Mexico City – Day 2

Posted on January 17, 2003 in Vacations

No, still no photos. We´re back in the Internet Cafe located in the Zona Rosa (the pink not the red zone). We spent too much money today visiting the Templo Mayor and the Palace of Justice (where we paid a guide to explain the Rivera murals to us — he did a nice job, though he didn´t teach me any Mexican history that I had´nt known before (but then, I´m not the average gringo.

A taxi driver told us that one needed three things to drive around in Mexico City: a good set of brakes, a good horn, and Jesus Christ. I´ve decided not to drive out to the pyramids: instead we´re going on an organized tour. Drivers cut in all kinds of directions just to get ahead. We´ve seen taxi drivers go short of the sidewalk to get around stalled traffic. More than once, I found myself facing opposing traffic. I´m leaving this town for the experts.

Main attraction: the Templo Mayor, the remnants of the great double pyramid that used to stand in the center of the Aztec capital. A large, informal market fills the square between the sanctuary of the old gods and the Sanctuary of the new one. Aztec dancers staked out a rainbow-colored Aztec calendar. Some of the dancers reserved the closest spots for their own stalls where they sold reproductions of artifacts, skulls, and, in one case, nearly obsence drawings of Aztec warriors carrying off comatose maidens. (I never realized that they made so many.) Prices were astounding for those of us reared on the markets of Tijuana and Ensenada. Even the more tourist-infested markets offered better bargains than the dives of the Avenue Revolucion in TJ.

We ate well without ever entering a restaurant. For less than five dollars the two of us bought ourselves generous helpings of ceviche (lime-pickled seafood in salsa) and sodas. Lynn hunted down bargains in beads and jewelry for her nieces while I, naturally, procured skulls and similar artifacts.

Mixed among the souvenir-infested blankets were a few faith healers, some styling themselves as Aztecs. I observed, but did not photograph a man who kept a smoking bowl of copal. His customers, who were many, approached him one by one. He´d press his thumb to their foreheads while murmuring something, possibly in Nahuatl. This man wore a panama hat, a white shirt, and blue jeans. A hippy contender dressed in a traditional Aztec headdress and breachclout. He prefered to do consultations, as far as I could see, rather than actual healings. An elderly bruja dressed in bright native-woven rags enjoined us to partake of her services. A sign indicated that she offered only ¨white magic¨¨. The images of saints which surrounded her (including ¨Santisima Muertas¨– Saint Death) conflicted only with the tarot cards she used to tell the fortune of an anxious university student. While she made him cover the cards with his hands, she explained her services to us. Of course, she spoke so rapidly, we did not understand.

The Templo Mayor itself consisted of ridge after ridge of black and burgandy walls made of pumice. Concrete paths took us around the site, which included the remnants of several feathered serpents, eagle warriors, and polychrome inner sanctuaries protected by steel roofs. In the very back was a modern museum where we enjoyed exhibits of sacrifice remnants, a skull rack, several terracotta idols (including my all time favorites Xipe Totec and Mitlantecuhlti), and, the Mona Lisa of the place, a round stone depicting the chopped up remnants of an Aztec goddess who´d been thrown off the pyramid in mythic times after slaying her mother.

Tomorrow, we go to the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park and to the cemetery where Diego Riviera is buried. Sunday is reserved for Lynn´s pilgrimage to Guadalupe and on Monday we visit the Pyramids.

To be continued….