Until recent days my driveway had been too icy to take a chance driving down the hill so I had about a week stuck at home. It was great. I came upon a site on TV about the greatest places in the world to see. Being well aware of my own prospects, the only way I will ever visit these wonderful places is to view them while I had the chance. A warning appeared stating that the site I wanted to watch only had a few days left before it would be removed. Perfect time for me to binge-watch 24 thirty minute episodes of these fascinating places. I love caves of any sort and the first episode is about the Paleolithic Cave Art of Spain and France. We first visited the oldest paintings in the world, the extraordinary cave art of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet.
If I could visit just one of those three caves I would pick Chauvet for it’s large drawings and variety of subjects. There are lots of bears, horses, cattle, and a leopard, to name a few.
I have always enjoyed cave paintings and prehistoric art. I have a poster of Australian cave paintings in one of my bedrooms. We have many pictographs and petroglyphs of native American art in the area where I live. Pictographs are rock art created by applying pigments, typically made from natural materials like ochre, charcoal, or clay, to stone surfaces. Petroglyphs are created by pecking, carving, or scraping away the rock surface to reveal the lighter stone beneath.
Jean Marie Auel is a Portland writer who wrote a series of novels set in prehistoric Europe that explores human activities during that time, and touches on the interactions of Cro-Magnon people with Neanderthals. Her books have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide. I very much enjoyed, “The Clan of the Cave Bear” of which a movie was made. All this business of cave paintings has inspired me to read it again. Oddly enough she went on to write four more books of the Cave Bear series and they were not good. They read like something a fifth grade student would write. I guess she put her best in the first book. I had read somewhere that she had signed a contract to write four more books and did so but her heart wasn’t in it.
One of the episodes of the World Heritage Sites series covered the pyramids of Mexico. Having spent two weeks in Mexico City about 15 years ago this was one of my favorite episodes. I always get confused between the pyramid ruins of Teotihuacan (tay uh tee waa kaan) and Tenochititlan (tuh •nowch teet laan), the old capital of the Aztec Empire. Tenochtitlan was a city founded by the Aztec people on an island in Lake Texcoco, and it became the political and religious center of their empire. Today, the site of Tenochtitlan is occupied by modern-day Mexico City which was built on top of it. While in Mexico City one day a group of us went to visit the pyramid ruins at Teotihuacan, one of the highlights of my visit. There are three main features, the Pyramid of the Sun, the largest of the three which I managed to climb to the top, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent.
The ruins of Teotihuacan are a little over one hour drive from Mexico City and well worth the trouble of getting there should you ever find youself in that area.
I was in Mexico City to work on preparing a house for 8 seminarians to live in as they received their studies at a near by University. We cleaned, changed light bulbs, provided waste baskets, hung doors, things like that. When off work we visited large beautiful cathedrals and so forth. The best was attending Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. A group of seven of us, along with Fr Alex, our parish priest, had flown there to help out. Our priest’s sister was the Mother Superior of a convent where we stayed. It was a wonderful experience. Mexico City is an amazing place just humming with life. The following photos aren’t the best but you can get the idea.
All these great memories were aroused in me by that one episode in the World Heritage Sites TV series which I binged on these past icy, snowy, slushy, raining days.
