Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends

Let's start with the guilt. My flat is still looking like a bomb has gone off, so no pictures for you yet. And it's dark so they'd look rubbish if I took them now anyway. Second kind of guilt is for not taking many (any) photos in Coyoacán, so any that make their way onto the blog will be others', unless I can work out how to use the scanner at work to reproduce my postcards. That leads neatly on to my third and final source of guilt for today, which is technical in nature: I can't work out how to get the (admittedly not very good) photos from my work-issued Blackberry to the blog. There might be a way to upload them somehow from the Blackberry straight to the Internet... any ideas, people? I tried Bluetooth to my iPhone and that didn't work. I feel slightly ashamed of having so many whizzy electronic devices that I can't use properly.

Outside the Caza Azul

So let's cast our minds back to last weekend. Saturday came and went with little activity other than a determination to make the most of Mexico's lax attitude to antibiotics to sort out my dodgy tummy once and for all. 'Generix' pharmacy did the trick within 24 hours, and on Sunday I met my Japanese friend Manami for a trip to Coyoacán, once home to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, now a colourful, slightly bohemian neighbourhood in the south of Mexico City with a vibrant market, museums and throngs of visitors. There was a predictable queue snaking along the blue walls of the Frida Kahlo museum, but it was totally worth it: not just for the paintings, fresh and punchy as they are, but for the little touches of unusual insight that were peppered through the museum. It was spooky to look up at the same alcove as Trotsky would have seen when he woke up from a sleepover at his friends' house, shortly before an ice-pick gave him a grisly end; slightly creepy to see Frida Kahlo's deathmask perched on top of her bed, as if she'd tried it on and discarded it before going out; touching to see the intricate dresses she wore and the analysis of why she had that particular dress sense (a combination of polio making one leg shorter, and a spine problem causing serious back problems, that made her put the focus on the upper third of her body when dressing and styling herself).

Viva La Vida (the original by Kahlo, before Chris Martin was but a sparkle in his mother's eye)

A michelada with an IT analyst by day, rock guitarist by day later, we took a stroll through the main square, which was chock-a-block full of people selling palm branches (I tried and mostly failed to explain the significance of Palm Sunday to Manami - eleven years of church school education and I am still officially Not Good at the Bible stories) and other festive things like candy floss and tacos. We cast an eye over at the Mercado de Artesanía but my feet, which I had foolishly shod only in flip-flops, refused to go any further, so that will have to be saved for another day.

Coyoacán square - just imagine lots of families milling around clutching palm fronds

More blog coming soon on my birthday minibreak to Puebla... stay tuned!