Saturday - Day Eight
Entry now complete!
So today we went to Teotihuacan and I can say without a moments hesitation that it did not disappoint! It was even more amazing than I had imagined it would be. I only wish that we could have stayed longer. It was the most incredible place to visit!!
We set out just before 8AM, which was okay but I would love to have gotten an earlier start. Come on 6AM isn't too early! It was really fun because our bus not only had our buddies from USU on it, but the guys from our house were on it as well. Our female roommates unfortunately had to ride on another bus. We would have dominated the place if they had been there too.
Our bus had a guide, a fellow who teaches at UNINTER I think, but he made it clear from the get go that he was not our guide, but our teacher. Apparently there is a guide for tourguides here in Mexico and you can get yourself into trouble if you call yourself a guide when you are not a part of the guild. After this he began telling a bit about the history of Teotihuacan, much of which I already knew but with a few tidbits I hadn't heard before. It was a long ride and many of us dozed or listened to music on the way. I took a picture of Dee sleeping and she has vowed to get revenge. One thing that attests to the prior experience of our teacher/guide is that everytime we had to make a stop, he was telling us to use the restroom whether we thought we needed to or not. Bathrooms are not as available in Mexico (most gas stations, fastfood places, etc. don't have them) or they don't always work properly. There are bathrooms at Teotihuacan, but they are some that don't always work. So we diligently used the potty every time we stopped at a place that had one. The bathrooms can be scary but it is better to use than it is to lose it.
It took us about an hour and a half to travel to the pyramids and it was so incredibly cool to see them come into view for the first time. They were so much more massive than I thought they would be that I was just enraptured. Before we went into the site itself, we stopped at a place to eat our lunches and get some lessons in the many uses of the maguey plant. This actually is a very cool and versitile plant that was used by the indigenous people in Mexico for a lot of things. It is a large succulant plant (we will have to post pictures) with really large branches/spines coming from the heart of the plant. These plants can be used to make everything from paper, which was used to make the old codices, to fibers and string for clothes (there were rugs there made out of them), needles for sewing, a type of shampoo, and about 15 other things. It is also were the people get the liquid for making pulque and taquila. It was interesting to see pulque, which I have read about but had never seen a picture of. It is the traditional alcoholic drink for Mexico and everyone from the Mayas to the Aztecs to later the Spanish drank it. They were passing out free samples, but obviously us Mormon gals declined. It was an interesting peach color though, and I was glad to see what it looks like. I have written about it before, but it was without any first had knowledge. Taquila is the stonger liquor that is made from the plant, which I didn't know before.
After demonstrating some of the properties of the maguey plant, the fellow who had been showing us all of this took us into the shop where they sell souvenirs and showed us around. They had some really cool stuff, but it was tremendously expensive, and in spite of the fact that they were one of the few places that accepted American credit cards, I limited myself to only buying a coupld of postcards to get change. I really loved one of the statues they had made out of local obsidian (one for MCoG mind), but I don't have a couple of thousand dollars to spend obviously.
We had lunch in the gardin and there were a whole bunch of cute little cats there. Animals just tend to roam feral here and these cats were like that. They would carefully take food from you if it was offered, but they were obviously not use to people touching them. Nevertheless, Dee and I thought that they were very cute!
After lunch we got back on the bus (after another potty break) and continued on to the pyramids. I was a little miffed that our end time of 4PM was changed to 3:30 with no better explaination for the change but that Harry's Bar opened early (I think that it was actually because of traffic concerns), but my irritation faded as we got into the site itself.
Dee and I decided to stick with our teacher/guide and he actually did a great job of showing us the highlights of the city. One of our first stops was the place that I had wanted to see the most, but I didn't realize where we were until we climbed up over a pyramid that blocked our view and saw the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.
It was so cool and yet different than what I had been expecting. I rememeber reading that the pyramid is basically hidden behind another one, but I didn´t realize what that meant. You cannot see the Quetzalcoatl pyramid until you have climbed the other one and there is not much space between the two. I have no idea why it was built this way. Unfortunately, they are doing some work on the temple so that we couldn´t get very close to it. I have always wanted to have my picture taken next to one of the serpent heads, but that was not to be. I had to be satisfied with knowing that I had seen it and that when I come back I will probably be able to see a lot more.
One thing I forgot to mention that occured before we went to the Quetzalcoatl pyramid is that we stopped to have a quick lesson in how to produce the colors that the Teotihuacanos used to paint their city. One of the vendors (of which there are many, but more on that later) showed us the basics of producing pigments for decorating the city with frescos. They used the eggs from a bug that lays lots of them on cactus plants to make a bright, dark red. The eggs themselves are chalky grey-white, but when they are crushed they make this beautiful red. He also demonstrated how to make yellow. This color comes from a type of plant with green stalks. The maestro just licked the cut end of the stalk and then drew a line in bright yellow across the paper. It was so cool to see how such bright colors can be produced in nature. Then after his demonstration, he offered to see us postcards (he was a vendor after all) and Dee bought the packet of postcards that he had used to demonstrate creating these colors so you will get to see them when we get home. They are nice postcards too!
Anyway, after this demonstration and visiting the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, we continued on into the city. It is totally huge and it takes a while just to walk through it. And we are lucky! If we had been peasants living back in the day, we would have been summararily executed if we had set foot on the path we were taking, the Avenue of the Dead. Only the priests and important people, like foreign kings and dignitaries, could walk on the central road of the city. Everyone else had to go around the whole city to get to the other side.
Before making our way to the Pyramid of the Sun (actually it is a pyramid to a rain goddess. The Teotihuacanos worshipped two female deities as their primary gods) we had to pay through a swarm of penny vendors and take a look at some of the other features of the city. (More about the vendors later...) One of these stops was to look at what archaeologists have unearthed beneath the city. You see every couple of generations in this city, the rulers or priests would decide it was time to renivate this or that temple. Well it makes no sense to demolish an already perfectly good building so instead they would build the new one over it. So in some places the archaeologists have uncovered what they call Teotihuacan II, while the main part that people see is TIII. So we took a short detour underneath the temples to take a look at what has been found there. There is actual paint left on the temples that were buried and you could sort of get an idea of what it would have been like to see the city when it was completely covered in colorful frescos.
We also got to see more of the water system that the Teotihuacanos used. They were very clever at building with slightly different levels to the city so that the water would flow down and out of the city keeping things clean. They could also channel the water so that people could have running water. Our side trip took us where we could see an actual shower that they would have used back in the day. They were obviously very clever people in this place. Anyway, it was very neat.
Our next stop was to a crumbling palace to get another demonstration from a vendor like before. He was selling replicas of the ceremonial knives that would be used to cut out the hearts of sacrificial victims. Dee and I were interested in the knives, but we didn´t have time to haggle at that moment. We needed to move on to the next point of interest, but the vendor noted Dee´s name (she told him it was Tonya) and we were off again.
Then it was time for the highlight of the tour, the chance to climb to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun (Rain). Our guide said that we had 35 minutes to climb to the top, take some pictures, and come down on the other side where he would wait for us. I was a little worried about whether I would be able to make it to the top in that time frame so I started right away before the rest of the group had finished looking around at the bottom.
Well, I will tell you now that it wasn´t an easy climb. I felt pretty out of breath and out of shape by the time I had reached the first level and the others were following quickly behind me. Dee stayed with me most of the way and we took it slow, but it only took us between 10-15 minutes to climb to the top. It is an amazing view from the top. It is pretty clear why the Teotihuacanos wanted to build their city there. It is surrounded by beautiful mountains and is much greener than you would think it to be. We enjoyed several amazing minutes at the top just chatting with the rest of our group and marveling at how much of the city still remains buried beneath the various hills we could see. Only about 1/4 of the city has been excavated so who knows what is still out there to be discovered. Our guide told us that the first time he had come to Teotihuacan in the early 60s, only the Pyramid of the Sun (Rain) had been excavated, and that was a rather shoddy job (the head "archaeologist" had found that the pyramid was connected to another structure and he thought is looked bad so he blew it up with dynomite). So he has basically seen the city uncovered and reconstructed during his lifetime, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Just on our visit we could see archaeologists working in the area behind the Pyramid of Queztalcoatl so who knows what it will look like in another 50 years.
After we descended from the pyramid, we continued on toward the Pyramid of the Moon (goddess), but guess who was waiting for Dee at the bottom. Our friend with the knives. Dee fell in talking with him and I could see that they were haggling over how much for the obsidian blades. I walked over too and together Dee and I played the poor sisters who both wanted a knife but could not afford the $400 asking price for one. Working together we got the price down to $400 for two knives ($20 each) and everyone left feeling pretty good about life. Well, the thing about these vendors is that if you completely act like they don´t exist (which our guide saw was perfectly culturally aceptable) they will leave you pretty much alone. But once it is clear that you are buying, watch out!
They decend on you like locusts (well not quite that bad). We soon found ourselves looking at everything from blankets to ceremonial masks. We had a great time talking the vendors down and buying the things that we fancied. Unlike in the local mercados where it is tacky to try and talk a vendor into a lower price (they definitely need the couple of pesos more than we do) you are expected to haggle with the penny vendors in the city. They make a good living off of their sales and usually start their price at double what they will take for it. We went on after our group poorer in money, but richer in cool things for our rooms, houses and classrooms.
One of our last stops was at one of the few well preserved frescos from TIII, a picture of a jaguar, and our guide said that the rest of the time was ours as long as we were back at the bus by 3:30. We looked at a few more very cool buildings. We didn´t have time climb the pyramid of the Moon, but we did see the building that has plumed snail carvings and other fancy decoration on it. Then we exited towards were the buses would be and looked at the shops that lined the way. I wanted to find a replica of the famous statue that was uncovered at Teotihuacan, but found Tloc, the rain god, and his consort instead and happily purchased them along with a feathered serpent head for $100 or $200 pesos (I can´t remember which). Dee went back into the city to find one of the vendors that was selling masks and I was a bit worried that we wouldn´t get back in time.
Finally she showed up and our last purchase of the day was a quick haggling session for two blankets with the Aztec calendar on them. Then we broke and ran for the bus, passing up the opportunity to try the bathroom facilities of Teotihuacan. We got to the bus right on time and everyone was quickly seated. Then our guide said that he had been joking and that they wouldn´t have really left us. I wanted to throw something at him, but refrained. Really it had been an excellent day and, while I could have spent several more hours wandering around the city, I was content with what I had seen. I was already planning how we would manage a return trip with the whole family.
Dee and I mostly slept or dozed on the way back to Cuernavaca, occaisionally stirring when the guide pointed out something interesting in Mexico City (which we spent a great deal of time traveling through what with the bumper to bumper traffic there. I look forward to going back there at the end of our stay in Mexico.
We got home without incident, and although I think there was some interesting dinner conversation that night, I don´t remember much of it at the moment. One of our roommates, Martha, was really sunburnt after a day in the sun at the pyramids and then swimming in the pool at the house, and so we offered to share our kickbutt, highpowered alovera with lidocain. It´s good stuff although I only had to use it the first day we were hear when I forgot to put on sunscreen. Since then it has been my morning ritual to smear the greasy stuff wherever I thought I needed it. We also chatted with Martha about our trip, and she said their guide hadn´t been as good but that Dee´s and my commentary and brief history lesson were a good substitute (sweet lady).
After that it was back to the real world and the knowledge that we had school the next day. Thank goodness there was no homework over the weekend!
