Honeymoon: Ruins

Start from the beginning of our Mexico trip.

One of the biggest draws of visiting central Mexico is the chance to see the ancient ruins left behind by the pre-Hispanic civilizations. We visited three different sites, built by three different cultures: Monte Alban from the Zapotecs, Teotihuacán from a mysterious disappeared culture, and Tenochtitlán from the Aztecs.

Monte Alban

Contemporaries of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Zapotecs inhabited the mountaintop ceremonial center of Monte Alban for more than a thousand years, from 500 B.C.E. to 800 C.E. Archeological finds from the early stages of construction suggest that it might have been the first culture in Mexico with a written language and calendar. The city reached its peak from about 300 to 700 C.E., when it controlled at least 200 other settlements in the surrounding valleys. Most of the existing ruins date from this period, and the architectural style — including sloping staircases, corniced walls and ball courts — suggests influences from the civilization of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. For unknown reasons — possible theories include drought, disease or revolt — the city subsequently declined and was completely abandoned by 1000 C.E. [1]

A 30-minute bus ride from Oaxaca, the ruins were nearly deserted when we visited. We enjoyed wandering around the site, which is amazingly well-preserved and which boasts beautiful scenery even without the ruins. It was our favorite site of the three we saw, even though its buildings don't approach the scale of those at Teotihuacán.

The Gran Plaza, a man-made area created by flattening the mountaintop. The structure in the foreground, Building J, is thought to have been built during the first few centuries A.D., when the people of Monte Alban were heavily influenced by Chiapas and Guatemala to the south.

Excavations at Monte Alban have revealed ceremonial altars, pyramids, palaces and more than 170 tombs.

Scroll to the right to see a panorama of the Monte Alban site.

Teotihuacán

At the same time that the Zapotecs were ruling the Oaxacan valleys, the Teotihuacanes controlled the Valley of Mexico, near present-day Mexico City. At its height in 500 C.E.  the city housed at least 200,000 inhabitants and covered more than 12 square miles. But the city was abandoned by 700 C.E. and little is known about the people who built it — their language, where they came from and why they left remain a mystery. Scholars believe the decline was gradual, caused by overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources. The name Teotihuacán means "place where gods were born," and for centuries the city remained a pilgrimage for Aztec royalty, who believed that the gods created the universe there. [2]

It's one of the most popular day trips from Mexico City and our guidebook had warned that armed robberies of the bus were not uncommon. At the bus station, they videotaped everyone on board, which turned out to be an amusing precaution because additional passengers were allowed to board throughout the trip without being videotaped. All the potential robbers had to do was get on at the second stop. Luckily, no one targeted our bus (our book was several years out of date and Mexico has gotten safer in the past few years).

For the first time it didn't rain, and it was even sunny, making it easily the best day of our trip to this point (after our first few mediocre days in Mexico City). The site is roughly 2 kilometers long and as with most archeological sites in Mexico, you are free to walk all over the ruins. One of the most surprising things about traveling outside of the U.S. for me has always been how much laxer the rules are, both in terms of historical preservation and visitor safety. Annoyingly, the Mexican government allows hawkers onto the site and they're unfailingly persistent, following you around selling masks, instruments and other trinkets even after you've indicated you're not interested.

The Pirámide del Sol, the world's third largest pyramid, behind Egypt's Cheops and Mexico's Cholula. Each side measures 722 feet with a height of 213 feet. It's 248 steps to the top. It was built around 100 C.E. from 3 million tons of stone, without the use of the wheel, metal tools or pack animals.

Standing atop the Pirámide del Sol, looking toward La Ciudadela, a sunken complex thought to have been the residence of the city's ruler.

The Pirámide de la Luna. The main thoroughfare is known as the Calzada de los Muertos (Avenue of the Dead), so named because the Aztecs mistakenly believed it was lined with tombs of kings or priests. The buildings are instead thought to have been temples and palaces for the city's elite.

Us on top of the Pirámide del Sol.

Tenochtitlán

Present-day Mexico City sits on the ruins of the Aztec civilization of Tenochtitlán, a metropolis of great wealth, extensive trade and towering pyramids. According to legend, the wandering Aztec tribe reached a small swampy island in 1325, where they witnessed an eagle standing atop a cactus and devouring a snake, which they interpreted as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy and a sign to stop and build a great city. Despite the challenges of building a city on a lake, they persisted, and by the time of the Spanish conquest in 1521, Tenochtitlán housed up to 200,000 people, connected by canals and causeways and supplied with fresh water by two aqueducts. It was four times the size of the contemporary London and far larger than any Spanish city. [3]

At the heart of the city stood the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, also called the Templo Mayor. The temple was enlarged several times, with each new stage of construction accompanied by the sacrifice of captured warriors. As with many of Mexico's pre-Hispanic cultures, death and sacrifice played an important role in Aztec mythology. Not only did the Aztecs extract vast resources from conquered tribes, including jade, cotton, tobacco and cacao, but they also regularly waged war to assure a steady supply of sacrificial victims for the god Huitzilopochtli. The Spanish found the Templo Mayor gloomy and grotesque and thought human sacrifice was barbaric, which seems ironic given the ongoing Spanish Inquisition and the torture inflicted by the hands of the church.

The Spanish razed the city when they arrived and built the new metropolis of Mexico City on its ruins. They even used the stones from the temple in the construction of a Catholic church. Today visitors can browse a small section of excavated ruins, situated in the heart of downtown Mexico City.

- Steph

Sources:
[1] Frommer's Oaxaca City; Moon Oaxaca; Lonely Planet Monte Alban
[2] Lonely Planet Teotihuacan; Frommer's Mexico City
[3] Frommer's Mexico City; Lonely Planet Mexico City; Metropolitan Museum of Art


Keep reading: The city of Oaxaca

Honeymoon: Mexico City

Mexico City's Zócalo, as seen from the Torre Latino Americana

We got married! And went to Mexico for our honeymoon in search of good food, good drinks and cities to explore. Our first stop: Mexico City.

Our time in the Mexican capital didn't get off to the smoothest start — the airline lost Ben's bag, our taxi driver couldn't find our street and our AirBnB apartment was a bit of a disappointment.* For dinner, we found a restaurant that served stuffed baked potatoes (and nothing else) and when I asked to see a menu, the waiter replied with a two-minute stream of Spanish, of which my tired, jet-lagged brain only understood the words "pico de gallo." It was an abrupt welcome back to Latin America.

Many streets are lined with foods stands.

Day 1: The Day When Nothing Is Open

Our first day here was Mexican independence day, which Mexico takes quite seriously (though they didn't succeed in defeating the Spanish for 11 more years). We had booked our trip around our wedding, not around Mexican holidays, and hadn't realized everything in the city would be closed today. We just wandered around, got a feel for the city and witnessed some of the military celebrations, including aerial flyovers and commandos hanging by ropes from helicopters.

Mexico was full of patriotic, historic and military symbolism, maybe even more than in the U.S., but one thing Ben observed was the way the colonial story is the reverse of that at home. The American historical "we" is the European colonists — we got tired of the British crown, we fought them, we won and called the country America; and by the way, there were some native people here who were in our way. In Mexico, the "we" is the indigenous people — we are Mexicans, we were invaded by the Spanish, we fought them off.

On the right is caldo xochitl (pronounced so-sheel), one of my favorite food discoveries. It's basically chicken broth with rice, but topped with typically Mexican ingredients including cilantro, lime and avocado.

At dinner, we encountered our first "weird" food — worm salt (or sal de gusano). It's made of salt, ground chiles and powdered worm and it rimmed the glass of my mango cocktail. We weren't that grossed out by it (Ben wasn't quite sure whether to believe me when I told him that I was pretty sure that gusano translated to worm), but we won't be rushing out to buy it anytime soon. On the upside, our pumpkin gnocchi and chipotle penne were downright delicious.

Our first impressions of the city: it rains a lot (this being the rainy season), the architecture in the colonial center is impressive and it's not the most pedestrian-friendly place (we kept dashing across roads without crosswalks to reach the metro).

Museo Nacional de Antropología

Day 2: The Day With The Museums

Mexico City is famous for its museums and to avoid museum fatigue, we decided to focus on the ones in Chapultepec Park, including the Museo Nacional de Antropología. It traces Mexico's pre-Hispanic cultures up until the Spanish conquest and provided a good introduction to the ruins we would visit later in the trip. Ben wondered why the indigenous cultures in the United States didn't create civilizations on the scale of Teotihuacan or Chichén Itzá. The best guess we could come up with was that the climate in Mexico allowed the tribes there to settle down in a way that wasn't possible in the U.S. — but that's just a guess.

We tried to also visit the Museo Nacional de Historia, but some byzantine rules about lockers prevented us from entering and instead we wasted some money going to the Museo de Arte Moderno, where most of the exhibits were closed. We made up for this by enjoying Argentine food and Latin music for dinner. We should note that we were surprised at how safe we felt walking home at night in Mexico City. Granted, we were staying in a nice neighborhood, but it felt much safer than our nice neighborhood in Buenos Aires.

Day 3: The Day With A Million Policemen

See those policemen in the photo? That's maybe 1% of the policemen we saw this day — seriously, there were thousands of riot police blanketing downtown Mexico City. At first we wrote them off as a product of Mexico's drug war, especially since they didn't seem to be doing anything. They let us pass through to visit the Catedral Metropolitana, which is the largest cathedral in Latin America (though if you're looking for grand cathedrals, go to Europe).

For lunch, we tried to eat at a Spanish restaurant recommended by our guidebook for having a great menu del dia (the Spanish-style fixed lunch menu common across Latin America). It occupied the first and second floors of an elaborate old mansion. The first floor was an unappealing cafeteria where the staff directed us to the second floor. There everyone was dressed in tuxes, the waiters put our napkins in our laps and gave us funny looks for our casual clothes. So we decided that wasn't the right place and left. We wandered into a random taquería and enjoyed one of our favorite meals in Mexico.

