Pretty much any time I am out walking around I eventually hear this young girl’s voice in the distance, haunting and slightly ominous. I tried to catch the source for at least a week and finally tracked it down to an ancient steel megaphone bolted to the top of an old truck, slowly cruising up and down each street, the recording of the girl’s pleas repeating over and over. This:

I wondered all sorts of dark thoughts about the possible source, was the truck driver a father, playing a recording of a lost daughter, searching for her each night? Women’s rights are a big issue here recently, perhaps the young girl is pleading for some sort of societal change in the treatment of women?

Or, maybe, just maybe, it’s from a junk metal collector who got tired of repeating his refrain, calling for old appliances and metal, until his throat was closing up, and instead got his 10 year old daughter to record his plea.

Sometimes I assume things are much darker than they turn out to be.

The recording is 20 years old, the girl is 30 now and this mystery recording has spread not only to hundreds of scrap metal collectors in Mexico City but to the rest of the country and down through South America as well.

I will absolutely be listening for her when I head south next month.

And yes, there’s a techno remix.

I’m running out of mystery fruit, this might be the last one.

NOSE – You know that thing where you put potatoes in fruit salad? This smells like that.

TASTE – Pear, it’s a pear, in taste and texture. A very mild pear. It’s not great, very mild and has all these tiny rock hard seeds.

DOES IT GO WITH TAJIN – Actually yeah.

IS IT GOOD – Sorta?

No idea when this one is ripe but the outside is stating to mold so…..

No smell so far, the skin is super odd feeling, slicy slicy time!

Yeap, it’s another kind of passionfruit, I had no idea.

NOSE – Passionfruity.

TASTE – Whoa, waaaaay too tart. Was I supposed to leave it until the mold was everywhere first?

DOES IT GO WITH TAJIN – Oh, shut up.

IS IT GOOD – I dunno, it’s a level of tart approaching a lemon, other flavours are nice but I wouldn’t eat again.

My coffee shop gives out slips of poetry with your caffeine. Usually they lose something when I run them through Google Translate but today’s poem retains some magic.

it is in us
where it happens
the meeting
and it's useless
prepare or wait

This one looks like the very first fruit I tried, the Mamey, but much smaller, it was being sold in a different box so I’m assuming it’s a different fruit.

NOSE – Hmmm, kinda nothing, a bit fruity sorta.

TASTE – No. I may have made a mistake. I’m thinking, hoping, this is not ripe. All I’m getting is a mouthful of tannin. Not edible. The skin was pretty soft when I cut it, softer than you would let a cantaloupe go but yeah, I’m guessing not ripe.

A common theory as to why no Mesoamerican culture invented the wheel is because they didn’t have any pack animal to pull it, cows and donkeys and horses all came from Europe. (FUNFACT: Horse actually evolved in North America first and crossed into Asia before dying out in North America long before humans arrived here).

A obvious side effect of not having the wheel is that your cities tend to use canals rather than streets, originally Mexico City was almost entirely canals

When the Spanish conquered they filled in all the canals with the exception of one small village far to the south, Xochimilco. Today Xochi is the far southeast corner of Mexico City and the only place where the canals survived.

The best part of a trip to Xochi is you get to ride the tram system, it starts where the furthest subway line ends and continues all the way to Xochi.

I arrived hungry and found multiple shops making machetes, gigantic quesadillas, which I have not tried yet, ordered one.

Buuuuuuut linguistic miscommunication happens and I ended up with three… of the gigantic…. quesadillas. I got them to go and ate one in a park nearby and gave the rest away.

I wandered down to the embarcadero and walked along the canals for a while.

I was gonna spend more time in the area but after an hour or so of wandering the past week of 20+kms a day in 30c heat finally caught up with me, all at once. I could not move, my back instantly locked up and I had to sit for 45 minutes, after which I made my way home, slowly, one foot at a time, for two hours. I got home around 5pm, fell into bed and slept 20 hours. I have a tendency to overdo things, not sure if you heard.

I really did not expect to find so many mystery fruits, I have never even seen a picture of this one before.

It kinda looks like some unripe cousin to a pomegranate and when I bought it the skin was nearly as hard. Overnight, however, the skin became more leathery and submits to a firm thumb.

Let’s go to the knife!

I mean… it smells perfectly ripe, I don’t think it’s rotten…

NOSE – A slightly earthy, baked-pear scent.

TASTE – Whoa, texturaly it’s this very odd fudgy, moussey just slightly gooey to the touch, feel. It tastes like earthy, chocolate, pear and almost a hint of umami.

IS IT GOOD – Yeah, it’s pretty odd but tastes really nice.

DOES IT GO WITH TAJIN – Oof, that was a mistake.

FUNFACT: Apparently the first fruit I had, the cantaloupe-sweet potato one, is called a Mamey.

Central de Abasto (CEDA) has been on my must visit list since I was a kid, dreaming about future travel. The last time I was in Mexico City I ran out of time and couldn’t make it as it’s fairly out of the way.

CEDA is simple the most, the biggest, the craziest. It’s the largest market of any kind anywhere in the world, it’s estimated between 1/3rd and half of all food items consumed anywhere in Mexico pass through CEDA at some point.

Numbers!

Size – the market is over 2kms by 2kms long.

Trucks – about 50,000 trucks are present at any given time.

Hours – the market functions 22 hours a day, it closes for cleaning from 8pm to 10pm nightly.

Employees – about 70,000.

Customers – about 300,000 attend the market per day.

The market basically supplies every single food item in Mexico City, from supermarkets to the taco lady on the corner.

This next video is quite boring. To emphasize the magnitude of CEDA I recorded myself walking from just the start of the banana area to the end of the banana area. Each major item has a similar space.

I spent half a day just wandering the market, trying not to get in the way, I walked from the south end all the way to the north but probably saw maybe 5% of the market after walking 10+kms of it.

I shot the following video after two different people told me this was quiet time for the market, it was about 2pm.

The hand trucks are called “diablos”, the guys pushing them are “diableros”.

One of the very best reasons to travel, for me, is to see things and experience things that reset what you thought the limits of things were, to give yourself new frames of reference for things you’ve always known. I was laughed at by market workers more than once for the look of wonder and my mouth hanging open (could have been the hat tho, now that I think of it, it’s not great).

There are taco stands every 50 metres or so in all areas of the market, I picked one in the basement of the beef processing area at random, was the best tacos so far this trip.

I could honestly write pages about the market, it was mind-blowing, they have their own bank, their own police, their own jail, their own mayor, doctors, clinic, dentists. They also have extremely dark, serious issues that I am not the person to expound on.