For a week and a half we'd been holding off doing anything cultural. At some point our son Mike was coming down to visit, and we knew he'd want to see everything with us. All I can say is, boy, was it worth the wait.
Mike's flight got in late Tuesday, and so Wednesday bright and early we took a cab to the Museo Nacional de Antropología. Since everyone in our family is an art history buff, we'd all been wanting to see this world-famous collection for most of our lives-- and the reality out-stripped anything I could have imagined.
The entry fee was 85 pesos-- around $4.25-- per person, which was ridiculously cheap (compare that with the Met, where tickets start at $25.) Once in, we saw the museum itself was an enormous rectangular structure surrounding a central courtyard and organized by both ethnography and archaeology (one building section covered the Mayas, for instance-- here's a link to the collection organization:
The breadth of the collection was stunning-- we had to take frequent breaks in the lovely gardens behind each section because, as I put it, "my brain was full"-- but even more impressive was the curation. Everything was beautifully displayed, in a manner that made intuitive sense, and everything was put into cultural perspective. Every culture had displays on their gods, their social hierarchy, their trade routes, their interactions with other cultures and the materials they had locally available or traded for. It was really a blueprint for what a museum can (and should) be.
We spent about four hours there, but we could have spent four days; there was just so much to see and learn. I really can't do it justice in words, so here are some of the fabulous treasures we brushed by.
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