Tuesday, October 15

This was our last day, and we spent it seeing a little more of Mexico City on our own - we gave Horacio the day off.

Lucia and Esmond had expressed interest in the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), so that was the first place we went. However, while walking to the museum from where our Uber driver let us off, we heard music, and went to investigate. And here's what we found:

Five men dressed in elaborate red, white and gold costumes march around a tall metal pole. One man plays a small wooden flute and a small drum.

You may remember that when we were at Teotihucan, Horacio told us about the Danza de los Voladores, or Dance of the Flyers. Those of you who followed the link to the video I included will recognize the costumes these guys are wearing. In other words, we had arrived just in time to see the dance performed live!

Notice the guy playing the flute and the drum. He's fingering the flute with his left hand while beating the drum with his right. Here's a closeup:

The first man starts climbing the pole, carrying the ropes:

The first man is several feet off the ground.

Three others follow, until all four are at the top - the flute and drum player stays on the ground and continues playing. Each man sits on one side of the square platform. Then they start rotating the platform, so that their ropes wind around the pole. Each man's rope is wound around thirteen times, for a total of 52.

Seen in silhouette, the four men sit on the platform.

Then, when the ropes are all wound, they lean backwards and drop off, and go circling gracefully around the pole, with their heads pointing downward:

Still in silhouette, the four hang suspended upside down in midair.

...while the ropes unwind and lower them slowly to the ground:

The four men are now only a foot or two above the ground.

...at which point they flip over and land on their feet.

In some traditions, the man playing the flute and drum also climbs the pole, and sits (or stands!) at the top playing while the other four fly down. However, our group didn't do that. In any case, it was an impressive sight, and I'm glad we were fortunate enough to come along at the right time to see it.

After this entertaining diversion, we continued on to the museum:

The front facade of the museum, with a large Mexican flag out front.

The museum consists of two large wings facing a central courtyard, with this impressive fountain:

A tall carved column reaches to the ceiling. Where the column meets the ceiling, there is a large spoked wheel around the column, and water drips from the wheel to the floor below.

The problem with museums is that, unless they're unusually small, they contain far more exhibits and far more information than you have time to see in a day, or even a week. So we only saw a small fraction of what there was to see. One particularly impressive exhibit was this reconstruction of what the Quetzalcoatl temple might have looked like back in the day:

A large reproduction of a portion of the temple, with the carved heads and the serpent. Instead of being bare stone, this one is painted in soft shades of red, green and yellow.

After leaving the museum, we went to an open air food market. Esmond and Lucia can't find good chiles at home, so they stopped at a produce stand and loaded up:

The stand has bins full of several kinds of chiles, as well as yellow onions, red onions, and garlic.

That evening after dinner, we had a birthday cake for Terry in the hotel restaurant (a few days early - her birthday is the 19th). Earlier that day, I slipped off by myself and went to a nearby bakery to order the cake, and then went back later to pick it up. Of course, we couldn't eat the whole thing by ourselves, and since we were leaving the next day, there was no point in trying to save it, so a few other lucky restaurant patrons got treated to free cake!

And that was the end of the trip. The next morning, Horacio picked us up and took us to the airport, and we all went our separate ways.