Mexico City's Treasures

So on the 12th we explored the largest city in the world. We got to the city the night before and were lost in the city 2 hours looking for our hotel. We went to an amazing musuem, the Musuem of Anthropology. There was a lot of cool stuff in there from all the different cultures in Mexico. We learned that the Aztecs were actually called the Mexicas, which is where Mexico got it's name from. We saw a ton of cool pottery, carvings, and other artifacts from the cultures. We saw Aztec stuff, Mayan stuff, Olmeca stuff, and some other smaller cultures. There were some interesting information they wrote about that seemed related to things in the Book of Mormon and to our temple ceremony.

After the musuem we went to the Castillo de Chapultepec, which was another musuem that told about the history of Mexico. I learned a lot about the U.S. and Mexican history. I learned that America conquored a lot of Mexico, clear down to Mexico City in 1846 and our flag flew over the Castle of Chapultepec for a bit. The U.S. told Mexico what land they wanted and gave them back the part they didn't want. That is when we got California, Utah and Nevada. There were some really cool things to see.

After the Castillo we took a bus over to the Basilica and saw the church that is dedicated to La Virgin de Guadelupe (Mexico's version of the Virgin Mary). We thought is was the church where there are walls of gold, but it wasn't. It was just a mecca for catholics in Mexico, where supposedly the virgin appeared several times. After being there for a short time we took the subway to the Zocolo, which is the main square in Mexico City where we saw the Cathedral. This was the church we had heard about with walls of gold. There where four rooms on each side of the church with walls ornated with gold. In the back and the front there was a big shrine to the Virgin de Guadalupe all in gold. I had never seen so much gold in my life. It looked pretty amazing. This picture is probably less than 10% of the gold in this church. It was neat to see Mexico City, but we were happy to leave the craziness of the city.