Taxco

Today in the morning we checked out from our AirBNB in CDMX, took an Uber to Taxqueña bus station. We easily found our bus to Taxco, checked our luggage and 2.5 hours later we were in a totally different lanscape, culture, colors, food and smells. On the way:

Taxco is in Guerrera and is an extremely hilly town famous for its silver and jewlery industry. This is also the overwhelming part of it, in the center it's difficult to quietly walk without people trying to pull the visitor into their silver shop. Even official looking tour guides tell you some information and immediately afterwards recommend a silver shop. So we're learning how to ignore them. Sellers of all kind of touristic objects are also sticky. But this is mainly on the main square and its vicinity. Other things that were not as expected: no Uber or Didi in this town. You have to waive a taxi, negotiate the price and go. Address as a concept doesn't really work here either, the driver just looks an the Google Streetview on my phone and understand where to go. There are extremely lot of very old VW Beetle cards, all somehow manipulated to have automatic gears. It's really impressive how these operate in these very steep streets.

We visited the church on the main square:

We visited the pre-hispanic mine. This was a really interesting site. The mine was already operational when the Spanish arrived. Since there was significant amount of silver, gold and other metals mined there, they decided not to let the Spanish know about it and sealed its entrance. It was accidentally discovered in 2013 during some construction works. We descended into the mine with protective helmets, listened to some stories in Spanish and climbed quite a lot of stairs down and up.

For dinner we went to a restaurant where locals eat and had the local speciality of Pozole: a corn-chicken souped with avocado and crispy pork-belly (chicharon).

CDMX - Polanco

Today we explored the Polanco neghborhood in Mexico City. We started at the Museum Soumaya. This place hosts a very wide range of artifacts. Copies of famous European artists are displayed here, mostly for those who want to see these things together and have no opportunity to travel to Europe to see the original. Michelangelos's fulls size David is located in the lobby of the museum. Different floors cover different eras and movements. On each floor there are various Mexican artists whose works are also displayed mixed together with the non-Mexican ones. This makes the museum peculiar.

Another interesting thing is the design of the building:

We also checked out Museo Jumex, but we found only one single exhibit open to the public, the rest was under construction and reorganization. The exhibit was about the axolotl (the tiny animal I wrote about which also lives in Xochimilco). The project included a projection on the axolotl based on the Julio Cortazar's story. The amphibian can use gils, lungs and skin to exchange gases. The computers were also running some calculations about its genome. I didn't quite get it, but no dout the animal has moved from Mesoamerican codices and artistic symbolism into a mass cultural icon, even as it is disappearing from its natural habitat and is considered as critically endangered.

We had a "tamal" in Eno, the restaurant at Jumex operated by Enrique Olvera, the celebrated chef, running the 2-Michelin-star restaurant Pujol in the city. He is responsible for pushing the modern Mexican cuisine to global fine-dining. He's also responsible for this chicken-mole tamal:

After Jumex we just meandered in Polanco a very fancy, modern neighborhood, which can easily mistaken to Manhattan:

Parque Quetzalcóatl

Parque Quetzalcóatl is outside of CDMX on its west side. The park is one of the most unusual architectural-landscape projects in Mexico: a privately initiated ecological park combining art, landscape architecture, and experimental “organic architecture”. The park is designed and built by Javier Senosiain, a Mexican architect, who is the pioneer of this movement. The park is generally closed to the public, it'll open in about 5 years from now. However the operators/builders are running private tours in it, and we succeeded to get spots in one of those. The park is an interesting combination of architecture (reminds me Gaudi) and landscape engineering. There are apartments in the park, two of them are available on AirBNB's OMG category. To complicate all this there is an awful lot of symbolism and references to the Mesoamerican and Aztec mythology and cosmology, art, habitat. A combination of mythology and ecology. The snake is a returning motive in the landscpe, even the aprtment building is part of a giant snake.

The apartment building:

We didn't enter the apartment complex, but we did explore the other parts of the park. The park has buildings, thst are anything but standard. In the Aztec myths there are 3 kingdoms: the mineral/cave kingdom, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. For each Senosiain dedicated a separate buildong. Mineral Kingdom:

Plant Kingdom:

The Animal Kingdom is not ready yet, but the building and the view from it are impressive anyways:

Us in the park: