Mexico City, Day One

Today was nice and relaxed. Yesterday I felt the start of a cold coming on, which happens a lot when I travel and when I change temperatures rapidly. And since I went from snow on the ground to t-shirt weather I wasn't surprised when I woke up with a sore throat and head cold. But a cough drop, a hot shower and a packet of kleenex later and all was well. Shelly made waffles for breakfast, and we went for a walk in her neighborhood. It's very upscale, and her apartment complex has a little garden and a pool. The streets all have pretty trees and cars that zip along without looking where they're going. After our walk we came home and she and Alan (her husband) had "Christmas" via webcam with her family in NY. They're a pretty far flung bunch and today was the first opportunity they had to get a group together. But it worked out perfect as I hadn't given Shelly my Christmas gift either. I got her a box set of Miyazaki movies, an exclusive at Borders. It had Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicca, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. She loved it. (Yay! and she didn't have any of the movies before that.) Then we went and walked to the huge supermarket, aptly named Gigante. We picked up food for the week while Shelly tried to orient me to her neighborhood. (It failed.) I did learn what to look for for the SITO taxis though. Those are the regulated "safe" taxis. Libre taxis, which are typically cute green and white vw bugs are apparently just an invitation to getting mugged, assaulted and/or kidnapped. Good to know. We came home and I was starting to feel the high altitude. We lazed around and watched Lucha Libre or Mexican masked wrestling. First we watched Mini-Lucha Libre, which is "small person" wrestling. Alan explained to me that most of the small wrestlers are made up to look like popular wrestlers, We watched Little Son of Satan wrestle Metaliquina (little metal man). Then we watched the Pequina Ultimate Dragon (little ultimate dragon) wrestle Mini Mr. Halloween. It was more entertaining then I thought it would be. The large wrestlers were fun too, they're really acrobatic and their costumes are quite extreme. I played a bit of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and then took a nap. Dinner is served late in Mexico City, and we'd decided to go out. Dinner hour doesn't start until 8:30-9:00. We tried to go to a place Shelly had heard about that is kind of fancy, but it was closed. I wore "nice" shoes that ripped up the back of my foot so bad it bled. So we ended up going to a sports bar type place called "Papa Bill's" I had a really good chicken fajitas. I ordered that because was the only thing I could read on the menu, LOL. But I was very happy with it. The waiters were good, and I was amused by the top hats they all wore. Alan was disappointed they didn't have them for sale in their merchandise section. It was 11:00 by the time we were done, and to save my poor bloody foot we took a cab home. (a SITOS not a Libre) Now, even though I napped earlier I'm exhausted and am going to bed. Tomorrow we're going to go to a open air art market. I'm wearing my sneakers!

Much Better!

I had a bit of a personal issue regarding a convention I'm going to later in the year. I won't go into details, but I'm glad I have good friends. They all came through to distract me and keep me entertained while it worked itself out. Well, I donated over 9000 grains of rice (before a power outage lost my count! Thank you Hyminia), went through the archives of I can has cheeseburger and Cute Overload (thank you Ginny_t). I paid off the last of my car loan on Friday, and to celebrate my current 100% debt-free status, and to further destract me, I decided to spend money on something completely frivolous and get a DS lite. Of course once I decided that every DS lite in the cny area was immediately snatched up. I spent most of Saturday looking for one. I went to 3 gamestop stores (each one claimed the other had one), an EB Games, Target, and Best Buy with no luck. Then I called Walmart, K-Mart, Circut City and a couple of local stores. =/ No one had one. Then Sunday, I went to BJ's wholesale for something else and there it was, a DS lite bundle that came with two games. The games look pretty stupid, and the only color they had was pink, but I got one! I went back to gamestop and bought a Phoniex Wright game, Elite Beat Angels, Trace Memory and a Spanish Coach game. Then I hit up some craft stores while it was charging. I bought myself a soap-making kit, despite not needing yet another craft to do and played with some shrinky-dinks. I forgot how much fun those are. I'm going to get some more sheets. My cellphone doesn't have a cellphone charm thing, but the DS lite does. Maybe I'll make some zodiac charms to hang off it out of the shrinky-dinks. After it was done charging I played through Trace Memory in one sitting. I'm terrible at games, terrible, so this means it was a pretty easy game. But I enjoyed it and liked the story. Today I read some manga and then went to my friend Margaret's house. We had a good dinner, hung out and watched some anime.