Teotihuacan

I went to Teotihuacan last Sunday with the art professor from UNIVERSAL, the language school that I go to. He was our tour guide.

Teotihuacan is the first ancient ceremonial site in Mesoamerica that was used by various groups of Pre Hispanic peoples.

The major parts of Teotihuacan are the two temples, the temple of the moon and the temple of the sun. There is a very long road over 4 miles long connecting a series of smaller temple after smaller temple and the two bigger temples. It is estimated that only 25 percent of Teotihuacan has been excavated. As you walk among the ruins you see huge hills where ruins are hiding but have not been dug up yet. Maybe a job for Eric! hahaha. I climbed up both pyramids and a lot in between. There are not a lot of trees and foliage around, it is mostly dirt and you can see a lot of mountains all around in the distance.

All of the temples and buldings at Teotihuacan were orignally frescoed, or in other words, covered with plaster and adobe to create a smooth finish. Today however all that can be seen are the rocks that encompassed the original buildings without the stucco on top of it. There are a few places where rebuilding was necessary and a few other places where the orignal stucco can still be seen.

It is not known exactly what group of people built this ceremonial center. It is a site of debate but most people just say that the Teotihuacan people built it; easy enough.

Teotihuacan is a two and a half hour bus ride from Cuernavaca. After visiting the ruins we went to a building where this guy dressed in a poncho and sombrero showed us only a few of the hundred or so uses for a special type of cactus from Mexico that is called like maga or something like that. It was the original parchment paper. You could use the milk from the center of it supposedly as an aphrodisiac. The crazy poncho guy made us try the milk from it by the way. It is also what the fibers of the poncho and blankets they were selling were made of. The end of one of the leaves could be used as a needle and thread. There were a ton of uses. Then the guy gathered us around in a circle, all the while making stereotypical Mexican jokes that I really didn't think were funny at all even though some people were laughing. This is when we tried the nectar of the cactus and also he made us all try some type of tequila that had something special about it. I was pretty confused because he kept calling all of us baby and talking really fast.