Mexico is an appealing country with two faces: ruins of disappeared and disappearing ancient cultures on one side, and zealous Hispanic colonial styles on the other side. This album contains selected photos I took during my tour exploring just a tiny part of the country before and after attending the conference Loops'07 in Morelia. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go that far to see the mysterious Mayan temples, although I wrote a little essay "See you, Maya" on my blog before I left for Mexico.

An itinerary was supposed to be written right after the trip; however, writing papers made it postponed forever. Now, three years later, my memory has become too dim to support me writing a travel note, which might be useful to others. Actually, according to what I had seen in Mexico, I had a lot to say about its politics, economy, culture, traditions, etc. Unfortunately, I forget so much that I am not able to write down anything in a systematic, logical manner. There were, however, three things that impressed me the most, which I shall briefly and superficially narrate.

I was terribly surprised when I saw stretches and stretches uncompleted, seemingly abandoned houses all over the places, especially in suburbs and rural areas in Mexico. Although a few people were still living in some of the houses, the sight looked really desolated and impoverished, despite what the reality was. But why? I was then told the reason. Many Mexicans went to work in the US; once they made some money they sent it to their families in Mexico to build houses. Their families began to build the houses long before they received sufficient amount of money. Consequently, most of the houses could not be completed before the Mexican workers in the US sent enough money back. In fact, many those houses would never be completed because either some Mexican workers could not make more money in the States but had to go back to their villages or some finally brought their families to the States too, or both. Regardless of the reason behind, the sight was certainly not pleasant to both Mexicans and tourists. If there were things like this in China, medias like CNN would have spent pages to report, as usual, by means of advanced photographing, photoshopping, and rhetoric skills.

The second observation that astonished me was the similarity between the patterns engraved on Mesoamerican Indian sculptures, pottery, totems, buildings and those on jade articles, pottery, bronzes in ancient Chinese cultures and civilizations. I knew this similarity before but seeing it with my own eyes on site was nevertheless more surprising. Many patterns I saw in Teotihuacan and in the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City look very close to those appeared in Liang Zhu Culture and in Shang and Zhou Dynasties. It was a theory that the American aboriginals are actually Mongoloid race; their ancestors migrated through the Bering Strait to North and then to South America tens of thousand years ago. Nonetheless, the South American cultures, for example Maya, have histories at most several thousand years. On the other hand, early cultures in China, such as Liang Zhu and Hong Shan Cultures are dated back to at most six thousand years ago, also much later than the in-theory migration of Mongoloids to America. It is then very interesting to see how the aforementioned similarity arose.

Being a physicist, I do care a lot about how much emphasis a country's government places on scientific popularization. Therefore, I was impressed and moved when I saw many hallways and corridors in metro stations in Mexico City were dedicated to series of posters, introducing science - in particular biology and astronomy - to young generations. I still remember a tunnel there, whose ceiling was beautifully decorated with lights, as the constellations in dark sky, which was indeed able to trigger one's imagination and desire to explore the mysterious outer space. I knew at that time the subway stations in China were occupied by commercial advertisements, which was very disappointing, at least to me, given that the big cities in China had much better modern appearance than Mexico city. Of course, China is far from the richness apparently shown by some of the Chinese cities; however, a country should not tie its endeavor to popularize science among its citizens to its economic strength. How much can the former cost anyway? I hope the situation has been improved in China now.

Well, please forget about these somewhat oppressive topics, at least temporarily, but enjoy the pictures.