Mexico City!

Hola, everybody!  Sorry it's been a few weeks since the last post.  As always, we are incredibly busy down here in Juarez, but I have some downtime tonight so I can finally put up some posts.  At the end of June, Sarah and I made a last-minute trip down to Mexico City.  We figured we should go on one more adventure just the two of us before the baby shows up and ruins our lives. 

Mexico City is a beautiful place, and completely different from life on the border.  It's green, cool, breezy, and you can just walk around pretty much anywhere you want.  The first day Sarah booked a street food tour for the both of us, so that we could taste the wide variety of Mexican cuisine (more on that in the next post).  We also picked up some things at the local craft markets to help fill our giant, starkly decorated home.

The next day (Friday), we took a tour of some of the historic sites in downtown Mexico City, including the cathedral and the Presidential Palace.  

Right next to the main square is the Templo Mayor, a massive Aztec temple that was discovered only recently.  They had some pretty impressive artifacts. 

After that, we made our way the Museo Antropologico de Mexico, perhaps the most impressive museum I have even been to.  We took the advice of many of our friends and family and paced ourselves through the museum.  I think we only saw about half of it, but the Mayan and Aztec displays are incredible.

I finally got to see the giant Aztec calendar, that I've seen on so many textbooks and Mexican advertisements.

Perhaps the most culturally important artifact in the museum, however, had to be this giant Olmec head, which I can only imagine served as the inspiration for that giant talking head on my favorite Nickelodeon game show as a kid, "Legends of the Hidden Temple."  Does anyone else remember this show anymore, or is it not really as awesome as I remember? 

So how do you top off a perfect Friday night in Mexico City?  With Lucha Libre, of course!  We managed to score tickets to the weekly professional wresting event to see some of the great figures of our time duke it out in the ring, including The Blue Jaguar, Mistico, Valiente, Mascara Dorada, and my personal favorite, Starman (he showed up in spacesuit).
 

The next day we started making our way to Teotihuacan, first stopping to visit the Basilica to La Virgen de Guadalupe, the most visited religious site in Latin America. 

Our next stop was the pyramids of Teotihuacan, which were pretty impressive.  We were also fortunate enough to go with a good friend of ours, Dane Nielsen, who happened to be working in Mexico City during our visit.

People were pretty impressed that a seven-months-pregnant woman could climb to the top of two pyramids (myself included), but Sarah's pretty awesome in general.

Overall, we had an absolutely fantastic time down in Mexico City, and I managed to eat my weight in tacos.  It was a nice little break from the border for the weekend.