Mexico!

The envious never give praise, they only take it in.
– Mexican Proverb

I am sitting in my hotel room at 12.40 am, hurriedly writing this column from Mexico City, which is 2,240 metres above sea level. The air at such a high altitude has less oxygen and a first-time traveller to Mexico may feel slightly dizzy and have shortness of breath for the first day or two, until the body adjusts. I think I am feeling an additional shortness of breath due to anxiety because I am expecting my editor to call me anytime for a ‘where is my article’ reminder.

Mexico is a wonderful, colourful, vibrant city, densely populated with a whopping 22,280,000 people and thoroughly modernised. I felt like I was in Kuala Lumpur City centre, just five times bigger with a sprawling metropolis and shopping malls that eclipse ours.

The people in Mexico City are interesting to watch. Very fashionable. Men mostly in suits, women in the latest fashion. But that may be because my business partners from Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil kept having meetings in the poshest business centres and were bringing us to all the swankiest restaurants that serve Mexican food that is dizzyingly diverse, going from stuffed giant chillies to tortillas to beef cheeks, tongues, and stomachs to scarabs dipped in chocolates and eaten with flowers and even crickets ground up with chillies, vinegar and oil in front of our table to make a sauce that is uniquely determined by us by how many and what type of chilli goes into the grinding.

The history and culture of this ancient city is even more interesting. There are more than 200 pyramids in Mexico and the largest pyramid in the world is in Cholula, Mexico. Tlachihualtepetl, or the Great Pyramid of Cholula, is about 66 meters tall with a base of 450 by 450 metres.

History is always written to praise the victor and vilify the defeated, and I suspect many of the stories portraying Aztecs as bloodthirsty human sacrificing goons and that the Spanish came and redeemed the people from the tyranny of the Aztecs are just Spaniards and Europeans rewriting history to make them heroes, while portraying natives as dumb barbaric oafs.

The Mayans and other Indians who lived before pre-Hispanic times were far too advanced to be the way they were portrayed. There is a mystery about the pyramids and how they are all connected through energy grids and how they were once used to harness free energy that tells us that our great great ancestors were far much more advanced than we give them credit for. We have just lost knowledge that matters and have sunk into a low level of understanding about the human being. We have become slaves to narratives sold to us.

So, to cover the fact that lesser humans stole and destroyed from superior humans, warlords who have a need to force their way of life, do the thing they do best – destroy any evidence of the past civilisation and built their monuments over the past. So, the great temple known as the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan which once symbolised the axis mundi, the Aztec centre of the world, where the sky, the earth, and the underworld met, got buried under a Spanish church and what we see now are only a tiny fraction of the ruins.

A sad remnant of a majestic past and I look around and see shops selling trinkets and popcorns and other useless things humans these days seem to need so badly, all mushrooming around what was once the greatest civilisation of its time, and I wonder how we as a species fell so far and so hard.

Morbid thoughts aside, let me tell you what is the best part of Mexico. It is the people. They go out of their way to make you feel comfortable and they are generous with their time and money when they do that. There is a warmth and camaraderie that Latin Americans display that makes one feel very much at home in Latin America. Kinda like how we Asians make guests feel very much at home when they come to Asia.