I would have liked to have captured more of this, but coating the foothills you can see a multitude of the worst kind of slums. I got the impression, especially seeing just how many of them there are from the plane, that a fair proportion of Mexico City's population live in this squalor. Sergio, my tour guide, told me that they usually don't have running water or electricity, and that families have lived there for generations. I guess you get used to it after a while.
Near the Teotihuacan pyramids, a nice souvenir shop and lapidary conspires to deprive tourists like me of copious amounts of money. Their speciality is making these elaborate stone masks made from obsidian, lapis lazuli, garnet, jade, etc. The masks and sculptures are replicas of artifacts from the Archaeological Museum and apparently take around three weeks of grueling labor and risk of pneumonoultramicroscopicvolcanosiliconiosis. I thought that was cool, so I bought an awesome lapis lazuli mask.
Finally, we arrived at the Teotihuacan Pyramids. Briefly: "Teotihuacan is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas. Apart from the pyramidal structures, the archaeological site of Teotihuacan is also known for its large residential complexes, the so-called "street of the dead", and its colorful well-preserved murals.
