Teotihuacan is a solid hour away from Mexico City. There are a few options for getting out there, if you’re not driving yourself: Take a tour; take public transportation (bus) or do a taxi or Uber (or some other similar service).
I decided that it made the most sense to let this be our first ever Uber experience – and it was the right decision. Uber has its problems, true, but it really is a tremendous innovation to a) be able to let the driver know your destination ahead of time, so he can decide whether or not to take the job b)pay via the app c) see ratings. It takes so much stress out of the experience. In this case, I know that the weird path I’m being driven through the back streets of a town was on purpose and not an attempt to run up the fare….
Agustin was our driver. An older man, he has almost 4,000 rides to his credit, was polite, but since he really didn’t speak any English, there was no conversation, which didn’t bother the Introvert at all. We just rode out of town, seeing the sights and listening the American oldies on the radio.
We left later than it’s recommended for Teotihuacan. The site is large and mostly unshaded, and does get crowded, so the optimal experience would be a very early arrival. But…I had tired boys who I really didn’t feel like awakening at the crack of dawn again, so we ended up getting there around 11:15.
Most people, to the extent that they know about Teotihuacan at all, assume it’s an Aztec site. Mexico City=Aztecs, so that’s right, isn’t it? No – by the Aztecs rose to power, this site was largely uninhabited. No one knows much about who they were, what they were about, or why the community collapsed.
It was hot, but not unbearably so – but then I have a high tolerance for heat. It’s cold that I run from. The site was pretty crowded, with visitors from all over. Mexicans, of course, but also Germans (of course – they and the Brits are the most enthusiastic European travelers), Japanese swathed in scarves, and a lot of Americans (Look. I know that in this hemisphere, we are all Americans and I am always aware of that and try to write accordingly. But there is just not succinct shorthand for speaking of inhabitants of the United States other than “American” – so it will have to do.) – family groups, but mostly groups of young people. Students, I’m assuming.
(Admission: 70 pesos apiece – about 3.85 USD.)
It’s an impressive site for its size and the act of imagination it takes to visualize a thriving community and the work it took to construct it. I assume that a society that constructs such huge temples matches the effort with elaborate ritual and a complex way of life, and since we don’t know much about it – is an intriguing mystery to contemplate.
But… Michael and I both agreed that we prefer the Mayan sites in Guatemala that we visited: Tikal, Yaxha, Aguateca and the other one I can never remember the name of. There’s more known about them, the landscape is more to our liking – having howler monkeys leap and, well, howl right above your head is hard to beat – and there’s just more there. As I said, Teotihuacan has the sight of the site itself, which is worth experiencing, the massive pyramids, and some very interesting murals that have survived – but that’s it, really, that’s on site and not in the museum.
It’s definitely worth seeing, but Michael and I are sticking with the Maya for now.
A couple more notes from that part of the day:
- The major goal people have in Teotihuacan is climbing to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun. I was game, but I was dreading it, mostly because a)it’s a lot of steps up, and that is, you know, tiring and b) coming down these things is far more nerve-racking to me than going up. I think I’m going to die from exhaustion climbing up, but I know I’m going to die from crashing down those steps on the descent. But hey! I didn’t die! First, there were so many people there, there was a line to ascend, and it was a slow moving line, which meant that in the steepest part, you’d take three steps, wait a minute and then take three more, so I didn’t even feel close to dying. Secondly they had rope handrails, so I could join the other old ladies and hang on to that for dear life on the descent.
- (I think this was another reason that my younger son, although he liked the day, was not as keen on it as he has been on the Maya sites – there were just so many people, it wasn’t as meditative as experience as he’s had in the other sites, most of which, with the exception of Tikal, we’ve had mostly to ourselves (and Marlon, our guide on this most recent trip). But even Tikal, while certainly more touristed, has many more different areas, and is shrouded in jungle, so you don’t feel part of a crowd.
- There are many vendors, even on the site. They each sell exactly the same items (annoying jaguar whistles and obsidian knives), and they say the exact same thing the many vendors at Chichen Itza said: Almost free! Almost free!
So…how do we get back??
