EnRoute

I messed up. haha. This day was originally missing and day 6 was labeled as day 5, so here it is: the lost day; Day 5 part 2: the day-ening. I’m glad I noticed this because it was a really fun day and pretty easy to write about.

We started the day with an Uber to La Condesa, a fancy neighborhood in Mexico City. We ate breakfast at Maque, a fancy bakery in a fancy neighborhood. I had a fancy pastry and the fanciest chilaquiles, and of course an almond milk latte.

Hipodromo

After breakfast, we walked around Hipodromo, an area within La Condesa. Rachael stopped into a shop selling leather bags and chatted with the shopkeeper while I snapped a few photos of the neighborhood. I loved how diverse the architecture was and how much greenery there was.

Chapultepec Castle

From La Condesa, we traveled to Chapultepec Park. The park itself is huge and has several museums, a lake where you can rent paddle boats, and some other fun attractions.

Our first stop there was at Chapultepec Castle, a castle turned military academy turned presidential home, turned museum. None of the signage was in English, so I was glad the price of admission was only a few dollars. The castle is quite large and we could have easily spent a day there. The first floor had several rooms with beautiful floor to ceiling murals that wrapped all the way around all four walls.

The castle was divided into two wings with one site mostly devoted to those large murals and some exhibits of early Mexican currency and period costumes. The other wing had stately rooms decorated how they would have appeared in their heyday.

The castle sits on a hill on an already high part of Mexico City, so the view from the castle’s verandas and gardens gives you a great vantage point over the city. However, Mexico City has a pretty big smog problem, and so our view was quite cloudy. For the most part, any view of the sky during this trip was quite grey.

The artwork from Chapultepec Castle was really fascinating. I took some photos of a few pieces that caught my eye.

Anthropology Museum

After the castle, we walked across the park to the museum of Anthropology. I don’t think we really did this museum justice. We were quite dehydrated from all the walking around and didn’t realize there was a museum cafe. We ended up speed walking through the museum of anthropology trying to see the highlights before finding some water to chug down. When I return to Mexico City, I’d like to visit again and maybe spend a day there.

Porco Rosso

There’s this anime by Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli, called Porco Rosso about a pilot that is turned into a pig and his adventures as a pig pilot in the Adriatic Sea. Near our Airbnb, I found a BBQ place that shares the same name and Rachael and I stopped in for some American-style BBQ.