Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Museum of Anthropology

So having successfully navigated the metro we arrived at the Museum of Anthropology. It's a really cool pretty modern place with a huge column water feature in a main square. We got our tickets and check our bag in then got a audio tour doofer in English to share and headed to the first area. The audio tour was really good as most the written information was in Spanish but you could select different sections on the devise and get a little talk about what you were looking at.

The museum is massive, there is so much to see however their 3 main exhibits which are recommended to see are about the ancient tribes found in Mexico like the Teotihuacans, the Aztecs and the Maya, but the bit that interested us the most was a section about the evolution of humans. This included a cool model of what Lucy (Australopithecus) would have looked like (shes considered to be our oldest direct ancestor). They also had remains of mammoths and loads of other really cool stuff.  

There was a lot of artifacts from the ancient tribes, including lots of decorative pottery and obsidian arrow heads. The Aztec area housed mostly large stone artifacts including a sacrificial alter which was a huge round carved stone with a dip in the center and a channel running out and a really cool massive circular calender (see photo).

After a few hours we decided to get some lunch before tackling the Maya exhibit. I don't know what it is about museums but they are exhausting. We refueled and soldiered on for a time but I'd hit a wall, I was overloaded with culture and my legs hurt. So having seen all we could take we headed off and to a little park outside to have a sit down. 

Weirdly and this sounds like I was dreaming or been slipped some hallucinogenics, in the park were four men hanging upside down on ropes suspended from a spinning maypole. as the pole spun the ropes got longer slowly lowering them to the ground. one was playing a whistle and drums and one looked a lot like he had passed out. we took this in for a few moments, before a man asked for some money for the show. We gave him what change we had seeing as you don't see it everyday.

We headed back to the metro through a large park covered in children (the park that is not us, it was school holidays), and thankfully had a smooth homeward journey to wearily fall in to our hostel.

By Things

Photos of the Aztec calender and an upside down spinning man.





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