I had read that getting an Uber car was iffy on the way back. First, there aren’t that many Uber drivers hanging around the site, waiting, and secondly, cell service can be a problem. Both seemed to be an issue for me when I started trying..the app wasn’t cooperating, and there didn’t seem to be any cars nearby. So I walked up to the ticket guy and asked where the bus stop was and he said, “Across the road – it comes every fifteen minutes.”
And so it did. Cost: 52 pesos apiece (about 2.85). It wasn’t one of those luxury Mexican buses, but it was fine and very comfortable, although the ride did take a while. We stopped in the town before hitting the highway, but not just to take on new riders. Two law enforcement agents boarded at the stop, one with a video camera in hand. They walked through the bus (smiling, I might add – the one fellow fist-bumped both my sons), one observing and counting empty seats, and the other videoing the face of each person on the bus. Someone I know had had this experience, so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise – but it was still…interesting.
The bus goes to the big Norte station, which was still a ways from our apartment, so since we now do Uber…we did that.
Now I should note that at this point, no one had had anything to eat since a couple of sweet rolls around 9:30 am. Yes, we’d been hydrated (there’s no water available in the site, which we knew about, so we had a backpack with water bottles that we carried), but still…it was 4, and time to eat. I thought we needed more than street tacos, but we were too messy and worn out for anything even vaguely formal, so as we neared the apartment, I peaked into a homey-looking place and made an executive decision – and so in we went.
It might not have been the best decision, but you know what? People were nourished and had a new experience. And that’s the most important thing of all! New! Experiences!
It was small, but busy – I was kind of surprised that at 4, every table was taken with people eating full meals. Were people still eating lunch? I’m thinking they were. Anyway, our waitress didn’t speak any English and the menu was all in Spanish, and things were moving pretty quickly, so I did my best. I mean, I do know “pollo” and “sopa” and a lot of other food-related words, but some mysteries remained.
It was a menu de dia – so three courses, plus flan at the end. First course: soup, fruit or salad. The boys got fruit (lesson one: “fruit” in Mexico is always going to be spiced. I should have anticipated that.) I got the soup which was just okay, tasting mostly of raw onion more than anything else. Second course: rice, spaghetti or salad. We all got rice, which was…a small plate of rice. Third: about twelve choices of all types. We ended up with two chicken dishes – one grilled and one breaded and fried – and flautas. The chicken came with refried beans and something I could not figure out…but I think it was a sort of tortilla salad? Is that a thing? The flautas were good, my son said, although he really could not figure out how to eat them until he observed a woman doing so – she just stabbed her knife through the end of it and ate it from the other end on down.
The only drink we could discern was what was in pitchers already on the table: coconut water.
So, as I said, it wasn’t Instagrammable food, it wasn’t the best – certainly not up to the standards of the simple, fresh but really good food I had in Guatemala – but it got the job done and..oh…here’s how much I paid. 170 pesos.
Do you know how much that is?
$9.70.
For three complete dinners.
So…now it’s about 5:30. What to do with the evening, especially for tired people who really don’t feel like wandering about the city – we walked enough today, thanks.
There’s a movie theater just a couple of blocks away, so I looked up what was showing, not really thinking it would be worth it to go, considering we don’t speak Spanish. But then I noticed that in the listings, films were labeled with either ESP or SUB – and all the US films had SUB. I did a bit of research, and then, while the boys were chilling out, walked over to the theater to make sure, asking the girl in the ticket office if a film is labeled “SUB” that means the dialogue is in the film’s original language – in this case, English. Si, that’s what it means. Which surprises me – I thought they’d be dubbed. But apparently not (I think animated films are). So….
TITANES DEL PACIFICO
Was the evening’s entertainment.
(I never saw the first one. I survived this one. It was silly and loud but not offensive and 
had just enough emotionally-rooted character motivation and just enough interesting character actors to not bore me.)
Observations from the Mexico City movie-going experience at this theater, part of the Cinepolis chain:
- Tickets are purchased for reserved seats.
- They provide nifty, very substantial plastic trays for concessions.
- Attendants were at the door of the theater after the showing, taking trays, dumping trash and emptying unconsumed drink into buckets.
- Cost of tickets: about $3/USD apiece.
This is going to be one of the cheapest vacations I’ve ever had….
Charlotte was Both 