Our last day in Mexico. We started with breakfast at Cafe Tacuba:
...a popular and historic cafe in downtown Mexico City, which has been in operation since 1912. Among other things, they have an impressive array of pan dulces (sweet breads):
On the way to the cafe, I took this picture of an interesting looking building:
...which turned out to be a library.
On the sidewalk near the cafe, we passed an organ grinder:
Our flight didn't leave until about 4:00 in the afternoon, so we had some time to kill. After breakfast, Terry and Hector and Malena waited in the car, while I made another visit to the Catedral Metropolitano. This being Sunday morning, there was a mass in progress. In order to attend the mass, you had to register at a booth at the back of the cathedral - I guess that's to separate the faithful from the tourists. I stood back at a respectful distance and listened for a while. Of course, it was all in Spanish or Latin, so I didn't understand anything. But the inside of the building is very grand and magnificent, and I felt the spirituality of the moment.
The church is so large, that it has more than one altar. Here's a picture of a small altar at the front of the church:
..."small" being a relative term, of course. I guess I should say smaller. I also took this picture of the mass in progress:
In the front courtyard of the cathedral, there are some glass plates which allow you to look down and see excavations of older parts of the structure. For example, here are some old steps:
Around on the side of the church, I discovered this very impressive statue of Papa Juan Pablo II (Pope John Paul II):
After that, we meandered around town for a while, and I took pictures of some things that I had missed when we were on the bus tour. Most of those pictures have already been included on previous pages, but here's one more. Along the Paseo de la Reforma, in addition to the large statues and monuments we've already seen, there are a large number of smaller statues, all up and down the street. Some are of figures from Mexican history, and some are more modern, abstract works. And then there was this one:
For no particular reason, a statue of a hippopotamus in the middle of the sidewalk. Actually, I think it's supposed to be a bench. There were two young girls playing on the hippo when I approached, but when they saw my camera, they hid. You can just see a little bit of one of them, peeking out on the left side.
The last adventure was finding my way back to the the car rental agency. The night before, I had asked Hector to call them to find out where to return the car. The guy said to just bring it back to the same place where I picked it up. Well, that did me no good - when I picked it up, I hadn't the faintest clue where I was! So Hector managed to elicit some more specific information from the man, and I found my way back.
So we said our goodbyes to Hector and Malena, bought some stuff at a duty free shop, and had some lunch at an airport restaurant. This was the only other occasion (aside from the day in Veracruz) where we had an issue with the dog. This time, Hector wasn't there to speak up for us, so Terry had to do it herself. She said, in essence, "I've had a wonderful time this last week, please don't spoil it for me when I'm just about to go home." It worked.
On the flight home, from the airplane window, I took these last two pictures of Mexico City disappearing from view:
In the second picture, you can see that ill-fated intersection where I made that famous wrong turn the day we went to Veracruz.
As the plane climbed through the clouds, my view of the city got gradually more and more hazy, until it disappeared entirely. I felt like I was leaving Brigadoon.
When we got back to L.A., we picked up our car from the parking garage, and stopped at a minimart, where I put some air in the tires, got Terry a bottle of water - and had my first Diet Pepsi in nine days!
A final thought. I've just finished reading (for the second time) the Dark Tower series of novels by Stephen King. A major premise of this series is the existence of multiple worlds - the characters keep moving back and forth between our world and a variety of other worlds. Near the end of the first book, a character makes an observation that gets repeated several times over the course of the series - it almost becomes a theme statement. The character says "There are other worlds than these."
There are indeed many other worlds than the one I live in, and I'm glad to have had the chance to visit some of them.
A postscript. Martha returned to Fresno shortly after we left, and a few weeks later, we attended her graduation from Cal State Fresno. While we were there, we got to see Benche and Jenny (her parents) and Alex (her brother) again, as well as her uncle Martin.
The ceremony was a special graduation ceremony for the international students, and Martha also got an award for being an outstanding student. Here are some pictures I took at the graduation (I took these with my cell phone camera, so they're not as good).
The graduates
Martha's third from the left in the front row
Martha listens as the Dean says wonderful things about her
Terry interprets the proceedings for Jenny