One of the drawbacks of long term travel is that you sometimes forget to be a tourist. When travel becomes your life, not your vacation, the excitement of seeing new places fades a little bit and every new place is just another home town to you, one in which you have to take care of life maintenance. This is especially true when cycle touring. Our city visits become a time to enjoy sitting still, eating well, and being clean between all those sometimes grueling days on the open road.
It is great to treat each new city like home, feeling like we "live" there as soon as we arrive, but we are perhaps depriving ourselves of some of the tourist part of travel that made our previous shorter vacations so enriching. Lewis and I always explore a bit on our own terms, but in some places that's not enough. Mexico City is huge and has so much to offer. We cannot just rely on our own wanderings to find it. After spending our first week here "living" (ie, catching up on internet stuff, updating the budget, doing photo maintenance, working on the bikes, walking around the neighborhood looking for a place to eat, exercising, cooking at home, getting haircuts, going to a bar to see some music on a Friday night, and a bit of laying about the apartment - you know, stuff you would do in your home town - I finally got the notion to actually see some stuff. I curbed my pride and went to the Lonely Planet website and looked at their top suggestions for must-sees in Mexico City. There I found that, well what do you know, there is a lot here that I am interested in! By harnessing Lewis's mapping expertise and my time organizational prowess, next week is scheduled and chock full of museum visits, excursions, bike rides, neighborhood walks and more. We even have a day off in the mix, to do more internetting and relaxing and to tidy up any final bits of life maintenance before it's time to hit the road. I am a visual person so it is a relief to me to have some actions plotted on my calendar. Next week we get to live here AND be tourists. Yay!
Now that I feel some organization in my life, my creative juices are starting to flow. I am visualizing a needle felted bracelet depicting a colorful scene of Guanajuato. I am starting it this evening, and will make a little project pack to have with me through out our touristing next week, so I can work on it in our down time. I am exited to get started!