If you follow my blog regularly, you may have realized that I have a penchant for the journey aspect of travel — all the things you see and experience while moving from one point to another. The points might be what have attracted me to a place, but I love the discovery — self or cultural — that occurs in the process of getting there.

The internet is saturated with short travel videos that focus on the said points, many of them full of beautiful image after beautiful image, many of them in time lapse form. But when it comes to actual travel, how honest are these videos? So much of travel is the movement; the in betweens are often the meat of it.

One of the first things that struck me about this video was how much watching it felt like travel feels for me. Sometimes it’s sublime moments in beautiful famous places, but much of it is exploring a new place propelled by my own feet and the unique people you meet along the way and sometimes being crowded in a boat with other tourists who signed up for the same thing and adjusting to another country’s way of moving about and looking at the world through a dirty window and seeing it for what it is, but still finding beauty in it and in the process of moving.

And then the last stretch, that bittersweet, wistful, exalted arrival at home; not always choreographed to such gorgeous melodies in the background, but a gorgeous moment, nevertheless.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

One overcast afternoon in Mexico City, I took to the streets of Colonia Condesa armed with a small camera and backed up by posse of creative people who are as passionate about the D.F. as I am. We did what I love doing independently; we walked all over the neighborhood aimlessly, taking pictures of everything.

I was with the group I’d spent the day with at the art school while they worked on their mural. It was an awesome experience to walk around with people who enjoyed making regular stops to take pictures and we had six sets of eyes to pick up all the details of the neighborhood.

Condesa is one of Mexico City’s more famous colonias. It’s another one of the Barrios Mágicos and it’s known for being a trendy part of town. But like the rest of the D.F., you can always find a bit of grittiness and a few quirks in the mix:

A flower stall at busy intersection.

More flowers for sale.

ECOBICI, Mexico City’s bike sharing program.

Pretty tiles in cracked wall.

A restaurant waiting for its dinnertime crowd.

The “Love Ambulance”.

Creative wheat paste advertisements for a website that provides guides to the city. I identify with the woman in the upper left hand corner who has springs where her feet should be.

Separate bins for compost and regular waste in Parque Mexico. A friend from Mexico tells me that people don’t pay attention to this and throw their trash into any bin, but I like the effort and the potential it has.

The art deco street signs in Condesa are charming.

The Lindberg Theater in Parque Mexico being used for skating and recreation.

A building uniquely decorated with globe shaped light fixtures.

The Condesa branch of a Mexico City bookstore called El Pendulo. The Polanco branch is the most famous, but this one is also wonderful.

Of course once inside El Pendulo, I gravitated towards this.

Really great street art painted onto a piece of paper and attached to a post. Sorry if this scared you as you were scrolling down!

More street art. I like the way whoever did it took advantage of an already deep red wall to make something simple and vivid.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

Water is often on my mind when I travel. I’m not talking about beaches and waterfalls and pretty lakes, but about water in the everyday practical sense. Essentially, water is always more of an issue abroad than it is when I am at home in San Francisco.

There’s the fact that in so many places around the world, you cannot drink water from the tap. In Ghana, if we want to drink tap water, we have to boil it and then put it through a water filter. On other trips, my reusable water bottle that I fill up with tap water when I’m at home has to be replaced by day after day of bottled water from corner stores.

The hostel I stay at in Oaxaca, a city that has issues with water shortages, limits the time hot water is available to two hours in the morning and two hours at night to curb water usage. In Bolivia, so many of the low budget places I stayed at claimed to have 24 hour hot water but often really only had a trickle of lukewarm water that quickly went cold. As I was there in the middle of their winter in some of the highest altitude destinations in the world, this meant that I often skipped the cold showers because it wasn’t worth it.

When I was recently in Namibia, I stayed at a homestay for a couple nights and there was no hot water coming from the taps and the shower head didn’t work. To take warm showers, we boiled hot water and combined it with cold water in bucket and used that to rinse off.

Even in Western Europe, where clean and heated water is widely available, water comes to mind because of the prevalence of dual flush toilets. It demonstrates that there is generally more thought put into the wastefulness of using fresh water to flush waste down the toilet than where I live.

More and more, when I come home, I think about how the way we consume water in the U.S. differs from many other places around the world. It’s a kind of availability and usage that is largely taken for granted. And this is the case even where I live, a state that’s at a constant risk for drought.

As I write this, I am drinking a glass of fresh water from the tap made even tastier and cleaner by putting it through a filter. I have to walk only a few steps to refill my glass. I take a warm shower daily with plenty of water pressure and without having to wait very long for the water to heat up.

But last Friday, for a short period of time, this was not the case. I had come home from work, relaxed a little bit, and wanted to take a quick shower before meeting up with a friend later in the evening. In the bathroom, I turned on the shower and moments later, the water stopped.

