Part two not day two; the days have run together. Pretty sure this was mostly Sunday, though. Something I meant to say in my essay yesterday but didn’t because I’m a bad writer (or rather at least someone who just publishes his first drafts) is just how green of a city the DF is. Huge parks, lots of trees. More than other cities? Definitely more green than NYC.
We visited a history museum, and it was pretty fascinating to see they way they tell the story; I studied the Mexican revolution in college (one of the three profs in my political science department did his doctoral work in Chihuahua), but of course I was reading english language, and thus american-slanted versions of the whole story. A set of facts isn’t a story, and so the story they told with basically the same facts was interesting.
For example, the Porfiriato, the post-french king nominal republic that is told in US history as a dictatorship in all but name, is regarded as a period of relative peace and prosperity, at least by the museum wall texts. I do wonder if there’s as much controversy over them there as there is here? Like the wall texts in many US museums that referred to my ancestors as ‘savages,’ sometimes adding ‘noble’. Not a huge fan of those myself.
After the museum, there was a nice walk through a park. The museum had a no food/drink policy, so immediately after getting out we were all dying of thirst. I drank a liter of gatorade and another half of water while we wandered towards lunch. Which was in the wildest food court I’ve ever been in. Outdoors, but with a bazillion umbrellas sort of interlocked like a Greek phalanx’s shields. Pleasantly shady underneath. So, outdoors-but-sheltered, and then the kicker: there was table service! Really, can’t be beat. Delicious food, too.
Then we got into a car and sped across the city. Well, relatively across the city. I don’t know. Our colleague Moses keeps an apartment there with his fiance, and they have access to a rooftop pool. They found out that we were in town and invited us over for an afternoon party at the pool. It was a great time; really lovely folks, I got to meet a bunch of the family etc. Beers were drank, cigars were smoked. I had forgotten my bathing suit, so our host offered to run across the street to wal-mart to get one. They brought back the biggest pair of trunks WalMart sold, and it was… barely big enough to get on. No pictures because I embarass myself enough as it is.
Then, a truly spectacular sunset, complete with stratocumulus clouds forming over other, distant parts of the city. I had a real hard time editing the pictures of the view down to just these two. If you held a gun to my head and made me pick between these two? not sure I could.
Anyway, on our last day, we went to Teotihuacan. But that’s the next post…
