Yorch Place

I went to Mexico city this friday, for work reasons, I visited two companies that are our providers of some trade show stuff, they are located in the "colorful" neighborhood Iztapalapa, is one of the dangerous areas of the city, which means, poor, ugly, dirty and more probable to be robbed.

Some members of my family (the kind your grand parents told you are family but you don't see the connection) lived there for a while, then moved to Queretaro, they are the stereotypical chilango in all senses, accent, actions, behavior and so on.

I arrived in cab with both companies, (to their warehouses) both ugly, and since it was my first time there, I wasn't sure the cab leave me in the correct place, but I have to look confident, like "I'm local" confident, in order to avoid being a target of the robbers.

Well my getting to my point, this is a "paper store" (where you can buy pencils, paper and all kind of stuff you need for school) and has a full cage, because they where robbed in several ocassions, it is the first time I see a paper store that had this, I have seen licor stores (24hr stores) that has this, but never a simple paper store with iron bars.

Here is an image of the metropolitan areas of Mexico City and Santiago de Querétaro and the influence area, parts that are not unite to the city but still are dependable of the city, like for shopping, or official paper work.



The darker zones are the metropolitan areas and the clearer are the ones that are influence, in this map I would add Celaya and Salvatierra and the towns between this two and Queretaro, since I know this are also influenced by Santiago de Queretaro.

Mexico City the capital of my beloved country is located in the center of the country in the middle of mountains at 2000m above sea level, but since april 3th it has beaches.

The goverment of the city created artificial beaches with a cost of $200,000usd in order to provide a place to have fun in vacations, the beaches are free to everybody and according to the media 100,000 people has visited them.

The good point is, fun for free, and chilangos that no need to leave the city to go to the beaches, of course is no the same but it's nice.

The bad point, well it is very expensive, $200,000usd in tax money to have the people entertain, I hope the goverment put some stores in there in order to get some money back, or some plan to recover that investment and also made the places self sustainable, or else the beaches are going to be completly destroyed in a few years because of the lack of budget. They should consider to charge a symbolic fee, something like $10.00 pesos per person (less than a dollar) and $5.00 pesos per child. Also some charge for extra services and stuff, like a store with food, a store with beach stuff (t-shirts, balls, sunscreen, and other stuff), rental of towels, everything very affordable in order to help the beaches to stay nice and in good shape.

This wednesday I went to Mexico City, until today, I was working, and went ot "Palacio de los Deportes" (Sports Palace) a building built in 1968 for the olimpic games, from a good distance the building looks impresive, but when you are near, you can see how old it is. Still a cool looking bulding. And another palace to Mexico City, there is the "Palacio de Correos" (Post Palace), "Palacio de Bellas Artes" (Fine Arts Palace), "Palacio de Chapultepec" (Chapultepec's Palace), and so on.

I was there in an expo, two days befor the sports palace was the place where the "Sexual Expo" took place, to bad I wasn't send there at that time!

I never visited the sports palace before in a working issue, always to see concerts and shows, and yesterday (thursday) and today was the Chayanne concert (Chayanne is the guy who danced with Vanessa Williams in "Dance with me") he is more famous in Mexico than in other countries, but still he is huge (but not my kind of music)

So I took photos (of course) of the sports palace and of the hotel I stayed.