Popup Market

Lizy and I drove out to get something at the pharmacy and on the way back we took the same street we had taken the evening before, but overnight a market had popped up and taken over the street. We parked the car to look around, I was particularly on a mission to find a tamale to eat for breakfast. There were a bunch of vendors, including stalls selling, fruit, vegetables, meat, spices, dried chillies, mole pastes, and cooked food. I thought again to what Elizabeth had said about unrefrigerated meat. How were they able to sell meat in the open air?

As I walked through stalls vendors gave us fruit samples. One person gave us a sample of avocado and another vendor gave us a fruit with texture like papaya, but with a sweater taste. The fruit was called mamay. The market was many blocks, but I did not find a tamale. I ended up buying a different breakfast street food. It was called a Tlacoyo. I’ll describe how it’s made.

The vendor took a handful of corn floor and worked it flat. Then she put a dollop of refried beans on the flattened corn and wrapped the dough around the beans like you might with a dumpling. Then she pounded the dough flat again to a football shape. She put the flattened dough on a hot griddle and cooked it until it was a little browned on both sides. She put the finished tlacoyo on a styrofoam plate and topped it with pickled nopales, a spicy green salsa, and crumbled cheese. It was probably the best thing I’d eaten so far in Mexico City. Lizy got another three for her and her parents.

Walkling through Chapultepec Park

Lizy and her parents decided to drive to the Archeology Museum and I decided to walk. It was exciting because I finally got to enter the first section of Chapultepec park after having been denied the privilege the day before.

All the signs in the park were adorned with the park’s mascot, the grasshopper, however this cartoon grasshopper was the only grasshopper I saw in the park. The tree cover in the park was thin and highly regular probably due to the fact that the forest had been planted by the government as part of a restoration about one hundred years ago. Before the restoration the park had been completely bare of trees. During the restoration the government had also installed water falls made of concrete. I walked by one of these waterfalls and thought it kind of looked like a water feature in an amusement park. Couldn’t they have brought real rocks to construct the waterfall from? But maybe than it would’ve eroded or something if amusement parks build them like this there must be reason.

After walking further into the park, the park offered me a big surprise. In the middle of a field there was a Canadian Totem. It was given to Mexico by the Canadian government in 1960 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mexico’s independence. It was interesting that Canada in the 1960’s decided to give this symbol of native tribes as their gift to Mexico. In the 1960’s many young native Canadians were still being forced to attend residential schools where they were forbidden from speaking their native language in an attempt to assimilate their culture. It just shows the conflicting ways that native culture is viewed by the government. I think this conflict is something that is shared with Mexico, so maybe the gift is more appropriate than I first thought.

I kept walking through the park and walked by a street filled with orange boxes used as concession stands in the park that were under maintenance. Then I walked down a street of operational concession stands. Either selling snacks or toy monkeys. There was what looked like an outdoor restaurant, which I said to myself maybe I’ll come back with the rest of the group to eat at. The concession stands lined the street for several kilometers. The path went between two man made lakes, then turned left and went out of the park to the museum. In the man made lakes you could rent petal boats and they sort of cemented my feeling that the park was like an amusement park.

Waiting in Line

There was a huge line just to get into the Anthropology Museum. I waited in line thinking that Lizy and the gang would arrive before I got to the front. I waited in line with a few guys traveling from Canada. One of the two friends went to get some lime chips from one of the concession boxes. I tried some of this exotic flavour and thought they were some of tastiest chips I had ever had. Parking was a nightmare for Lizy and her parents and I ended up having to wait for a while for them at the front of the line.

I spent my time continuing to read Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. He was talking about the historical origins of speciesism, the term he used to denote the belief that human have moral priority over other species. He claimed speciesism had its origins in Ancient Greece where people like Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy of rationality in beings. It was moral for creatures with more rationality to have as servants beings with less rationality. This kind of worldview allowed both speciesism, and also the moral tolerance of slavery, as the slaves were always conveniently of lower rationality than the masters.

The monotheistic religions, brought the idea of the sanctity of human life, but further entrenched speciesism. He believed that Judaism had some concessions for animals, but that Christianity went out of it’s way to explain the moral superiority of humans. He gave the example of a passage in the New Testament where Jesus kills Pigs in order to remove demons from people even though he could’ve removed the demons without killing the pigs because why not kill the pigs, they’re just tools for the use of humanity. I don’t think I fully grasped how vitriolic Christianity was towards the humane treatment of animals until reading the book.

Anthropology Museum

Lizy and her parents finally got to the museum. It was a little confusing getting tickets, but before too long we were in the museum. The museum consisted of large rectangular buildings that surrounded a huge courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard was a large mushroom shaped monolith was water stream down from the edge of the cap. When we looked outside from the buildings on the perimeter we kept incorrectly thinking it was raining, but we were just seeing the water falling down from the mushroom.

We started with the building that ran along the right side of the courtyard. The first floor is what I would think of as being more like archeology, while the second floor is what I would think of as more like ethnography. The ethnography section consisted of exhibits of different native cultures that either still existed in modern Mexico or existed in the near past. Because of of needing the cultures to still be around the cultures on exhibit ended up being from the more remote parts of Mexico, as these were the tribes not worth conquering by the Spanish either because it was too difficult, the tribes didn’t have anything worth taking, or the land they were on had no natural resources that could easily be exploited. However, this left a hole in that there was no ethnography of the great empires, like the Aztecs because they had been totally integrated into the Spanish empire many years ago. These Big societies were in a sense over represented in the downstairs exhibits though, since they were the ones that had built big monoliths and pyramids that could be dug up and put in a museum, so in the end I guess it all balanced out.

