Lunch in the Park

We walked together to Chapultepec Park. I lead the way through the park pointing out sites I though they would find of interest. Lizy got a kick of the busts of Mexican poets. I directed the group to what I thought was a single restuarant in the park, but it ended up being a food stall that was part of an outdoor food court. Lizy and I walked through checking out all the different food courts. To me they all kind of looked the same. Lizy ended up choosing one of the stalls because it had the most locals. I got a pozole soup, which was great.

The Monkey Mystery

After lunch, we headed through the park toward the palace on the hill. We walked through the trail with many stalls that sold souvenirs and snacks that I have described in this blog before. The path was filled with families, so that it was slow walking through the crowd. They all seemed to be buying these monkeys with really long arms that people would wrap around their necks.

“Can someone explain the monkeys to me?” Lizy said.

“They’re monkeys. It’s a toy,” I replied.

“But everyone has them.”

“Do you want one?”

“I don’t think I’d want one even if every person here and every person I knew was getting them. I don’t get the appeal at all.”

“Not everyone can get everything. I’m sure even Einstein didn’t understand geology or something.”

What do with our Water

We walked around the corner and up the hill into the palace complex. The Palace was built on a hill, so that it overlooked the rest of the park. At the bottom of the path that spiraled around the hill to the top, a man checked my bag. He told me I needed to finish my water before getting to the castle. I couldn’t bring water into the castle. I really didn’t want to have to drink or throw out all three of the water bottles I was carrying in my backpack. I wondered if this was the last clerk checking backpacks and at the top it was the honor system or whether there would be another man checking at the top. I mean why even have the guy at the bottom of the hill checking bags if there was just going to be a guy at the top of the hill checking bags. Were there certain things one couldn’t even have on the hill that he was checking for. Like maybe you couldn’t even have a coke on the path up to the castle. I felt like I couldn’t ask the man if there was another checkpoint as that would be too suspicious if I could even cobble together the question in a way that the man could understand.

I hedged my loss, by drinking one bottle on the way to the top. The climb was more rigorous than it appeared. As I climbed the hill the metaphorical tension mounted.

“It’s just water. We can always buy more at Walmart,” Lizy said seeing my concern.

When we finally got to the top, I saw that there was another man checking bags at the gate to the palace grounds. Beside the man was a little shed with a bunch of the monkeys with long arms lying around. I guess you couldn’t bring in long armed monkeys either.

Lizy did some quick thinking. She rearrange my backpack so that her half finished water bottle was near the top and the other bottles were beneath a book. When we went through the checkpoint the attendant immediately saw Lizy’s half finished bottle and said we could go through conditionally on losing just the half bottle. The rouse had worked. I was able to bring the rest of the full bottles into the palace.

Chapultepec Castle

Chapultepec Castle was built before Mexican independence as a residence for colonial officials. It was renovated extensively in 1864 when one of the Hapsburgs, Maxamillian, was given the throne of Mexico, so he could use it as his palace. Later in the 19th century it was used by the long lived leader of Mexico, Porfirion Diaz, as a secondary residence. Today the palace is used as a museum. There were two main sections to the museum. In the side wing there are exhibits that recreate palace rooms as they would have been used by Diaz and Maxamillian. In the main section of palace was a series of exhibits that walks one through a general history of Mexico starting at Cortez’s conquest and finishing with a room about modern day Mexico.

We started by walking around the recreated Palace rooms of Maxamillian. All his furniture had been imported from Europe. Lizy remarked, “Couldn’t he get anything in Mexico. Not even one nightstand.”

We walked upstairs to see how Diaz used the palace. He also imported most of his furniture from Europe even though he was native to Mexico.

After Lizy went to the bathroom she remarked to me, “I just saw Diaz’s bathroom. It was beautiful. Today the bathroom’s in this palace don’t even have toilet paper.”

“I know. We paid to get in. What is this?” said a woman that had overheard Lizy’s complaint.

“To be fair,” I said, “I don’t think the way Diaz lived was necessarily reflective of how the average Mexican lived in his time. I’m sure if they showed an average bathroom from that time period, you’d be talking about how much better the bathrooms now were.”

“Honestly,” chimed in Elizabeth, “It’s much cleaner and nicer than I expected. Way less homeless people than San Francisco.”

A little while later when we were back on the main floor, Lizy told me she was thirsty. We went around the corner from the guards and I snuck Lizy some water from my bag. We were like criminals.

Next we explored the main hall with the exhibits on the History of Mexico. In the room dedicated to Cortez’s conquest there was cool painting of a birdman attacking an armored conquistador on a horse. The conquistador had driven his sword through the torso of the birdman. I saw it as an allegory for how the Spanish had been victorious. The native’s obsidian was no match for the Spaniards’ steel.

Later in the hall, I dwelled on another painting. It depicted the different racial classes in Mexican society of around the time of the Spanish American war. It depicted what different parents would create after mating. One weird quick of the painting is it seemed to, even for racial prejudice, to put more emphasis on whether the parent was an albino then I would’ve thought necessary.

We went through the rest of the museum quickly. By this time Lizy and her parents were tired, so they headed back to the condo. I decided to check out another museum in the park.

Tamayo Museum

The Tamayo Museum was just north of the castle. The building looked like a concrete nuclear bunker. The museum was specialized in contemporary art and was currently exhibiting three artists.

The first artist was from Kosovo and he drew on his experiences of being a refugee of war from Kosovo in his art. In the middle of the exhibit was a giant wooden structure that represented his parent’s house in Kosovo that the family had to flee. To me it looked more like a tree house than a single family home, but it was metaphorical after all.

On the wall there were some of his sketches of what he called “Burgeois Chickens”, but I thought they looked more like Aristocratic chickens.

Then there was a section with statues of animal constructed from dirt. I almost stepped on a snake that I didn’t see on the floor, but a security guard stopped me.

His final piece was of giant cutouts of animals milling about a pond. The animals weren’t drawn realistically, but in the style of how a child might draw an animal. It was strange to me that the animals were turned in different directions from each other and only one side had an image. It was especially strange that one of the birds that was almost flush with the wall was turned so the blank sided was visible to everyone except someone that was standing in the narrow gap between the cutout and the wall of the museum.

The next artist exhibition consisted of a series of experiences. The first experience was a room where there were a group of live musicians playing a short repeating spanish song. The room was decorated in a way that reminded me of a dingy montreal apartment in the wee hours of the morning after the party was dieing out. Beers strewn on the ground and all the furniture looked like it come from off the street and one guy was half passed out still strumming his guitar.

The second experience was a movie on nine different screens. The beginning of the movie was a temp slowly setting about nine cameras throughout a mansion in upstate New York. Every time he turned on a camera the corresponding screen would turn on and the audience would catch a glimpse of the worker. The setup was very slow. Then nine musicians, one per screen sang a song together.

Some of the musicians were in locations that made sense to be playing music, like sitting at a piano in the drawing room, but some of the musicians were in weird places. One guy was singing in the bathtub covered in bubbles.

Afterwards the temp slowly went to each set up and turned off the screen.

The last experience was a room with printouts of fire. The images were on one side like the last printouts art display, but here all the images were turned in the same direction. So when you entered all the printouts were turned toward you, then you could walk behind the props as if you were walking onto the stage of live performance.

The last artist I don’t have anything interesting to say about, so I’ll leave my descriptions here as this is already running long. I walked back to the condo from the museum and we went out for dinner together.