Last Day in DF

For our last day in DF we had a semi free day to do whatever we wanted to do. There was an optional tour of the National Palace with Alvaro (the guy who took us on the tour the first day). I decided to wake up at 8:30 to go to the Palace and see the murals of Diego Rivera. It was totally worth it becuase the murales were amazing (the size of the entire wall) and also the stories that Alvaro told us were pretty awesome as well. The murals started as a project to show Mexico´s history to people who couldn´t read very well (almost like a huge comic book). Unfortunately Diego Rivera (the guy in charge of the project) didn´t get along with all of the presidents so there were many years that he couldn´t work on the murales. In the end, after 40 or so years of working on the murals Diego died and the project ended. But he got up to the Spanish conquest so his murals told the history of the indigenous people. Also there was a massive collage of all the parts of history together that showed up until the mid 1900s.

After the National Palace, a few people decided to continue with Alvaro to the museum of Bellas Artes, but I decided to go to mass in the Santo Domingo Cathedral. It was a tough choice to make but I was glad that I decided to go to the cathedral. We got to see the really political cardinal enter and give a sermon about opression (which is interesting because the politicians that he supports are the ones who have created more opression for many Mexican people) When he entered the cleared everyone out of the aisle and lots of people were taking pictures... It felt like a star was entering because many of the photographers seemed like professional photographers.

After mass, a small group of us went to a museum of photos from the student movement in 68 and also from the opressive government in CHile during the 80s. There was a great documentary about the photographers who documented the government violence against the people during the reign of Pinochet. The movie was very revealing about how the neoliberalism projects that the US imposed on many latin american countries has caused alot of suffering for the people of the countries. It seems to benefit the very weathly but hurt the majority of the citizens. One of the girls in our group goes to the University of Chicago were many of the neoliberal ideas began with Milton Freidman... it was interesting to see her reaction to the film.

Once the film ended we went to a really cool place for lunch with great vegetarian food. We ate on the second floor on a balcony. The view was great and there was a pianist playing jazz in the restaurant... it was a very relaxing lunch after such a busy week. For the night we went to a bar and danced to some reggae music with lots of people from Jamica and the US. When we got back a 2:00 in the morning we were definitely ready to sleep after such a long fun week.