For the last bit of my time in Mexico I board a bus from Xalapa to the capital. In the queue to board, three people back, is a man of extreme proportions. His shoulders are at least three times wider than his tiny pinched waist, and his arms are just about as thick as his legs. This man has lifted many heavy objects.

His hair is shaved back-and-sides and the slightly longer top is gelled up into black needles. He’s wearing a large, sparkling stud in his left ear and a pair of insectoid reflective shades. Everything about him has an edge.

To complete the drama he wears a skin-tight red elastic tank top that only amplifies the sharp V of his physique. Through the fabric that's thinly stretched over his huge left breast, a large and precisely tattooed black swastika offers its opinions. Our tickets come with seat reservations and there is a chance his will be the one next to mine.

It isn’t.

When the bus arrives in Mexico City I get the metro to where the airbnb apartment is. The doorman recognises my backpack as signifying that I am a customer of Carlos’ and fetches him from a café down the road. Carlos comes over and shows me around the apartment. He explains that he will be going away but that his mother lives nearby and could be of help to me if I need it. So he takes me back to the café and introduces me. His mother is wearing large Armani sunglasses and during our conversation pauses often to pour salt onto her white, wine-stained pashmina.

In the evening I walk the starkly uneven pavements of Colonia Roma, a slightly crumbly looking version of Brooklyn NY with decaying colonial buildings and the many shits of stylish dogs. I love it.

The museums are closed today. All of them. You’d think a few would take advantage of the open goal and close on a Tuesday instead. Even the giant park in the centre of the city is locked off. As if someone powerful has decided that on Mondays there is to be no culture in the capital.

And so I walk with little purpose from Roma to Condesa. I lunch on a taco filled with a chile stuffed with marlin fish. From there I get on the metro and ride to the Zócalo, the giant square in the middle. Even the square is closed: fenced off while they dismantle tents dedicated to obscure countries. A giant flag of Mexico writhes silently at its centre. At one end are both halves of the cathedral (or the two cathedrals?) where people kneel and pray to variations of Jesus and his mother.

From the Zócalo I walk towards the Sonora market, famous for being a place to buy witchy-type stuff. On the way are endless streets of semi-market—both stalls and more permanent shops—carefully zoned by theme and each vendor dedicated to minutiae.

It begins with party/celebration equipment: banners, decorations, and balloons etc, then transitions to fabrics and fabric accessories, then to stationary, then to household items. One stall is dedicated to every type of plastic bag. Another to brush heads, sorted by bristle length and stiffness, head gauge, and colour. This theme continues for at least half an hour of brisk walking.

The Sonora market itself begins innocuously with kitchen utensils and piñatas. Next are live animals in cages—from chickens and pigeons to dogs and ducks. Out of the corner of my eye I see a goat being dragged off. Then fancy dress costumes. Finally, at the back, comes the magic. Magic and religious iconography.

Giant bundles of herbs and other dried things pour out deep medicinal smells. A few shucked snake skins nestle delicately amongst them. At other stalls, the potions are ready-made: rows of dusty plastic bottles filled with shocking coloured liquids and armies of candles in the same hues, all labelled with the kitsch iconography of the dark arts.

Miniature Santa Muertes and plastic skulls huddle in dark corners. Every fifth stall or so eschews the heresy of witchcraft in favour of the joy and hope of Christianity's martyring saints: pierced St. Sebastians, bleeding Jesuses, weeping Marys, etc.

Because it's Tuesday, all the museums are open. So this morning’s outing is to Frida Kahlo’s house, the place where she was born and where she died, painted blue and red and green. The house is charming, wrapped in complicated ways around a courtyard of ponds, flowers, and sculptures. In the kitchen, above a long wood-fired hearth, tiny cups hang from the wall spelling out “Frida” and “Diego”. On the facing wall more cups hang in the shape of two symmetrical doves with branches in their beaks. A peculiarly tender whimsy in the face of their otherwise tumultuous relationship.

From Kahlo’s house I go north to Buenavista where there is a Geology museum. Lunch is a stew with goat called birria, served in a dark, hot room where two giant pots boil and large chunks of the animal are grilling on the open flame of a hob.

