Continuing my series about the July 18-19 weekend trip to Mexico City, for which I've already written posts about the shows that we attended on Saturday (Lucha Mutante and Arena Coliseo), this post will cover our activities outside of the shows themselves. This is mostly a bunch of scattered notes that jump around in time.
Getting into Mexico City
To maximize time in Mexico City, I decided to take a red-eye flight from JFK in New York. The flight was scheduled to arrive in Mexico City around 4:45am, but beat even that time and was 20 minutes early. For those unfamiliar with the way Mexico works for foreign tourists, if you fly in (or drive past the border area with the United States), you have to get an FMM tourist card in order to be legally present in Mexico (assuming that you don't have some other visa). Then you have to go through inbound customs with your luggage.
The good thing about flying in around that time is that the immigration and customs lines are virtually nonexistent. In the middle of the day, it can take about an hour combined to get through both. At 4:30am, I think I waited a total of about one minute; in fact, it probably took me longer to walk from the immigration area to the (nonexistent) customs lines.
The red-eye flight works out if you're tight on time, which is often the case for these weekend trips, but I'll probably arrive at a more conventional hour when I take my longer trip in September.
Before Lucha Mutante
Cecilia's flight was due in around 9:30am, which meant that I had about five hours to kill alone in the airport. During this time, I managed to order a cappuccino in Spanish by myself without being misheard! Progress!
Anyway, once Cecilia arrived, we had breakfast at the airport and then killed time in the Reforma 222 area until meeting the Terrys at their home before heading to Lucha Mutante together.
Oh, and Cecilia and I picked up Flamita/Fireball masks that BTJr., acting as a middleman since Flamita was out of town most of the weekend, helped us get. Despite appearances, I actually started inquiring about the masks before the Fireball bit (BTJr. can confirm this); the timing just happened to work out fortuitously. I don't know how the Flamita/Fireball situation will play itself out, but I'm very happy to have one of the first (and possibly one of the only?) masks signed by "Fireball AAA".
Dinner with Guerrero Maya
Jumping ahead to after Arena Coliseo, Black Terry Jr. arranged to get Guerrero Maya Jr. to very kindly give us a ride out of Arena Coliseo (which is not in the best of neighborhoods) and go to dinner with us (yes, he drives in Mexico City; he's crazy!). We talked for a long time about various topics at dinner. The En Busca tournament was naturally a big one. also found out that his favorite luchador was the original Pierroth.
Maya also told us that he decided to become a full-time luchador because he found his day job (which involved accounting) to be dreadful. Some variations of that story had been published previously, but to my knowledge, he had never mentioned the accounting bit in those. This actually came up in the course of small talk: when Cecilia mentioned that she was an accountant, Guerrero Maya's response was "Es toda una desmadre, ¿no?" (roughly, "It's a complete mess, isn't it?") It's kind of amusing to me how many people I've met from lucha libre who are or were involved in accounting. Maybe Bárbaro Cavernario should talk to Guerrero Maya about his intended backup career choice. (Or maybe not, if he actually really likes it!)
Breakfast with Titán
By the time dinner was done, it was close to 1am local time, and somehow Cecilia arranged for us to meet Titán for breakfast at 8:30am. This was actually so early that I think we actually woke Titán up when we let him know that we arrived at his apartment building, but Titán was super nice as usual (in fact, he's one of the nicest people I've ever met, bar none).
At breakfast, one particular thing that stuck out is that Titán told us that he likes working against indie luchadors; at some point he would like to face Wasson and the Kriminal Boys and enjoys his matches against Aero Boy. (I told him that I'd also really like to see a singles match vs. Flamita, if the opportunity ever were to arise.)
Getting to Chilanga Mask
After breakfast, we met BTJr. at a metro station to walk to the DTU offices together. BTJr. explained that a bunch of people would be riding together by van to the Chilanga Mask show. I was imagining one of those larger vans with 4 or so rows of seats. I was wrong.
The van had actually the driver seat, front passenger, and a big open space in the back, where most of us sat. (Coming with us were, among others, Aero Boy, Bárbaro Cavernario, Apolo Valdés, Noriko.) This wasn't exactly the most conventional of travel arrangements, but we got to Coacalco okay. :)
Before the show, all of us went to a seafood restaurant called La Barranca, just down the street from Coliseo Coacalco. I had some delicious paella. Definitely worth your while to check out this restaurant if you have some time before or after a Coacalco show.
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