Two Days in the Valley

Yeah, so it's been a few days since I wrote. Having been using one of the ten or so computers at my hostel, I came back the next day to find that they had all vanished. Apparently they all broke, at once. Pretty coincidental if you ask me. Keep in mind that there are also no power outlets anywhere in this entire place, even in the kitchen. I think it's a conspiracy to move civilization back to the stone age. Either that or they're just really cheap. Any way, I've been spending the days doing some incredible things. Saturday I went to Teotihuacán, probably the most famous ruins in the vicinity of México City. They're hardly ruins though; in fact, the Pyramid of the Sun weighs in as the third largest pyramid in the world. It and the other famous structure there, the Pyramid of the Moon, both date back to about 100 A.D. The rest of the site originally extended quite a distance, and still lines both sides of the infamous Avenue of the Dead which runs through the center. Apparently the buildings are alligned with the solar system and have a myriad of numerogical/astrological symbolic corelations, but I was too cheap to pay for a tour guide so I just made up my own. Perhaps the most amazing thing was a handful of murals, which used to cover just about every building here. Some of them have retained the original colors, which at nearly 2,000 years old are quite awe-inspiring to behold. All in all I spent about six hours in the open sun and climbed over five-hundred steps (pyramid size steps, which are like twice as big as our typical steps), but it was well worth it.
On Sunday I decided to take advantage of the city's weekly free museums. Let me tell you, there is nothing in the world as boring as trying to cram visits to multiple museums in one day, especially when the displays are in Spanish. Wait I take that back; the only thing in the world more boring than visiting multiple museums in one day is trying to describe what you saw there. So, moving on to more exciting things, I did go to a bullfight! This is something I have always wanted to witness, and yes it's offensive and cruel to the bull, and I'm an evil person for supporting such a barbaric custom, yada yada yada, but it was darn entertaining! And despite multiple bulls being tortured and killed, which really was quite sad, one of the matadors got injured as well, so it kind of seemed like a fair fight. No really it was quite shocking: This particularly cocky matador thought he had just outsmarted this particularly clever bull, when it lunged at him with its horns down and tossed him up into the air! The crowd gasped as he landed and got up, limping, his leg covered in blood, and as his assistants rushed in to distract the bull, he turned his back and the bull rushed forward to toss him again! This time they had to carry him off. When the backup matador rushed out to finish the job he was extra cruel and enacted his revenge for humankind by stabbing the bull multiple times instead of with the typical solitary killing thrust, and the crowd booed him right out of the ring. It was all pretty horrifying but in the end you couldn't help but feel some love for that bull, and deep down even a dark wish that he had gotten that other matador too.