Spent the day wandering around the Bosque de Chapultepec or Chapultepec Park, specifically we went to the Museo Nacional de Antropologia which is a huge and somewhat overwhelming museum of the Mexican culture dating back thousands of years.
They have a great collection of artifacts and have done a pretty good job of displaying them. As would be expected most of the information is presented in Spanish but there was a surprising amount that we could decode and then of course there were random mostly grammatically correct versions in English.
One of the things I liked the best was actually a bit of the architecture. When you pass through the main entrance into the forecourt as it were you are immediately confronted by a circular waterfall from the ceiling of what turned out to be an enormous roof/canopy supported by this one central column embossed with all sorts of of Inca glyphs.
As usual we hit the info-overload wall after about three hours (and we split that up with a nice lunch at the museum) so we strolled over to the botanical gardens which were just closing and didn’t seem all that impressive for the most part. This is probably not doing them justice in any way since we only spent 5 minutes there.
Deciding that it was far too early to be heading back to the hotel we checked out the Museo de Arte Moderno which has a nice sculpture garden, thankfully split up into the geometric side and the non-geometric side. If you are getting from this that perhaps the geometric side is not where my interests generally lie you would be correct. Anyway there were some neat pieces.
We also took a gander at the art inside which was a combination of Diego Rivera era paintings most of which were nice and then a collection of 1960’/1970’s era installation pieces most of which did not float our boats. Of probably two hundred pieces on display we liked two maybe three. A rabbit being hung by a rope from a top hat, and a piece made up of thousands of shiny white and sometimes rose red buttons strung on thread hung from the ceiling. There were probably three or four hundred such threads each with twenty to to thirty buttons located at random along the length which also varied. It was a really cool piece particularly as it shifted/swayed slightly with the changing air pressure in the building.
Since then we have walked home through yet another neighborhood of random tat shops, food stalls of various stripes and the odd cafe or two. The streets were alive with people walking home, eating and generally moving purposefully from point A to point B unlike ourselves. I have to admit that we are not staying in a neighborhood that is hip and happening. This means that there aren’t any cool bars or interestingly-crowded restaurants to shack up in and enjoy an evening of hanging out and chatting with people.
Of course part of this is more a function of our mostly-complete lack of functional Spanish which is most definitely a draw back. It is also a function of having walked something on the order of 8-10 miles each day for the last three so we weren’t exactly interested in wandering over to the supposedly cool part of town on the off chance that it is.
Tomorrow it is back to Starbucks and their free wifi to do some planning for tomorrow night. We have it sort of sorted: we think there is some sort of fancy light/music show back in the Zocalo to enjoy in the evening. We just need to find a cool place to be to enjoy some cocktails and watch the show from a good vantage point.
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