The geology museum is old and shows little sign of change, filled with 19th century cabinets of dark stained wood, glass, and bronze trimmings. The specimens inside them are older. Apart from the basement, which is filled with “interactive” displays—buttons that do nothing and VHS-driven displays tirelessly recounting their decade-old messages to empty dark corridors—no attempt has been made to modernise.

A small assortment of mammoth skulls and a few complete dinosaur skeletons (one still only partially emerged from its womb of bubble wrapping) are as fancy as it gets. For the rest, we are satisfied by rows of stones and minerals and their typewritten labels.

Most tradespeople on the Metro actually sell things: headphones, lighters, chewing gum, and the like - and they announce their wares (always homogenous in kind) with a relentless, loud, repetitive patter. The majority of passengers behave as if nothing was happening but occasionally a sale is made.

After the vendors, the next most common type of participant is the singing blind person. They enter a carriage at one end with an amplifier strapped to their chests. With one hand they navigate down the carriage, and with the other they hold a cup full of small change and a microphone, into which they sing their sad songs of woe. The already squeezed passengers squeeze some more to let them pass. Some singers have their eyes closed while others keep them open, their milky-white dead eyeballs rolling with the train.

The strangest method I witnessed involved two cooperating participants. After boarding the carriage together, one of them emptied out crushed glass from a folded t-shirt onto the floor of the train. He then lay down next to it and began smashing the glass pieces with his already heavily scabbed elbow. Meanwhile, his companion walked up and down the carriage giving some kind of angry sermon. As the train pulled up to the station, the man on the floor carefully picked up all the glass, including a few shards that had escaped under a seat, and folded it back up into the t-shirt. No one had donated any money. It hadn’t even seemed like they were asking for any.

Today was my last day in Mexico and instead of it being meaningful and significant, it wasn’t.

First thing was a metrobus ride south to La Bombilla to another house where Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo had lived. The building, commissioned by Rivera, was a beautiful construction of geometric concrete and large grids of windows. The neighbourhood is rich and filled with other expensive and bespoke houses, all hidden behind high walls and security gates. The streets are empty except for the various servicemen tending to the endless needs of the inhabitants.

From here, a long ride north to the Bosque de Chapultepec, a large park in the centre of town. I visited the zoo which is free to enter but charges $4 (20p) to use the toilets. It’s a pleasant place with large and densely shrubbed enclosures. This is probably good for the animals but it does somewhat undermine one of the reasons of their being there: to be seen. The hippopotamuses, though, were huge and very visible.

After the zoo, the anthropology museum. On entering, hunger overcomes me and so I head to the in-house cafeteria: a buffet of high presentation and low quality. I leave after paying vast sums, but not before witnessing the entrance of at least 100 academics, presumably in herd for a conference: a lovely carousel of awkward small talk and subtle job seeking.

The museum itself is a giant space filled with thousands of artefacts from a vast span in time and space of the Americas, documenting the deep and rich civilisations of its past. The central room, at the furthest mouth of the long courtyard, is dedicated to the pre-Cortés capital of Tenochtitlan and teaches an interesting lesson about the origins of Mexico.

In November 1519, seven months after arriving at the coast of Mexico, Hernán Cortés arrived at Lake Texcoco, and the island state of Tenochtitlan. Two hundred years prior, the Méxica had built the city as a centre for their expanding empire which had been conquering all the smaller nations around it. Tenochtitlan arose complete with its own creation myth and personal council of gods, borrowed and adapted from all the cultures the Méxica had consumed. The beginnings of a singular nation of Mexico.

At this ripe moment, Cortés enters the city, and through disease, mystical terror, and modern weaponry, subsumed this nation into the Spanish crown. The old was swiftly and violently destroyed by the conquerors. An alien creation myth began to propagate; the old gods, reduced to crumbling stones, were replaced by the holy trinity from Bethlehem; and out this crater a new and confused nation began to try and re-find itself.

In the evening I pick up my laundry. Shower. And pack for my flight home the following morning. Then I walk to a bar and order a mezcal.

It begins to rain. Heavy, dark, linear rain. So instead of walking somewhere else, I eat where I am.