Hasta Luego! I´ll write more soon!
So today we went to Teotihuacan and I can say without a moments hesitation that it did not disappoint! It was even more amazing than I had imagined it would be. I only wish that we could have stayed longer. It was the most incredible place to visit!!
We set out just before 8AM, which was okay but I would love to have gotten an earlier start. Come on 6AM isn't too early! It was really fun because our bus not only had our buddies from USU on it, but the guys from our house were on it as well. Our female roommates unfortunately had to ride on another bus. We would have dominated the place if they had been there too.
Our bus had a guide, a fellow who teaches at UNINTER I think, but he made it clear from the get go that he was not our guide, but our teacher. Apparently there is a guide for tourguides here in Mexico and you can get yourself into trouble if you call yourself a guide when you are not a part of the guild. After this he began telling a bit about the history of Teotihuacan, much of which I already knew but with a few tidbits I hadn't heard before. It was a long ride and many of us dozed or listened to music on the way. I took a picture of Dee sleeping and she has vowed to get revenge. One thing that attests to the prior experience of our teacher/guide is that everytime we had to make a stop, he was telling us to use the restroom whether we thought we needed to or not. Bathrooms are not as available in Mexico (most gas stations, fastfood places, etc. don't have them) or they don't always work properly. There are bathrooms at Teotihuacan, but they are some that don't always work. So we diligently used the potty every time we stopped at a place that had one. The bathrooms can be scary but it is better to use than it is to lose it.
It took us about an hour and a half to travel to the pyramids and it was so incredibly cool to see them come into view for the first time. They were so much more massive than I thought they would be that I was just enraptured. Before we went into the site itself, we stopped at a place to eat our lunches and get some lessons in the many uses of the maguey plant. This actually is a very cool and versitile plant that was used by the indigenous people in Mexico for a lot of things. It is a large succulant plant (we will have to post pictures) with really large branches/spines coming from the heart of the plant. These plants can be used to make everything from paper, which was used to make the old codices, to fibers and string for clothes (there were rugs there made out of them), needles for sewing, a type of shampoo, and about 15 other things. It is also were the people get the liquid for making pulque and taquila. It was interesting to see pulque, which I have read about but had never seen a picture of. It is the traditional alcoholic drink for Mexico and everyone from the Mayas to the Aztecs to later the Spanish drank it. They were passing out free samples, but obviously us Mormon gals declined. It was an interesting peach color though, and I was glad to see what it looks like. I have written about it before, but it was without any first had knowledge. Taquila is the stonger liquor that is made from the plant, which I didn't know before.
After demonstrating some of the properties of the maguey plant, the fellow who had been showing us all of this took us into the shop where they sell souvenirs and showed us around. They had some really cool stuff, but it was tremendously expensive, and in spite of the fact that they were one of the few places that accepted American credit cards, I limited myself to only buying a coupld of postcards to get change. I really loved one of the statues they had made out of local obsidian (one for MCoG mind), but I don't have a couple of thousand dollars to spend obviously.
We had lunch in the gardin and there were a whole bunch of cute little cats there. Animals just tend to roam feral here and these cats were like that. They would carefully take food from you if it was offered, but they were obviously not use to people touching them. Nevertheless, Dee and I thought that they were very cute!
After lunch we got back on the bus (after another potty break) and continued on to the pyramids. I was a little miffed that our end time of 4PM was changed to 3:30 with no better explaination for the change but that Harry's Bar opened early (I think that it was actually because of traffic concerns), but my irritation faded as we got into the site itself.
Dee and I decided to stick with our teacher/guide and he actually did a great job of showing us the highlights of the city. One of our first stops was the place that I had wanted to see the most, but I didn't realize where we were until we climbed up over a pyramid that blocked our view and saw the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.