I tried the sink faucet and just a little water came out before it stopped as well. I was frustrated. But couldn’t continue to be irritated as I thought about how the problem was likely to be very temporary and the whole issue I was facing could be stamped with the hashtag, #firstworldproblems. If I was in another part of the world, I’d have given up on the idea of taking a shower a lot more quickly.

It wasn’t too long until the water partially came back on. And it kept running through my mind how in some places, even the quick shower I took could be seen as something frivolous, even with just the tiny stream of water that was coming out. How crazy is it that on a global scale, something as fundamental as access to clean water can be considered a luxury?

This is the thing about travel, if you allow yourself to travel to certain places in a certain way, you will often be confronted with your position of privilege, even if you think you are doing things on the cheap. Perhaps especially if you are doing things cheaply. And it can make returning to your first world home more uncomfortable when things that once seemed commonplace now challenge you to acknowledge your prior ignorant bliss.

Maybe that’s reason enough for some people to avoid travel, but personally, I feel that I should take the opportunity to see the reality of the world when it presents itself. I want what I see to make me hold myself more accountable. I want it to push me to make changes in whatever little ways I can. And I know that the different realities of the world are always there, whether or not they’re right in front of me.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

On paper, the size and population of Mexico City can seem overwhelming. But aside from when I’m downtown or using the busy metro system, it often surprises me how the city doesn’t feel as populated or massive as it really is.

There are 16 boroughs in Mexico City, and within each borough are several neighborhoods. Some of the boroughs like Coyoacán and Xochimilco used to be separate towns that were swallowed up by the city over time.

While Mexico City as a whole seems to revolve around the historical center, more than other cities I’ve visited, the individual neighborhoods tend to have their own distinct character and vivacious centers. To me, this makes Mexico City feel more like a unified collection of towns rather than the big sprawling mass that it is.

In 2011, Mexico City decided to designate 21 of the most charming and historical neighborhoods as  “Barrios Magicos” (Magical Neighborhoods). Unsurprisingly, as a visitor to Mexico City, I’ve spent the bulk of my time in places that are on that list. Here are some everyday images from two of them, Roma and Coyoacán (and a few more from just outside):

An old bus turned in to public art parked outside a square in Roma.

Beautiful architecture in Roma.

A street in Coyoacán, not far from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul.

The area around the central plazas of Coyoacán can be lively at night. It was a rainy night, but there were several vendors, plenty of people out, and live music under a tent in one of the plazas.

I love the joy in this photo. And the churros were delicious.

During the day I spent at CenArt, we picked up tortas for lunch in a charming neighborhood just outside Coyoacán. The flowers above and the following pictures were taken there.

Etched into a sidewalk. It made me a little wistful about my time in Cuba when I saw it.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a friend from the States who was in Mexico City at the same time as me. She was there with a small art class and they were kind enough to let me tag along for one day of their mural painting.

The wall space they were provided with was located at CenArt, a colorful multidisciplinary art and education center in the Coyoacan borough of Mexico City. Painting is not a medium I specialize in, but I did get to put in a few strokes of light blue for the sky. I really enjoyed being in that environment for the day, surrounded by creative people in such an artistic space:

Really great art work on display on display in one of the lobbies.

Even the workshop space looked so artistic.

A work in progress.

A little garden made with recycled scraps.

Their almost finished mural against a backdrop of two very colorful buildings.

The resident cat relaxing in the bushes.

Centro Nacional de las Artes (CenArt)
Avenida Rio Churubusco 79
Colonia Country Club
Coyoacán, 04220
Ciudad de México

Visit their website for information on performances and exhibitions.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a typical day for me in Mexico City. I’m walking around in the afternoon summer downpour and I’m lost. Along the way, I stop to ask anyone who doesn’t look like they’re in a hurry for directions. I eventually find the building I’m looking for with the help of two Mexico City transplants, a couple originally from the Midwest of the United States.

I’ve come to this building because of a recommendation from a new friend I made in Oaxaca. Originally from New York, she is now a teacher at an international school and she’s given me the contact info of her masseuse in Mexico City. A ninety minute massage is a fraction of what it would cost me at home. After over three weeks of carrying my too-heavy backpack and sleeping in hostel beds of varying quality, it’s an opportunity I don’t want to pass up.

I use the building’s phone system to dial the apartment number I have written down for the masseuse. I try again and again, but no one answers. Finally, a man walking out of the building holds the door open and lets me in. I go up to the apartment and knock on the door. No one is there.

Next door, a group of people exit an apartment. “Who are you looking for?” one of them asks me. She tells me she is not sure who who lives there, as she has just recently moved into the building. “Wait here,” she says. “We’re going to the store, we’ll be right back.” Confused, I agree to wait.

