7.20.13

Today was my big sight seeing day. I’ve been sick the past two weekends and I leave for Guadalajara this Friday so this is my only real change to do the tourist thing. I used tripomatic.com to plan it all out – I highly recommend it. I had a huge day ahead of me with at least 8 different sights to see. I was doing almost the whole city in one day. Luckily I just had to take a taxi there and then it was all within walking distance.

I went to the bank to finally exchange money and then hopped into a taxi to the beginning of my day: La Alameda. Unfortunately, this is the park where our BFF hangs out so I had to be careful to avoid that part of the park. The driver dropped me off right outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes, my first stop. The taxi driver was so sweet though and I told him my itinerary and he suggested a restaurant for lunch. It was a couple blocks up from where I was planning to go, but it wasn’t too far and he highly recommended it.

El Palacio de Bellas Artes is a huge museum/opera/concert hall. The building in and of itself is gorgeous. The detail of the architecture was outstanding. I thin the building was created in the end of the 1800s, the city’s heyday. The display of wealth – gold everything, exquisite stonework, frilly column heads, and adornments everywhere – was breathtaking. Then, when you enter the lobby while everything is still ostentatious the architecture simplifies some. Beautiful marble pillars and floors everywhere, but it didn’t feel as in your face as the outside of the building. IT was what one would expect from an opera house, but on the tops of the columns, instead of Grecian column heads, there were mayan-esque masked fasces. It was a beautifully done combination of the European and the Indigenous cultures.

The murals on the walls of the museum were breathtaking. I was able to stand next to tour guides and eaves drop to figure out what was going on in each one. They spanned from Cortez’s torture of the Aztec kings, to the industrial revolution to World War Two. They were wonderful even for someone with little art history knowledge. On my way out, an old guy asked if I like one of the murals across he way. “I have to be honest,” I said, “I don’t really understand it.” To be honest, I just saw the 7x7ft boobs at eye level and walked by it. So, he explained it to me. From across the atrium, one could see that what I thought were three separate paintings was really just one. The artist had spit it up so you could view it from across the atrium and not have the columns get in the way of it. The old man said that on the right and the left panels were the horrors of Hitler – torturing and mutilating the Jews. The large middle panel showed a naked woman breaking free of her bonds, emerging from the volcano of war with the torch of liberty in one hand and a flower of hope in the other. At her feet was the fallen Hitler. He said it predicted the end of WW2. I looked it up online after I got back and while the painting was definitely about WW2 and the fall of fascism, the whole Hitler/Jew angle is debated. After viewing the museum of tons and tons of murals, I went outside to marvel at the beautiful gardens. They were exquisitely sculpted and mirrored the splendor of the palace they surrounded. I’m always surprised by the amount of PDA in Latin America. The gardens were filled with couples young and old eating each other’s faces. The gardens, nonetheless, were beautiful.

From there I went to the Palacio Postal. Again the architecture was beautifully done. There were filly thingies all over the building. It was really pretty and clearly old and from a grander time. But, the inside completely blew the outside away. The railings around the teller’s boxes was incredibly intricately done. Walking around the tellers, there were two old-fashioned elevators on either side of a regal staircase. Now when I say it was regal, I don’t just mean that it was enormous and imposing. I mean that one step could feed all of Africa for a year.  Well, that was an exaggeration. It would probably take two or three.

After wandering around the post office, I walked towards my next destination: Café Tacuba. It was a café founded in 1912 and was super cute. But, because the taxi driver recommended me a different restaurant, I decided to just get a cappuccino and admire the architecture. It was quaint, but nothing breathtaking. Unfortunately, the cappuccino was extremely hot and I wanted to get going so I drank it too quickly and burned my tongue badly.

After that I was off looking for the Hosteria de Santo Domingo, the restaurant that the taxi driver recommended. I walked along Calle Tacuba for a while and discovered that I was in the perfume district. There were dozens of small shops with exclusively perfume. After that, I passed into the wedding district. There was shop after shop of wedding dresses. It made for splendid window-shopping. The architecture was all late 1700s early 1800s and they had maintained the buildings’ facades. The avenues were simply beautiful and I really enjoyed getting to know the architecture without being in tourist-ville.

Finally I arrived at Hosteria de Santo Domingo. It had only a small sign in the window and I almost missed it completely. When I walked in, though, it opened up into an atrium of a three-story building. It too was a very old restaurant, although they didn’t flaunt their founding date like Café Tacuba did. I got the Chile Enogada, what the taxi driver recommended as a “puro Mexicano” meal. The waiter also asked if I was here for that specifically, so I figured it was worth getting. Unfortunately, it was not. It was a big green pepper stuffed with meat and other unidentifiable accompaniments. Then there was this nauseatingly sweet thick nut sauce flooding my plate and to top it all off were pomegranate seeds. The taxi driver described it as “muy rico” which mean very rich and delicious. It was very rich and thick with flavors and it wasn’t awful, but it certainly was too much for me. I actually had to take a couple of minutes before I was able to get up from the table, it hit me so hard. Regardless, it was a good Mexican experience and I felt like I had tasted a truly Mexican dish.

After that I headed back towards the Zócalo, the center of both the Spanish rulers and the previous Aztec rulers. This street was parallel to the wedding dress street and it was full of tux and suit stores. I knew I was getting close to the Zócalo about two blocks before I actually arrived because the streets filled up with people selling useless crap. As I battled my way through the streets, I found to my surprise that Mexicans were buying this stuff, too. In fact, the majority of the people I saw looked, and sounded Mexican. I spent some time in the makeshift market that took up most of the Zócalo but found that it was mostly junk. Around the Zócalo is the cathedral, the national palace, and very important Aztec ruins that the Spaniards built their city on top of.

I headed to the Cathedral. It was a massive building, a truly ginormous church. But, to my surprise, I found the front to be in a state of disrepair. Nothing was falling off, but there was a lot of mold growing on the stone. When I went inside, I found really insane gold ornate altars like I expected, but the stone work of the cathedral was kinda shotty. I wandered around and while I was blown away by the intricate woodwork covered in gold, the plain walls with mortar showing through kept stopping me. The contrast was pretty jarring. I went into the priests’ changing room where they put on their robes. The paintings in that room were insane as well. After spending about a half an hour in the cathedral though, I just got really mad at religion and the guilt trips and the insane wealth and the pomp and circumstance. I had a moment where it was just too much and I left the church. I think what bothered me was the beauty of the building and trying to put myself in townspeople’s shoes 400 years ago – or even today. I would have been so blown away by the beauty of the paintings and the altars and all the gold that I probably wouldn’t have through twice about religion. It felt as though they were buying followers, trying to buy me. I was so in awe of it all that, for a second, I felt as though they might have succeeded.

I calmed down and turned around the look again at the outside of the cathedral. There was a big line heading back into the castle. I asked a nearby tour guide what the line was for. He said it was to go up to the top of the cathedral to look out over the city. He also offered to give me a tour of the nearby Aztec temple museum for $11. I was feeling really lost in all the city’s glory and craving a good guide so I agreed. I started to ask him some questions about the cathedral and so we just went through the whole cathedral again. Looking at it from an architecture perspective helped me to calm down about it, but I just didn’t like it one bit.

Then we went to El Templo Mayor which was the Aztecs main temple. The Aztecs lived on Tenochitlan: an island in the middle of a big lake. Tenochitlan is now the center of the current-day Mexico City and the lake has been drained to make way for this huge metropolitan city. The Spanish put their new gimundo church right on top of the Aztec city and it wasn’t until the mid 1900s that people putting in some sort of cable found the ruins of the old temple. Its quite cool. Each Aztec king put a new layer on top of the old pyramid, building up the pyramid until it was huge. So, while the Spanish destroyed all the stuff on the outermost layer of the building, they didn’t mess with the inner, older layers. They have excavated the layers now and have found some really cool sculptures and offerings and cultural stuff. I am infinitely glad that I got the guide. Without him I would have had no idea what I was looking at. We spent two hours looking at the excavations and the museum inside. It was fascinating.

After we got out of the museum, we were walking down the street and one of the old buildings was at an 80-degree angle. I asked why so we wandered in. It was and old convent and today is the Ex-Teresa Arte Actual. They put an art gallery in this old convent. Because of the shifting of the city and because no one was looking after the building for a hundred years, one edge sunk more than the other. Consequently, the whole building is tilted worse than the leaning tower of pisa. That’s something fascinating about the city – its constantly sinking. Buildings sink proportional to the amount of weight. When they excavated the temple mayor, they took all of the weight off of the ruins. So, while the city around it has sunk 3 meters over the past 30 years, the temple hasn’t sunk as much because there isn’t any weight pushing it down. It thus appears to have “risen” back up out of the city.

After that we went to the old site of the Spanish embassy. When they went to put a parking garage under the building, they ran into a huge Aztec building. The basement belongs to Mexico, but the upper floors are the Spanish cultural center, part of the Spanish embassy and technically Spanish soil. The museum Museo de Sitio CCEMx-INAH shows the ruins of a building that they believe was the Aztec noble’s school. Then there is a pretty café up on the third floor where you can look out over the cathedral. Its precious. After that I called it quits, paid the guide 50 bucks for the whole afternoon and he put me in a taxi and sent me home. We’re meeting tomorrow morning at 9:00 at the anthropology museum for another long day!

The taxi driver and I had a great conversation about HIV on the way home. How it is transmitted, how its different from HPV, how to protect it, how to treat it, etc. He was really interested and kept asking me more and more questions. I was super surprised at his interest. Finally, we pulled up to my building and he said thanks for talking I learned so much blab la bla and then he said, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I'm a homophobe and my son just came out as gay”. I’m worried about him. It was so cool. He turned off the meter and we talked about how to accept his son. Apparently he had been raped as a child and so had his son. He said the rape didn’t make him gay, in fact it made him determined to not be gay. How come it made his son day? I told him that the rape didn’t make his son gay. That’s just how his son was. He wanted to know how his son could know he was gay if he’d never had sex with a woman. Just the way I know I'm not gay and I’ve never had sex with a woman. You don’t need to have sex with someone to know you’re not attracted to them. I lied and said I was a doctor and that it isn’t a choice that that’s just the way his son was. There was nothing he would ever be able to do to change his son. “You don’t have to understand him, you just have to accept him” I said. It was really a raw moment for this guy. His son had been violated the same way he had, his son just came out to him a week ago, they weren’t speaking, and he learned about this deadly virus that’s super prevalent in the gay community. I really wanted to keep talking to him about it, but he got called to another location. Really great moment.

Finally, I got home and crashed in bed. I have no idea how I'm going to get out of bed tomorrow. That’s it for today, folks.