Work and Play in Mexico día tres

July 17, 2013

I thought yesterday was great, but each day just seems to get better here in Mexico with my Jetpack family!

The day started out with me exploring the Jetpack code base, fiddling with my personal site ( crashing it over and over 😉 ),  and scheming up new ideas for Jetpack based purely off what would make my life better :).

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Oh, there was a cat too. We have conceded that the cat is the real meetup boss.

We had a pretty delicious lunch. Probably the best food so far this week. I again had enchiladas. I enjoy eating enchiladas whenever possible in the U.S.A. and since I am at the source I have had them almost every meal here. Each time they have tasted different, but all good. This time there was beans! Last time I was in Mexico ( over ten years ago ) beans were a huge part of each meal. This time I am lucky to see them at all.

After lunch we set out to do some sight seeing. We hopped on the Metro on the way across town. It was an intriguing experience. Richard alternated between making us run on and off the trains and telling me to hide my American things so I do not become a target.

Our first stop was the absolutely fantastically amazing Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México. It is a huge Catholic cathedral that has been since 1813. The building is gigantic! Only one small section was open for us to explore and it blew me away. The size and grandeur of the interior rivals anything I have ever seen before. There were carvings and art everywhere that was incredibly intricate and detailed. I am providing some pictures for you to salivate over now, but I did get several great 1080p videos I am working on processing and uploading here that will amazing you.

There was a pipe organ probably fifty feet tall! I wanted to touch the keyboard for just thirty seconds. That is all. Gotta get in good with the Pope and come back.

 

Outside there was a huge flag. Probably half the size of a football field. I do not think I have seen any bigger.

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We wandered around for a bit looking at things here and there.

Then we wound up at a Catholic church. Here is it “just a church” but to me it was another cathedral. Though maybe a quarter of the size of the cathedral ( if that! ) it was still quite large and impressive. This church was called Guiada Sabados.

Some more random pictures of cool things along the road, and the porcelain house. The porcelain house was a restaurant that probably held a couple thousand people! Biggest restaurant I have ever seen.

We then wound up at a museum where we had our pictures taken against a green screen. It was pretty fun making random poses and putting ourselves into pictures with various backgrounds.

Afterwards we went to the restaurant upstairs in the tower. It had an amazing 360 degree view, which I am working on incorporating into a full panoramic picture. For now enjoy these

And the panoramic shot! It came out pretty well. If you zoom it in close you will notice that parts of it have water drops. It was raining outside and the water was only sticking to some windows. Gives an interesting effect. This is the full 360 degrees  of the tower. The original stitched image was over 200 megabytes and 12 feet wide! I scaled this down to 20 megabytes and 1080 in height.

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When we got up to leave the ladies mentioned that the bathroom was one of the nicest they had been in so I decided us gentlemen needed to visit the bathroom as well. It was a mind blowing experience! First off the sinks were made form angled pieces of glass. On walking further into the bathroom we noticed that the urinal was located on the side of the external window. It makes the user feel as if they are peeing off the side of the building. The view was breathtaking ( of the city weirdo! ).

At the end of it all we piled into a couple cabs to ride back to La Casa. During the day I had been quizzing Miguel and Richard on Spanish. I was fairly fluent in conversational Spanish when I was a teenager. It is slowly coming back to me. Richard said my pronunciation is usually spot on, which is encouraging. Tim and I are considering getting Rosetta Stone and fully learning Spanish since half the team speaks Spanish and we have several Spanish speaking countries on our list for future team meetups.

It was a very good day. Richard says that tomorrow is going to be even better. I cannot wait to see what is rolling around in that brain of his!

 

FYI – If you are reading this as an Automattic Happiness Engineer on trial send Karen a bottle of nice scotch. She will think you are the greatest trialer ever 🙂