John's Mexican Journal – 11/04/2005 through 11/12/2005
Pg 2
Saturday - City of The Beetles - Ciudad de Mexico
Breakfast at the hotel was a buffet with a combination of the familiar and the different. There were cold cuts, tripe, and "jam and cheese sandwiches," which, after I remembered the J is pronounced as an H in Spanish, sounded more familiar. There were scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and omelets made to order. It was an excellent breakfast.
Afterwards we were introduced to our guide for the week, an elegant gentleman named Fernando. Fernando would be escorting us around the scheduled points of interest and giving us historical, cultural, and political background. His job is different from that of Fran, our tour director, who's responsible for arranging things, solving logistics problems, and making sure everyone gets back on the bus after a stop.
Our bus, was a huge new Volvo with room for twice as many as we had in our group. We were able to spread out. This would be our transportation for the entire week. It was driven by a friendly young man named Rafael. Rafael could get that behemoth in and out of places I’d be afraid to take the family sedan.
Our first stop was the National Palace, where we saw the murals painted by Diego Rivera in the '30s. The most interesting aspect of the murals was his depiction of Karl Marx and Communism as the savior/salvation of Mexico. Imagine that painted on a US federal building.
We then walked a block to the National Cathedral where we saw public confessions going on. People were lined up ten deep to stand next to a priest and whisper their sins in front of tourists who were wandering around the sanctuary. This seems to be the norm, as every church we visited had public confessionals.
The Palace and the Cathedral both face a huge public square, built over what used to be the old Aztec ceremonial center. The square was being swept by guys with brooms. There were people with brooms all over the city. The city was very clean considering the size of the population. We noticed a man delivering huge blocks of ice around the square, easily three or four feet tall (the ice blocks, not the man). He was using the same kind of ice tongs they used to deliver ice to people’s homes back when iceboxes were actually boxes with ice in them. The street vendors chop the blocks up and use the ice to cool beverages.
The Aztecs selected the location of the city based on a commandment from one of their gods that they should settle where they found an eagle perched on a cactus and eating a snake (which, by the way, is the national symbol of Mexico). They found what they were looking for on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, and built their capital, Tenochtitlan. Perhaps the Aztecs should have given more weight to engineering than religion. Since the city is built on what used to be a lake, it’s been sinking steadily. Some of the older large structures are now eight feet below street level.
Next we were driven to the National Museum of Anthropology, where we were fed lunch (hot dog and cabbage soup in addition to more familiar things) and regaled with pre-Columbian Mexican history. It turns out there was a lot more to pre-Columbian Mexico than just the Aztecs and Mayans. The Museum is a new-looking state of the art building, but it was missing a few things, specifically railings on the edges of the ramps and platforms. It would be easy to walk off the edge of a platform and break a hip. An OSHA inspector would go berserk here.
Then we were ferried back to the hotel and were given the option of making an excursion to see "some pyramids." It wasn't an official part of the tour, so we couldn't use the Globus bus, but Fran arranged with the hotel to line up a couple of SUVs and drivers for those who wanted to go.
We were going outside the city for the first time. Traffic was very bad. Our driver said that there are restrictions on the number of cars during the week (I don't know how they enforce that), but everyone can drive on the weekend, so they do.
There are different cars in Mexico City, cars we've never seen in the States, but the most interesting automotive phenomenon, besides the heart-in-your-throat driving, were the thousands of old-style Volkswagen beetles we saw everywhere. Manufacture of the classic beetle continued in Mexico up until two years ago. It was like being in a time warp.
We drove for miles through the city. I was impressed by how clean and well-built it looked from the highway, nothing like the National Geographic-Save the Children images led me to expect. There were some subtle flaws not apparent to the naked eye, though. We noticed a striking modern skyscraper and asked our driver what it was. He said it used to be government offices, but was damaged by a major quake in the '80s and has stood empty ever since. No one has the money to fix it or tear it down. The thought of living in the shadow of that accident waiting to happen gives me the willies.
We'd been on the road for about an hour before we started to see the sort of poverty I was familiar with from my visits to the border towns. We passed hundreds of shanties built from construction rubble and roofed with anything flat the residents could find. Our driver said most of the people who lived there were squatters who'd come to Mexico City from the country, thinking the streets of the city were lined with jobs. Many who didn't make it in the city were too embarrassed to return home. Mexico City residents call them "parachute people" because they just dropped in.
No one had said within my hearing which pyramids we were going to, but I thought it would be interesting no matter which ones we saw. We kept seeing signs indicating that we were getting closer, and then, there they were, looming ancient and majestic over an area that looked like it could have been a Des Moines suburb.
If you'd asked me to name two pre-Columbian sites anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that I'd like to visit, my answers would be "Machu Picchu" and "the Pyramid of the Sun." I was looking at the Pyramid of the Sun and its companion, the Pyramid of the Moon. Very cool.
Because traffic had been so bad, we arrived shortly after 5 PM. We thought the site was open until 7. We were told by the guards the site was closing at 6. It was going to be a short visit. We parked the van and headed to the pyramid.
The site (Teotihuacan) is huge. Even though you could tell from a distance that the pyramids were surrounded by the 21st century, you couldn't see any sign of that from ground level. To get to the Pyramid of the Sun, you had to cross an area the size of a couple of football fields. There were several stepped walls you needed to climb over and you didn't appreciate how steep the steps were until you looked down on the side you had to descend. From the top of the wall the steps were barely visible. The wall looked vertical. We had to go down sideways because the steps were too narrow to place our feet straight. This was true of the pyramid steps as well. The ancients apparently never discovered the Riser-Tread Formula.
After we got over the last wall, we were standing in a huge open mall with the Pyramid of the Sun on one end and the Pyramid of the Moon on the other. The Pyramid of the Sun is quite a bit larger so we went there first. Nan hadn't liked the steps on the walls, so she elected not to climb the pyramid. I didn't know how much time we were going to have or how far up I'd be able to lift my bulk, but I thought I'd see how far I could get.
As it turns out, I only got as far as the first level before I decided I should go back and meet up with the others. The rest of the group had already gone down and the guards were shooing people off the pyramid.
I stood on the first level of this ancient thing, feeling like Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon in “National Lampoon's Vacation.”
Beverly D'Angelo: "Look at the canyon, Clark!"
Chevy Chase (looks at the canyon for two beats): "OK, let's go!"
With time (lots of time) I think I could have made it to the top. It might have taken a helicopter to get me down, though. That puppy is steeper than it looks. I had to keep my eyes focused on the steps or I'd get vertigo, and I was only 40 or 50 feet up.
When I got back to the mall, I didn't see Nan, so I figured she'd headed for the Pyramid of the Moon since that's where the driver said he'd meet us. I had to run the gauntlet of relentless peddlers who wanted to sell me souvenirs. "Hey, rich man! 50 dollars for this ceramic mask! 40 dollars! Buy it for your second wife! 30 dollars! 20!" You had to say no five or six times to some of those guys.
But I've stood on the Pyramid of the Sun.
I met up with Nan; we hooked up with our driver and the rest of our group, and headed back to Mexico City. It was only 8 PM when we got there, but we were both too tired to seek out a restaurant in the Zona Rosa. We just went around the corner to Sanborns, the store with everything (even a restaurant), had some enchiladas and tacos, and went to bed.