Learning about Mexican history

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After some breakfast of the tastiest frosted cereal I have ever had we were off to explore Mexico City. Our first stop was the Palacio de Bellas Artest , a beautiful building designed in 1901 and built in a Art Nouveau style with marble imported from Italy. The inside is equally impressive, Art Deco style this time. On display on the lower levels were several Diego Rivera paintings, which are copies of those he painted for display in the Rockerfeller Center iin New York. Rockerfeller destroyed the originals due to Rivera´s leftist leanings. He specifically objected to inclusion of Karl Marx. (Or so at least say the signs next to the paintings). Conveniently entrance to the museum on the top floors was free today so we wandered up the grand staircase to see the large-format murals surrounding the central courtyard space. The murals in the building itself were painted by Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Siquieros. These artists all interpreted the Revolution and Mexican history through the medium of enormous murals in the first half of the 20th century. Rivera´s murals appear in many places throughout Mexico City and I am sure we will be seeing many more of them. We in fact tried to visit the Museo Mural Diego Rivera which is supposed to show all the important figures in Mexican history out for a walk in the Alameda (which is the park across the street from Bellas Artes) but this was closed for some sort of renovation. We will try to see it when we return on the 1st. Some of the murals in Bellas Artes showed the colonial times, some the revolution and some the pre-Hispanic times. They were all very large and somewhat overwhelming and I wonder if that was not the intention in the first place.

While heading to the bus station to go to our next destination we saw the people on the streets who were marching in the protests. We still do not know exactly what they were protesting but will try to find out as it seems important. We took the bus to Chapultepec Park which is a huge area that has museums, lakes, gardens, playing fields and a zoo. We were there for the Museo Nacional de Antropologia. This is a great museum - probably one of the best I ever saw in its design and the way it is laid out. It is organized around what amounts to a large central patio with the exhibition rooms surrounding it. These are in turn surrounded by gardens which you can enter from most of the rooms. We got the audio guide which was a good idea but not necessarily unavoidable as the labels are excellent and explain a lot. We do get very tired reading all that stuff though so it was a good mix to listen some and read some.

The objects are very well labeled and laid out. Although there are many it did not get overwhelming as it does in many other museums. We looked at the overview rooms as well as the rooms of the cultures whose geographical location we would be visiting. So we did not look at the Maya rooms because that is all in the Yucatan peninsula and we are not going there. So we saw the Teotihuacan and the Mexica (Aztec) rooms. It was interesting to learn about the other cultures because before it always seemed to me that the Aztecs and Mayas were pretty much the only ones (what can I say, I am ignorant) but it was of course not like that. The Teotihuacan culture was pre-Aztec in fact and quite powerful in their day. It is just that the Mexicas or Aztec were the last culture and the one whose language Nuhuatl still survives to this day, so more is known about them than about the others. We also learned that the Aztecs initially settled on a small island in the middle of a lake in 1325 out of which they built their new city Tenochtitlan. This was the only place their much more powerful neighbors would let them settle and did not leave them much room for farming. They overcame this by growing crops on floating reed islands which allowed them to collect harvest twice a year instead of the usual one time. This small island the Aztecs started their empire from is now the middle of Mexico City, almost exactly. Ruins found near the Zocalo and the cathedral are what is left over of their empire today.

Touring the museum made us verrry tired, so we went to sleep early.

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