Mexico City after the rain

After lunch, the police presence started to pose a problem. We couldn't get near the central square and had to traverse an eight-block horseshoe to cover what should have been a single block. Along the way, we asked for directions to the Palacio Nacional from about half a dozen policemen, all of whom failed to mention that the palace was actually closed, along with basically every other government building in Mexico City. Turns out the riot police are not a regular presence in Mexico City — they had been brought in because of ongoing protests by teachers from all over the country. And because of the protests, all government buildings — and the famous murals they house, including several by Diego Rivera — were closed to the public.

Just as we're standing outside the closed palace, it starts to pour. This would have to be the low point of our time in Mexico — everything was closed, we were soaking wet and hadn't found much we liked about Mexico City. Fortunately, after a hot chocolate, things started to turn around for us. We made it to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera just before closing, where we enjoyed studying the mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, we got a great view of the city from the Torre Latino Americana and enjoyed a much more successful final two days in Mexico City.

View from the Torre Latino Americana

See, we look happy again.

Day 4: The ruins at Teotihuacán

Day 5: The Day In Which We Finally Like Mexico City

First point in the city's favor today: the most delicious French toast at a bookstore cafe (it almost tasted like fried dough) with mango jelly on the side. We were spending the day in Coyoacán, described in our guidebook as one of city's most traditional neighborhoods, whose plazas and narrow cobblestoned streets are marvelous places to stroll and appreciate the neighborhood's relaxed ambience. We enjoyed the Museo Frida Kahlo, located in the house where Frida grew up, and where she and Diego Rivera lived for many years. The house was filled with her art, clothes (of a distinctive traditional style that covered her injuries), her mole recipe, and a beautiful revival of her garden. (We were inspired by the museum to rent the great movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek, to watch in the airport on the way home.)

Spot the gringa at the Museo Frida Kahlo, also known as the Blue House or La Casa Azul.

On the left, Frida Kahlo's easel, which was a gift from Nelson Rockefeller; on the right, the kitchen where Frida and Diego cooked using pre-Hispanic methods.

A few blocks away was the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, which was a total bust. Trotsky was exiled from Russia by Stalin, who murdered his children and eventually him in Mexico — where he lived with Frida and Diego before moving into his own house — but we wanted to understand what their ideological fight was about, and why the artists were so drawn to him. The museum didn't bother to explain any of this.

After lunch, we hurried over to the Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones, a museum dedicated to all the invasions Mexico has suffered, including by Spain, France and the United States (three different times). The museum was hosted in a former convent, but we didn't know this when we entered. The first room was a kitchen with information about nuns and eating utensils. Then there were several rooms with pictures of saints and religious artifacts, with no mention anywhere of invaders. Ben was convinced we had come to the wrong museum, and was about to leave and ask for our money back, when we found a large case of guns. The convent had later been turned into a fort and was the site of a major battle. We were in the right place after all.

We got a good overview of Mexican history, though I was amused that our book had claimed that "all sides are treated fairly and without animosity in the displays" — what with calling the wars with the Americans unjust and referring to Victor Huerta as the usurper rather than as the president, the exhibits hardly seemed unbiased.

The main plazas in Coyoacán

For our first four days in Mexico, we had barely eaten vegetables (except the tomatoes and avocados included in basically every dish) and at the beginning of the day, I commented that all I wanted was salad and gazpacho, figuring there was little chance of finding either. Mexican water isn't safe to drink, which means a lot of lettuce isn't safe to eat either, and some people stay away from salads their entire trip. I didn't think I could survive two weeks of meat and tortillas, and at lunch at a nice restaurant on Coyoacán's main plaza, we both risked ordering salads, which turned out to be delicious and safe to eat. I couldn't believe my luck when we later wandered past a restaurant serving gazpacho. We came back for dinner and the gazpacho was easily the best I've had outside of Spain (and possibly including the gazpacho in Spain). I loved my first bowl so much, I ordered a second bowl.

We spent part of the evening sitting in the public square in Coyoacán, which was one of our favorite spaces in the city with its festive and communal yet peaceful atmosphere. It was a great way to bid goodbye to Mexico City.

- Steph

Here are a few more of our favorite Mexico City photos. To see the captions, you must view it full-screen and choose "show info".



* After a good experience with AirBnB in Buenos Aires, we've had one horrible experience, one poor experience and one mediocre experience, which has us wondering if we should continue to use it anymore.

Keep reading: Pre-Hispanic ruins

We got married!

We got married! In a beautiful state park on the San Pablo Bay just outside of San Francisco.

Photos by our wonderful photographer Jasmine Lee.* If you'd like to see more photos, just email us and we'll send you the link.

At China Camp State Park in San Rafael

Steph's dad walks her in.

Steph's sister Kim reads from "Winnie the Pooh."

Steph's brother Doug officiates.

From left to right: Doug (brother), Kip (father), Sandy (mother), Steph, Ben, Gretchen (aunt), Dave (uncle) and Kim (sister).

Steph's sister did her hair — in the back of the car 10 minutes before the ceremony started.

Post-ceremony BBQ with Ben as grillmaster

Our "wedding cake" — aka dulce de leche apple pie

Of course we had to get in a few pictures with the motorcycle.

* The photos of the BBQ and apple pie are actually by Steph; everything else by Jasmine.

- Steph and Ben