El Día de los Muertos

From a foreigner’s perspective, the Day of the Dead is both exciting and unnerving. People claim it’s a joyful festivity but there is something creepy about cleaning your ancestor’s bones at the graveyard, or sleeping by your Grandmother’s grave, or even dancing on their graves.

Above: Miss Haversham Reincarnate

All the food and ofrendas you see are made for the dead so that you can share a meal with your late loved ones. In the zócalo, fortune-tellers abounded to help connect with the deceased. The place reeked of incense which guides the dead back to the living according to local legend.

The Day of the Dead comes from an Aztec festival which worships the Queen of the Underworld who is supposed to keep watch over the bones of the deceased. 

However, some traditions have been adopted from abroad and incorporated into the festivities. For example, little kids pester passers-by with their calabazas (pumpkins), asking people to fill them up with American-style trick-or-treats. It sounds cute but when you get bombarded by random kids demanding chocolate, it's actually pretty annoying.

Photo from Ellahoy.es. How could you say no?!

But Mexican Day of the Dead treats are so much more than cheap candy. My parents and I (who came to visit!) were particularly fond of the traditional pan de muerto,(a type of sweet bread), which is best enjoyed dunked in chocolate or milky coffee. There are also tonnes of sugar or chocolate skulls which look far better than they taste! These skulls were bought to Mexico in the 17^th Century by Italian missionaries.

Above: Sugar/Chocolate Skulls or Calaveras de Azucar. Source: noticias.starmedia.com

If you are in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, it’s traditional take a night-time trajinera in Xochimilco whilst getting drunk. But considering my parents were there, we decided to forgo the booze-fest and take a ride in the afternoon when the river was less crowded. There were several hagglers on the river and we were bombarded by boats bearing flowers, mariachi bands and beers.  As soon as they heard me speaking English, people treat me differently and I chuckled to myself as some of them slagged us off for being stingy bastards, thinking we wouldn't understand.

It’s been wonderful having my family here and it gave me an excuse to do some tourism I might have otherwise overlooked.  I feel blessed to have the sort of adventurous parents who not once questioned my decision to come here and have embraced a new culture with an open-mind.