Still on the hunt
As for the ice bike, I remain on the hunt. Four years ago when I first noticed them, these things were all over the market areas, but then they began to disappear and now it takes quite a bit of stalking to find one. Ice is now delivered in little three-wheeled motorized vehicles mainly. But if I lurk around long enough and keep my eyes open in the right places I can usually find one.
All this convinces me that there must be a large, unused pile of them somewhere for sale cheap. Or maybe they all got shipped to Guatemala?
Anyway, today I am supposed to go see a guy who might know a guy whose brother once had some friends that might have known some people in the ice industry. Wish me luck!
There is a nice website about night-time biking in Mexico City, similar to our Tuesday Night Bike Rides, here.
Meanwhile, I’m still investigating bike culture. You see bikes in the strangest places here, like in restaurants.
–Erik Ryberg
December 27th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Is there really that high demand for ginormous ice blocks out there? Like, really, what does one do with that much ice?
December 27th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Hi Mickey,
Actually there is. Most of the little restaurants (and they are really, really little) don`t have any kind of refrigeration so they use ice. Also, street vendors use ice to keep drinks cold. The ice vendors break these blocks into smaller pieces and sell them by the chunk. In the morning you can see pieces just sitting on the sidewalk by a door — delivered in the way milk used to be delivered in the U.S. fifty years ago.
–EBR