10 years of Chris in photos.

Hope everyone enjoys! I know everyone else has jobs and family and stuff but it would make me feel great if you stopped your life for a few minutes to admire me.

Thanks,

Chris

(click on the picture to open the web album....)

Chris Poses

Mexico CIty Week 2

Too Much for Two Weeks
Mexico City Week 2

Let me first say that I believe whole-heartedly that Mexico City has received a bad reputation from everyone that’s ever given us advice about traveling here. The police kept everything organized even with all of the protesting and craziness that went on. The people we had interactions with were very kind and helpful and we did not feel threatened once. Everyone else went about their own business. Being the huge city that it is, everyone has big city blinders on.

We were pretty tired from all of the hiking in our first week here. I would venture to say that we walked at least 5 miles each day, which was a lot after laying around for several weeks in Irapuato not doing much physically. However, we were definitely ready in week two to pick up the pace, especially since we had found our Starbucks energy source, and we still had so much to see it was mind-boggling.

First we visited the area in Mexico City called Zona Rosa. It was one of the most open minded, relaxed, friendly places we visited—very cool and hip with tons of bars, sex shops, and several happenin’ gay clubs.

Another area we visited a couple of different times was called Condessa. We visited an amazing museum (based on a Frank Lloyd Wright design) that had some of the best paintings and drawings I have ever seen in my life. We also ate at a T.G.I Friday’s (had an amaaaazing mudslide frozen drink – It’s amazingly hard to find good frozen drinks here), visited several Starbucks, and a mansion where I enjoyed the best mojito I have ever drank. It was, by far, the most rich and snooty area we visited in Mexico City. It was strikingly obvious how many more white people there were in the rich neighborhood.

We visited the ancient Aztecan ruins in the middle of the main part of the city called “Templo Mayor”, what used to be the principle pyramid and worshipping ground for the original people that came here hundreds of years ago. The Spanish as said repeatedly before destroyed all they could and it ended up being turned into a garbage dump until the early part of the 20^th century when an archaeologist excavated the site and unearthed some amazing treasures and history. It’s not much to look at now but the history behind it is intriguing and sad, as is the case with all other indigineous people around the world. But these people apparently gave Mr. Cortez a hell of a bloody fight. Here is a picture of me taming a wild jaguar that was patrolling the museum:
More museums and more museums… There are apparently one hundred and fifty museums in the city. There is a friggin museum for everything. Not counting the ones I’ve named in other posts, we’ve visited the Da Vinci museum, the Modern Art Museum, the anthropology museum, the Diego Rivera museum, the history of dentistry museum, and the “some dude collected a bunch of 15, 16, 17, and 18^thcentury junk” museum. I’m sure I missed naming a few.

The Da Vinci museum was pretty cool with all of the inventions he created, mostly for war, but a lot for mass production, lifting, general physics… cool stuff.

The dental museum had a recreated dental office from two hundred years ago. Amazingly most of the instruments looked exactly like they do in today’s dental offices except for a few that looked like Abu-garhib torture devices.

The Diego Rivera museum basically just had a big mural he painted in it – I think his most revered. It’s a great mural I have to admit.
The Modern Art museum was I think the most impressive museum of them all – some amazing paintings of all the Mexican muralists and other contemporary artist’s work that were jaw-droppingly great (my second favorite museum overall). There was very little if any of the “cover your body in paint and roll around of a canvas on the floor” art and that you’d expect to see in a modern art museum.

The museum of anthropology was humongous and overwhelming but well worth a visit if someone is never going to visit any of the ancient ruins like we are. They do have they remains of the cave person called “Lucy” though – several million years old, which is pretty cool. There is also a statue from thousands of years ago that looks like a not so distant relative of GW:

We of course took a day trip to see the pyramids of Teotihuacan. The views were spectacular and the miles of hiking in the scorching sun were well worth it. Melanie climbed a little pyramid but I couldn’t convince her to climb the big mama. This is her from my view at the top. Here’s another view from the top. I really love climbing these pyramids! They’re really steep and really tall and definitely will make your legs a little shaky and your heart race. I actually saw a few eighty year olds clutching their chests and gasping for air about halfway up – probably best to attempt when you’re young. If you think of it like any other staircase you’ve ever climbed it’s really no big deal (other than being hundreds of feet in the air). The key is to not look more than one step ahead than the one your stepping to, down or up. It kind of translates, at least for me, to life in general.

