A week in Mexico City! Part five.

Day six:
All good things must come to an end, and our week in Mexico City was almost over. After all that we had seen and done we were ready for a quiet day. We decided to spend the day in Xochimilco a borrough of Mexico City. Most of Mexico City was built upon lakeland, the whole city was made up by islands and canals, over time the lakes were drained and the canals filled in. Xochimilco is the only part of town where you can still see the canals and their ecosystem, in order to try to preseve them, the area was declared a world heritage site in 1987.

We took the metro to the final station - Xochimilco - from there it was a short walk to the "embarcadero" where we boarded a "traijenera". This is a non-motorized boat, that reminds you of the venezian gondolas.

On Sundays we were told hundreds of families come to be taken around the canals, the boats are fitted with a table and chairs, and you can buy food from other boats along the way.

We were alone in our boat and asked the boatman to give us a two hour trip. We really wanted just a quiet and peaceful day. As we floated along we saw that the islands around us where places where people lived, everybody gets around by boat.

It is a very beautiful and green area, and peaceful, just as we had wished for. One of the islands is called the Island of the Dolls, it is an island where hundreds of dolls hang in the trees:

The story has it that a man called Julian Santana Barrera found a girl drowned there and to pay her respect he put her doll up in a tree. Later he kept putting up dolls that he found until his death in 2001. The place turned into a tourist attraction and visitors bring more dolls.It is a very strange and sad sight, quite scary.

We were happy to move on! Further ahead we met a boat with "mariachis"playing for tourists in another boat.

We were quite impressed with the inhabitants that we saw moving from one island to the other standing up in the small boats. We however after two hours were ready to get back on dry land, We found a charming place close by to have lunch.

  

We headed back to downtown, and just had time to drop by the exhibition by Yoko Ono at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance.

It was a great exhibition, especially strong for calling the attention to the abuse so many women suffer daily in Mexico City.

We had only one day left of our week before heading home. We spent it shopping! Close by our hotel we found a space dedicated to Mexican design - just our kind of thing:

The last picture from our trip is from one of the streets as we were walking back to our hotel:

Sort of sums it all up; Catrina, the pink and white taxi, the bar...Mexico City turned out to be everything I had wished for and much more. It was a great place to celebrate my birthday!