The ethnography wing began with a cool terracotta status depicting different cultural influences of Mexico. The black people seemed a little Tin-Tin esque if you know what I mean, but it was an interesting statue nonetheless.

There were crafts the natives had created, life size habitat reconstructions, and traditional costumes.

One interesting fact I learned was that some tribes adopted Christ as a god voluntarily, so that they would have an easier time trading with the Spanish. But they incorporated Christ into their religion like they did for other gods and had him as one of many deities in their pantheon. They missed the monotheism part of Christ, but I think they were like eighty percent of the way there.

Lizy felt some of the exhibits had dated designs. According to her the sourcing of the artifacts were lacking. The recreations didn’t mention who created them. The descriptions lacked the introspection of colonialism that one would expect at a modern museum. And most of all the artifacts were not displayed against a pure white background.

Next we went downstairs to check out the archeological exhibits. The first exhibit was on the prehistory of the Mexico region. There were a lot of models of mega fauna that have since gone extinct. I especially liked a diorama showing a group of humans hunting a mega elephant. They had collections of fossils from the mega fauna including a mega elephant, a mega horse, and a mega sloth.

Lizy overheard an american child ask her dad, “How do we know these are really the rocks they’re telling us they are.” Lizy thought she had a good point.

The next section had exhibits around the Teotihuacan empire. This was the largest empire in the Mexico Valley region before the Aztecs. They had some recreations of the giant pyramids that one can still see north of Mexico. It got me excited to see the pyramids a few days later.

The next section was on the Aztecs. There was big disk, that people often mistake for the Aztec calendar. They had a hoop attached to a wall, that looked just like the hoop from the ball game in The Road to Eldorado. If you haven’t seen the movie, a group of degenerate spanish gamblers find Eldorado the city of gold in the new world. The natives mistake the duo for gods and the pair have to win this ball game to prove their legitimacy. The game is played by hitting the balls between players using their hips until they can hit it through the hoop. The duo cheat at the game by using their pet aardvark as the ball who always bounces where they need him to go.

I told Lizy to pretend to play the game and I’d get a photo. She posed beside the hoop while miming a kick.

“You need to hit the ball with your hips,” an onlooker heckled. Someone had seen the movie.

The next zone was on the Mayans. This section had a cool crypt with examples of death masks found at Mayan tombs. The death masks reminded me of the mask of Agamemnon we had seen in Greece. It seemed to me an example of convergent cultural evolution. I thought that it was a shame that the American cultural evolution was interrupted by the Spanish because it would’ve been interesting to study the similarities and differences of two cultures completely isolated: old world and new world. I looked everywhere for a Mayan calendar, but did not find one. They Canadian guys i had stood in line with and told me it was in this museum, but maybe they had just mistook that Aztec disk for a calendar.

After the Mayan zone there was a Oaxacan zone and then finally a coastal people’s zone, but by this point I was too hungry to really pay attention.

Panuchos or Tacos

After we finished looking through the final zone, we found out we narrowly missed the last seating at the restaurant. It looked good too, or maybe I was just starving. It was 5pm and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

We drove to Polanco and stopped at a small taqueria called El Turix. They only had one type of meat, A Yucatan style marinated pork, but you had you could choose between eating it in tacos or panucho. Lizy accidentally ordered tacos, because she didn’t realize what a panucho was. The panucho was a deep fried tortilla, then they’d scoop a layer of refried beans, a handful of Yucatan pork, and top if with pickled red onions. The panucho were Yucatan style, which means wrapped like a cigar around the meat. Next to the crispy panucho the soggy, small tacos seemed unappealing. I ended up giving her half of my panuchos and ate most of her tacos. What could I do?

Second Soup

We got a message from Elizabeth, that Andy wanted more soup from the Chinese place we had gone the day before. Lizy called to get a takeout order, and on the phone they seemed to be confused. The guy told her to just come on by and he’d figure it out.

At the restaurant Lizy went in to get the food, while I waited in the car. The owner’s wife recognized Lizy and waved at her. There was some confusion at the counter. The owner started to talk to his wife and chinese about the predicament. Lizy couldn’t understand, but she thought the conversation must have gone something like this,

“Why’d you tell them they could get takeout?” the wife asked the husband.

“She loves our restaurant, how could I turn her down?”

“Because we don’t do takeout.”

“We’ll just give them the soup in containers.”

“We don’t have containers. We don’t do takeout. I like this woman too, but we we can’t accommodate her.”

“I said I would, and I won’t go back on my word.”

“We can’t physically do this.”

“We’ll just put the soup in our normal bowls and put some plastic wrap over them and send her like that.”

“You’re going to give her our bowls? How is that a way to run a business.”

“Better question. What kind of business would this be, if don’t keep our word.”

So Lizy came out carrying a dine in bowl of soup. It was a strange sight to behold.

Driving Back

One funny thing happened on the drive back to the condo. It was normal seeing cars run red lights in Mexico City, especially motorcycles, but on the way back to the condo I was three cars doing some egregious red light shenanigans even for Mexico City. It’s one thing to make the decision right away, pound the pedal and zoom through the red, but at one red light I watched a car stutter through a red light. He’d accelerate as if he was going to go for it, but then stop suddenly as if he wasn’t quite sure. And he kept stopping and starting all the way through the intersection over like a minute and a half. A second car zoomed through the red. Then a third car accelerated as if he was going to follow suit, but then stop three quarters of the the way through the intersection. He then waited there for maybe six minutes until maybe 10 seconds before the light finally turned green, and only then did he finally decide to run the rest of the red light. I burst out laughing while driving and Lizy had remind me drive carefully as we has loose bowl of soup in the backseat of the car.