Country of the Dead
One thing I knew about Mexico before heading out here was that it’s rather full of skeletons and masks. Exactly how many of either, I could not possibly have imagined, though.
At the moment, I’m in Guanajuato (City of the Frogs, although they all seem to be dead now) where we’ve just been to a rather bizarre museum. Museo del Momias is full of corpses. To be more exact, mummies.
It turns out that when people are buried, their families need to keep up the payments for the tombs they occupy or they get thrown out. But you can hardly stick a corpse in the wheelie bin, right? So the best preserved ones (there are quite a few, given how hot and dry it is here) end up in a museum for people to gawp at. There are, of course, photos, but I won’t imbed them here in case you don’t want to see.
It a fascinating, strange place. Quite a lot of people have no provenance, or clothing. They were mostly only in the tomb for less than ten years, so they’re much better preserved than Egyptian mummies, with hair and teeth and, where the skin is torn and you can see through the ribs, vital organs. The museum seems to delight in finding the most uncomfortable specimens, and has a big room dedicated to people who died violent deaths (including one who was buried alive, hands up over the face hammering on the coffin lid) and a second full of babies. The woman who died whilst pregnant has her own case, which she shares with her tiny mummified foetus (extracted from her body by the museum).
Maybe this immersion explains why so many of our conversations have tended towards the best way to commit suicide, what we want to happen to our bodies when we die, or the ideal afterlife?
Guanajuato, Mexico - Saf
Location, North America | saf | 
June 15, 2009 8:20 pm
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By mum, June 16, 2009 @ 5:13 am
bloody hell what uplifting conversations you are having !!!it all sounds fascinating though.