways. And if you’re tall, like me, you need to watch out for branches, canopies and the occasional illegal electrical wiring.

In the DF (for Federal District), as the Chilangos (Mexico City residents) call their hometown, everything feeds into this dizzying sense of hyperactivity. Each stretch of wall is fair game for brightly coloured advertising. Ramshackle dumps lean on shiny modern towers for support. Cheap loudspeakers blare distorted disco music to lure customers. The constant honking of car horns mixes with birdsong.

Just before leaving for Mexico, I picked up a copy of Hombre al Agua, a novel by Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, in which he describes his hometown as a “city of apocalyptic joy.” The description seemed fitting as I looked at a market stall where the Tim-Burtonesque skulls of Day of the Dead figurines – musicians, travellers, priests and newlyweds – stood in smiling gothic rows. In Mexico, tragedy and joy are like two sides of the same shiny coin.

At Café 111, the meeting place for the bourgeois-bohemian set, my intial manic impressions were confirmed by denizens of the hip Condesa district. “It’s total chaos,” said Odile, a Montrealer who works at the café. Behind her, Fabiola, a native Chilango, nodded in agreement. Even Astrid spontaneously told me that that it’s a completely crazy place – and she’s from Bogotá.

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