Day 2 – Public Transportation – Friend or Foe?

Day 2

We eat breakfast at a café right next door to the hotel, when we had been here in 2009, this café served yogurt and granola.  They don’t anymore and I ate a cheesecakey muffin and fruit for breakfast and David had chilaquiles which I ate a good portion of also.  Chilaquiles are basically delicious nachos with beans, sour cream and salsa verde for breakfast.  I guess its usually made with yesterday’s tortillas, fried.  Yum! We definitely have to find some alternative breakfast options, though.

Our goal for the day – find the place where we are supposed to register for classes.  Since we didn’t even know the right day for registration, we are sure to make some mistakes finding the location.  To play it safe, we decide a trial run is called for.

We decide to take the Metrobus.  We stumble around the ticket machine, trying to buy tickets.  We end up walking away with $5 credit still in the machine and a ticket with no value.  As we try to enter through the gate (kind of like on a subway, but to get to a bus platform) our ticket won’t work.  We try a few more times, until the bus agent guy pulls us over to the machine and adds the fare onto our card.  Ok, now we successfully enter through the gate.

The MertoBus is very crowded.  There are designated stops and a lane for buses only, so it moves faster than Muni, everything moves faster than Muni.  Each time the bus stops, people pile on, there is no more room, but they push, and people are really squished.  Some people would hate this, I’m sure.  I certainly don’t like it, but it doesn’t bother me too much.  On the buses and subways, there are designated cars for women and children only.  They’re not as crowded, sweaty or pushy.

The bus stops, it’s the end of the line.  But we haven’t gotten to where we wanted to go.  UNAM is in the south of the city, kind of like where SFSU is in San Francisco.  We get off, because we have to.   Another bus comes, we take that. Then we take a PumaBus, which is the university shuttle.  We get off, we walk and we walk, trying to find CEPE. Eventually we find it and we talk to some folks.  “Yes”, they say, “come back tomorrow.”  We also speak to a woman who has a couple apartments we may want to rent.

We decide on a place called NonSolo for dinner.  It’s on the edge of a plaza with a huge fountain.  We sit at the tables on the sidewalk, this place is hip and romantic.  We order some wine, bruschetta and cannelloni.  It’s all delicious and the ambiance is lovely.  As we finish eating, it starts to sprinkle.  We take our wine inside as it begins to rain harder.  In moments, the outside dining area is whisked away and the rain curtains are drawn.