Refugio del Tricahue
Following the advice of the tourist information office in Talca, we headed up into the Andes for a weekend at the Refugio del Tricahue, a small mountain retreat located at the end of a long-ish dirt road and, remarkably, reachable by public transit.
Talca
After our relaxing stay in Concepcion with Pedro, we headed off to Talca, a medium sized city halfway between Concepcion and Santiago, to take a wine tour through some of the region's famous vineyards. Upon arriving, however, we were rather shocked to find that this city had been pretty thoroughly devastated by the earthquake. Whereas Concepcion showed some signs of damage but was mostly lively, over half of Talca's buildings were either uninhabitable or simply leveled.
Concepcion
Our first stop after Santiago was to Concepcion, the home town of our friend Pedro. We ended up staying for four very entertaining nights with Pedro and his welcoming family. Concepcion, as you may remember, was near the epicenter of the earthquake that struck Chile about six weeks ago, and the seafront city additionally had to deal with three tsunamis a half hour after the quake.
Santiago’s Pre-columbian art museum
One afternoon after class, we decided to head over to Santiago's pre-columbian art museum, located in the former colonial tax house just a block from the central square. The building was damaged in the earthquake, but luckily for us it was open for business by the time we arrived.
Santiago part 2
As we mentioned in our first post about Santiago, Venla took a photography class that resulted in a lot of really nice pictures of the city. We thought that we would share some of them here. Enjoy!
Isla Negra
Just before leaving Santiago, we took a nice day trip to Isla Negra, one of the homes of the rather famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. It was quite a nice place on the coast between Santiago and Valparaiso, which he had built shortly after his marriage with his first wife (of three). We should note, though, that the luxury of the place (as well as his other house in Santiago, which we also visited) kind of makes us doubt the communist image that the poet cultivated.
Valparaiso & Viña del Mar
Our first visit from Santiago was to the popular beach towns of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar. The town is also well known for its rather precarious location on top of steep hills that cascade down into the sea. So steep are the hills that in bygone times the Valparaisanos built a system of cable car elevators to make the trip less arduous.
Welcome to Santiago
Our first stop in the "Real" South America was, of course, Santiago, Chile. This was a really nice city where we decided to spend two weeks to get to know the country a bit before setting off for more rural adventures.
Finally Moving on to Chile
We finally did it. The entire goal of this trip was to go to South America, with a quick stop in Central America and Mexico on the way. That was pretty naïve: there is just too much to see and do in that part of the world. So, five months later, we celebrated finally getting to our goal as we stepped on a plane out of Mexico City: we were going to sip wine in Chile.
Lucha Libre: Mexican Wrestling!
One of Mexico's funniest (and yet oddly fascinating) quirks is the professional “wrestling”, or Lucha Libre. This sport, which originally derived from the American fake wrestling dramas, quickly developed into a fad, and from a fad into a national pass-time. In this inexplicable mix of soap opera, action movie and acrobatics, Mexico's best wrestlers don brightly colored masks and uniforms to face off twice a week in one of Mexico City's two coliseums and in living rooms across Latin America.
Xochimilco Canals
One of those things that we did not do on our honeymoon in Venice was take a ride in a gondola. At 80EUR for 40 minutes, it was just too rich for our newly-wed blood. However, Venice is not the only city with canals, and the Xochimilco canals in Mexico City were calling...
Torre Latinoamericana
Mexico City owes some of its fame not only to being one of the world's biggest megalopolis, but also one of the most polluted. It was so badly lost in the smog in the 1990s that it pioneered measures such as prohibiting cars to circulate one day of the week. The situation is supposed to be better now than it was then, but still you can't walk around the DF for a week without feeling your eyes run and your throat itch a bit. And pictures of Mexico and the surroundings do have a smokey feel to them. Yet there is at least one positive to this situation: mind-blowing sunsets!
The National Museum of Anthropology, Part 2
As we mentioned, yesterday, the Anthropology Museum of Mexico City is full of wonderful and inspiring Aztec artifacts, but it would be quite an omission not to mention the rest of the exhibits. In fact, the museum is a vast, four winged building built around a long, rectangular courtyard. The Aztecs occupy an entire wing by themselves, in a place of honor opposite the wing with the entrance.
The National Museum of Anthropology, Part 1
Temples and pyramids, ball games and sacrifices, calendars and plumed headdresses, feathered serpents and skeleton heads,... exotic as they may sound, all these attributes actually formed a fairly normal part of my childhood. Well, Nik and I aren't exactly the only survivors of seven children sacrificed to the great Quetzalcoatl, because we knew how to hit the rubber ball better than anybody else... but we did grow up surrounded by cool drawings of the Aztec world. So when Matt and I visited the great Anthropolgy Museum of Mexico, we headed straight for the Aztec section, and made sure we took enough pictures to bring new inspiration (or at least bring back memories) to the artist.
The Mexico City Modern Art Museum
Taking yet another break from old stones, we made our way one morning to the museum of modern art. Our hopes of seeing works by Mexico's most famous artists were once again defeated, but we had a good time browsing through pretty entertaining exhibits and clearing our minds of pre-hispanic stuff.
The Ruins of Teotihuacan
No visit to Mexico would be complete without a visit to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. The most famous of Mexican ruins, featuring in movies such as Frida and even surpassing Chichen Itza's renown, Teotihuacan was one of the earliest and most important cities in Mesoamerica. Founded at the time of Monte Alban and many of the earliest Mayan metropolises such as El Mirador, Teotihuacan was one of the most powerful Mesoamerican cities ever.
The Ruins of Tlatelolco
Just north of Mexico city's historic center lies a neighborhood called Tlatelolco. While just a neighborhood today, the barrio boasts one of the richest histories in the valley. Much of this history is still visible today in a surprisingly interesting and enjoyable setting.
The Frida Kahlo Museum
Though we have described Mexico City primarily as loud, polluted, dirty and ugly, we should probably be fair and mention that the city did have some exonerating circumstances; it was a giant construction area. We couldn't quite figure out weather the whole downtown was being refurbished because of the upcoming Bicentenary festivities, or weather the streets and buildings were just sinking into the soil so badly that they had to undergo constant revamping... Either way, we found that a lot of the places we tried to go were closed; from the museum of contemporary art (not too too much to Matt's dismay) to official building hosting Riviera murals.
The Templo Mayor, dedicated to Philippe (who just missed it)
The first old pile of stones that we went to see in Mexico City was the centrally located ruin of the Templo Mayor, which was the highest religious structure (both figuratively and literally) of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan was, of course, located on a lake in the central Mexican valley and, at the time of the arrival of the Spanish in 1521 had a population between 175,000 and 200,000. After conquering the city in 1521, the Conquistadors quickly set about destroying the Aztec identity and remaking the city in a European image. They filled in the canals that criss-crossed the island to make streets, tore down the temples and palaces, reusing the material to build European style citadels, palaces and churches. In just a few years, the greatest city in Mesoamerica had become indistinguishable from any European city.
Welcome to Mexico City
Monstrously huge, endlessly dirty, deafeningly loud, incredibly polluted and terribly ugly... this is the place where we wanted to end our tour of Mexico. Our time in Mexico City was, nevertheless, a quite enchanting experience with plenty of museums, concerts, and old piles of stone to compensate for the inherent ugliness of the Districto Federal.