Photo: Flickr/Paul Brady

“A red trickle flowed from the young victim’s nostrils, and when he stopped blinking the crowd started to thin, people walking away in a silence as yet unbroken by the wailing of an ambulance. At that moment, Araceli fully and finally comprehended the cruelty of her native city, the precariousness of life in the presence of so much unregulated traffic and unfulfilled need, a city where people born farmers and fishermen sprinted before cars faster than any horse or sailing ship.”
– From “The Barbarian Nurseries” by Hector Tobar

I’ve been a faithful user of Mexico City’s EcoBici bikeshare program since it began a few years ago. We don’t have a car, so both Crayton and I use the EcoBici to go pretty much anywhere. Crayton rides it to work; I use it to go to the markets, friends’ houses, and to my tours.

In theory, the bikeshare program is a fantastic idea. We’re helping get more cars off the streets and we’re no longer paying cabs to sit in traffic. But a lot of times I wonder: what the hell am I doing riding a bike in this city? Cars cut me off. Pedestrians step right in front of me. Peseros rumble dangerously close to my left side, silently warning that they could come closer and crush me with a flick of their tires.

I’ve been thinking about this even more than usual lately, because I had my first accident a few weeks ago. A woman in a dark parked car opened her door and I smacked into it. (Other than a few scrapes, I was fine.) Crayton has now had three accidents, including one that resulted in a cracked rib. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this entry is about a bike-riding vendor in Mexico City who is hit by a car. It’s fiction, but still, accidents are a very real possibility here.

As the EcoBici program continues to grow — there was a six-week waiting list, last time I heard — here are some suggestions on how cyclists can ride as safely as possible:

Tips on How to Ride A Bike Safely in Mexico City

1. Follow the flow of traffic. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people riding the wrong way down a one-way street. This is especially dangerous in the city’s main bike lane on Reforma. A few times I’ve turned a curve and almost hit someone who was headed right toward me. Please, if you’re riding a bike, ride in the same direction as the cars.

2. Respect the stoplights. I know, I know. A lot of cars don’t respect the stoplights here. So why should the cyclists? The thing is, it’s much more dangerous for a cyclist to get hit by a car, than a car to hit another car. If you’re just blazing through the intersection without a care in the world — as I’ve seen people do here — you’re tempting fate. Crayton has also argued to me that if the cyclists respect the stoplights, then drivers will respect us more, too. I’m not entirely sure if I believe that one.

3. Be aware. Mexico City drivers are, by nature, both reckless and defensive. They’ll ignore red lights and swerve across three lanes of traffic to make a right-hand turn. Chilango drivers still haven’t accepted that cyclists share their roads, so if you’re on your bike, it’s important to keep an eye on the cars in front of you and behind you. I often sneak looks behind my shoulder to see if a car is hoping to turn, or at least to let him know I’m there. I also use hand signals to communicate where I’m going. Which brings me to my next piece of advice…

4. Don’t ride too fast. I personally love riding down a busy street, the wind whipping through my hair. But if you’re riding too fast, you have less time to act quickly if something comes across your path. Riding a bike in Mexico City can feel like a video game a lot of times — obstacles like the tamale vendor, the street sweeper, and the woman walking her dog step right in front of your tires, and you have to be able to anticipate.

5. Watch out for motorcyclists. For some reason in Mexico City, motorcyclists think they can ride in the bike lanes and blatantly ignore traffic laws — even more than regular drivers.

Other Basic Safety Tips

• Crayton and I always wear helmets.
• We never talk on the phone or listen to music while we ride.
• Texting while bike-riding seems like an obvious no-no, but I’ve actually seen people do this before.

Knowing The Law

A current version of Mexico City’s transit law is hard to find, but Crayton, a skilled Googler, unearthed this PDF — ojo: it takes awhile to load — on the Setravi website. Setravi is the Secretaría de Transportes y Vialidad del Distrito Federal; the rules about cyclists start in Article 29.

It’s actually a pretty entertaining read. Sensible transit laws actually exist in this city! It’s just that few people follow them. (And maybe that’s because the law doesn’t have any teeth — cyclists who don’t follow the law receive a verbal warning instead of fines.)

Do you have any other tips for riding a bike safely here? Let me know below.

More on bike-riding in DF:
A Cinematic Love Letter To Riding a Bike Through Mexico City (The Atlantic.com) A neat, two-minute video depicting what it’s like to ride a bike here. You’ll notice the cyclist doesn’t exactly follow the traffic laws.
Bike Riding Flourishes in, of all places, Mexico City (Fox News Latino)
Atiende EcoBici Lista de Espera de Usuarios (El Universal)

I finally brought them home from cooking school. On the upper-left corner of the metate, you can still see the stains from the cacao beans from the time we made chocolate from scratch.

For awhile now, I’ve liked green salsa more than red. Green was always brighter, more acidic. A drizzle on my taco set off sparks on my tongue. And when the salsa had avocado, as green taquería salsas often do here, I wanted to curl up and take a nap in its creaminess.

Red salsa never hit me that way. It wasn’t luxurious or intense. Red salsa just sat there. Blinking. (Little did I know red salsa doesn’t work like that. It plants a seed, and then hurries away to see what you do with it.)

In the past few months, whenever I’d visit taquerías, I’d find myself looking at the red more than the green. I already knew what the green contained: chile serrano or chile verde, maybe chile de árbol or an avocado. But the red remained an enigma. Did the taquero use tomatoes? They’re not essential. Which chiles did he use? Guajillo, cascabel, mora? There were no acidic tomatillos to mask everything. With red salsa, you tasted the chiles themselves. The result was subtler, more mysterious.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with red salsas at home, so I tiptoed into the game with a batch of guajillo-árbol salsa from Ricardo Muñoz’s excellent book Salsas Mexicanas. I’ve used it several times before, always with good results.

This salsa contained a few tomatoes, pureed with toasted chiles until they became a thick, deep-red soup. (In another time five thousand years ago, maybe I could’ve dyed my hair with this stuff.) One bite murmured of garlic and the piney herbs of the guajillo. Then came the searing heat — like, straddling the line of edible — from the 8 chiles de árbol I used. Heat is the main difference between a table salsa and one you’d cook meat and vegetables in, by the way. The former, if you like spicy food, should be tongue-swellingly hot.

Seven days later, I still have a glass jar of this salsa in my fridge. I’ve slowly been working my way through it, spooning it into quesadillas, on chips, over eggs. It’s fabulous on anything.

Recipe below. Oh, and tell me — where do you come down on the fence? Red or green, and why?

Red Taquería Style Salsa
Translated from Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s “Salsas Mexicanas”

The original recipe calls for 10 chiles de árbol, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, for fear of creating something so hot no one would eat it. I used eight. It was perfect.

Ingredients

8 chiles de árbol, seeds removed and reserved (you’re going to add them to your salsa later)
2 guajillos, seeded and de-veined
3 ripe roma tomatoes (300g/11 oz.)
3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
1/3 cup water
salt to taste

Directions

Toast the chiles briefly on a comal over medium heat. You’ll only want to do this for a few seconds, until they get slightly softer and aromatic. Try not to blacken them — black spots add a bitter flavor. Remove the chiles to a bowl and cover them with hot water. Let them sit for about 20 minutes, until softened.

In the meantime, raise the heat slightly on the comal and toast the tomatoes on all sides, until soft and blackened in spots. (It’s okay to char the tomatoes, just not the chiles!)

Add the chiles, tomatoes, garlic and water to a blender, and pulse until smooth. Add salt — I used about a teaspoon — and pulse some more. Don’t forget that salt is really important in a salsa, so if it doesn’t taste right, chances are you need more of it.

Serve at room temperature.

The beach in Leblon, where we stayed

They sell bags of these on the beaches -- they're fluffy, donut-shaped snacks that come in salty and sweet flavors.

Sunset overlooking Leblon beach

One of the views from the Christ the Redeemer mountain

A samba band boarded the little tram that took us up the mountain.

Jack fruit dangled from the trees, outside the windows of the tram near Christ the Redeemer.

Rio has agaves too! These are outside one of the subway stations.

The Escadaria Selarón, a famous set of mosaic steps in Rio's Lapa neighborhood

The cajú fruit, pictured at São Paulo's Municipal Market.

On my second day in town I booked a tour with Around SP, a small company in São Paulo that offers tours of the city’s cultural sites. I told my guide, Luis, that I wanted a culinary tour, so we zoomed off in his car one morning with plans to hit some of the city’s markets, bakeries and dessert shops.

The Food Tour Begins

One of our first stops was a feira, or outdoor neighborhood market. It looked just like the tianguis: vendors had set up under plastic tarps, selling fruits and vegetables arranged into attractive piles. They called out to customers passing by. (This was no doubt the Portuguese equivalent of “We have papaya! 10 pesos a kilo!”)

The feira had things I’d never seen before: bulbous, thick squash shaped like a barbell; short spiky cucumbers; wild Brazilian cabbage known as couve, shredded and wrapped in plastic. Thick bulbs of garlic hung from ropes. Mounds of spices sat in large bowls — whole cumin seeds, peppercorns, dried chilies.

A big meat and seafood section lay beyond all the fruit, with the items displayed in neat rows inside plastic display cases. There were fresh sardines, calamari, and whole, fresh fish that I didn’t recognize. I was kind of in awe about how orderly this section was. In Mexico all the meat sits out in the open and kind of piled on top of each other.

The sardines, which I would've bought if I had a kitchen.

Whole cumin seeds at the São Paulo feira

They sell cinnamon just like in Mexico!

This is the couve. It's a garnish for feijoada, a typical Brazilian dish.

Dried herbs are sold bundled with red chiles.

The market prices are displayed on a clothesline.

The spiky cucumber (it has a tail, too) is known as maxixe.

Moving on: São Paulo’s Mercado Municipão

Toward the end of the day we stopped at São Paulo’s Municipal Market, a huge indoor place filled with fish, produce, sausages, nuts, dried fruits, spices, thick blocks of guava ate, and even cacahuates japoneses. (In Portuguese they’re called amendoim, and they come in barbecue flavor!)

It was pretty much a gourmet-food lover’s paradise. Bacalao, several varities, lay stacked maybe two feet high, next to linguica and soft cheeses, hard cheeses, olives. We tasted soft, spreadable catupiry cheese on crackers, and I looked at an oyster bar longingly, where people sat slurping and drinking beer. The market’s second floor has a food court, where you can supposedly find the best mortadella sandwiches in the city.

A view of São Paulo's Municipal Market from the second floor

I still wasn’t very hungry, so we walked around the fruit area. I tasted jabuticaba (pronounced jah-boo-chee-KA-bah), an oversize grape kind of like a capulín. And, best of all, I tasted cajú, the cashew fruit.

Didn’t know cashew came from a fruit, you say? I didn’t either. The weird thing is that the cashew lies outside the fruit itself, like a little hat. You have to open the shell and fish out the cashew. The flesh itself, on the main part of the fruit, was the strangest thing I’d ever tasted — rubbery, fibrous and juicy like a ripe peach. I think I laughed while I was eating it, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Here is a picture of the cajú, again:

The cajú fruit, pictured at São Paulo's Municipal Market.

And the jabuticaba, which is fantastic in a caiparinha. And it apparently grows on trees, literally on the bark itself.

Pão de queijo: The perfect end to a great day

We finished our tour with a piece of pão de queijo, a stretchy, dense cheese bun made with tapioca flour. As a sidenote, I think I had pão de queijo every single day in Brazil. I think it might be the world’s most perfect food.

Rio de Janeiro photos coming next!