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: