Lesson of the day. Cafe de dias in Starchucks (intentional) translates as coffee of the day. It comes out of a box. It is goon box coffee. It should translate as swill of the day. I thought for a moment I had mistakenly ordered decaf. But it’s the gamble I am willing to take in my daily games of Mexican roulette – what is this thing? Who knows? Will I eat it, drink it or do it? Probably.
Today’s adventure comes to you two days later from a Starbucks on Reforma, one of Mexico City’s major roads and location of statues of long-dead heroes and assorted men from bank notes. But it’s all about the National Anthropology Museum. More specifically, the Archaeology floors that I examined with the meticulousness of the Archaeology student I was 20 years ago. I loved learning about assemblages, ancient people, architecture and customs, particularly in MesoAmerica which was not easy to do in Australia. Unfortunately, whatever idiot side of my brain processes spatial stuff couldn’t keep up with the book smarts side. I was total rubbish at practical things like lab work, plotting mud maps and drawing ceramics, so I had to bail. Oh, I graduated with decent marks because the grades were always in the reports. But I just knew that I couldn’t work in the field. I have always loved it though.
I knew the National Anthropology Museum would be epic. It’s basically the number one thing to see in Mexico City on all recommended lists. It was an Indiana Jo archaeology Disneyland Day without the mouse ears basically.
The day began with me exiting the hotel on a quest to find an alternative breakfast location. The hotel breakfast was fine – no complaints – it was a reliable source of huevos (eggs). But it was just getting a bit boring and well, easy, dining at the same place. So Google Maps revealed the location of a place on the way so I packed my kit and was off. (Am always reminded of the line from Temple of Doom – ‘Shorty, get our stuff!’ – that Indy yells about three times in the film. I am both Indy and Shorty in this adventure so I think it works.)
After the odd misstep, I found the cafe. Sparkling chandelier, fancy music, croissants – French patisserie. Oh crap. I have fabulously bad luck at these places. It’s like the French can smell the stench of reality and unpretentiousness on me (yes I was wearing deodorant) – this was no different. I saw people eating eggs and asked for desayuno (breakfast). They took one look at the backpack, 1 litre bottle of water, clompy responsible walking shoes. and all I got was the pastries menu and a cheap seat at the counter like a poverty-stricken backpacker from the doss house. Low blood sugar began to kick in. Quickly, I computed the options in my head. I was in the middle of the Sahara desert of breakfasts. No carts, nothing open for miles that I knew about other than convenience stores. You may ask why I didn’t just walk out and buy a bag of crap from the 711 or eat a big fat Danish. Two reasons – a combo of the tablets that I take for migraines and my own metabolism means that I can’t process sugary things for breakfast. I will pretty much end up with a racing heartbeat and nausea. Those pastries were out. Also, lack of food scrambles my thinking. Access to savoury stuff quick is imperative. So I went the least damaging route – a quinoa and carrot muffin and a double espresso. The muffin was minuscule. I have scraped bigger baking disasters off the inside of my oven. Only option was to eat and throw myself on the mercy of whatever menu fate had in store for me.
(How interesting. I believe the entire city has been kicked out of buildings for an earthquake drill. Now I double regret that coffee because there’s no access to a toilet. Oh joy.)
I decided to walk (Camino) to the museum. About 40 minutes and see what else I could find on the way. As luck would have it, 20 minutes around the corner was a group of taco stalls. One was clearly more popular than the others with a queue and Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ pumping through a Bluetooth speaker. This was deliverance! Two delicious lamb tacos for second breakfast for the cost of half that tiny thing resembling a muffin. Backwards two fingered salute to the French! Viva Mexico!
I navigated a treacherous path through roadworks that blocked most of the street, barely managing to escape with my pants legs clean from the dirt and grit being shoveled everywhere. More planks than the Pirates of the Caribbean movie crossed trenches most of the way along. Not a Farmers Union Iced Coffee in sight. The path took me to Chapultepec Park, also known as the lungs of Mexico City. It is one of the biggest free and open green areas in Latin America, filtering out much of the smog which I personally haven’t seen. I took in the statues, an amphitheater, a squirrel that ran across the path, a massive monument and a billion little carts of snacks, toys (the one of choice being a plush monkey that sat on your head and shot water from somewhere), key rings, nasty jewellery etc. You know what I mean. One side was dedicated to fitness with jogging and tai chi. The other dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure (ie crap). The anthropology museum was on the other side of a lake lined with more stalls. I ambled my way there, knowing I had to meet the group at 6. As long as I was out of there by 5ish, it would be cool. No stress.
I arrived at the building, checked my backpack and commenced the onslaught on 22 rooms plus two temporary exhibitions. The first of the two was on the private collection of a 19th century diplomat called Alfonso Reyes. Or his money bought stuff??? Origin story vague without English panels but the stuff was amazing! I am particularly fascinated by art that intertwined the horrific and the beautiful. The painting below was a particular favourite. I stood for ages taking in every little detail.
I started snapping my camera with the energy and enthusiasm of a paparazzi looking to upskirt Diana circa 1985. Next were two screens depicting the fall of Tenochtitlan. Conquistadors and Aztecs drowning, toppling from burning buildings, impaling or shooting each other … Such rich detail. Lots more paintings of the Eagle eating a snake on the cactus (what’s on their flag), cacti, maps, small statues, huge portraits of Montezuma. Even the landscapes were great – normally I am all about the portraits or paintings of people. Wow! And I hadn’t even hit the main collections yet! I entered the main courtyard to this powerful piece.
I was fully psyched for the next temporary exhibition on photos of Mexican ruins depicting their changing appearance over the passage of time and evolution of photographic techniques. Scroogian fantasies are constructed brick by ancient crumbling brick of crumbling old temples with precariously protruding roots and local guides posing with pack horses etc. I am also obsessed with the travels of Stephens and Catherwood, the famous Yank and Pom who sketched and wrote their way across the Yucatan in search of the Mayan temples in the 1840s. So to see turn of the century photographs ruins I had either visited or seen in Catherwood’s sketches was very exciting to me. Sadly, my pho’s of photos are a bit reflective and not too good to post. Double sadness was a total absence of exhibition merch.
Lightbulb moment! A pre-emptive stomach strike was in order to prevent vaguing out halfway through. I headed for the knife and fork symbol on the mapa which corresponded to a bit of a fancy cafe but not French! A friendly older chap named Marco served me a delicious omelet and coffee and commiserated with me about the fires when he found out I was Australian. Best of all, I took soooo many pictures of squirrels!!!!! This is the best one.
The bottom floors – 11 rooms – are dedicated to archaeology, covering the broad geographic and culturally diverse areas of Mexico. The first rooms go right back to mega fauna and prehistoric man. The dioramas and miniatures were outstanding in detail. I particularly appreciated unnecessary details like sabre toothed tigers digging their massive canines into Australopithecine figures or this mammoth taking out five guys, featuring fine details of bloody craniums.
The Preclassic rooms featured elaborate reconstructions of temples and paintings I saw at Teotihuacán the day before. I turned around and let fly with a violent expletive of shock when I saw this.
It was absolutely massive. An awe-inspiring structure to me but a selfie magnet to most others. The feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, is one of the main MesoAmerican gods. It’s everywhere. Nine skeletons were found under the temple with their hands bound, victims of sacrifice. This was a reconstruction of a temple at Teotihuacán but we never saw this!! Where was it??? Vaporised?!?! Hidden under a tarp??? Sucked up by aliens?? Spewing!!!
The green bird, the musical puma, talking jaguar – replica paintings and statues all there and English captions! Two other big rooms reconstructed to look like temples. Amazing. Then I hit the post Teotihuacán period when groups in the area competed to fill the power vacuum left by the Teotihuacános. The Toltecs were a fairly earring group, famous for these massive statues called atlantes. They had hundreds of them and they are huge. I will also point out that each room had a garden outside with plants and mini reconstructions of buildings or site miniatures.
Room 6 was the Scrooge McDuck Money Bin of the museum. I felt like an adventurer stepping into a secret chamber of antiquities. History punched me in the face with the intensity of a full- force jab to the cranium packing a five finger knuckle-duster. It was the AZTEC ROOM! (Although, technically they called themselves the Mexicas). I could blow my entire WordPress storage on photos from here. The first thing you see is this.
Despite its position at the opposite end of the room, the Aztec sun stone is a deity unto itself dominating the crowd flocking to it. It hangs high on the wall so people can pose with it for the obligatory photo. See me right up the top of the page! The myth that this was the Aztec calendar has been fully debunked. Nope. Buh bow. These are the Aztecs after all. There will be blood. Actually, gladiators would lie down on this huge carved stone for ritual sacrifice. The deity in the middle gripping some hearts is a bit of a giveaway. Not sure which part of the calendar people mistook that for originally. Star sign of the hangry??
This reconstruction of a temple shows the braziers to the left and right where the priests would burn incense (not Glen 20). Quetzalcoatl is in his usual place at the bottom of the steps. Victims performed a back bend over the stone in the middle while the priests carved their heart out and hurled the body down the steps. They didn’t do this for kicks. The Aztecs believed that sacrifice was necessary to keep their society going – for the sun to keep rising, for the rain to keep falling, for the grain to keep growing. Captives from other tribes and local people were killed but so were children whose tears were considered especially delicious to the rain god, Tlaloc. And kids these days think it’s rough if they can’t get wifi!
Tenochtitlan was built on a lake which is why it’s wonky. You can see theong causeways the Spaniards rose up. During the battle for the city that the Spaniards eventually won with the help of a little thing called smallpox, many conquistadors, horses, armour etc plunged right to the bottom of the lake off the causeways. A few were destroyed to cut off escape routes. You can also see the Templo Mayor on the model. Left is the Tlaloc side (water god), right is Huitzilopolit (war god) side. The Eagle warrior workout zone – perhaps like the Crows shed for the time? – is just next to it. Some of these buildings would be under the Metropolitan cathedral now.
This is Coatlicue- skirt of serpents (literal translation of the name) goddess. It is a very awesome statue. I looked at it for ages.
Eventually I left this room with heavy heart, enriched soul and a billion pictures. The rest of the archaeology rooms were dedicated to regions. The first was the Puebla, Oaxaca region which has a big site called Monte Alban. Now I know there is a secret underground room there because the museum created a replica under some stairs. Everywhere you went, there was a new little thing to discover!!
The Olmecs were an ancient civilisation that many of the other cultures try to link back to in the same way that family history nuts try to link themselves back to William the Conqueror. They are most famous for giant heads!
The next room was the Maya who are still my favourite culture. I love the clash of cultures and the rich history of the Aztecs vs Spaniards and I could read about the horrors of the conquest all day, but there is something about a Mayan temple covered in intricate glyphs and carvings in a humid jungle surrounded by quetzal birds and howler monkeys that leaves me weak at the knees. A feeling of adventure centuries later continues unabated. Discoveries are still being made and the Mayan culture continues to thrive today. So I hit these rooms with mucho gusto!
That said, there wasn’t much here compared to what is in the Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan heartland. Downstairs was a reconstruction of the tomb of King Pakal from the Temple of Inscriptiones at Palenque. My old mate Pakal. I saw him on my last trip to the Yucatan. His tomb is famous and I will save that for the Palenque post, but I can say that the lid on his sarcophagus looks a bit like he is piloting a spaceship if you look at it the wrong way. So I had a giggle when I saw him in his outfit here looking like he was about to go up in Apollo XI.
With a flick of my wrist, my piece of crap twenty buck Target watch revealed that I had been in a reverie for 5 hours. I had about an hour and half to get back to the hotel for the group meeting. Decision time. I elected to ditch the top 11 floors of ethnography l, figuring I would see live people walking around in traditional costumes soon enough. I didn’t want to waste time perving on dummies. I figured I would rather check out the lake. So, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book of the 80’s, I made my fork in the road choice and hooned through the last room on the Hoboken and Anasazi people of Southwestern America. (Wondered if that was a stretch??) Then the obligatory visit to the gift shop with a disappointing variety of merch. Only a bookmark and a cheap magnet of the sun stone – really??? Shorty get our stuff!!!! Ok – grabbed backpack from locker and headed for lake.
Didn’t have that much time. But the following discoveries were made – a guy charging for photo ops on dummy horses dressed up like cowboy horses (el dodgy), lots of paddle boats, a strong busking culture, obligatory Starbucks and a terrifying absence of 3G when I needed an Uber to get back to hotel. Oh crap. Too far to walk. Maybe it was the trees in the park. Time to retrace steps back to main drag where the signal might come back. Ended up flagging a cab. Got back to hotel. Another successful escapade!
At 6pm, I met the Intrepid group. There are 16 of us. A family of 4 from Australia, two Aussie couples, three women from the UK, one chap from the UK and a Bulgarian chap living in the UK. We went out for dinner where I had grilled chicken in an effort to counterbalance my two Negro Modela beers. Dave, the chap from the UK, had chicken mole. This was mole unlike any other I gave ever seen. It was thick like chocolate pudding and super sweet. On enchiladas, it was kinda wrong. It is now a bit of a running joke. For Aussies, you pronounce it mo-lay. I explained that a mole is like a slag in Australia. Dave and I get on stupendously. (Hi Dave if you are reading this!)
Stay tuned for further adventures in tacos and explorations in Mexico City
HockTales: a Central American Adventure 