BUT ENOUGH ABOUT WORK

I feel Americans define themselves so much by what they do for a living. I get it, be proud of what you do, I know I damn sure am, but there’s so much behind a person apart from a career. I’m going to focus on those things with as little work talk as possible. So for Mexico, I’m gonna break this down into weeks that I’m here. Let me tell you, I get excited about nearly everything. So I’ll try to put into words how cool everything truly is. I’m going to go through every week and talk about all the fun places I’ve gotten to visit, and talk about all the different food I’ve gotten to eat. As I’ve mentioned at least 17 times on this blog, I. Love. Tacos. I’ll briefly mention a few places here, but I’m gonna leave most of those for the other section of the blog!

Week 1 (Officially):

Week 1:

Where to start, where to start. Week one has been full of adventures and getting to know the city better. After watching countless YouTube videos about typical American shit to do in Mexico city, I, for a better term…did exactly all of that typical American shit, and loved every second of it.

After my co-worker and good friend Alex and I arrived at our hotel there was one thing on our  mind. Food. And if you read not too far above, tacos were the only choice. On recommendation of the hotel staff and even a personal recommendation from my native coworker, we headed off to Taqueria El Califa (Check Out This Place in my Taco Blog).

After stuffing our bellies full of tacos, we decided to take a brief stroll to familiarize ourselves with the city. From this lovely stroll, we came across two unforgettable places, Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the Zocalo.

Palacio De Bellas Artes

Upon reaching the end of Alameda, we found ourselves at La Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico’s most prominent cultural center. The building is known for housing the works of Diego Rivera. Diego was a prominent Mexican muralist and overall helped start the muralist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His works are featured all throughout Mexico and the United States, including a place near and dear to my heart, Detroit!

Bellas Artes boasts a powerful image from the outside. Its giant pillars make the building look strong and fierce, kinda like a , “don’t fuck with me” yano?  The golden crown on top adds a nice taste of color and personality, acting as a “I’m still dainty and cute.” The building is simply stunning, and honestly kinda reminds me of a Greek Orthodox church. Makes me feel like I’m home. Now Bellas Artes is used for both exhibits and hosting performances. While I paid a visit, there seemed to be an orchestra performing, but I was there to see mostly Diego’s stuff. I’ll very likely go back to see a performance at some point. Let’s talk about Diego’s most famous, and my personal favorite mural, Man, Controller of the Universe.

I mean, just look at this thing!!! How friggen cool is this mural? It’s so big that it couldn’t fit in my camera and what I have for you here is just a small portion of the full image itself. It’s 100% a must see when you come to CDMX. A little bit of backstory for you: Rivera initially was commissioned to create this painting for the Rockefeller family at Rockefeller Center in New York. The mural has a lot of duality. The wing with the space and the large macro perspective compared to the other wing with the microorganisms at the lowest level.  The fun, super exciting part is that what you see above and it was deemed incredibly controversial. A huge part of this painting (sadly, mostly not pictured) is the duality between communism and capitalism. Rivera, being a huge communist himself, wanted to show a clash between the two. On the right hand side, underneath the space wing, the bald-headed man is Lenin, former Premier of the Soviet Union. Well, this offended the Rockefeller family, and they essentially painted over his face. Basically go see this mural, and try to stand near a tour as you gaze, because you can look at this mural for and hour and discover something new every minute! Anyways, this basically gave me my new aspiration in life, to be that guy. Blonde hair, blue eyes? Yeah, I think Rivera was just painting me without knowing it.

Next on our List: The Zocalo

After basking in the beauty of Bellas Artes, we ended up walking a few more blocks South and came across La Plaza del Zócalo, or as its more commonly called Zócalo. The Zocalo is the main central square in Mexico and actually used to be the main ceremony center for the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. This city center is so amazing because there is so much going on. Dead in the center you’ll find the largest flag in Mexico, and around it swarms of people doing various activities.

What was really cool here was how prominent the Aztec culture was. There were many people dressed in traditional Aztec clothing doing Aztec dances, [playing drums, and cleansing people as they wished. Smoke would be blown over a person’s body as a horn would be blown cleansing people of their wrong doings.

Apart from the people doing traditional dances, the city is actually built on top of the ruins from the ancient town, Tenochtitlan. Excavation works and preservations are now in place to make sure this marvel stays intact and does not get further destroyed. It was really cool to be able to walk through. The museum lets you walk all the way through the temple, seeing where people used to practice religious events and house people. Be warned, it’s mostly in spanish, so if espanol isn’t your thang, you can just walk by and see some rocks. They actually used to collect skulls, and have an entire dedicated wall at the end of the route for it. Probably will end up using my brothers as decoration after he drives me up a wall for the millionth time.

Anyways! This is a lot of what we spent time on the first week. We did some other things here and there, but I’ve revisited them in later weeks and will go into them in more detail in a later post. I’ll try to post weekly to keep everyone up to date. Thanks for joining me for Week One, and hope you can keep following along!