El Zocalo
When downtown, be sure to go the Zocalo, the great central market plaza, with the presidential palace and the Cathedral, where the ruins of the Templo Mayor was recently unearthed. The ruins and their museum are well deserving of a two hour visit.
Martin, our mexican guide of japanese descent, not only was a great guide to the site (he can do it in English, Spanish or Japanese), he also had an interesting spiritualist take on the aztec religion. He explained how people strived to become like Quetzalcoatl, just like people now strive to emulate Christ, how all these human sacrifices were made out of piety and spirituality, and how the religious rituals displayed great skills in medicine and astronomy, as well as architecture and art. He talked of how spanish invadors not only enslaved the indians, but also destroyed their spirituality.
I preferred not to argue with him about mysticism, the fact that it was never specific to that or any religion, nor the thing that mattered to most people, that it could be found much better in other religions, and that it was beside the point as to what made this particular religion so abject.
Yeah, that and the fact that spanish conquerors didn't teach subjection to indians; most of them were already quite subjected to far more cruel masters. Opening the entrails of a live person, taking his heart, offering it the sun god, then burning it, beheading and skinning the victim, collecting his blood, throwing the remains down the pyramid, eating parts of them, and repeating the process thousands of times on as many victims, -- lovely rites that the Toltecs taught the Mayas and the Aztecs. Stone Ages indeed, despite their astronomical and architectural prowess.
Oh, and sacrificing the best people to the Gods, or destroying the town every fifty-two years isn't conducive to long-term accumulation of human or material capital. No wonder these civilizations remained in the stone age. But Martin is a statithinker; for some reason, he identifies with the aztecs, and thus will do anything to rationalize their culture. Us good, them bad. A dynathinker would accept facts as facts, and would judge actions as better or worse than alternate actions, instead of trying to classify people as good or bad.
In any case, fascination for bloody death and material destruction is still very much present as an strong undercurrent in the mexican culture, though the country is by and large civilized, and may explain why they are easily drawn to the ideology of violent fight -- socialism.