Personal Narrative: A Trip To Mexico City

The bus driver taking us back to Mexico City from the ruins at Teotihuacan looked skeptical when my girlfriend Margaret, noticing we had missed our stop, told him we wanted off.

We were at a red light near an old hospital, a vacant lot, and a line of frowning men stirring shallow cauldrons of bubbling meat at some food carts. As the doors opened for us, the driver said something in Spanish about how the people who were milling around on the sidewalk out there were going to rob us.

“Verdad?” Margaret asked. He didn’t answer, but I took the open doors as a sign that probably nothing too bad would happen. Surely this driver cared enough about goodness and decency to not let two of his follow humans willingly exit his bus onto a corner that he knew to be truly dangerous, right?

I mean, I wouldn’t say the bus driver and I were great friends exactly, but I’m

Now an outdoor seafood grill doesn’t really qualify as “street food” necessarily, but like I said before, in Mexico City just forget all your other plans and responsibilities and do whatever sounds best in the moment.

We took a seat and I ordered some fish and octopus tostados as waiters carried other people’s meals out from the kitchen. There was all kinds of food, but the plate that really caught my eye was an octopus that got brought out floating in a soupy broth of its own black ink! Talk about a humiliating way to get served up as lunch.

My no-ink octopus tostado was plain and dignified by comparison, but I wasn’t too bothered about that as I watched a lady slurp down her forbidden dark fluid. I wondered if perhaps there are some things that humans aren’t intended to taste as I picked up my bag full of black magic viper cum. We paid our cuenta and Margaret and I headed to the other food carts at the front of the market where we