The Culver family adventure continued in Mexico City with a handful of well-chosen activities, some fortuitous errors, and abundant serious relaxing. It didn’t hurt that there was a holiday during our stay that literally stopped traffic: we just rolled with it.
To see the first post in our Mexico trip, it’s at this link and it’s all about Tulum
The first day in Mexico City was Keri-less, as I woke up in Mexico City with full-fledged laryngitis. There will be no jokes here about my drill sergeant style of holidaymaking, but if there was one, it would be my throat telling me to “take a break, control freak!” The fam took the opportunity to go for a lazy walk through Chapultepec park, and I still hate it that they did things I didn’t get to do with them. (*sings Little Sister Blues*)
Kyle’s thumbs up in front of that mountain pic hearkens back to a trip he took in 1997-ish, when he and his buddy climbed up and skied down three volcanos in Mexico, including the one pictured here, setting records for their speed up and down, and for tequila-soaked memory loss afterward. (Just kidding, he set no record for the partying.) It’s a while ago but he’s still got the mountain chops. Try and get him to take a shot of tequila, though, and his face goes chartreuse.
Museum of Anthropology
Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología is known as one of the best in the world. It is immense and gorgeous, and completely overwhelming. My dear friend Carmen, with whom I first stayed when I was in Mexico City in 1996, took a course to learn about each of the dozen rooms in turn – because each one is an epoch or a culture. It’s the only way I can imagine making sense of this place: visiting over and over for months, with professional guidance. Otherwise, there’s so much that one little brain can’t soak it in.
We decided to limit the rooms we visited, to just three: Introduction to Anthropology, Teotihuacan, and Mayan. The first room consisted of tabletop maquettes showing scenes from prehistoric lives, and long explanations printed on walls. By contrast, the Teotihuacan room is all about artifacts, large and small, that tell the story more graphically. From the tiniest beads and pottery to scale models of the Teotihuacan pyramid and its decorations, it’s much more eye-catching. The Mayan room is similarly colorful and eye-popping, and they’ve re-created a pyramid outside one of the gallery doors, where the pyramid (and other buildings) appear as if in a jungle.
My advice would be: GUIDE. Get a real guide. We loved visiting and it was a beautiful day for walking across Chapultepec Park to go to the museum, but I left wishing I had learned more about even one room. There are official and unofficial guides, including a salt-and-pepper-haired professorial-looking guy we blithely passed by as we entered. I’d like to go back and hire him next time!
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
There’s something to be said for coincidence. I did a lot of the planning for this trip, and for no apparent reason I ordered it one way (Tulum, then Mexico City) rather than the opposite. Coincidence struck when I was making plans for city evenings – dinners, Lucha Libre, outings, whatever – and saw that one of my all-time favorite bands was playing at Foro Sol (now called Estadio GNP, which is so much less poetic, and so much more corporate) on the Friday that we were there. LOS FABULOSOS CADILLACS!!!
I don’t know if you’ve been in a full stadium with 64,997 other fans lately, but it was CRAZY! We all wore ear plugs and it was still plenty loud for dancing and singing along. Our seats were above the nosebleed section, but it didn’t matter. There was a set of electric favorites with everyone singing along, then they rolled out a piano and Vicentico and the guys did an acoustic set (and everyone sang along), then they came back for some mad ska insanity at triple volume (and everyone sang along.) My face nearly broke from smiling.
It’s Revolution Day!
Best laid plans… We thought we’d take the tourist bus so everyone could get a feel for the monumental places in the city, but it was Mexico’s Día de la Revolución. This conflict, from the 1910s, began as something of a populist reaction to rapacious land laws and repression of Indigenous groups, though I don’t know enough to be useful so I’ll point you to Wikipedia for more information. Anyway Reforma, the main avenue, was closed for a parade celebrating this day, which has particular resonance for Indigenous groups, as you’ll see in the photos here.
We made our way in to the city center and got to see rank after rank of people and culture, as well as infantries all dressed to the nines – some carrying eagles!
One thing that has always caught my eye in Mexico has been José Guadalupe Posada and his engravings. You’ll have seen them too, since over time they became the basis for the Day of the Dead commercialization we have all come to know and love. José Guadalupe Posada illustrated for the news (something like editorial cartoons), telling the stories of the day for the majority of the population, who could not read at the time. He satirized the ruling classes with these images and could be said to have contributed materially to the people’s demands.
Floating to Xochimilco’s rhythm
If you don’t know about Xochimilco, let me tell explain. No, there’s too much, let me sum up: Mexico City was built on a lake, in which early residents built up mud and dirt till they had created land for agriculture, inside the lake. They called these pieces of human-built land chinampas, and they were better for growing because of the access to water.
The city has since built up around that original lake, and agriculture happens everywhere except Xochimilco – but still, these strips of land are used for growing flowers and house plants. Between the chinampas, colorful boats are “poled” along, like in Venice, but these boats have picnic tables aboard. As a guest on such a boat, you are treated to a gorgeous meal, handicraft sellers that step from boat to boat, free-flowing beer and tequila, and boat-bound mariachi players. It’s a colorful, noisy, filling way to spend an afternoon!
We highly recommend a weekday for this visit. Weekends, we were told, there are so many boats on the canals that your own boat barely moves, except to whack up against other boats. This happened to us once or twice even on a weekday, but don’t worry, they’re very sturdy! Still, it was much more pleasant to be able to course up and down the waterway and see the sights, than to be in a traffic jam on the water. Also, try the blue corn quesadillas!
Walkabout
In French, they’re called flaneurs or (more recently) flaneuses – people who walk around lazily for fun. I’m not sure what name we’d get for our traverses in Mexico City, so I’ll just let a few pictures speak for themselves.
That has gotta be the biggest Zocalo in the world
Is that true? I dunno, but I’m posting it anyway. What a grand space, made grander the day we visited by the preparations for the parade route: brass bands, horses and riders, floats, dancers, a flag the size of a football field, and one eagle man, all lining up around the square to start their procession past thousands of Mexican patriots.
Here you can see Ramon, Kyna, me, Kyle and Missy, who I don’t think I’ve introduced yet. Though she is wearing shorts here, she is Kyle’s squeeze, who has gamely made the move to Kyle’s homestead in Alaska – so she doesn’t usually get to wear anything short of a parka! She and Kyle posed with the Eagle Man, who is channeling Mexico’s history.
The cathedral lines one edge of the Zocalo. There are little restaurants on upper floors around the square, where you can get not-very-good food at rather high prices, but for these pics, I think it was actually worth it.
All the things we ate
Of course we had tacos. It wouldn’t have been Mexico if we hadn’t eaten tacos. But we also had crazy delicious other stuff – like churros at El Moro downtown, chilaquiles at Madre Cocina in the Coyoacan market, a gorgeous two-sauced red snapper at Contramar in Condesa near Cibeles Circle, aaaand bugs.
Well, my siblings and Missy ate fried grasshoppers. Ew. Kyle was dubious when we took that picture, but couldn’t be one-upped. You can see Ramon’s body language in the photo below, and mine was even more repulsed! I don’t think Kyna liked them all that much, because she left them in the cupholder in our next taxi.
I think the following pics are obligatory whenever one visits a market: all the variety and color you could want, from nuts and snacks to dried shrimp to beans and herbs to HOT SAUCE!
Thanks for coming along with the Culvers to Mexico City. We’ll be back! There were some tacos we didn’t get to try, even after this last night pig-out at Maizajo in la Condesa.
