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Published: January 16th 2010
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UNAM
Mexico City University - UNAM Seeing large pyramids and eating cactus
In the end of this trip I spent a few days in Mexico City. Mexico City is a place where you can easily spend a week or more and still not have time to see everything worth seeing. I spent much less time than that so consequently I saw very little. But I did see a few interesting things and I present that here in this entry. I have also in the end thrown in a few additional photos that I for one reason or another thought were interesting enough to publish.
I start with
Mexico City University - UNAM. The main campus of UNAM was built in the 1950-ies. They took great care in making the campus an inspiring place by mixing architecture and art. They were so successful at this and the result was so good that UNAM today is declared a World Heritage by UNESCO. You can see for yourself in the photos if you think it’s justified or not.
I walked around the city centre one day and passed the GPO. The interior was quite a spectacular combination of mainly brass and marble. I just have to throw in
UNAM
They took great care in making the campus an inspiring place by mixing architecture and art. a photo of it here on the blog. I hope you like it as much as I do.
One day I decided to go on a daytrip from Mexico City to the town Cholula. In Cholula there is an archaeological site that holds
the largest pyramid in the World. As long as you talk about volume it is larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Almost twice as large if you are to believe what Wikipedia says.
The only reason to visit the Great Pyramid of Cholula is really to say that you’ve been there and that you have seen it. To be honest it doesn’t really look like a pyramid at all. It looks more like a grass covered hill. In fact, when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico they thought it really
was a grass covered hill so they built a church on top of it. Only later did they discover that underneath the grass there was a gigantic manmade structure. Today only a few small sections around the base have been excavated and restored to their former beauty. The rest looks like a grass covered hill with a church on top.
But I would still say it can
UNAM
UNAM today is declared a World Heritage by UNESCO. You can see for yourself if you think it’s justified or not. be worth going there if you have the time. I have now seen the Great Pyramid of Cholula. If I ever decide to visit Egypt I can now say “Oh that pyramid is so small. I have seen a much larger one in Mexico.”
But if you want to see pyramids that look like pyramids you are better off visiting another archaeological site -
Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan used to be the capitol in the Aztec Empire. In its heydays it is believed that as many as 200,000 people might have lived in the city, making it the largest city in the Americas at the time.
The site is dominated by three structures:
• Pyramid of the Sun - the largest structure in Teotihuacan. It might be the third largest pyramid in the World
• Pyramid of the Moon - slightly smaller that Pyramid of the Sun but still an imposing structure
• Avenue of the Dead - a large avenue running the length of the entire site.
In addition to these there are maybe a hundred or so smaller structures all along the Avenue of the Dead and at other places in the area. There are
UNAM
The art is created for the academic environment. One of the characters is holding a pair of compasses also structures that haven’t been excavated yet. These can be seen as small grass covered hills. Hope they don’t unleash any Spaniards anywhere any of those unexcavated structures. When they see a grass covered hill they have been known to build churches on top of them…
In the end of this blog entry I have added four photos that I’d like to write a little about.
In Mexico City there is a very efficient and safe metro system. It makes travelling within Mexico City very easy, convenient and cheap. On the trains there are always salesmen, buskers or beggars going around trying to make money. They mostly sell CDs and DVDs but sometimes they sell other things too. One of the strangest items I saw being sold in Mexico City Metro was a Pamphlet for students containing formulae in mathematics, physics and chemistry, a periodic table of the elements and various other tables. Being a teacher in mathematics and science I just had to have a photo of that guy. It is impressive that he tries to make a living from selling scientific literature in the metro. Anyone who does that is a hero!
The second
UNAM
One of the buildings looked like this photo is of a leafcutter ant. I think the leafcutter ants are so funny when they strip a tree of all its leaves and carry these to their nest. In the nest the ants use the leaves for growing a specific kind of mushroom. This mushroom then produce food for the ants. The ant in the photo is carrying a very big leaf, isn’t he?
The last two photos are of some odd food that I tried. The red one is grasshoppers and the green one is cactus. The grasshoppers are great as snack and the cactus is quite a tasty vegetable.
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Joel Smith
non-member comment
Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Mexica Empire, not Teotihuacan
Many people have made this same mistake and thought that Teotihuacan was the capital of the Aztecs (Mexica). Teotihuacan was a very old city when the Mexica visited it. They used it as a religious center. Their capital was Tenochtitlan, which is in the center of Mexico City. You can see some of the remains at the Templo Mayor, behind the Cathedral. The pyramids were demolished and the main buildings around the Zocalo were built over the remains. When the Spaniards visited Cholula, they knew it was a pyramid. Bernal Diaz del Castillo was a soldier with Cortez. He wrote a book about the conquest and mentions that the pyramid (cu) in Cholula was bigger than the one in Mexico City (which he saw later). Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700) compared the pyramid of Cholula to the ones in Teotihuacan. In the early 1800's (1802-1804 more or less) Alexander Von Humboldt visited Cholula and measured the pyramid.