We spent more time in the park. Here’s a great pic of Melanie: Isn’t she beautiful?

One of the last things we did here was to go to the Basillica de Guadalupe. Thousands of people from around the world make pilgrimages there to see a picture on a wall. It’s a long story behind why and I won’t get into it, however, it is my mother’s patron saint and I went to check it out for her and to get her a religious souvenier. Here’s a little taste of what it was like... total religious madness:

The last thing I want to say about our time in Mexico City is about the hotel we were staying in: “Casa de los Gringos”. I call it that because everyone there spoke English and were from the states (mostly west coast hippies from Washington or California). There was something really annoying to be in the heart of historic Mexico and be surrounded by English speaking dirty hippies – I would, however, highly recommend it to anyone from Santa Cruz wanting to visit Mexico City. There was also no sound buffering and our room was right next to the bathrooms. We had the pleasure of hearing every loose stool, vomit, fart, burp, snort, sploosh, and splash amplified in stereo. We felt lucky if anyone flushed anything (thanks for conserving all the water hippies) and forget about anyone making an effort to conceal up their doo doo covered t.p. that they’ve thrown in the garbage. I also had a couple of different (non-important) items stolen from various places around the hotel. I’m so ready to leave this place – communal living is the pits. There was one guy from Somalia that we had some very interesting conversations about world politics with.

I left a few things out considering the amount of adventures we packed into the relatively short time here in Mexico City. We truly had a blast here though and I can’t overstate how wrong everyone was that said we would have problems here or would not enjoy ourselves. The food overall was good and cheap. The hotel, although as stated had it’s disadvantages, but was dirt cheap. The public transportation was amazing and the cheapest in the world. We apparently chose a good time to be here. There was apparently a mass exodus of people during these past two weeks for spring break and holy week, although it still seemed like a lot of people to me, it usually is much more crowded.

Well it’s on to San Cristobal, the city named after me, in the next couple of days. It will be a long bus ride – hopefully they play a couple of good movies. We will be seeing more pyramids and ruins at Palenque (so excited we’ll get to see monkeys and climb more pyramids!). I will write more soon. Thanks for traveling along with me.

Mexico City Week 1

Protests, Religion, Art, and Starbucks
Mexico City Week One
(Warning: this post contains a painting of boobs)

We arrived in Mexico City on a Monday night and as I said in my last blog entry I got cussed at and I believe cursed by an ancient woman on the street. Since then, by the way, I have given money to countless old ladies, even ones not asking, and have been counter-cursed several times over. I also gave money to the large cathedral here in Mexico City and I drank some of the holy water. So anyways, the next day we waded into the protest and have since witnessed three other protests and countless numbers of armed police, military personnel with big guns, and riot cops in full gear. Funny thing is with all these protests and all these police I have yet to see anyone arrested or any violence whatsoever. We actually joined that big protest for a while. Being Santa Cruz protest pros we thought we could show them a thing or two about how to get some things accomplished. Felt kind of awkward being the only naked ones though. Protesting all day is hard work and we had built up quite an appetite. We grabbed some dinner and headed back to our hotel to sleep and have dreams about societies that actually actively protest their government’s unfair/ corrupt policies instead of simply partaking in telephone opinion polls.

We woke up the next morning at Casa de Los Gringos (I mean Amigos) and we headed downstairs to have the dollar-fifty breakfast special. They served chilaquiles, at least that’s what they called them, (they were actually gringoquiles - stale corn chips smeared with black bean paste and topped with mozzarella cheese) and corn flakes for breakfast with stale bread and coffee. Yum!!! I was starting to long for the Starbucks we had noticed near the town square the day before. It was the last breakfast we would eat at our hotel.

