Our cousin took us to nearby juice stand that also makes light milkshakes called licuados. It is an interesting store as it is run by a family and the two brothers making the jugos and liquados are blind. My cousin met the family years ago and said they used to do that on the street before the stand. They asked him for help on getting a store and he did.
Organization is the key for them. They know where everything is in their stand. They even take phone orders and are ready for deliveries made by the staff. If you didn’t know they were blind, you would have never thought about it. There drinks were really good too.
My cousin took us to make a run for his restaurant. He went to buy meat at a meat market area. If you like seeing a lot of dead meat, you would have been living a dream.
After he dropped the meat off at work, he picked up his wife and made a stop to the Basilica de Guadalupe. It is two churches in one location. The first church was built centuries ago and is slowly sinking in the soft soil of Mexico City so a new one was built and completed in 1976. The first church was closed when the new one opened but has since been reopened as they have been able to stop the sinking, although it is tilted. The church is also the most visited in the world; well, at least that is what the tour book said.
The next and final stop was a trip to Bosque de Chapultepec, a park in Mexico City host to the anthropological museum and the Castlio (castle) de Chapultepec.
When we arrived at the park we were in for a treat as natives were performing high atop a poll playing music. My dad told me to watch them. As I was setting up to record them, and right before I hit the record button they jumped off. They were tethered to the poll and hung upside down playing music as they slowly descended for about four minutes. It was an amazing site.
If you ever enter a museum or park like we had done yesterday at Teotihuacan you have to pay 35 pesos if you want to film. It is an interesting fee and something that might be hard to enforce since my camera doubles as a video camera.
There was so much to see about the history of Mexico before the Spain arrived. We walked around to learn more about Teotihuacan and they had some replica architecture there along with models of how the city looked.
The further you walk in the museum down each hall, the closer to our time it gets. At the midway point was the Aztec hall which was the biggest since they had the most artifacts. One of the biggest actual artifacts was this giant human sacrifice stone with a channel for the blood to flow out so it wouldn’t splatter all over the place. After several hundred sacrifices, you learn to do it efficiently. The hall also contained an actual Aztec calendar carved out of its location.
We then walked down to the Mayan hall where they had examples of their architecture. I was told it was accurate by my cousin and I believed him when I hit my head on the doorway.
On the way to the castle on top of a steep hill, we stopped off at a monument called the Monumento a Los Niños Heroes that honored six students – all teenagers – of the school that died defending the castle when it was a military school. The last survivor took the Mexican flag off pole and jumped off the cliff because he didn’t want it to fall in the U.S. hands.
The trip up the castle is a long walk uphill or a 13 peso ride up; we opted for the ride. The castle not only served as a military school but also a presidential palace. The castle is now a museum and it picks up right where the anthropological museum stopped; the history of Mexico with European influence. The building is preserved well and all the paintings and murals were beautiful, not to mention the view of the city.
I was pretty tired when I got home, mostly because I’ve been up since 8 a.m. local time, 6 a.m. PDT where I live. Tomorrow, we are going to do some shopping then go to the historical center of Mexico City where the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Palacio National and Templor Mayor are.
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