Here in Mexico, Mexico City is not referred to as such by the local Mexicans. They refer to the city as D.F. (pronounced: Day Effay). It stands for Distrito Federal the same way our capital is referred to as D.C. So my wife, my son and I headed off from the Puerto Vallarta area to D.F. for some business, but for me mostly an opportunity to see the capital city which I had never been to and do the usual touristy things. Before leaving I had had my proper measure of frightful stories about people being abducted by cabs and being robbed or held for ransom. I had been particularly warned about the dreaded green and white taxis, usually VW bugs. I did follow the warnings and stayed with the unmarked hotel summoned taxis and the ones marked "Sitio" which congregate at marked taxi stands and are usually yellow and white, that is when I was not strap hanging with the locals on the Metro subway system.
The Hotel
On a previous trip to D.F. my wife stayed at the Casa Gonzalez which is in the Zona Rosa which is near the old colonial center of the city but which looks like Times Square in New York. The hotel was very nice, the price was right. This time we decided to break the bank and stay at a small hotel that was in a nicer neighborhood. The hotel, La Casona Hotel - Relais was beautiful. It was set on a street that had a tree filled center strip with park benches. It was old and very beautiful inside. My son commented on the fact that most of the pictures seemed to be of fox hunts. That wasn't quite true but there seemed to be a bias for English style pictures. You can see the hallway in the picture. Definitely not your typical Holiday Inn. The people were really nice, a great and very helpful concierge and a decent restaurant.
The Mexico City Metro System
My first afternoon, I decided that I would try to master the subway system since it seemed to provide an easy way to get to many of the places on my list. The system is pretty easy to navigate. For 2 pesos (about 17¢) you can go wherever the system can take you. The nearest station was 3 blocks from the hotel so I decided to go to the Palacio del Belles Artes. The Metro is designed the way a traditional rail system is designed, which identifies trains by terminating destination. It can be confusing at first until you find the map and determine what the terminating stop is in the direction you want to go in, but there are line maps in all the stations and in each of the cars so it's turns out to be fairly simple. They only have the full system map by the ticket booths before you go through the turnstiles, so it's necessary to plot your course before you go into the system if you don't have a map. Beware of rush hour, it's really crowded and things can happen in crowds, especially if you are the lone gringo. It's better to take a cab which are fairly inexpensive by the way. Just don't take those green and white ones.
The Museo del Belles Artes
I made it easily to the Palacio del Belles Artes, which is a very baroque style building which has a very art deco style in the interior. It was designed by an Italian architect but with revolutions and other impediments it took a while to complete. 
Originally it was designed to be a concert hall but the front atrium was redesigned to allow space for some very large murals. There are two floors of murals representing the best of the 20th century Mexican muralists: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Jorge González Camarena. One of the murals by Diego Rivera was the one that he had originally painted for Nelson Rockefeller in the RCA building in New York. This is the famous one which poor old Nelson had a problem with because Diego included a portrait of Lenin. 
Nelson tried to censor Diego and Diego told him no, so Nelson had it painted over. So here it is in all it's glory and it is really an incredible piece. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to get a picture of the whole mural, so my shot is of the central panel. To the right is the offending portrait of Lenin, what was Nelson thinking? Truely an incredible statement about man, history, politics and science in the 20th century.
The Freida Kahlo-Diego Rivera House
Another destination I had been planning on visiting in D.F. was the Frieda Kahlo's house. This is the house she was born in and died in. She and Diego shared it and it reflects their extensive art interests. The amount of work there from each of them was fairly minimal, most of it residing in other museums in Mexico. The thing that was most interesting to me was their collection of retablos and of pre Columbian Mexican sculpture. A retablo is a spiritual painting that people would do to commemorate a vision or spiritual experience. They are not done by "artists" but by ordinary people who were inspired by their experience. 
They are typically done on a piece of metal and are small, typically around 12 inches by 8 inches. Freida and Diego had a collection of hundreds of these paintings. There was a stairwell in their house that had the walls two stories high covered with retablos.In the garden was small platform shaped in the traditional Olmec style that had maybe a dozen pre Columbian stone carvings.
