March 11, 2018
I had eaten a large plate of rich, spicy mole, and I had about the worst case of acid reflux I had ever had that night. I was up until 3:00 AM, at which point I finally took two Benadryl just to get some sleep. That totally knocked me out until after 9:00 AM, so we got a late start. We left the hotel around 10:00 and headed for Paseo de la Reforma.
The Paseo de la Reforma, or the "Promenade of Reform" is a very wide divided street modeled after the great boulevards of Europe, such as the Champs-Élyseés in Paris or the Paseo del Prado in Madrid. It was designed and built in the 1860s to link Emperor Maximilian's castle to the city center.
Today it is the hub of the downtown business area and home to most of the city's tallest skyscrapers.
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| Photo from here |
Our goal was to walk along the Paseo de la Reforma to Chapultepec Park (where Maximilian had his castle), about 1.75 miles from our hotel,
In the aerial photo at the top of this post, you can see that the Paseo splits around a monument. I remember this monument well from my first visit to Mexico City with my mom in 1978. We could see it from our hotel room window. It is known locally as El Angel, and more formally as The Angel of Independence. It was built in 1910 during the presidency of Porfirio Diaz to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Mexico's War of Independence.
