I bought a “manbag” from Target to house my new Nikon D40 camera purchased for this trip. While it’s not the most inconspicuous thing one can have when in a dodgy area within Mexico city, it is several orders better than a Tamran Camera bag that screams “please beat me up and rob me”. Then again, manbags might also elicit this reaction from people. 
This particular manbag (or murse as some call it) has a screenprint of a hapsburg double eagle. I have ZERO idea why the Mossimo folks went for the holy roman empire angle on this one, but it looks badass enough. Somewhat like a hostile Big Bird with two heads. My hope is this will scare off — or at least terminally confuse — any would-be muggers, perhaps into thinking I’m some art student with nothing but a pad full of excreble life sketches instead of turista with amazing camera. We’ll see if this works or not.
Strangely, the Hapsburg eagle also happened to have been the personal logo of Emperor Carlos V (sure enough a hapsburg) who was Hernan Cortes’s financial backer.
Cortes’ conquest of Tenochlitlan (modern day Mexico city) and the tragedy surrounding it is partly the reason I’m visiting. Every now and then I pick up a history book and read things, and those things compel me to visit the places where history happened.
For instance, the plaza in Mexico, the Zócalo — incidentally, the second largest urban plaza in the world — is the same exact plaza lain by the Aztecs in the 12th century. And just north of it was the grand temple (pieces still standing) where in one day, 80,400 captors to the Aztecs were sacrificed by a team of priests in a four day period by the cruel glass knife.
That was roughly 200 sacrifices every 15 minutes.
Mexico City began as a serene island in the middle of a lake with several fantastically engineered causeways and an urbanization within larger than London in its day. And while relations were peaceful between the Spanish and Mexica for six months or so, that piece was broken by a paranoid attack on the Aztec nobility on part of the Spanish, during an important celebration. After that, it was bloody war. And Cortes’s forces fled over the lake as the Aztecs started ripping up sections of the causeways to keep them out.The Spanish would then build large boats in giant sections over a period of several months, and haul those sections over many miles to the lakeshore to reassemble in order to retake the city by a naval assault. And in the end, the Spanish did take the city, literally flattening every building by cannon.
After the destruction, the city was immediately rebuilt (in colonial style) and the lake was drained by the colonists until the city slowly became an urban sprawl chained in by mountains not unlike Los Angeles. Because much of the city sits on a former lakebed, the buildings still sink to this day. Famously, the more historical buildings are now an entire story below street level.
Nearly 400 years have passed since this tragedy, and there are by far more cheerful aspects of Mexico City to focus on, in spite of its blood-soaked past. For instance, there is a fantastic art and culinary scene. There are the dramatic murals of Diego Rivera, complimented by the more inward looking works of his partner-in-crime, Frida Kahlo. Striking examples of colonial architecture abound, as well as more modern interpretations. There’s the mysterious grand pyramids of Teotihuacan, another civilization that had it’s zenith around the same time as Rome. Finally, there is the largest anthropological museum in the world, with a collection of precolumbian artifacts that simply have no peer.
All of these things I am going to attempt to squeeze within a five day period, then hopefully fly home, rested and inspired after a week of sensory overload.