Leon Trotsky’s House
My next stop was a small museum nearby which was Leon Trotsky's house. They had been good friends and if you have seen the movie "Freida" you know they were very good friends! Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin while he was in exile here in Mexico City. The picture is of Trotsky's work area where he dictated his thoughts which were then typed up by secretaries and published.
The National Museum of Anthropology
The next day I headed out on the subway again to the Museum of Archeology. We didn't have a lot of time and that is the kind of place where it would be great to have a guide or at least rent one of the listening devices that explain various things of importance. It's particularly important since if you aren't totally fluent in Spanish you will miss a lot. Very little of the signage is in English. We only had a few hours 
so we basically did a survey of the ancient Mexican cultures and hope to do it more rigorously the next time. In past years we had made visits to the maya areas of Mexico so we cruised that part quickly and spent most of our time on the Olmec and Aztec cultures. 
Our plan was to go the next day to Teotihuacán to see the pyramids there, so getting some background was in order. Since Teotihuacán was supposedly an Olmec city, that was my main interest. The large statue standing in front of the window is actually from the Toltec culture that built the city of Tula in the 10th century A.D. 
This was a number of centuries after the Olmec culture fell apart. The Jaguar in the next picture came from the Aztec culture which was even later, around the 12th century A.D.
The Pyramids at Teotihuacán
The next day we checked out of our hotel and hired a cab for the day to take us to Teotihuacán which is North of the city. When we arrived there we hired a guide who spoke English to spend a couple hours with us. Invariably, the difference between having a guide and trying to go it alone at a ruin site is the difference between not knowing what the heck is going on and having a reasonably vague idea. The city of Teotihuacán was built by the Olmec people. Their culture began around 1500 BC and they started intensive agricultural practices with raised fields. The valley of Mexico is a closed valley at an altitude of 7000 feet surrounded by mountain ranges that includes a number of volcanoes. It has a very moderate climate that is at times semi arid and irrigation is necessary. Teotihuacán is at the foot of a volcano that has an active spring that feeds a river that flows through the city. 
They built extensive rock channels to pipe the water through the city. They also built rock drainage channels to carry rainwater away from the city to the river. Many of these channels still work. The picture is of a wash area in a dwelling where the water comes out of the wall at about 6 feet from the floor and cascades down to the floor. The floor in the dwelling was purposely slanted to allow the water to run along a wall and into a drain. Remember that this city was built around 1500 BC. Not necessarily in its present form but it declined and was abandoned by 600 AD. 
The city was organized in groupings of buildings which archeologists think were extended family dwellings. Each grouping had its own temple area that was used for rituals and making offerings. These were made of mud mixed with pebbles then smoothed and polished using cactus as the smoothing agent. This produced highly polished surfaces which were then painted in brilliant colors. 
By mid afternoon we arrived at the pyramid of the sun which is 70 meters (228 feet) high and I scrambled up part way to take some pictures. At the northernmost point of the city was the pyramid of the moon which was similar but slightly smaller. 
Because of archeological excavations which are underway in the pyramid of the moon, that one was not climbable. We were tired and hungry at that point and headed off for something to eat.
Lunch and the flight back to Puerto Vallarta
We dragged our cab driver over to a local restaurant and we all had lunch before hitting the road back to the D.F. airport and the flight back to PV. On the way out of the gate I noticed a number of signs an stopped to take some pictures. It seems that here in Mexico people are having problems with Wal-Mart too. Where ever they put a store it drives most of the small Mexican businesses out of business. And in Mexico small business is the lifeblood of most communities. There are no big employers in most of the rural areas. 
The drive back is on an auto pista which is one of the 4 lane toll roads in Mexico. The tolls are exorbitant by US standards and no one here would ever call them a “freeway”. We often drive the auto pista from Tepic to Guadalajara and it costs about $20 for a 2 hour drive, but far better than the two lane mountain roads with busses passing on blind curves. The flight from D.F. to PV is just 1 hour but the cost is about the same as flying to Los Angeles due to Mexico’s history of monopolies. The monopolies are gone in a legal sense, but in reality it will take a while for market forces to lower the prices. As I indicated earlier Mexico City is at an altitude of 7000 feet (about 1.4 miles), Puerto Vallarta is at an altitude of zero. Ah, the pressure!!!!
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