A Train Ride

Even on weekends traffic in Mexico City can be dreadful.  The city streets are calm, but the highways leading out of the city are jammed as a good portion of the city's more than 20 million people heads out of the city on weekend excursions.

So yesterday we decided to do something that would involve no driving... we took a train ride.  In Mexico, except for a few special tourist routes, there is no longer any passenger train service.  However, recently a suburban train route was initiated to serve some outlying towns in the metropolitan area that are not served by the subway or the Metrobus.  Alejandro wanted to see what it was like, so that was our Sunday excursion.

We took the Metrobus (for a change it wasn't too crowded) to the Buenavista Train Station.  In the days of train travel, was the terminal for passenger trains arriving in Mexico City.

              The train station has been enlarged and turned into a modern shopping mall.

But the train tracks are still there, and some of them have been put to use for the new suburban route.

 

It was a comfortable twenty minute ride heading out through industrial suburbs to the northwest of the city.  (In heavy traffic it could take a couple hours to make the trip by car.)  We took the train to the end of the line, a city called Cuautitlan.  In pre-Hispanic times, Cuautitlan had been in important city of the Aztec empire.  Alejandro had never been there, and we thought we would see if there were any archaeological sites or historic monuments.

                     Unfortunately, Cuautitlan is not going to win any "city beautiful" awards!

 

There are no archaeological remains of Cuautitlan, and only a couple colonial churches,           including the cathedral.

The fact that it has a cathedral, indicates what an important city it once was.  While we were taking pictures of the church, a policeman told us that photography of the church was prohibited.  Totally ridiculous!  I've heard of picture-taking being banned inside of a church, but never the exterior!  Well, too bad.  We already took some pictures.  Ha! Ha!

Even though the city is devoid of tourist interest, it was still an interesting excursion for me to see the celebration of "La Candelaria" or Candlemass.  (Read the previous post.)  People heading to church were carrying images of the baby Jesus, all dressed up for the occasion.  In church the images would be blessed by the priest.

We walked through the municipal market building, and for the last minute procrastinators, there were still numerous stalls selling a huge variety of outfits for your image of baby Jesus.

There were even stalls where you could have your baby Jesus repaired or repainted!

After a couple hours we took the train back to Mexico City.  Alejandro was quite disappointed with Cuautitlan, but I was happy to have seen an aspect of Mexican culture that I had not seen before.