Tour to Teotihuacan

A few days ago we took a tour bus from our Hostel to see a few sights around and outside the city. We've been on a few tours run from here now, and they've all been good value. The tour guide Isaac really knows his stuff, and it helps that he's a friendly and funny guy.

First stop on this tour was the Aztec ruins at Tlatelolco. There's a few things of interest in Tlatelolco, including the remains of what was the second-largest temple in Mexico. This temple was built in layers, with each new layer being added on top of the last as the Aztec's power grew in the city. When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they demolished parts of the temple to build a church on the same site. This church, the Temple de Santiago, had a really sweet atmosphere - I really like the style it was built in, but the whole time I was inside I felt guilty for being a tourist inside a church where locals were praying. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to have tourists walking through a church service back home taking photos of everything.

Just outside this church, there's a large square called the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures). Apparently, this site is infamous because it was the place the Mexican government massacred around 300-400 demonstrators in 1968. It was just before the Mexican olympic games, and the government of the time wanted to show the world a strong, unified Mexico. However, students and protestors wanted to use the extra attention directed on the country to demand various political changes. Events came to a climax when the army was ordered to fire on the crowd. No-one knows for sure how many people were killed, and the massacre has been the subject of numerous cover-ups and subsequent investigations.

Next stop on our tour was the Basílica de Guadalupe. Here's a photo of some Mexican cops outside the shrine. Mexico city is full of cops, but they all seem to just hang around in groups laughing and playing with their mobile phones like a bunch of school kids. Seems like a bit of a cushy job. I saw one police car drive buy with 6 cops jammed in the back seat, so the back doors were wide open to fit them all in.

Anyway, the Basílica is home to one of Mexico's most treasured things, which is a robe of an Aztec guy with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on it. The story goes, this guy saw a vision of the virgin, but the church didn't believe him, so the virgin told him to gather roses and take them to the cathedral in his robe. When he got to the cathedral, he dropped all the roses and on his robe had appeared the image of the virgin (painted by God). This is a huge thing for Mexicans, since 90% of them are Catholic, and even skeptics like our tour guide aren't sure what to believe about it. You go by on this little elevator thing and get to take photos of it, so here's my photo:

(Pretty good photo I think). Also, here's a panorama photo I took from the top of the hill there. It's also pretty good if I say so myself:

Ok, the last stop on our tour was Teotihuacán. This is basically a deserted city that the Aztecs found, and no-one really knows who built it, or why it got deserted. When it was found it was all trashed, and everything looked like this mound of stones:

Now it's all been restored by archaeologists, so it looks like this:

There's two large pyramids there, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. We climbed both of them, which is steep but doesn't take too long, and it gets you away from guys trying to sell these annoying whistles and blowy things that make an annoying screaming noise.

Here's some more photos. Me on a pyramid:

Mez with a cactus:

And a band we saw, who weren't very good, but were funner to watch then any emo band could ever dream of being. Our bus driver played percussion with a coat hanger: