Where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived is now a museum.

On Thursday morning, March 29, we took an Uber with the Lewises to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán.  Fortunately, our son Carl had ordered tickets for us in advance, so we were able to bypass the line that coiled around the block and go right to the entrance.  Frida and Diego were enamored of Communism, and even welcomed Leon Trotsky as a house guest.  One of Frida’s last self-portraits was entitled “Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism.”  She was chronically ill, and depicted herself within the healing hands of Karl Marx.  Diego himself sympathized with Marxism and thought that it would save Mexico by provoking class warfare.  He made this explicit in one of his murals for the National Palace.  Diego and Frida had never experienced Communism under Stalin and the bloom had not yet worn off the Bolsheviks.

John and Laura married in the Church of St. Dominic de Guzmán.

Leaving Coyoacán, we took an Uber with John and Laura to the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the church where they were married.  It was built in 1648 and named after the twelfth-century founder of the Dominican Order.  The church was so close to the apartment where Laura’s family lived (she told us) that she was able to walk to the church for the ceremony in her wedding dress.

On the day we visited, and the parish was getting ready for the celebration of the triduum, the three days leading up to Easter.  We only were able to visit the inside of the church for a short while and take photos.  From a street vendor we bought a loaf of sweet bread, and then we drove again, this time into downtown Mexico City to visit the Centro de Artesanias.  There (after Bridget and Laura bargain-shopped for hours), Bridget bought an alebrije, a folk-art sculpture of a fantastic bird.  To spend time with Laura’s sister Anni and her husband Jap, plus friends Begonia and her husband, we went to the trendy Condesa district for a meal at the Restaurante Tandoor.  That was our last full day in Mexico City.  On Friday, we made plans to visit the Zócalo district and then catch our plane home.