Dance of the Flyers

We arrived back in Mexico City and back to visiting the little coffee shop close to my son's apartment every day. He has very fast internet and our Airbnb internet was patchy so I  tended to work in his guest room during the week.

My daily routine was to stop there for breakfast for their delicious coffee and bagel combination with scrambled egg, bacon and cream cheese on my way to his home.

The cafeteria has a group of friendly workers.  Most of them are young women who greeted me with smiles every day, waiting patiently for me to make a hesitant order (even though after a couple of days they knew what it would be) in Spanish and then helping me with the prices.  Working with numbers in Spanish is so hard. Even though I know most of the numbers individually the combinations when you are buying vary a lot. Particularly since we have to deal with hundreds and thousands quite often.  For example, breakfast cost us about $480 MX ($2.60 US), so it was a challenge to hear them speak it quickly and then work it out in my head. The cashier usually turned the screen for me to see the number and then said it aloud to help me.
 

So after five weeks my Spanish was much better and the experience at the cafeteria was more conversational and less hesitant.

Our last week in CDMX (the common abbreviation for Ciudad de Mexico) included another trip to the Fine Arts museum. 

Anne and Gina getting into the entrance line which stretched to the main road

This time for a great show of traditional dance and music through the centuries and from different parts of Mexico. Our tickets were bought by Nick's lovely neighbor as a parting gift.  She had hosted us for drinks on Christmas Eve and had generally been very welcoming when we had met her on the stairs and so this was a generous gift to us.

 

The theater in this building is spectacular with a Tiffany glass curtain on the stage

and a beautiful stained glass circle under the dome - which gleams gold from the street.  

 

The highlight of the show for me was a dance that had a cowboy and his lasso dancing with several girls, him twirling the lasso and them spinning in long, flowing dresses.

 

The last weekend in the city included the long awaited trip to the Museum of a

Anthropology and the central park Chapultepec and its castle.

 

The museum has the most amazing feature as you walk in - a free-standing pillar which supports a massive roof.  The pillar spills water over onto the tiles below where the water is collected and sent back up.

You really need to visit this museum a few times to fully appreciate it.  I was pretty exhausted after visiting the first few halls showing prehistoric and Mesoamerican and then through the Aztecs.   There are so many small details and of course the struggle of reading many of the Spanish descriptions.  

There are, of course many descriptions in English but they are less frequent.

At some point a voice on the loudspeakers started saying something in Spanish that was several paragraphs long.  Then the voice started again in English and said simply "Please don't touch the exhibits" which, by the way was the only phrase that I understood in the Spanish.  Anne said he had gone on to say something about following the rules and showing respect for the museum  etc.

There were a few notable things for me in the first few halls that I really appreciated.  The first was that the little models showing pre-historic people were all anatomically correct - no flat surfaces where the genitals should be. 

No genitals in this diorama, but an example of the detail in a post-prehistoric scene

The second was that the statues and carved images from the Mesoamerican times were very alien to my western view.  I was able to distinguish faces in the carvings but many of them depicted a person with a headdress on that also had human facial features - these are hard to look at and decipher and I'd like to learn more about the significance of these depictions.

Finally the amazing number of artifacts found and preserved from a massively large timeframe.  From small figurines to large artifacts like the large sculpture that Anne had told me about that had a large hole in the middle for sacrificed human hearts.

The casual descriptions of these sacrifices were hard to read, including the famous ball game that had a ritual component to it (no doubt only exercised during significant rituals) where players who undertook moves in the game that went against the sun (whatever that means) were decapitated and their blood soaked the earth to bring good fortune to the community.

 

This game was played widely with I suppose only some instances where a mistake in the game could be fatal - but it did give me pause thinking about how spectators and participants felt about the relative value of their life in the community.  I suppose their view of death must have been so incredibly different from ours.

 

After visiting the remaining halls with a much lower concentration on the details we walked outside and discovered that the Dance of the Flyers (Danza de los Voladores) was about to start in a park across from the museum, near the entrance to Mexico's central park.

 

This is an ancient ceremony still practiced in some parts of Mexico and in Guatemala where it lives as a Mayan ritual.

 

The pole is immense and the participants scale up it without any protection.  At the top they tie ropes, that have been wrapped around the pole many times, around their waists and with a man sitting at the top playing the flute, singing or drumming, the ropes gradually unwind as the flying men circle the pole.

From there we walked across to the immense central park of the city where the paths were full of visitors and small impromptu tented shops selling candy and oddities.  

 

The best seller that week was a small spider creature that you could wrap around your neck and which had a tube and a trigger that allowed you to squirt water from its tail (like the thread of a web).

We walked to the castle in the park (Chapultepec Castle).  The viceroy of New Spain (an office that Spain used for the governor of both the West Indies and the territories claimed by Hernán Cortés) ordered the construction of the castle in 1785 soon after taking office.  He died a year later of suspected poisoning and the castle was sold to Mexico city in 1806 after not having had an owner.

The building is beautiful with amazing views of the park and the city.  The halls and stained glass windows are spectacular and the entrance ceiling and several walls in the palace have been decorated with murals painted to depict significant historical events in Mexico painted over 200 years after the castle was first built.

A man stopped us while we were in a hall with a mural that spanned the entire room to tell us that he lived in the USA but was from Mexico.

  He wanted us to be sure to understand how significant these murals were.  These panel were painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros painted between 1957 and 1966 and depict the revolution in Mexico between 1906 and 1914 starting on the right with the period of decadence where can-can dancers entertain the aristocrats while the common people have plunged into slavery,

moving on to a worker's strike that the painter believed was the beginning of the revolution following with ideologues who predate the leaders of the Mexican Liberal Party (Karl Marx is recognizable here)

followed by popular leaders and Constitutionalists and finally in the next room a revolutionary who has abruptly stopped his horse with bodies behind him - signifying the end of the first stage of the revolution.

Another mural that was quite powerful was painted by Jorge González Camarena and is displayed in one of the halls.  It signifies the violent clash between the eagle warrior signifying Mesoamerican culture flourishing in the region and the Spanish conqueror. 

The are both extinguished in the battle and out of this emerges a small eagle on the bottom right that will become the Mexican homeland built out of these two worldviews.

The gardens feature a fountain and great views over the city.

A photo from Nick's camera shot by a friendly visitor to the Castle

In the front of the castle are the statues of the Boy Heroes (Los Niños Héroes), teenage cadets who fought to the death defending the Castle against the American forces in the Mexican-American war. 

One of the boys, in an attempt to prevent the capture of the flag, wrapped it around himself and leapt to his death over the cliff on which the castle is built.  A ceiling mural depicting this act by the teenager is painted above the entrance stairway of the castle.

Anne's photo of the ceiling mural

 

A hundred years later Harry Truman visited the monument to these boys and, when asked by reporters why he had done this famously said: "Brave men don't belong to any one country.  I respect bravery wherever I see it."

We were pretty exhausted after the day of walking and we made our way down past this monument to the city-side entrance to the park where we caught an Uber back to our airbnb.

The next day we would be flying out to the amazing beaches on the southern part of Mexico.