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Some Mexicans believe that if, at the stroke of the New Year, you are wearing red underwear, you will be lucky in love. And if you are wearing yellow, you will be lucky financially. For some reason they don't seem to sell red and yellow striped models. Some people may want to double up tonight and wear both. Happy New Year to all.
Bar La Ópera, in the centro histórico on the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Filomeno Mata, has been written up in every guidebook about Mexico City for as long as anyone can remember. So although most of its customers are Mexican, it is also a de rigueur stop on the tourist itinerary for any foreigner who gets thirsty in that neighborhood. It was built at the end of the 19th century, a time when Mexico's strongest foreign influence was not the United States, but France. Hence, as you can perhaps tell from the wall and ceiling adornments in the photo, it is our closest answer to a Parisian restaurant from the Belle Epoque.
On the enormous ground floor of the Pastelería Ideal bakery on Calle 16 de Septiembre in the centro histórico, there's an overwhelming selection of everything sweet that could possibly emerge from an oven: cakes, rolls, cookies, doughnuts, pastries and muffins. The smell of sugar is so overpowering that it alone could put a diabetic to the hospital. But if you follow your nose up a flight of stairs, you'll find a veritable museum of cake.
Six- and seven-tier wedding cakes, with green, blue or peach-colored icing. Cakes that weigh 240 pounds, can be divided into 1,100 portions and cost over a thousand dollars. Cakes that sport spurting, functioning fountains. Cakes that serve as immense platforms, atop which are staircases comprised of six progressively smaller cakes.
There's a section of white wedding cakes, in the midst of which you feel as if you were in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg after a snowstorm.
A few days after a notable earthquake in 1999 I visited the Ideal and asked if any of the cakes had fallen. "No," the woman at the cash register told me. "They just danced a little."
Perhaps because I am from New York I associate Christmas with cold weather and the possibility of snow. But in temperate climates, Christmas has to make itself manifest in more subtle ways.
OK, maybe subtle isn't quite the appropriate word. Would you be embarrassed to drive around with these reindeer antlers attached to your windows? The city is crawling with them.
How about "Spider Claus?"
This is perhaps not precisely a manifestation of the holiday that is upon us. But the Christian message struck me as entirely appropriate.
In Luis Buñuel's classic about street children, Los Olvidados, there is a scene filmed on the Eje Central, a boulevard which was known at that time (1950) as San Juan de Letrán. Some may remember that there is a brief view of this marquee, of a movie theatre called the Cine Teresa.
Today it's a porno theatre. Perhaps appropriately, the name of the closest street is Delicias, and on the corner there is a doctor who will treat you for venereal diseases. The day I shot this photo, the bill included a double feature of Lust and Take it in the Throat. The place has such a seedy appearance that even I (with a customarily high tolerance for seed) have not gone in there. If anyone has had an experience in the Teresa, please post a comment.
