A World Away in Mexico: Week 6
With only 2 weeks left in Mexico, I am trying to make the most of my weekends and free time. During the week I have gone to some amazing Mexican restaurants and cafes to try to experience more of the culture surrounding food (also the tacos are addicting). On the weekends I have been traveling around Mexico City doing as much as I can in a day.
This weekend I went to the National Museum of Anthropology with some other people from CIMMYT. On the way there we stopped at a café to have a traditional Mexican breakfast. I had Molletes, which can be compared to a grilled cheese, but it is open faced with beans and meat. At the museum, we had fun wandering around the exhibits and learning more about the history of Mexico. There was the original Aztec Calendar stone (the Stone of the Sun) from the Aztec ruins in Mexico City. There were also historical sculptures, sacrificial stones, and original structures. I really enjoyed learning more about the history of Mexican people and seeing how it influences life in Mexico today. It was also fun to see the artifacts and hear more of the stories that I learned about in history class.
After the museum, we wandered around the Chapultepec park that is in the center of Mexico City. Over 250,000 people visit this park every day, so you can imagine the rush and disorganization. Vendors contribute to this chaos by yelling advertisements for their stalls that line the sidewalks selling crafts, food, candy, and souvenirs. There is also a famous statue called “Alas de la Ciudad”, which means “Wings of the City”. It is a quintessential photo for visitors in Mexico that I definitely had to visit.
My Sunday just as action-packed as my time in Mexico City the day before. I visited 2 markets in Texcoco (the city I am staying in). The first market was in the center of Texcoco, and it was more of a food market. It had fresh produce, candy, spices, and vendors selling cooked food. It was cool to see the different fruits and spices that are so common in Mexico, but barely seen in the US. The second market was different from anything I had ever experienced. It was a jumble of vendors selling everything imaginable, from clothes, to bags, to food, to cooking equipment. It was a maze and went on for what seemed like forever; we walked for about an hour and a half and didn’t even see the end. The street was very narrow and it was a struggle to walk through while trying to avoid motorcyclists, food carts, and a mass of people. It was the picture of chaos
After the market, the other World Food Prize intern, Indira, and I met up with another girl our age who lives at CIMMYT. She was letting us use her kitchen to bake because our room only has a microwave, and that wouldn’t make a very good cake. Baking is one of my favorite things to do in the summer, so I was seriously struggling with not having an oven. We made a chocolate cake that, because of all the anticipation (and our baking skills), tasted amazing. Baking was a much-needed stress reliever after our adventures in Mexico City and the Texcoco Market.
Back at the lab, this week we finally got to test the tortilla and nixtamal samples we collected from the tortillerias a few weeks ago. The samples needed to be freeze-dried and then stored in a “cold room” (freezer) to get rid of any moisture before we could test them. After milling the samples and weighing them, we needed to adjust the moisture again. The aflatoxin results we got were lower than the results for the whole grain, which was good because that means nixtamalization (the process of cooking corn in calcium oxide to use in making tortillas) was working to remove some of the aflatoxins.
Next week a new shipment of maize samples is arriving at CIMMYT which will keep me busy until the end of my internship in Mexico.
Molly
