Last week, in the spirit of Exploring Mexico Now That I Don’t Have a Full-Time Job, Alice and I took a trip to Ciudad Universitaria to see UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
It’s considered among the largest universities in the Americas, with nearly 200,000 undergrad and grad students enrolled this past school year. Can you imagine? The place is huge.
They’ve also got a lot of really cool murals, and a new contemporary art museum called MUAC. (Which we reached by cab, because we couldn’t figure out how to take the free university shuttle.) It ended up being a neat day trip, though. We saw the famous Central Library mural created by Juan O’Gorman (pic above), and we wandered around and saw kids playing ping-pong and studying outside on bean bag chairs. We stopped at a cafeteria for a snack — a muy rico panela and avocado sandwich — and then hit MUAC, which ended up being this giant, peaceful breath of glass and steel.
We ate our real lunch at Café Azul y Oro, which I’ve been dying to go to. All the local magazines have hailed it as high-quality Mexican cuisine for a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. I loved that the place was casual (paper napkins; no AC), and the menu creative — my prehispanic corn-gelatin dessert was officially the highlight of the afternoon — but I’m not sure I’d make a special trip, especially considering it takes me an hour to get down there.
Definitely will eat there again next time I hit UNAM, though. Then hopefully then we can see the murals we missed, and the rogue auditorium that’s been taken over by students.
Lots of photos of UNAM, MUAC and Azul y Oro after the jump.
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