Saturday Feb.8
First, the good news: my workshop at the conference is sold out. 
Annie and I are on the bus to San Miguel. It took an hour or so to get out of vast Mexico City, but now we’re looking at dusty fields, many cacti, small concrete houses climbing up hillsides. Superhighway choked with trucks but the air is a bit clearer, after the dense smog over the city.
Yesterday, a huge treat — the National Museum of Anthropology. A magnificent building with an exhaustive collection of artefacts illuminating the history and creativity of the Mexican nation, with its many eras, ethnicities, and languages. Beautifully laid out and immensely impressive, especially that these early people carved sacred sculptures of their many gods out of massive hunks of stone – and that somehow those immense creations were moved to the museum. We were in awe. But also the delicacy of other art, pottery, sculpture, and especially for me, the papery Codexes of written records, some in hieroglyphs. An advanced and complex civilization, decimated in the 1500’s by the Spaniards.
One of the things I couldn’t get over was the similarity in some cultural traditions, despite those cultures being thousands of miles and often centuries apart. Mexicans built stele, big pointed slabs of rock stuck in the ground, like those found all over the world. They made pyramids and filled them with food and treasure for the dead in the afterlife, just as the Egyptians did. One of their foundational myths, we read, is that a flood wiped out all life on earth and the gods had to start again, and that the earth is carried on the back of a turtle. And much else, in this civilization thousands of years ago, in common with every culture on earth: warfare, constant warfare and violence, young men raised to fight and die; class distinction – royalty and the rich, civil service and merchants, peasants. The power of masks, the importance of precious decorative objects, jewelry, gold. The need for drugs like fermented drinks and a supernatural explanation of life and death – here, as in ancient Greece, many gods; for us, only one. The importance of story. Sport, dancing, musical instruments thousands of years old – flutes, drums. And much more.
I wondered if Mexicans are more preoccupied by death than other cultures. The ancient culture celebrated human sacrifice; still today,on the Day of the Dead, they celebrate their dear departed, and much Mexican art depicts skeletons and skulls. And why, Annie and I wondered, are there no cats depicted in the art, despite many dogs and other animals.
Also amazing – I’m paying to have internet and data during my trip, so was able for the first time to use Google translate, to hover my phone over explanations in Spanish and instantly read a translation. Miraculous. We sat outside for a bit and heard an interesting birdcall, so I checked my Merlin app: a long-tailed grackle.
It was all fascinating. We explored the gallery about what used to be called the Aztecs but are now the Mexicas, stopped for lunch, and went to the Mayans. By then we’d been there four hours, enough, although there was far more to see. We wandered in the giant park that surrounds the museum – hilarious, on the entry to the park there are, of course, many rows of vendors shouting for attention, and at one point an untended boombox bellowing at us at top volume to buy a hot dog. Noise is constant here. We sat in the Botanical Garden, a respite, and took a very crowded bus back. No more taxis.
Our host Jorge told us about a bar on top of the nearby Sofitel with a great view of the city, so we went there for an aperitif. But this highrise hotel had been taken over by an Indian wedding; half the rooms in the hotel were booked for three days, if you can imagine the cost of that. The bar was full of women in glittering saris. But we found another bar on a lower floor and had beer and guacamole in a site of unaccustomed luxury, and on the way home bought buns, again, for dinner.
The city is a madhouse of museums and people struggling to survive. Unimaginable what will happen if Trump’s tariffs take hold, on top of what the government has already done to its people. I feel more fortunate than ever, though perhaps briefly. Last night I read that Trudeau feels we should take seriously Trump’s threat to annex Canada, and could not sleep. The ghastly, incomprehensibly bad news follows us everywhere.
This morning, up early and to the bus station via another miraculous app, Uber. The adventure continues. Out the window – more dusty gold fields of low bushes and cacti, distant hills. After the crowds of the city, almost nothing but cars and trucks — and us — moving through.
Pix: The massive Aztec calendar. The god Chac Mool, possibly a rain god – so Egyptian, no? Hand carved stamps, used for fabric, pottery, and also for the human body. The god of music. Lunch at the museum – hibiscus flower juice, enchilada with molé, quesadilla with cheese, and Mexican hot chocolate. MMM. Codexes. Annie on the 14th floor of Sofitel with a Mexican craft beer in a photo for her son Nick, who has a craft beer website. Onward!
