Yesterday we were up and about relatively early. We packed, put our luggage at reception and cleared our flat. Then we walked over the immense motorway outside the building and the park to the Museum of Anthropology. The park was covered in dew and filled with people doing a rather martial form of yoga around a monument commemorating the resistance to a French invasion. We walked through the botanical garden which was beautiful, filled with lovely flowers and cacti and succulents. There was a garden of edible plants which smelled delightful and made us hungry (we hadn’t had breakfast, or rather the Gentleman Friend hadn’t; I’d had my cup of tea).
The purpose of going to the museum at this time was both to get a bus to our next stop, Cholula without arriving too late, and to arrive at the museum before the crowds. We were successful in both. There were a couple of smallish tour groups, but nothing too bad and school visits only began as we were leaving.
The museum was fantastic. It was a second choice after the Frida Kahlo museum and it was absolutely the right choice. Remarkable artefacts, a completely alien iconography and aesthetic, remarkable stories. Yet continuous to themselves, it all made sense to Western hemisphere eyes, and they must have found our Eastern hemisphere aesthetics as strange and mystifying.
The museum – and the botanical garden – were also very impressive. For the museum, the only one I can think to match it is the Palace Museum in Taipei, which has far more money at its disposal than Mexico as well as a somewhat different nationalist narrative to tell. Such a contrast to, say, Malaysia, which falls into the same upper middle income category. This was proud, clearly a lot of money spent on design and on upkeep and on keeping it truly international.
We took a bus to Cholula and arrived in good time, travelling up out of Mexico City past two volcanoes until we were in the high Puebla valley where the air was cooler and cleaner. Our place in Cholula is perhaps the nicest we’ve stayed in: decorated in a slightly cod-folk way, but a full apartment with lots of attention to what one needs: comfortable seating, lots of plants, outdoor and indoor spaces, a comfortable bed, mirrors, plenty of storage space. My only complaints are that the stove doesn’t work too well and that the lighting is poor. There are hummingbirds outside our door.
Cholula is a lovely town, one that I can well imagine settling into. It’s small enough to be manageable, and beautiful with its pyramid and its churches and its volcano and its painted streets. It’s also sophisticated in a way that Valladolid was not. There is a university here so the cafes are good and there is style. There is even an organic shop on our street, facing one of the bigger churches. There are also more bakeries per head of population than I have ever seen. It got chilly outside at night in the rain, but generally the weather is perfect: very warm but not hot and always cool in the shade, with lighter air thanks to the altitude.