A Tourist

Hello there! To all my darling readers out there (which I think, amounts to all of TWO people including myself) who have been waiting with bated breath for my next post, you can fix that 100-watt smile back into your lovely faces again! I’m BACK! As for what I’ve been doing all this while, well... nothing much. I re-read Harry Potter 6 in anticipation of the movie, and watched it first show, on the day of release. And like all five of its predecessors, this one is also a disappointment (even though I have quite a crush on Tom Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy, and wouldn’t mind going for the movie a second time, just to watch him in action again! Sssigh!)
And among other things... I also had a haircut. What I wanted was a trim, but undoubtedly, I did a very bad job of explaining that to the hair salon lady in my broken Spanish, because, when she was done with my hair, it was atleast three times shorter than how I wanted it to be- rather like a badly wrecked cuckoo’s nest, with fly-by bits of hair going in every direction. Anyways, what with ironing and a bit of serum, I thought I looked quite chic... like this:-



But now, a couple of hair-wash-days later, I look like this:-



Seems like my hair was just dying to come out in all its unbridled Malayali splendour! 

Now, back to what this travel blog is actually supposed to do... Here goes...

Xochimilco

Yeah. That’s where we went this weekend. The floating gardens of Xochimilco. Popularly known as the Venice of Mexico. It took us about one and half hours to get there (had to change metros lines twice, followed by a half-hour ride on the Tren Ligero which finally dropped us at Xochimilco station) and another 45-mnt walk to one of the boat jetties where we paid through our nose (THREE HUNDRED AND FITY PESOS!) for what we thought would be a nice romantic boat ride through the famed Xochimilco canal. And how wrong could we be!!!
The jetty looked nothing short of breath-taking, with atleast a hundred improvised-canoe-like boats, bobbing up and down merrily, each one a riot of colour in itself, and with absolutely original names like Maria Euginia, Margaret Gomez and so on ( Our boat was called Vive Lolita! – I’m guessing that the owner was either a fan of Nabokov, or of Lolita-esque nymphets! ). I gasped in wonder, thanked my stars for bringing me there, and promptly took out my camera and went clicking madly until Prathyooshan and the boatman threatened to start off without me. And it all went smooth until we pulled out of the jetty- We commented on the weather (Oh! Isn’t it just the purrrfect weather for a nice cruise down a floating garden?), on our expectations of the ride (Aw! This is just going to be like being in a gondola in Venice! Or even better!), and if my memory serves me right, I think we even HELD HANDS!!!!!!! (which is saying something, considering the fact that both of us are extremely anti –PDA).



But the sight that awaited us just at the end of the jetty took the magic out of the moment in no time.

There were at least fifty similar boats vying for space in the narrow canal, either packed with gangs of drunken revellers or with vendors trying to sell everything from corned beef to stuffed toys to halter tops and ponchos. On either sides of the canal were where almost all the vegetables and flowers for Mexico City is grown, but being sandwiched between an Ana Louisa and a Veronica, both of which housed mariachi singing groups each trying to outdo the other, there was little chance of us every getting a closer a look at those botanical wonders. We spent the next hour bumping into the ass of/ scraping the sides of the gondolas around us and nodding our heads negatively to all the overpriced touristy wares that the vendors try to thrust upon us. And, needless to say, the most glorious part of the tour was when we sighted the jetty again on our way back. Of course, there was one silver lining to the trip - Prathyooshan got me flowers, which he doesn’t do very often!! (he was emotionally blackmailed into it, but umm... let’s not dwell on unpleasant details, shall we?).

Totally forgettable experience, nothing to write home about, and so, I’m not wasting any more precious blog space on that episode!

But you can still check out my pictures to get a feel of the place, they are right here!