They have a different sun here, and it is fucking hot

Yes, so Friday, and still in DF. Went to Teotihuacán today, which wikipedia claims was the America's largest pre-columbian city. There's a lot of debate between anthropoligists as to who the original founders of the city were, but we can certainly say that those motherfuckers LOVED STAIRS. My legs are straight jello, son. Climbed to the top of the aptly named Pyramid of the Sun, was concerned about passing out from heat exhaustion on the way down, which on those steep ass tiny steps of sharp rocks meant paralysis or death.

It was unbelievably odd walking around on structures built almost two millenia ago.

I was accompanied by Tia Gallo, who was mostly excited to go at the prospect of buying silver bracelets, which, for some reason, are the thing at Teotihuacán. A good deal of fun watching her haggling skills in action, and depressing infuriating made me wanna punch people in the face watching gueros attempt to haggle. One gent was outright cruel. He wanted to buy a t-shirt, and refused to pay more than 2 bux fitty. The woman trying to sell him the shirt kept telling him that she refused to go lower than 3 dollars, that, really, 3 dollars is a very good price for a shirt. This red faced jackass, who reeked of a ten thousand dollar travel package, become a beast over 50 cents, shoving money in her face, almost yelling '25 pesos! TWENTY FIVE PESOS!' She looked scared, shook her head no, and he stormed off to whine to his sunburned shapeless wife about how unreasonable these people can be. I wanted to thank him, on behalf of gueros everywhere, for making international travel much more difficult for us, for helping to build ugly stereotypes of us. Shoulda, di'nt.

Walking along the avenue of the dead, it struck me how much more impressive these pyramids must have been in 150 CE. How terrifying, even. To visit Teotihuacán for the first time, having not seen a city, nor even stone buildings . . . and then there's a goddamn pyramid 75 meters high, 200,000 people living around it.

After a bit I realized that these structures were almost certainly built with slave labor, and I was completely uncertain how I felt about the site after that.

Oh! Yes! Two days ago I visited the national anthropolgy museum . . . Holy hell. I saw maybe a third of it, all crazy fascinating, and I was there all day. Beautiful complex Zapotec sculpture, Mixtec codices (accordion style books), all illustration, no written language, and good lord, everything the Maya did was gorgeous interesting gorgeous. They did have a written language, and it consisted of dense interesting crazy glyphs. Can't wait to go further south, Maya country, see Tikal, etc.

The anthro museum is straight mandatory if you ever find yourself in DF.

Yes, now I think its time for a splash of tequila with Abuelo Gallo, who may be the best storyteller ever, even though I dunno wha' the fuck he's saying half the time.