Our next trip was to Teotuhuacan, an ancient ruins site about 50km to the northeast of Mexico City.  Teotuhuacan was incredible.  The below picture is an internet download.  I was unable to get up quite that high to get the whole landscape view.  The grounds are huge and the two primary temples are massive. 

The word Teotuhuacan is an Aztec word (in the Nahuatl language) and means birthplace of the gods.  The city is not an Aztec city, it predates the Aztecs by almost 1,000 years.  I am ashamed to admit that I didn't realize that it wasn't an actual Aztec city until I visited the city itself.  It goes by the Aztec name because noone is certain what the original inhabitants called it.  The Aztecs originally found the city abandoned and they called it birthplace of the gods because they did not believe that humans could create such huge and magnificient structures.  They believed that the city could only have been built by the divine and incorporated the city into their creation myth of the world.  

This next picture is of the Pyramid of the Sun.  This structure is just massive, approximately 80 meters high.  Our guide explained that the temple should actuallly be bigger, but that because of the dynamite excavation methods used, much of the building was damaged and blown away.  It's easy to condemn modern archeologist (well the ones in the early 20th century) for damaging the building, but you have to remember that this entire city appeared to be nothing but hills and forrest before excavations began.  The casual observer would have thought the Pyramids were nothing but more hills in an otherwise very hilly region.

A final note about Mexico and indigenous cultures.  Mexicans are fiercely proud of all of their traditions from the Spaniards, to the Aztecs to the Mayas and all of the other less well known idigenous peoples that have inhabited Mexico.  To understand Mexioc, you truly have to understand all of these traditions, their history and their current impact on Mexican society and the Mexican pysche.  As for me, that means a lot more reading.