Along with Tokyo, Mexico City is one of the two largest cities on the face of planet Earth.  Its population is in the proximity of 27 million people, and this is expected to shoot over 40 million long before the end of the twenty-first century.  Hopefully, as visitors there, we got the best taste of the essence of Mexico City as possible while there - I believe that I got a pretty good taste of it, but then again it helped that my team leader for the week was Billy Moore, a great man of God who lived and worked in Mexico City as a missionary for 9 years.  He certainly knows the right restaurants, the right transportation routes, and he knows the culture and people. 

I spent 8 or 10 hours of each day out in the city.  I could hardly get enough of it.  I have been in large cities before, particularly San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.  However, Mexico City stood out to me for its sheer size and diversity.  The Metro (subway) system is supposedly the most efficient in the world, and it certainly did a great job of getting us anywhere in the city we needed to go, and was easy to figure out and use.  On one day, our plans required us to travel from La Universidad (University) to La Basilica (more about that later), which are on pretty much the farthest opposite sides of the city from each other.  The subway ride alone lasted around 40 minutes or more (I can't remember exactly).  One can exit this subway at any stop and be in a part of the city where you can't even recognize anything in common with the previous stop.

It is a city of contrasts.  See the difference, for example, between the packed and noisy walk to the Basilica (Image 1) and the tranquil and open streets near the Pink House (Image 2).  I found incredible peace in the neighborhood of the Pink House - peace I would have never expected to find in the middle of Mexico City.  In contrast, I was likewise bewildered at some of the outlandish sights I saw.  For example, my team was walking along near the National Cathedral at dusk, and I noticed as I walked through an intersection that there was a car stopped at the light and there was a man yelling angrily into the car.  Suddenly he started punching at the driver through the open window, then opened the door and started kicking him.  The last glimpse I caught as I hurried to catch up with my group was of both men outside the car in a full-on brawl.  It's not like I was scarred or anything, I mean I've seen a lot of stuff.  But it was a sight that really sunk into me the fact that violence destroys lives and drags people kicking and screaming away from their nature - created in God's image.

One of the places where the sheer size of Mexico City became most apparent was on the university campus.  U.N.A.M., which (I think) stands for Universidad Nacional Autonomico de Mexico, is the largest university in the world, with (again, I think) 350,000 students.  In fact, it is not part of Mexico City - it is autonomous, meaning (to Ed Wharton's students this is old hat) self-governing.  It has everything from its own political leadership to its own internal public transportation system.  The place is massive.  My group visited a part of the campus known as Las Islas.  It is a large grassy area fringed by tree-covered knolls (Image 3).  Here, we broke up into groups of two or three to discuss and pray about what can be done for the cause of Christ on a college campus like UNAM.  Caleb, Tyler and I spent the time talking about the universities we will be working with in Samoa and possibly Fiji.  It was amazing to me as I realized that the entire campus of the National University of Samoa (which I visited last summer) could fit on this grassy area called Las Islas.  And yet, to UNAM, Las Islas is just a little grassy area way up on the Northern fringe of the campus.  It took us ten minutes to walk from the campus gates to Las Islas, and we were still on the fringe!!!

One of the best and most educational parts of the experience was the fact that, starting on about the third day, it became the team's responsibility to get to each destination on their own - that is, we were no longer just following Billy, we had to find it on our own.  Generally, he would tell us what Metro stop we needed to get off at, and that was about it.  So we had to get from the Pink House onto a bus, off the bus at the right stop, find the Metro from the bus stop, get in the Metro, get on it going the correct direction, figure out how to handle changing lines on the Metro, and finally getting off at the correct stop.  The instance when this arrangement was the most challenging was when Billy told us to find our way to Las Islas.  The Metro was no problem - by then we had figured out how the system works, and it is very easy once you figure that out.  However, when we got off the Metro we found ourselves on a street corner with no idea where the university is and where on the university Las Islas is.  So, being the least terrible at Spanish in our group, I asked directions and we started on our way.  Every couple blocks I would ask directions once again, and each time I had to correct my course.  I ended up leading a group on a zig-zag course, but we finally reached the blue gates of UNAM and entered.  From here, I thought I had it all figured out, since everybody had told me that once you were in the University, Las Islas was "todo derecho", which I thought meant "Just stay to the right."  Well, Billy finally had to whisper in my ear that right is "derecha" and that "derecho" means straight.  So "todo derecho" actually meant "straight ahead."  Once I nailed that down, it was pretty smooth sailing.  I really enjoyed that opportunity to pioneer through the streets of Mexico City and arrive successfully at the destination.

I truly fell in love with Mexico City.  Within this city, I had some good time with God and some good time with my team and companions on a whole (Image 4).  I would love to do the Lord's work there or in another Latin American city some day.  I even half-jokingly, half-wishingly told Melissa Smith that I want to join the team that she and Scott are forming to go there in 2003.  Come what may, the city is now a part of my life that has taught me much and will always stay with me.

Note: Image 5 at the bottom is a wide-angle shot of the view from my hotel window, which I reconstructed from 3 photographs.