Always Stay a Little Cautious

Our last day. At 4:45 PM, we’ve booked a taxi to take us to the airport. Our flight is at 8:45 PM. You’re supposed to be at the airport three hours before departure, and since you can never be too sure about traffic, we’re heading out early. We’d like to keep our room until it’s time to leave. Unfortunately, we had to pay for a whole extra night for that... no discounts, sadly. We had read about a market called Tepito, known as the mother of all street markets. It sounded promising, so off we went. The market wasn’t fully up and running yet, so we wandered around a bit. After a while, we noticed there were an unbelievable number of police officers around. Seriously, there were police buses every ten meters along the road... heavily armed. Hmm, we thought it would be wise to ask why. The police said, “Peligrosa.” We know that word. So, the area was indeed very dangerous, and there had been a lot of assaults here. We asked the police to arrange a safe taxi for us so we could get to safer areas :) If you want a good overview of what’s happening in the city over the weekend, it’s worth picking up the magazine Tiempo Libre. It only costs 9 pesos. Just be prepared to be good at Spanish, as there’s a lot of text. It’s funny how shop names are formed here. They just add the letters “ria” to nouns. Carne means meat, so carnicería is a butcher. Dulce means sweet, so a candy store becomes dulcería. Libra means book, and librería is a bookstore.