The group returns with refreshments and they proceed to invite me to join them. I’m hesitant at first, but my intuition tells me it’s okay. And it is.

They are a fun trio of mid to late twenty somethings. Two of them are coworkers at a tech company and another is the cousin of the woman who lives there. They are unwinding on Friday afternoon before they go out later that night to a Cuban club. It’s a happy hour of sorts. More friends and family come in and out the apartment and I am introduced, no big deal that there’s a random stranger hanging out.

They want to know if I like Mexican music. They pull up Los Tigres del Norte on iTunes so I can hear a bit of norteno music while we chat about our lives and work and San Francisco and Mexico City and Colonia Roma and how neighborhoods and cities evolve.

Eventually we find the person and the apartment I was looking for. I’d written the apartment number down wrong. I reschedule for the following morning with the masseuse, silently grateful about the great evening my mix up has led to.

——————————————————

It’s hard to believe that a solid friendship could evolve from a brief encounter on a crowded Mexico City Metro car, but in summer 2010, that’s what happened.

It was my first full day in Mexico City and I was with two New Zealanders from my hostel and we weren’t quite sure where we were going. A kind soul saw us looking confused and stepped in to help us out. Along with some exceptionally friendly locals I’d met the night before at the hostel, he set the tone for my exploration of a Mexico City that was so different from what you tend to see in the headlines.

We are both travelers, musicians, and fans of each other’s cities. We became friends and kept in touch and our paths have crossed a few more times in both Mexico City and San Francisco since that initial introduction on the metro. The day after the apartment gathering, we met up again to go to a memorial event for the grandmother of one of his friends.

The idea of attending the event sounded preposterous at first, but he assured me that it was completely fine for me to go along. And again, it was no big deal to be an unmistakable stranger at this family function.

It’s a yearly party they host to celebrate the life of a family matriarch who’s passed on, around the birthday of her patron saint. Apparently in her day, she was a beautiful and social woman, so they like to commemorate her in this way.

They are musical family, and they began by performing songs along with some members of local orchestra that plays traditional Mexican songs. There was a short mass and more music and a sit down lunch underneath a canopy to protect us from the daily summer storm.  Some of the kids practiced their English with me, some with a bit of encouragement from their parents while others were more outgoing.

One of the adults wanted to know if it was strange for me to travel in Mexico for a length of time and constantly hear people speaking Spanish around me. I explained that in California, it’s typical to hear many different languages being spoken and Spanish is one of the most common. And it’s just an aspect of travel that you get eventually get used to.

The strangeness of being surrounded by foreign language hadn’t occurred to me before they asked. What really struck me was the feeling that there was something extraordinary in how ordinary it felt to be there; a stray traveler taken in for the afternoon by a lovely family of strangers.

——————————————————

I read extreme stories reporting from Mexico City almost daily. There doesn’t seem to be a place for the everyday happenings of the city’s 21 million people in that kind of forum. I may have only encountered a miniscule portion of those people, but time after time, I’ve seen a kind of hospitality that you don’t find everywhere, a subtle kindness that’s almost mind boggling in its genuineness. In the vast range of things that Mexico City is, the people I’ve encountered there are a large part of why it shines so brightly amongst my various virtual pins on the globe.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

In addition to wanting to explore a new colonia, I decided to base myself in the Roma-Condesa area for a few days so I could be just a little closer to Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. On my first full day back in the D.F., I took a long and self-misguided walk to the park, and eventually found it with a lot of help from kind people along the way.

Chapultepec is akin to Central Park; it’s a huge tree-filled refuge from the city that houses various sights of interest and cultural institutions. One the most notable of them is the Museo Nacional de Antropologia. If you’ve been following my Mexico posts, you know that I have a keen interest in Mexico’s history and culture. This museum was like a culmination of all the places and stories I’d examined thus far plus an introduction to parts of Mexico and its history that I have yet to explore.

I didn’t get to spend too much time in the park, but I did enjoy my walk in on my way to the museum and seeing more unexpected sides of Mexico City.

A monument to the Ninoes Heroes, six teenage soldiers who died defending the castle in Chapultepec during the Mexican-American War.

The base of a large sculpture and fountain in the courtyard of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia.  It’s called “El Paraguas” and resembles a giant ornate umbrella that doesn’t protect you from the rain.

This is kind of like a plea to be remembered. Beautiful and applicable for the setting, but at the same time it’s sad to think about how what has been forced out of existence by oppression often gets reduced to a museum exhibit.

A hologram wall depicting faces of people or their skulls depending on where you’re standing. A poignant reminder of our similarities beneath the surface.

A model of Teotihuacan’s Temple of Quetzalcoatl.

A map of Tenochtitlan, i.e., what the area Mexico City encompasses looked like before the Spanish arrived and eventually drained the lake.

An Olmec head. These are incredible. In addition to being enormous, these heads are also known for their features which puzzle people because they more closely resemble African or Pacific Islander features than those of Mexico’s indigenous populations.

Portraits and stories of indigenous people of Mexico. I really like the way this was presented.

In one part of the museum, they use mannequins and sets to present life size depictions of culture in different parts of Mexico. Pictured here is Volador from the state of Veracruz. Apparently if you are lucky, there are certain times when the museum holds live performances of the Danza de los Voladores.

Beads, alebrijes and other crafts from the state of Oaxaca.

An intricate Tree of Life sculpture.

Tip: The Museo Nacional de Antropologia is extensive, so if you want to visit it, I recommend setting aside a whole day for it and another separate day for Chapultepec park.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

Oaxaca de Juarez wanes slowly as you leave overland. Centro is the core and the ideal. It’s not always the reality of the city, but it encapsulates the essence of it. When you enter the city beyond and the outskirts, the bright colonial houses of Centro fade into buildings that cosmetically tend to be more functional than fancy.

Spaces begin grow wider as you approach the countryside. On the road to Mexico City, beyond Oaxaca city’s reach are crop-covered rolling hills, brilliantly green against the gray wet summer sky that feeds them.

At some point, we reach a mythical looking place where long columns of cacti rise from the mountains. Interspersed with desert brush plants, they jut out of the steep slopes from the bases of the mountains to the summits. I love these kind of travel moments when unplanned, you encounter something so uniquely beautiful.

We arrive in Mexico City in the thick of the rush hour traffic. After procuring an authorized taxi ride, there is more traffic, as well as the driver getting lost on the tricky one way streets that lead to my destination.

I’ve had great experiences staying in hostels in Mexico City’s Centro and Coyoacan neighborhoods, but want to try out a different area this time. I’ve found a hostel in Colonia Roma and I’ve made a reservation through their website.

As a backpacker with flashpacker tendencies, something I enjoy about Mexico are the excellent hostels for a great value. Unfortunately, I quickly find out that for about the same price as the good places, Hostel 333 does not fit into that category. When I arrive, they tell me the bed in the room I’d reserved and received confirmation for is not available.

All they have available for the first night is a creaky top bunk in a too-small six bed dorm room. They’ve had the audacity to make it a seven person room by letting someone sleep on a foldable mattress on the floor which takes up any bit of extra space in the room and partially blocks the doorway. It’s so packed that I’m not sure how someone could clean it, even if they wanted to. The room is full of people who’ve been there for awhile and have clearly become accustomed to living in their own filth of used dishes and dirty underwear. Essentially, it’s the kind of hostel that gives hosteling a bad name. I thought I’d learned how to avoid places like this, but I guess I can’t win ‘em all.

Fortunately, I’ve got no time to wallow in irritation and I have a great way to temporarily get out of the room. I have plans and I’m late. I’m meeting a friend I made in Oaxaca in summer 2010 whose affinity for Mexico has also brought her back to the country. This time, she is with a class from her school in Oregon, a small awesome group of women who are in the midst of studying Mexican muralism and creating their own mural at a Mexico City university.

I go just a couple blocks over to meet them at the Pulqueria Insurgentes. Since I’m at a pulqueria, I must try pulque, yet another fermented beverage derived from agave. I go for the passion fruit flavor and it’s brought to me in a silver mug. At the first sip, I’m put off by the unexpectedly slimy texture. Once I’m past that, the drink has a certain wholesomey rustic charm to it. And with a plate of tasty tacos in front of me and good company around me, all is well in Mexico City. Terrible hostel rooms are temporary, but Mexico City’s magic is boundless.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve left Namibia, the second least populated country in the world, and have returned to the second most densely populated city in the United States. I’m back in San Francisco, a little reverse culture shocked and trying to convince my body that it’s 10 hours later than it thinks it is.

Something my jetlagged mind noticed upon my return is that being away has made the endings and beginnings that the changing of years brings feel more palpable than normal. The new year actually feels new. 2012 feels akin to the country I just left, empty and full of possibilities.

So what do I want from 2012? To be honest, I’m just starting to piece that together. But I think the kid in this video has some clues:

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.

Happy holidays! I’m in Swakopmund, Namibia and I’ve just returned to connection to the outside world after spending a few days in Etosha National Park searching for rhinos, lions, zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, ostriches, buffalos, leopards, and elephants. We spotted most of those animals, but most of all we saw springboks (a kind of gazelle) everywhere.

In the desert-covered Namibia, Christmas is during summer, so people take elements of Euro-centric holiday traditions and fuse them with some local flavor. At one of the lodges in Etosha, someone placed a Santa doll on top of a springbok, the closest thing the country has to reindeer.

©2012 Girl, Unstoppable. All Rights Reserved.