Mexico City: 16 March

Flight in

My partner watched a movie on the plane - Hencho En Mexico - and managed to rope me in because it got Good and Weird.

• The most hornt up mariachi band (38min)
• …and now children singing that same song?? (48min)
• Oh hey it’s Andor
• zapatistas only get like 30s of screen time, man

We land

Whilst dropping things at the hotel, a quick search around for stuff to do that wasn’t already on the list and

One-off Simpsons sight gag is the only image? A single two star rating? Sign me up!

Anyway, off to the castle.

Castillo de Chapultepec

The history here is a bit wild so strap in.

• Built by the Spanish Vicaroy as basically a summer home. There are some real winners in here:

• It’s on effectively the only hill in the city
• Shifted to a military academy after the independence - when the Americans invaded during the Spanish-American war, the child soldier students died to the man (child) rather than surrendering a hopeless position. This is commemorated with dolls that will now proceed to haunt you forever

• In the 1860s Mexican conservatives invited the nearest convenient Hapsburg to try to run the country. Here is Emperor Maximilian

It’s a good beard frankly and a good choice because it probably hides the “prominent Hapsburg chin” these terrible mutants had due to rampant inbreeding.

Maximilian managed to piss off everyone - the conservatives by being a “liberal enlightened monarch” and the liberals by being a goddamned royal. I think he lasted like three years. This would be far from the last time a Mexican leader would try to please both sides and get shot for it.

The republic was restored and there is an extremely badass mural about it. This city has some of the best damn murals.

That’s Benito Juarez, who beat the royalists/conservatives by being like 80ft tall. You’ll find that name all over Mexico for good reason.

But that republic was pretty unstable and this guy takes over and moves into Castillo de Chapultepec:

His name was Porfirio Dias and we’ll come back to him when I type Too Many Words about the Mexican Revolution in a later post, when we visit the Monument to it.

That said, here is a sneak peak in the form of another badass mural.

Notably pictured in there is Karl Marx, who among the influences during the revolution. Sound off in the comments if you can spot some Influencers. Shouldn’t be hard, literally everyone in the Mexican Revolution was fighting for something different than every other person lol