First we visited the Palacio governor’s palace military base thingy. The Spanish conquerors apparently built all of the main buildings on top of the main pyramids of the original Aztecan/ Mexicas, after they destroyed them and killed all the people of course. The Palace, however, is very large and impressive and Diego Rivera painted a ton of murals on the walls depicting the history of the evil gringos killing, raping, and ravaging all of the native people and destroying their amazingly beautiful advanced city. The murals are quite impressive. The whole place is crawling with military police carrying ak-47’s so it’s difficult to take too many pictures (they will confiscate your camera if they see you, even accidentally, taking any pics of them). There is even a garden in the middle that is filled with desert plants and at least twenty cats. It’s the only place so far that I’ve seen cats on this entire journey and one of the few places in the palace that it was safe to take some pics. Awwww so cute:

After the Palacio we headed into a marketplace that seemed to go on for miles. There were people yelling and screaming at the top of their lungs to buy their goods. Hot dog vendors yelling. Drink vendors yelling. The very large crowd of buyers all seemed to be yelling at each other. There was music blaring everywhere – all English music btw – Bob Marley, Queen, No Doubt, Usher, Blondie and many more. After a while Melanie and I even started yelling at each other, even though we could have heard each other talking normally, until we finally made it out of the market. It was like some sort of trance – very strange.

On to the main cathedral we went. Again built by the evil murdering catholic disease-bag Spanish conquerors. Actually other than being immensely huge it wasn’t that impressive looking. There was several cool side room shrines dedicated to patron saints/ martyrs (one usually goes with the other I guess). There was also the black Jesus shrine (don’t see that every day – usually he’s bleach white) – how’d they get away with depicting him as someone of color with the church? There were also a couple of other creepy monuments. One with a skull and bones of some martyr and one that bared an eerie resemblance to me! I was so freaked out I ran out of there screaming. Melanie had to cradle me in her bosom for a good twenty minutes before I would settle down. On a good note I got Melanie to cradle me in her bosom. After we got off the ground we walked by a statue dedicated to Pope John Paul II. I barely recognized him not being slumped over with drool dripping out of his mouth while breakdancers are spinning on their heads in front of him. Never seen the breakdancers video?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/26/pope.breakdancers.ap/

Totally unrelated but has anyone checked out the controversy regarding the chocolate Jesus?… it’s very disturbing to watch babbling Christian extremists making foolish arguments and threats. The sculpture itself raises a good point for everyone to think about the true meaning of the religious holidays that you celebrate. And, by the way, I’ve seen many paintings this week depicting Jesus having a penis, albeit not a chocolate one. But I bet there’s a good chance some of you are eating a chocolate Easter egg as you read this.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/50069/

Back to the blog… We headed back home but on the way stopped at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the main performance theatre and an art gallery, to check out some murals painted inside. There are murals painted by Diego Rivera, Orozco, Siquieros, and many more – all amazingly impressive. Check out this one by Siquieros – definitely my favorite (repressed children cover your eyes):

The next day started with our first stop at Starbucks for breakfast and coffee. They actually have good coffee and ½ and ½, which in Mexico is a miracle. Also pretty darn good breakfast sandwiches as well. Ashamedly we have pretty much eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Starbucks every day since… :( I know it’s bad, but I love Starbucks more than ever now. We have since found four or five more including one a couple of blocks from our hotel. We mostly walked around taking pictures all day and then that night went to a folk Ballet performance at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which included singing, musical performances and, of course, dancing. It was an amazing performance.

That was pretty much our first week here. We took a couple of day off to rest – we were pretty pooped from miles and miles of hiking in the hot sun. We’re currently at the end of week number two and I will write about that soon. I climbed a huge pyramid – can’t wait to show you all.

Until then,

Chris