Taco-rama en la Ciudad de Mexico

Cada vez que viajo a la Ciudad de Mexico, encuentro algo diferente y siempre me sorprende!

OK...so I'm back from about four days in Mexico City. It's really an awesome place. Flying into the city reminds of the approach into LAX in Los Angeles, except the city seems to cover about ten times the area that LA does. Mexico City redefines sprawling. It's chaotic and it's full of surprises. Flew down Monday afternoon for two days of NBTA conferences. I was the opening speaker as well as a panelist at one of the sessions. After two full days of speaking Spanish, my head was ready to explode. It's one thing to learn Spanish as a missionary and talk about the Gospel all day long. It's quite another more than 20 years later trying to talk the language of business without interjecting an invitation to go to church, sing a hymn, or read the Scriptures. Even though it was pretty taxing, I couldn't help but reflect while I was there on how grateful I am for the opportunity that I had to serve as a missionary and to have a learned a language. It's been a blessing in more ways than I could ever describe.

So I stayed at the Hotel Nikko, a Japanese-owned hotel off the Paseo de la Reforma. It was quite Japanese - it was just missing the boss programmed, seat-heated Japanese toilets. It was also very, very close to two of the most awesome little restaurants that I have ever had the pleasure of finding. First, El Farolito, una taqueria. Temecula folks, it puts the Taco Shop to complete and utter shame. Their tacos were unbelievably good. I had tacos de chorizo, chuleta con queso, y nopal. Nopal is this really weird Mexican vegetable that is all the rage with the Japanese now because it supposedly has some medicinal properties. I don't know about that - I just know that roasted over an open fire and thrown on a corn tortilla at El Foralito, nopal is awesome! The other place was Maria Isabel. Quesadillas like you've never had before. I mean this is no open tortilla quesadilla. They look like turnovers...I'm dead serious. Take a look for yourself (and, no I did not take a picture while dining - gracias a Google Images for this one):


I took a couple of pictures (again with the crappy cell phone cam) - one from my hotel room:


And one from a private club called Club de Industriales where I had breakfast Thursday morning:


Got a chance to walk around the city too and it really is an interesting place. After a third day of meetings with my company, I flew back home late Thursday night. It had snowed about seven inches while I was gone. Thus my streak of getting out of Chicagoland in time to miss a pounding of snow remains unbroken. I still get to delight in the negative temperatures. Here's what the air temperature was as I drove into the office this morning:

Yep, -4 at 6:05AM. Seriously. I won't mention what it was with the wind chill.

And like any good parents, we sent Parker off tonight to a place called Starved Rock for a Scout campout. He'll be fine. He may come back with no feeling in his extremities or maybe hair on his chest, who knows. This much I know - he's going to have a good time! That kid always does.