Topic - Mexico City

Cold weather in the temperate areas of central Mexico comes and goes throughout the winter months in a series of “fronts” that bring icy gusts and early frosts for a few days at a time. Then it warms up for some days before the next numbered front makes its way down from the U.S. — […]

A weekend walk from the Palacio de Bellas Artes to the Zócalo in Mexico City has become easier as Av. Madero is has been closed to vehicles. The decision came somewhat out of the blue, although with the levels of traffic downtown it’s improbable that advance warning would have led  motorists to queue up for “one […]

The Mexico City government got a head start celebrating the bicentennial anniversary (2010) of Mexico’s Independence with the launch of a new fleet of buses serving Paseo de la Reforma, the thoroughfare that runs right through the capital’s main tourist areas.  The 173 new buses replace more than 300 old buses, most of them the green and white […]

Thanks to catalytic converters, unleaded fuel, ozone monitoring and restrictions on dirty industry, air pollution in Mexico City is much less than it was in the early 1990s. Noise pollution, however, has survived the endeavors of planners to improve environmental conditions in one of the world’s largest cities.
The birds - of which there are a considerably large number […]

Downtown Mexico City is humming again - the museums and shops are all open, the restaurants are back in full swing, and the streets running off the Zocalo are teeming with the usual weekend crowds.
Some people are still taking the precaution of wearing face masks, but the city center now appears much as it did […]

A fair rule about torn banknotes is that if you have more than half of the note, then it’s valid, but less than half isn’t. In Mexico merchants of all kinds will reject banknotes that have any part missing, and many will refuse to receive bills that are torn in any way, taped together, or […]

One of the things that went out the window with the modernization of Mexico was stifling censorship of the airwaves, particularly television. For things like news, this is no doubt a good thing (although one would be hard-pressed to show that people are any better informed now than they were, say, 30 years ago).
One genre that […]

With the change in the weather come the coughs, colds and sneezes which are impossible to dodge when you live in a city of 20 million.
The capital’s army of independent  vendors are quick to catch on to the pecuniary opportunity afforded by the suffering, adding individual packets of Kleenex - two for the price of […]

Rush hour traffic in Mexico City has reached the point of saturation. Gone are the days of boasting about this great little side road that brings you out just past the traffic light that’s causing the jam. The number of cars that come streaming out of all these so-called short-cuts and rejoining the main flow […]

Some mistakes among foreign speakers of Spanish are caused by the misuse of gender.
As a rule, feminine words end in an ‘a’ and masculine words in an ‘o’, and so do corresponding adjectives. But there are a number of exceptions, a common one being  “el problema,” which is masculine. It’s not unusual to hear foreigners use […]