Today we concentrated on the historic center of Mexico City. We drove into the city straight to the Palace of Fine Arts. There we got to see a lot of Diego Rivera’s murals, including my favorite “Man, Controller of the Universe”.
I learned about this mural in English 7a class at Chabot College roughly 21 years ago. The school even put on a play about Diego Rivera and his inspiration to modern day Latino artists. The play was amazingly terrible, but I didn’t forget it. I didn’t realize this piece was in this museum, when I saw it, the only feeling I could describe is star struck. We sat and stared at it for a long while. We looked at other murals as well and I was surprised that the children didn’t have any jokes about the topless women that were prominent in Diego Rivera’s works.
Lydia loved this painting, she thought the woman on the right looked like Captain Marvel.
Keeping the kids interested was a challenge like no other. But we ended up leaving to go to the next place we have been wanting to check out, Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los cielos, or in English: The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. It is the largest Cathedral in the America’s, and was built between 1573-1810.
Construction began when Spain invaded and took over Tenochtitlan, which was the capital of the Aztec Empire until 1521 when Spain overtook them. There were large pyramids in Tenochtitlan, that were torn down and used to build this cathedral.
After we walked around the cathedral, we went to go see some of the ruins of Tenotchtitlan, I took a lot of photos, but I’m not going to post them because I am exhausted and if you read our blog about Teotihuacán, you get the idea.
After we walked around the ruins of Tenotchtilan, I came to the realization that I had seen enough ruins of past civilizations for the remainder of my life and I was hungry. So we walked to a restaurant. Before getting there, we walked inside the cathedral. The following are photos from the inside of this enormous cathedral.
We walked towards a building with roof top seating and was approached by some guy who spoke English to us before he heard what language we were speaking. His racial profiling was spot on. The food was not great, but the view was spectacular. We also got to see the Mexican Military take the enormous Mexican flag down from the middle of the square. Oddly the restaurant did not accept cards, so my first thought when a very large business accepts cash only is its a front for an illegal business.
We were there for a long while. Afterwards we walked back to our car and headed back to our hotel. On the way to the parking garage we stumbled upon these people dancing.
In the back ground is an engineering school.
We paid for parking at the parking garage for a whopping $12. We were parked there for 7 hours, if this was San Francisco we would have paid over $150. One more day and then we fly back to our home.
Our Family Adventure 