Exploring Teotihuacán
Daytrip to Teotihuacán
On our second day in Mexico City we wanted to see Teotihuacán, an ancient village which is famous for its pyramids. As we were still quite jet lagged and woke up really early in the morning, we again walked through the historical center and watched Mexico City waking up. We found a traditional bakery where we wanted to buy breakfast, but as the pastries were huge and super cheap, we ended up having food for the whole day (good to know for all the backpacking penny-pitchers of us).
After taking the bus and reaching Teotihuacán, we where overwhelmed by the huge archeological area with its pyramids and walked around for quite a while. Teotihuacán valley is a really old place, reaching back to 600 before Chr. and used to be the biggest village in America. As there was no written language in old Teotihuacán, its history can only be reconstructed by paintings on walls and sculptures. After the village lost a big part of its inhabitants, the Aztecs later found this place to be their center of traditions and religious rituals. Teotihuacán means something like “the place where humans become gods”, reflecting the importance of the valley for the Aztecs. Carina was a bit disappointed after finding out that the huge pyramids didn’t really have a function itself except for being a religious symbol and couldn’t imagine investing all the hard work building them, for the most part without any practical reasons. But luckily Teotihuacán valley today is an UNESCO world cultural heritage so that a lot of people come there to see and value the place so that there actually is still a function today ;)
There are two more days left in Mexico City until we go on to Oaxaca, so stay tuned for our next post!