It was so cool and yet different than what I had been expecting. I rememeber reading that the pyramid is basically hidden behind another one, but I didn´t realize what that meant. You cannot see the Quetzalcoatl pyramid until you have climbed the other one and there is not much space between the two. I have no idea why it was built this way. Unfortunately, they are doing some work on the temple so that we couldn´t get very close to it. I have always wanted to have my picture taken next to one of the serpent heads, but that was not to be. I had to be satisfied with knowing that I had seen it and that when I come back I will probably be able to see a lot more.
One thing I forgot to mention that occured before we went to the Quetzalcoatl pyramid is that we stopped to have a quick lesson in how to produce the colors that the Teotihuacanos used to paint their city. One of the vendors (of which there are many, but more on that later) showed us the basics of producing pigments for decorating the city with frescos. They used the eggs from a bug that lays lots of them on cactus plants to make a bright, dark red. The eggs themselves are chalky grey-white, but when they are crushed they make this beautiful red. He also demonstrated how to make yellow. This color comes from a type of plant with green stalks. The maestro just licked the cut end of the stalk and then drew a line in bright yellow across the paper. It was so cool to see how such bright colors can be produced in nature. Then after his demonstration, he offered to see us postcards (he was a vendor after all) and Dee bought the packet of postcards that he had used to demonstrate creating these colors so you will get to see them when we get home. They are nice postcards too!
Anyway, after this demonstration and visiting the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, we continued on into the city. It is totally huge and it takes a while just to walk through it. And we are lucky! If we had been peasants living back in the day, we would have been summararily executed if we had set foot on the path we were taking, the Avenue of the Dead. Only the priests and important people, like foreign kings and dignitaries, could walk on the central road of the city. Everyone else had to go around the whole city to get to the other side.
Before making our way to the Pyramid of the Sun (actually it is a pyramid to a rain goddess. The Teotihuacanos worshipped two female deities as their primary gods) we had to pay through a swarm of penny vendors and take a look at some of the other features of the city. (More about the vendors later...) One of these stops was to look at what archaeologists have unearthed beneath the city. You see every couple of generations in this city, the rulers or priests would decide it was time to renivate this or that temple. Well it makes no sense to demolish an already perfectly good building so instead they would build the new one over it. So in some places the archaeologists have uncovered what they call Teotihuacan II, while the main part that people see is TIII. So we took a short detour underneath the temples to take a look at what has been found there. There is actual paint left on the temples that were buried and you could sort of get an idea of what it would have been like to see the city when it was completely covered in colorful frescos.
We also got to see more of the water system that the Teotihuacanos used. They were very clever at building with slightly different levels to the city so that the water would flow down and out of the city keeping things clean. They could also channel the water so that people could have running water. Our side trip took us where we could see an actual shower that they would have used back in the day. They were obviously very clever people in this place. Anyway, it was very neat.
Our next stop was to a crumbling palace to get another demonstration from a vendor like before. He was selling replicas of the ceremonial knives that would be used to cut out the hearts of sacrificial victims. Dee and I were interested in the knives, but we didn´t have time to haggle at that moment. We needed to move on to the next point of interest, but the vendor noted Dee´s name (she told him it was Tonya) and we were off again.
Then it was time for the highlight of the tour, the chance to climb to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun (Rain). Our guide said that we had 35 minutes to climb to the top, take some pictures, and come down on the other side where he would wait for us. I was a little worried about whether I would be able to make it to the top in that time frame so I started right away before the rest of the group had finished looking around at the bottom.
