Mexico City

Mexico City, like most paces in Mexico, is a strange paradox.  It has some of the most beautiful buildings imaginable but also the polar opposite.  We took a tour bus downtown which was really cool except for the smog which did a number on my virgin lungs.  By the end of tour (which eventually got caught up in a minor traffic jam) our eyes were rasta red.

It's too bad that all the nice places are tourist traps as the prices are way higher and they are cluttered with knick knack dealers.  Nevertheless that didn't stop me from getting some nice pics.

I prefer the older architecture but some of the newer buildings are cool as well.

And no picture tour would be complete without some police (who are everywhere).  You have no idea how hard I tried to get a good picture of some machine gun police but always something screwed it up.  The camera never seemed to want to take the best pictures or would wait until an inopportune moment.  It's hard to take good pics from buses, but this one is interesting even without the machine guns:

It doesn't seem to matter if you are in the middle of the city or not -- someone has a rooster.  I've lived on a farm for 29 years and never once been woken up by a rooster, but in Mexico City it can be expected.  Here the rooster is far enough away that dogs usually wake me up first, but when we went to the suburbs to stay with Emma's sister Rosa the rooster was next door.

And from the roof of their house I took this picture of a guy out bailing: