We headed out on Friday the 13th to visit the museum of Anthropology and began the day on the metro bus. The plan was to take line 1 to a junction and then take Line 7 to the museum. Apparently there was a traffic, or bus problem, or something, and it dumped us off several stops before the end. Everyone got off the bus and we cut across the city where we saw a fountain of Fuente de Cibeles, a greek goddess, which is a replica of a fountain in Madrid. We continued on the tree-lined streets filled with cafe’s and street vendors and came across an old aqueduct that I am sure is a fountain during the summer months.
Kathy spotted a familiar logo of the company I worked for on one of the high rises so we took some time to take a few photos, walk to the building, and pose for some selfies to send back to the folks back home. The texts to the team was fun and I realize I miss working with those good people.
Since we were only a few blocks from the museum, we continued on and diverted through the park to walk amongst the trees. As we approached the museum we saw some more of the Aztec rope dancers taking a break between their performances. The museum line outside was about 50 meters long and moved quickly where we found another line 3x as long. Kathy wandered off to the gift shop and restrooms and I waited in line to purchase tickets, which only took about 30 minutes. And then we got to enter…
The Museo Nacional de Antropología is considered to be one of the world’s best museum in anthropology and for the entrance price of $12 USD, it is a real value. It is set up as a giant U-shaped building with exhibits covering recent discoveries in Mexico City, the history of human evolution and migration, detailed descriptions of the peoples in the last 10,000 years in the Americas, and additional religious and cultural displays of festivals and traditions. The first exhibit on the left was the recent dig (1977) of a room found in Mexico City called Tlillancalco, the place of the black house. In a nutshell, they were building in an area and came across some artifacts that expanded to a full-fledged dig. Here is the link for pictures and a description if you are interested.
Ever since I visited Greece and Thessaloniki ancient cities fascinate me. Cities are settled for a number of reasons, and those reasons generally transcend time; seaports, convergences of rivers or roads on trade routes, etc. And cities are build upon themselves when the ruins of one are paved over for the regeneration of new. In this case, Mexico city is an ancient city, now named Cuidad de Mexico, but was conquered by the Spanish in 1521 when it was known as Tenochtitlan that was founded in 1325 by the Aztecs in what was a swampy area in Lake Texcoco, which at the time was a sparsely populated area of villages controlled by the Tepanec people of Azcapotzalco to the west and the Colhuacán to the South. The Mexica (later known as Aztecs) were looking for a home and based on a prophecy of an Eagle landing on a cactus and this place was where they saw it. An island in an inland salten sea settled by a people looking for a homeland. This sounds a bit familiar. Well, you can research yourself with the links, but they basically created raised areas in the swamp to settle and raise crops and ultimately built Tenochtitlan that the Spanish conquered in 1521.
We wandered through the first couple of sections that covered Human Evolution and migrations of people where we know now there were two major migrations 20,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago where people crossed the Bearing land mass and worked their way down to what is now Mexico, Central America, and South America where they flourished in the ideal climate. We wandered through more a more recent display that showed the differences of the regions of Mexico, Central America, and South America and how humans built their houses, tamed the land, and traded throughout the region up to the present day. It was simply overwhelming, beautiful, inspiring, fun, educational, and exhausting. We had not eaten since breakfast and it was going on 3:45 so we decided to head out and get something to eat. And then we found the museum restaurant.
The restaurant is called Sala Gastronómica, and has a menu for each of the 5 regions of Mexico. We had some freshly made guacamole and some grilled shrimp tacos from the Baja region. Yum. We practices some of our terrible spanish with the waiters and then packed up to head home. The museum closed at 5 anyway and we had left the pups at 10 and we still had a bus ride home. We decided to come back because we had only seen 30% of the museum.
The bus ride back was crowded as it was rush hour. We made it from metro 7 to metro 1 and the thing was just too crowded so we ended up walking back to the AirBnB, which took us about 45 minutes. Overall, a fantastic day in CDMX.