Avenue of the Dead and calves’ brain tacos: Mexico City

If I, as a traveling Type 1 diabetic, can successfully make it through a meal of tacos made from calves’ brains, I don’t want to hear any other diabetic talking about what they can’t do because of their condition.

Yes, not only did I down one of the least palatable-sounding parts of a cow, I also got to stroll down something called the “Avenue of the Dead” and live to tell about that (see below).

Proving once again: Diabetes can’t stop you from doing anything.

On Day 13 of our short Mexico trip Masayo and I left Guanajuato, our home for the past ten days, and headed back to Mexico City by bus for a couple days before returning to my dad’s house in Florida. I am not usually a fan of big cities, but you can’t really visit Mexico without seeing the capital. Plus, our flight was leaving from there.

Mexico City gave us none of the danger, violence, choking pollution, or stomach upset that you always hear about. We had tacos in a little food stall on the street behind our hotel (near a giant new building to which workers were attaching huge letters that read “SCIENTOLOGY”), strolled around in the apparently nice air, and became impressed by the genial vibe.

Couples and kids walked around parks full of large monuments; statuary and fountains and well-tended hedges were all over the place. Spires and buildings decorated in carved stone lurked down boulevards and around unexpected corners.

Mexico City was, in a word, happy.

Climbing into the Mesoamerican past: Teotihuacán

Masayo’s friend from college in Japan, Masaaki, is living in Mexico with his wife and their young son. They offered to take us to see the ruins of the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacán in their car on our final day.

But first they wanted to show us some real Mexican tacos. We pulled over to the side of the road and sat inside a small concrete taquería, on the wall of which was a short menu with about five different items on it. Cow tongue, cow cheek, etc… the five of us ordered the smallish tacos as hunger and whim led us.

I didn’t understand the fifth menu item though; my Spanish wasn’t quite good enough. Masaaki explained what it was: calves’ brains.

Gulp. I’d never heard of such a thing.

Masayo and I have a policy of trying to eat strange things when the opportunity arises – after all, if locals eat it, it must be edible, right? If it makes us nervous, that’s our own prejudices. Getting past such self-imposed limits is one of the key benefits of travel.

But calves’ brain tacos? We looked nervously at one another, giggling. We were trying to talk ourselves into it.

And we did, of course. We sort of cheated by adding lots of cilantro (a.k.a. coriander) and cheese and sauce to them. When I bragged about this story later, people asked me how the mealy minds of young cows tasted, but unfortunately I don’t really know. Like cilantro.

But we ate them, and I assume full bragging rights about it!

Teotihuacán, at long last

The stone pyramids and buildings at Teotihuacán date from about 100 BCE, and they lie outside Mexico City a short ride in Masaaki’s car through frightening traffic. (Bigger vehicles have de facto right of way, he explained, so drivers of small passenger cars like his had to drive especially aggressively. From the back seat it was pretty hair-raising.)

Teotihuacán was at one time the largest city in the Americas; today it’s a ghostly area with crumbled and half-crumbled buildings and some of the largest pyramids in the western hemisphere. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and although Wikipedia says it’s the “most visited archeological site in Mexico”, there were hardly any other people there. Maybe it was too late in the afternoon for other tourists. It was nice to have it all to ourselves.

On the walk up from the parking lot there are plenty of shops (where we bought drinks) and people trying to sell various trinkets and toys to us. They knew that my friends were Japanese just by looking at them and spewed their hopeful sales pitches in both English and Japanese. (One guy seemed to think Masayo was Latina though; when Spanish didn’t catch her attention, he tried French. I laughed and told him to try Japanese. He did, but alas got no sale.)

Suddenly there before us stood the largest pyramid at Teotihuacán: the Pyramid of the Sun. The great grey stone behemoth had steps leading up to the top, but they seemed too numerous to actually climb.

So of course, we climbed them, all the way to the top.

The top of Pyramid of the Sun is flat so you can walk around and take in the whole of Teotihuacán. The views are pretty stunning: from the apex you look out over lesser pyramids (like the Pyramid of the Moon), the extensive ruins that are clear evidence of a large and carefully planned and well-built city, and the vast fields that extend to distant mountains on the horizon. (I got “Mountains Of The Moon” by Grateful Dead in my head for the entire time.)

The Avenue of the Dead

We then walked down the entire Avenue of the Dead, a long path lined with buildings that the later Aztecs presumed were tombs (but were not, so the name of the road is more melodramatic than it should be). There were extensive buildings, walls, and tiny tunnels; it reminded me a lot of Sukhothai in Thailand.

It was very quiet at Teotihuacán in the late afternoon with nobody else around. Sometimes a fly or other creature would buzz briefly around my head, and the faint murmur accentuated the peaceful desolation surrounding me, giving it a natural, ageless but decayed quality.

Trip’s end: Back in the U.S.A.

From there we had one more night in our hotel room, and then headed back to the US the next day. The immigration staff at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport gave Masayo some major hassle and we missed our connecting flight, but finally we made it home.

Looking back on our two weeks in Mexico, I can say that I have rarely felt a sense of cheerful happiness and humanity anywhere. The places I visited in Mexico – Valenciana, Guanajuato, Mexico City, Teotihuacán – seemed largely unconcerned about the outside world.

They have everything they need right in their own communities. For all the trouble you hear about in Mexico, at heart it’s a proud and satisfied place to be. There’s a good balance of walkable and climbable sights for exercise, and enough cheap delicious food to let you balance your diabetes well.

And if you ever see brains on a menu, eat them!

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