Chapultepec, CDMX, Mexico

Today was Inauguration Day in Mexico, a newly-created public holiday. While planning, I had read that the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, would officially take office today, but hadn’t realized how big a deal it was until we got here.

The official ceremony was held at the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, about 1.5km east of our hotel.

The Zócalo was the focal point of the people’s celebration. We watched tens of thousands of people stream into the Zócalo starting at 9am. Some wore their traditional clothes and danced up the street, as well as several marching bands. I couldn’t find any news reports on the crowd size, however last Sunday they had over 70k for a rebroadcast of a musical performance, and I’m sure this was more.

The large crowds in and around the Zócalo as well as it now being a public holiday meant we had to rejig our plans for the day. (Having a new holdiay created after I’d checked timeanddate.com for holidays is a new one for me).

We had tried to get into the Cathedral for their 9am daily pipe organ performance, but the Cathedral was barricaded from the public (we’ll try again later this week). I called the National Anthropology Museum (MNA) and they confirmed that they were indeed open today.

After breakfast, we watched a bit more of the incoming crowds from our balcony, and then headed out to the MNA.

We walked about four blocks away from the Zócalo and got an Uber. It was slow going due to temporary road closures for the inauguration. Took about an hour to get to the MNA, which normally would be a 20 minute drive.

The first view after entering the MNA is of El Paraguas, a giant art installation in the middle of the courtyard. It’s become a symbol of the MNA.

Decided to have lunch before seeing the rest of the museum. We’ve had good luck at museum restaurants, and it continued here. It was also fairly quick service.

We then started touring through. It’s a large museum, with 11 archeological rooms grouped by region. Our favourite was the Mexico room (ie city of Mexico), which contains the enormous Aztec Sunstone, and several other large artefacts dug up around Templo Mayor, just off the Zócalo. The Teotihuacán room was also impressive. It’s definitely a museum requiring multiple visits.

After, we caught an Uber back to the Zócalo. Traffic was still a mess so we just asked the driver to get us anywhere within a 20 minute walk. We were walking upstream the whole way back to the hotel, although it was just the last 50m that were squished.

We arrived back in time to catch the latter half of President Sheinbaum’s speech. It was pretty cool to see the size of the crowds, from the comfort of our balcony.

We were pretty much done for the day. Watched the VP debate (Canadians watching a US election debate while in Mexico), had some tacos from across the street, and called it a night. Hopefully no more sound checks tonight!