The hotel room we “slept” in last night was warm. It was so warm, when we opened the door to walk in for the first time, a waft of stale warm air washed over us. I can’t sleep in a warm room. So in the middle of the night we researched the other hotel we were going to stay at and they in fact have air conditioning in their rooms. So we packed up every thing and will be heading to that hotel which is a few hundred yards from our original hotel.
We will miss the weird designs on the ceiling of our last hotel. I can only describe them as being a larger form of a typical face tattoo and a lower back tattoo, a stamp if you will.
The next hotel is amazing, they have air conditioning, and there are three enormous king sized beds in our room. The hotel even let us check in at 9am.
Today we went to two museums, Diego Rivera’s museum he built himself, and Frida Kahlo’s home, The Blue House. The first gallery will be Diego Rivera’s, he built it and designed it himself. I took a lot of photos today. Of note was the murals he sketched and the ceiling tiles he designed. Check them out below.
After we left this museum, we drove to The Blue House. We bought tickets ahead of time and were able to walk past a huge line. When we walked in, we decided to buy an audio visual tour, it took us two hours to walk through Frida Kahlo’s child hood home. This is the home she was born in, the home she lived him most of her life, and the home she died in.
We walked through her home and learned a lot about Frida. She had a terrible accident when she was 18 years old. A car hit her and an iron rod impales her in her hip and exited out her vagina. We had a lot of fun conversations with our kids when they heard that description of events. Of course the audio tour didn’t just stop there, a woman with a thick spanish accent playing Frida in the audio tour then stated “I didn’t know I would lose my virginity that way.” It was a great statement that fostered so many wonderful questions afterwards.
As it turned out, Frida’s family fell in hard times and Diego Rivera ended up paying off the homes mortgage, he never considered the Blue House his home though. Their marriage was tumultuous, and the both cheated on each other ALOT! Diego famously cheated on Frida with her sister, and Friday cheated on him with a photographer, and Trotsky, to name a few. Oh yeah, Leon Trotsky moves in with Diego and Frida into their compound for a few months. They both pleaded with him not to move out for fear he would be murders, so he moved out to his own compound and low and behold a month later he was murdered.
The photos below are from the downstairs in their house. Some interesting photos are the day bed she slept on, and a circular framed photo of a commissioned painting the Wife of the President if Mexico commissioned. The frame is shaped like a womb, and the painting even though it has fruits and vegetables in it, also resembles female genitalia. The wife never paid the commission and so it stayed in Frida’s home.
The upstairs is where Frida’s art studio was, and she had two bedrooms there as well, Diego had one. They did not sleep in the same bed in their later years. Pay attention to the bed with a mask on it, that is where she died. There is a sculpture of a pig in one of the rooms, inside of that is Frida’s ashes. 😀
After we left this museum we walked a couple blocks to a market that Frida would frequent when she was younger,… and alive. I ordered some tacos and asked for salsa, the waiter told me to be careful in Spanish. He. Was. Right.
A singer with a guitar came to our table as we ate. I asked him in Spanish “conoces la balada de los tres amigos” and he did. But it was not from the movie, it was another song about three amigos. We ended up leaving and tried to find a park the kids could play at.
We ended up finding a park and took the kids there to play for a while. Then we drove home down some of the smallest streets I’ve ever driven down.
Those photos don’t do it justice, I had to back up multiple times in order to turn down other streets. So we are back at the hotel and the video below will tell you all where we are heading early tomorrow morning.
Our Family Adventure 