Well, I will tell you now that it wasn´t an easy climb. I felt pretty out of breath and out of shape by the time I had reached the first level and the others were following quickly behind me. Dee stayed with me most of the way and we took it slow, but it only took us between 10-15 minutes to climb to the top. It is an amazing view from the top. It is pretty clear why the Teotihuacanos wanted to build their city there. It is surrounded by beautiful mountains and is much greener than you would think it to be. We enjoyed several amazing minutes at the top just chatting with the rest of our group and marveling at how much of the city still remains buried beneath the various hills we could see. Only about 1/4 of the city has been excavated so who knows what is still out there to be discovered. Our guide told us that the first time he had come to Teotihuacan in the early 60s, only the Pyramid of the Sun (Rain) had been excavated, and that was a rather shoddy job (the head "archaeologist" had found that the pyramid was connected to another structure and he thought is looked bad so he blew it up with dynomite). So he has basically seen the city uncovered and reconstructed during his lifetime, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Just on our visit we could see archaeologists working in the area behind the Pyramid of Queztalcoatl so who knows what it will look like in another 50 years.
After we descended from the pyramid, we continued on toward the Pyramid of the Moon (goddess), but guess who was waiting for Dee at the bottom. Our friend with the knives. Dee fell in talking with him and I could see that they were haggling over how much for the obsidian blades. I walked over too and together Dee and I played the poor sisters who both wanted a knife but could not afford the $400 asking price for one. Working together we got the price down to $400 for two knives ($20 each) and everyone left feeling pretty good about life. Well, the thing about these vendors is that if you completely act like they don´t exist (which our guide saw was perfectly culturally aceptable) they will leave you pretty much alone. But once it is clear that you are buying, watch out!
They decend on you like locusts (well not quite that bad). We soon found ourselves looking at everything from blankets to ceremonial masks. We had a great time talking the vendors down and buying the things that we fancied. Unlike in the local mercados where it is tacky to try and talk a vendor into a lower price (they definitely need the couple of pesos more than we do) you are expected to haggle with the penny vendors in the city. They make a good living off of their sales and usually start their price at double what they will take for it. We went on after our group poorer in money, but richer in cool things for our rooms, houses and classrooms.
One of our last stops was at one of the few well preserved frescos from TIII, a picture of a jaguar, and our guide said that the rest of the time was ours as long as we were back at the bus by 3:30. We looked at a few more very cool buildings. We didn´t have time climb the pyramid of the Moon, but we did see the building that has plumed snail carvings and other fancy decoration on it. Then we exited towards were the buses would be and looked at the shops that lined the way. I wanted to find a replica of the famous statue that was uncovered at Teotihuacan, but found Tloc, the rain god, and his consort instead and happily purchased them along with a feathered serpent head for $100 or $200 pesos (I can´t remember which). Dee went back into the city to find one of the vendors that was selling masks and I was a bit worried that we wouldn´t get back in time.
Finally she showed up and our last purchase of the day was a quick haggling session for two blankets with the Aztec calendar on them. Then we broke and ran for the bus, passing up the opportunity to try the bathroom facilities of Teotihuacan. We got to the bus right on time and everyone was quickly seated. Then our guide said that he had been joking and that they wouldn´t have really left us. I wanted to throw something at him, but refrained. Really it had been an excellent day and, while I could have spent several more hours wandering around the city, I was content with what I had seen. I was already planning how we would manage a return trip with the whole family.
Dee and I mostly slept or dozed on the way back to Cuernavaca, occaisionally stirring when the guide pointed out something interesting in Mexico City (which we spent a great deal of time traveling through what with the bumper to bumper traffic there. I look forward to going back there at the end of our stay in Mexico.
We got home without incident, and although I think there was some interesting dinner conversation that night, I don´t remember much of it at the moment. One of our roommates, Martha, was really sunburnt after a day in the sun at the pyramids and then swimming in the pool at the house, and so we offered to share our kickbutt, highpowered alovera with lidocain. It´s good stuff although I only had to use it the first day we were hear when I forgot to put on sunscreen. Since then it has been my morning ritual to smear the greasy stuff wherever I thought I needed it. We also chatted with Martha about our trip, and she said their guide hadn´t been as good but that Dee´s and my commentary and brief history lesson were a good substitute (sweet lady).
After that it was back to the real world and the knowledge that we had school the next day. Thank goodness there was no homework over the weekend!
Hasta Luego! I´ll write more soon!