Mexico City - the Fine and the Fun

My haphazard exploration of Mexico City continues, and over the last two days I’ve visited some unsung and unexpected museums.

On Thursday, my local friend Brett introduced me to the beautiful back streets of the San Angel neighborhood.  It lies nearby my own Coyoacán, and I’d been there twice for errands and attractions (see Mummies), but my fly-bys had taken me only to the main avenues, which were busy, noisy and generally unattractive.

Two steps beyond them, however, the real San Angel opens up, or rather closes in, as you find yourself lost in narrow, winding cobbled streets, past ivy-covered walls, old iron balconies, imposing hacienda fronts, pocket parks with burbling stone fountains, and 16th-century churches.

The neighborhood features upscale shopping and restaurants, and we poked into several touristy stores built into the historic facades of colonial mansions, where the building itself was more interesting than the racks of colored scarves and day-of-the-dead figurines.  And we had lunch at a highly glamorous spot called the San Angel Inn, an apparently well-known restaurant occupying the galleries and garden patios of an old Carmelite monastery.  Several tuexdo’d waiters attended our table; I had roasted quail with a garden salad, and we shared a slice of mango cake for dessert as the sparrows hopped around our patio tablecloth looking for crumbs. 

But San Angel also hosts a museum called the Museo Casa Del Rio, free to the public, which features the fine art collection of Don Isidoro Fabela, a Mexican politician, in a 18th-Century house that was his home.  Photographs weren’t permitted indoors, but the collection of European and Mexican baroque and medieval paintings (including a large Rubens) and 19th century furniture was simply exquisite.  Prior to Don Fabela’s time the house played a role in the Mexican-American War, its cupola offering a key view of the approaching American troops (followed by a closer view, as they then occupied the house), and the cupola is now devoted to a memorial of the war, with photographs of soldiers and an actual US recruiting poster.  But the most jaw-dropping exhibit is the huge courtyard fountain composed entirely of plates and cups.

We also went to the Museo Carillo Gil, a modern art museum, but after the likes of Rubens neither of us could get up much enthusiasm for art based on aerial photos of soccer fields accompanied by a strip of sod on the floor.  The museum did feature José Clemente Orozco’s 1940s illustrations of the Spanish Conquest based on Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s account, which dripped and screamed with apocalyptic violence.

The next day I found myself in the Juarez neighborhood, close by the Wax Museum, and on the spur of the moment went in.  It seemed somehow wrong, after viewing medieval European art for free, to pay 115 pesos to see a wax Michael Jackson, but at least photos were permitted (nay, encouraged), and in the jostling swarm of excited kids of all ages it was impossible not to join the fun. 

The selection was of course geared toward Mexican statesmen, athletes and pop singers, which itself was educational (I knew a few of the presidents, but could place no one in the Bullfighting room) but being a museum of pop culture it was inevitably infiltrated by American effigies from Rihanna to Barack Obama to Wolverine.

You could get a combo ticket for the wax museum and the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum in the same building, but I found myself satisfied with just the wax museum.