Giraffe in Parque Central
Link to more photos. (View them individually to see the captions.)
As discussed in the previous post, Victor and I went to Ciudad Juarez to pursue the fiancé visa, and, due to the complications I detailed there, we had to spend two extra days there, too.
We took a tourist bus tour of the city early in our stay. We went back (by regular bus and by foot) the next day to get better photos of some of the sites.
In general, we were not too impressed with Juarez. For a city of well over 1 million, ...
- It's very unfriendly to pedestrians. It's quite difficult to cross major streets due to the weird way they handle left turns. There's almost always lots of traffic.
- There are few parks.
- Other than the single giraffe and one ostrich in Parque Central, there's no zoo.
- There's one rather small art museum and only one other, mostly history, museum.
- The sun and heat are unrelenting; there are rarely any clouds.
- The airport insists on immigration checks coming and going, even if you're coming from and going to other cities in Mexico.
That said, there were a few good things. Parque Central was about a 40-minute walk from our hotel. Even though the walk is not very pleasant, most mornings, we walked there and then spent two to three hours walking repeatedly around the mile-long perimeter track, sometimes going through the cactus botanical garden, stopping briefly to use the exercise machines, always admiring the lake and the many ducks and geese. Curiously, there's a second half of the park that's private and almost completely empty of people.
We also learned of a few highly-recommended small restaurants. We were able to try one for burritos and one for tortas, both excellent.
