Madre y Padre come to visit

It's been almost a month since Madre y Padre came to visit me in Mexico City, but it still deserves a dignified mention on my blog. My parents stayed at an excellente bed & breakfast, the Red Tree House, just south of Parque Mexico and about a 15 minute walk from my apartment. Mornings started with a delicious breakfast (I know, I was there eating all the pan dulce), and evenings ended with a wine happy hour and, if he had the better half of a glass, my dad serenading the room on the piano.

The first afternoon they arrived, I took them on a walking tour of Roma and Condesa and to all the pretty parks in the neighborhood. At the last park, my dad admitted that his back had been killing him and that he can't walk for extended periods like that. Oops. On Sunday, we headed up to the Chapultepec Castle (where Matt proposed, how darling), then over to the beloved Anthropology and History Museum, where we skipped lunch and slammed chile-covered peanuts instead. At night we had a super fancy dinner (at a restaurant that was so fancy I'll never get to return) to celebrate John & Gretch's 29th wedding anniversary. Also darling.

Monday we took a road trip to Tepotzlan, in the state of Morelos, which was pleasantly free of DF crowds and angsty groups of adolescent students. Despite complaining of back pain earlier in the trip, my dad bested my mom and I throughout a steep, hour-long hike up to an Aztec pyramid. Fortunately he reminded us on various occassions, lest we forget :) After my parents devored a giant slab of salty cecina meat (pork? beef?), and I a soggy enchilada disappointment, we caught a coach bus back to DF and took a proper siesta. In the evening, the padres treated my friends to an evening of tacos and beer, and Lord help us, the Browns were playing.

Tuesday began with my parents waiting on me as I interviewed a source for a freelance story, then we headed to the Pachuca street market, where fruits, veggies, flowers and spongy cow stomach tissue are deliciously displayed. Next stop: Centro Histórico. Unfortunately, the grandeur of the Zócalo plaza and the billowing Mexican flag had been put aside for endless production equipment, which I later found out was for a crazy light show to celebrate the centennial of the start of the Mexican revolution. We passed through a labrynth of security to get to Mexico's Bicentennial Museum (this time for Mexican independence), which offered a very interesting but very long foray into Mexican history.

We put off lunch to have an early dinner at one of my favorite places to eat, whose name I can never remember. In Mexico, most restaurants have lunch menus, where you can get soup, rice, a main dish and dessert, plus fruit water, for 40 pesos. This place costs 85 pesos, but is infinitely more fancy. On Wednesday, the padres last day in DF, we headed south to Coyoacán. To my delight (I swear I didn't plan it) we had lunch at a vegetarian sidewalk café then checked out the Casa Azul, where Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera lived and got all Communist on each other. A walk through Coyoacán's historic little plaza ended with a mountain of pistachio ice cream for all. Qué rico.

Our last supper, if you will, was at the Taco Ladies, the infamous sidewalk eatery where the tables and chairs are plastic and foldable and the roof is a plastic tarp strung over a plastic tube framework. They actually serve quesadillas on their portable stove, but they're known universally as the Taco Ladies. And my, do they make a mean tortilla.