Mexico City

We left Mexico City on Saturday. The air was so thick with smog that buildings 100m away were partially obscured. I was a lot more congested than I had been the day before, and I was coughing quite a bit; I'm pretty sure it was because of the smog. That was a huge change from every other day we were there. When we arrived on Tuesday, visibility was very good and the air seemed fine throughout the week. Presumably a different weather system came in: I can't imagine that Saturdays would be so much worse than weekdays.

Overall, we really enjoyed Mexico City.

Our hotel (the Hotel Milan) was very nice and the neighbourhood was full of good restaurants and street vendors. We ate very well most meals. Sufficiently well that we typically only ate two meals a day.

The subway costs 3 pesos (about 25 cents) per person per trip, no matter how far you ride it. The light rail system that extends out from the metro also costs 3 pesos. Buses are 5 pesos per trip, sometimes less. There are taxis everywhere. They cost quite a bit more and Lonely Planet warns that Mexico City has fake cabs that rob their passengers, so we didn't take them often. However, when we did, we found the drivers to be very friendly and they always took a direct route to our destination. Cabs in Mexico City are metered, unlike in Oaxaca where you need to negotiate the fare before getting in. Overall, it was very easy to get around. We were also within walking distance of many attractions, so we got quite a bit of exercise.

And the museums!

We went to the National Museum of Anthropology twice and still only saw a little over half of it. We visited hardly any of the second floor, which focuses on the culture in various parts of Mexico. We mostly stayed on the ground floor, which has artifacts from pre-hispanic sites from all over the country. And there are a lot of them. Many of the museum's exhibits appeared to have been refreshed fairly recently, so quite a bit had changed since our previous visit in 1995. I was surprised to find that the famous (huge) "Aztec Calendar" was in fact a record of conquests and not a calendar at all. The Mayan section also had many recently excavated artifacts from sites near the Guatemalan border.

This visit to the museum was also much more interesting for us, because we have learned a lot about the history of meso-america since our previous visit and so we had context for comparing artifacts from many of the sites.

It's a pity that reports of roadblocks and robberies in northern Veracruz kept us from going there: I would love to have seen some of the Olmec sites in person (though the best one at La Venta is now mostly under an oil refinery). It was interesting to compare and contrast the Olmec artifacts with roughly contemporary ones from Oaxaca. For example, the olmecs may have done a bit of cranial deformation, but most of their sculptures show people with normally rounded heads. There were also quite a few Olmec sculptures showing men with beards. In Oaxaca on the other hand, it seems like most of the nobles had flattened skulls and almost none were bearded.

Something that struck me this visit was how much the deliberately deformed skulls resemble Neanderthal skulls. The sloping forehead, protruding jaw and wide cranium seem very similar to me.

We took perhaps 400 photos in the museum (and perhaps 20 of the rest of Mexico City). I've put a few of the more striking ones up at https://picasaweb.google.com/100719842898341494426/20120110MuseumOfAnthropology#

In the Mayan section of the museum, Michelle found what may be the original smiley emoticon:


The photo below shows the smiley in context: