A touch of history and luche libre

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Today was a free day in Mexico City, so we decided to explore the National Museum of Anthropology. This involved BJ piecing together enough Spanish to book a taxi not only to get there, but to pick us up from a specific location at 4pm. The museum is huge, with mulitple wings covering various time periods and regions of Mexican and Mayan culture. We spent 4 hours wandering the many halls, full of artifacts, bones and reconstructions. Its a really impressive place, very well organised and massive in scope - it would probably take 3 full days to do the whole thing. We just stuck to the bottom level.

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We met back at our hotel at 5pm, then headed off for a tour to the Zocalo (main town square). This is where the Spanish began to build the city, with the original north-south road still here and used. Its also where the rubble of what used to be Tenochtitlan is - until the Spanish tore it down for building materials. We also saw the cathedral, the square itself (currently housing the Ashes & Snow photo exhibition - Andy we didn´t get a chance to see it, the queue was almost 2 hours), the Palace of Parliament where the President proclaims independence every September 15th from his balcony.

Ruins, wrestling, and tequila - what could possibly go wrong?

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Then - off for a truly Mexican experience - Luche Libre!! This is Mexican wrestling, complete with masks and the whole bit. We met our tour group at the cathedral hostel, including a bona fide wrestler and our guide for the night Jorge, drank some pre-show tequila, and piled into a minivan to the arena. Unfortunately no cameras were allowed but check out www.cmll.com for an idea of what we were watching. It was simply an exciting, authentic, hilarious and thoroughly entertaining experience - Ali can´t believe she actually enjoyed wrestling, she is so hoarse from cheering she currently sounds like Barry White!!

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We kicked on to a mariachi bar where things went pear shaped for BJ after he decided a bottle of tequila was better value than shots. This is after several shots and beers already, mind you, and we managed to drink the whole bottle in under an hour between 3 of us. This induced a total lapse of reason, resulting in me dragging Ali onto the dancefloor for some salsa dancing - we sucked, but strangely we didnt care :) Needless to say, BJ was not a happy camper at 7am the next morning when checking out of the hotel.