Turns out high altitude=less oxygen

Because Mexico City is over 2000 metres above sea level the air is a lot thinner than we're used to, and apparently this is why the last two days I have been dragging myself around exhausted despite my 9 hour sleeps. Even though I've been tired, we've managed to pack plenty into our days.
Yesterday we went to the Anthropology Museum, which is in Chapultepec Park, one of the biggest urban parks in the world. The walkways are plagued by stalls selling food, clothing, cds, lucha libre masks and, a lot of them, security leashes for children so they don't get lost in the 500 or so acres of park. Like much of Mexico city the footpaths are covered in rubbish, and the attempts by a more eco conscious governer to separate organics and inorganics are totally ignored, both separate bins overflowing with bottles and styrofoam and food scraps.
The park has something like 10 museums within the grounds, and in the time we had we only managed to tackle half of the anthropology museum. The museum was amazing though, there were separate rooms for the different people that have inhabited Mexico through time, the Toltec, the Maya, the Aztec and some of the amazing things that have been found underneath Mexico city. Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec state that Cortes conquered and subsequently built over to create Mexico city, and so an entire ancient civilization exists below modern Mexico city. It kind of blows my mind a little bit.
We saw the Aztec sun stone, that was unearthed the the 60s. Its the giant circular image that people incorrectly call the Mayan calendar that predicts the world will end in 2012, it was awesome.

There were a whole lot of skeletons, and replicas of skeletons, because pre Colombian peoples in Mexico really liked sacrifice, human sacrifice mainly. One of the exhibits had the skulls of children with deformed heads that were bought as slaves especially for their deformities and sacrificed to the gods.
Also creepy was the above baby skeleton stuffed into a jar..
The museum was huge and just generally awesome..

After the museum we went to an amazing restaurant near our hotel, it's been around since the 50s and I had the best Mexican food I'd ever had there. They made me vegan enchiladas with salsa verde and it was burny burny hot but still yummy. After dinner, beset with altitude related tiredness I went to bed early and then lay awake for hours watching the smoke alarm flash.

Today we headed out to a market called La Ciudadela. It's a great big half indoors, half outdoors market full of handicrafts set around a courtyard. We spent hours browsing, my step dad bought my mum expensive jewelery (he's learnt that if he picks the gift without her, chances are 9 times out of 10 she won't like it), and me and Ruben bought some gifts for our family in New Zealand. I bought a set of wildly unnecessary shot glasses and the cutest handmade giraffe for Sebastien. I had disappointing vegan burritos for lunch and like the other night, ended up making beer the main component of my meal.

Later on I went to a fruit stand and watched a guy chop up a whole cup of fresh amazing tropical fruit for NZ$1 and it made up for my disappointing lunch.
After that, we headed up to the top of the Sears tower and waited like 30minutes in line to get a seat in the cafe that overlooks the city and the Alameda Square. The wait was long and the balcony was freezing but the view was worth it.