Zentangle Diva Challenge #342 – Hola Mexico City Edition

I did last week’s Zentangle Diva challenge in Oaxaca, Mexico. We’ve now moved onto Mexico City where we are staying with our digital nomad son, Jeremy. It turns out that at a certain point, even wanderlusters feel the need to have a home base.

Jeremy has visited many of the great cities of the world on four continents and chose Mexico City as the place to put down some roots. The high school student who I had to beg to pay attention in Spanish class now speaks Spanish better than I do and my Spanish is pretty good. Locals sometimes think I’m from a Spanish speaking country, but not theirs.

Jeremy found himself a 3 bedroom condo in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City, one of the “hip” up and coming neighborhoods. In fact, if you want to follow along to see how he did that, you can tune in to watch him on HGTV’s Househunters International next month. I’m sad to say that I have condo envy. I refer to the condo Mr. Excitement and I purchased in Center City as “The Cave”. In contrast, Jeremy’s condo is light and airy.

We’ll come back to Mexico in a moment, but first, here’s my take on this week’s Zentangle Diva challenge to do a “duotangle” using the tangles Bunzo and Paradox. These are two of my “go to” tangles. I stayed strictly to the true Zentangle method, using an “official” 3.5 x 3.5 inch tile, a 01 Sakura pigma micron pen, a pencil and a tortillon. (If the Zentangle lingo has you scratching your head, you can read my explanation of it here.) I’ve been working with color a lot lately, so my result seems somewhat austere to me. Zentangle peeps feel free to chime in with your opinion and constructive criticism.

Back to Mexico City

Mexico City is a massive, vibrant, overwhelming, cosmopolitan city. It has a 16th century colonial Spanish center, surrounded by sky scrapers and neighborhoods ranging from crumbling to elegant, often on the same block. This evening, Jeremy took us to see a park with a Moorish architecture inspired bandstand. The locals were enjoying some after work time with their families and on the large bandstand were: a group of women in a belly dancing class, a couple doing swing dancing, and a music teacher conducting a circle of young violinists.

Jeremy then walked us over to a public library with an interesting interior, and we ended up in a small neighborhood Russian restaurant, eating borscht and chicken stroganoff while watching 1980’s Russian music videos. We took an Uber ride back to Jeremy’s condo in traffic so insane that we finally got out and walked the last half mile.

Here are some photos from the evening:

The “Moorish Kiosk” was constructed in the late 19th century to be the Mexico Pavilion at the World’s Fair of 1884 in New Orleans and at the Saint Louis Exposition of 1902. It was eventually moved to the Alameda Santa Maria la Ribera (Park) in Mexico City and restored.

Looking up at the interior of the dome.

The Vasconcelos Library is a massive public library opened in 2006. It is known for its suspended bookshelves. This photo includes the suspended skeleton of a large whale.

And what better way to end a day in Mexico City than by eating at a Russian restaurant. The truth is I’m a Mexican food weenie because I can’t eat chile.

My bowl of warm borscht soup with a dollop of sour cream because everyone goes to Mexico for Russian Food. Da?

Buenas noches.

Have you ever been to Mexico City? Do you think you would go?

Tagged as: Alameda Santa Maria la Ribera, Mexico City, Zentangle