At night, Madero Avenue heaves with people strolling with shopping bags under the halcyon lamps. The pedestrian passageway, brimming with shops selling cottoned frocks and cantinas serving high-proofed mescal and Modelo cerveza, empties onto the roundabout circling the Zocolo. The crowd moves in a tamed fashion, beholden to the rules of polite society, with the […]
In the coming days, the Castilians had masons build them a church and crucifix outside their lodgings, where they held mass and prayed every day. On one such morning, when discussing where to place an altar, the Castilians’ happened across a secret chamber full golden treasure—jewels and plates and ingots. Their eyes wept in adoration: […]
The National Palace poses on the eastern flank of the Zocolo and rises above the busy thoroughfare of Pino Suarez. Once the royal palace of Montezuma and then the residence of Hernan Cortes and later colonial viceroys, the palace, today, houses the offices of the president and those of the treasury. It keeps regular hours […]
Through the great city walls, they followed Montezuma into the city, into the market, so full of llife of that November morning, the merchants peddling hare and deer skins and embroidered cotton with big blue feathers, or the baskets of coin-sized kidney beans and brown cacao powder, or the shackled, pillaged bodies tethered to rock, […]
The Templo Mayor Museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. The cost is fifty-seven pesos, which includes admittance to both the archeological site and museum. The site welcomes visitors for free on Sundays. For children younger than thirteen, for students and teachers, for pensioners, the […]
Palimpsest 2015 Mexico City 1519-1521 Tenochtitlan On 18 March 2015, above the revered stone slabs of Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución and across from the double-horned Catedral Metropolitana, a large piece of cotton droops from its pole. The air is stagnant, the Zocolo under a sunny hush. On a breezier morning, perhaps, […]
Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 2019, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, finished his report and concluded that the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a communist one since 1975, needed to implement reforms to help its citizenry climb out of […]
It is Saturday night, and you are driving through a cityscape of twinkling skyscrapers and neon signs. People are out enjoying downtown’s pleasures. Some dash in and out of sushi joints while others stumble and smile from one pub to the next. Their exuberance is electric. You feel the hair on your arms raise […]
In the community of Hillsplit, standing above the seven green hills and looking beyond the jagged wall, looms the wooden effigy to the great Lacturn rising sixty feet into the sky. Lacturn gazes west to the sea and watches. Chiseled from venerable maple, his eyes are the most impressive, chilling visitors with their frigid unity. […]
In a small Ontario town on the shores of Lake Huron, there exists a street called Hope and on it sits a bungalow that does not look like the rest of the homes on the street—those other summer cottages with trimmed lawns, sprinkler systems, and ride-on mowers. Among these cottages, neighbours chat and ask one […]