Hello blogger friends!
I am happy to say that I have finished all my classes for this semester and am ready to head back to Vegas to spend a nice Christmas with my family and friends. I hope to catch you all up to what I've been doing in the last month or so via blog or in persno, so the first adventure I shall share with you virtually is my little excursion to Mexico City and the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan just outside of the city.
The trip to Mexico City and Teotihuacan was planned by the study abroad program that I take classes through. But a friend and I decided to go ourselves into the city the day before to catch a Norah Jones concert. We both kind of splurged on the tickets and got seats 3 rows from the stage and a little to the left. I say this because we saw the show at the National Auditorium in Mexico City, one of the largest venues in Mexico. Norah was awesome, but her set was all too short, and there weren't any opening acts. But I can't complain, I had been wanting to see her ever since I was 12, and to see her in Mexico made it a little more exciting. The staff there were camera nazis, so I only have one blurry picture of Ms. Jones:
So the next morning we met with our compatriots in the zócalo of Mexico City and headed over to the Palacio Nacional, which is basically the White House of Mexico. The Palacio Nacional shares the zócalo with the imposing colonial-era cathedral built by the Spanish shortly after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital where Moctezuma lived and met Hernán Cortés. The cathedral is beautiful and terribly imposing:
So after meeting up, we toured the 'palace', which is decorated with murals painted by Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist extraordinaire and husband of the equally brilliant Frida Kahlo. With that said, most of the tour was just discussing the work of Diego and the significance and sometimes subtle and hidden meanings in his murals that may not be very apparent to the casual non-art history major. His works are colossal, and took him many years to finish, he intended to paint the entire interior way around the Palacio Nacional, but alas, death caught up with him. His themes are very nationalistic, and he painted about Mexican history and the pre-Hispanic lives of the indigenous Aztecs and other groups. I was really wowed by them and can't wait to learn more about him. I was especially stunned by his depictions of pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan, the city built on a lake. Here are a few glimpses are his awesome work:
After the Palacio Nacional, we headed over to one of my favorite places in Mexico City, the anthropology museum! I love this place, and have already been there twice, each time 2-3 hours, and still have not seen all of the exhibits. The museum is a national museum, so all of the exhibitions are about the different regions of Mexico and the groups that have lived there. We all went to the Teotihuacan exhibit to acquaint with the history and culture of this ancient city.
Let me give you a quick run through: Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities of its time, having a population of almost 200,000 around the time of Christ. The city even had like modern-day equivalents to Chinatowns, where ethnic enclaves lived together. The architecture and art was very advanced, but the city fell into decline somehow (famine, war, disease) and the city eventually became dispopulated, there is even evidence that fire destroyed much of the city. Which that said, the two GIANT pyramids still remain, and I love ancient ruins, especially pyramids. The city is kinda creepy-cool. The main road the divides the city is translated into being called the 'Passageway of the Dead' and the two pyramids are each dedicated to a celestial body, one dedicated to the Sun and the other to the Moon, thus garnering their respective names Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. The another reason for these names is that popular legend says that Teotihuacan is the site where the gods met together to create the Sun and the Moon. The pyramid of the Sun is much larger than the one of the Moon, and I, being afraid of heights, almost didn't make it to the top. Strangely enough, on the top I found my Swedish friend who I met at my school in Puebla. Small world, huh? Here are some picture to feast your eyes on:
As you can see in the last picture, the pyramid of the sun was preeeeettttyyyyy high up there. In the background you can see the pyramid of the moon, which is also big, but dwarfed by the Mr. Sun. What is especially exciting about Teotihuacan is that it is an active archaeological zone, many sites are cornered off due to ongoing studies. In fact, the top half of the pyramid of the moon is sectioned off because archaeologists found human remains, possibly of royal digniaries or priests. Even though the pyramid of the Moon isn't as tall as the one of the Sun, the steps are hecka more steep and I thought I was going to die:
All in all, Teotihuacan is utterly amazing, and I can't wait to visit again, even though I may fall to my death in doing so. :D
MÁS FOTOS!
