Temples, school girls and Mayan prophecies

Safely reunited with our rucksacks, we've been spending the past few days sampling the many cultural delights Mexico city has to offer.

Trips to the fantastic anthropology museum, which rivals the British Museum in terms of artifacts (of course they haven't nicked most of theirs), and the impressive sun and moon pyramids at Teotihuacan mean that we are now fully versed in Mexico's prehispanic past.

Rob was particularly taken with the pyramids, as he became an instant hit with all the 13 year old Mexican school girls out on a history trip. They amusingly crowded round him cooing and taking photographs with their mobile phones. I think he feels a bit put out he doesn't quite get that same reaction from me!

Seeing all this amazing jewellery, pottery and architecture makes you wonder what us humans have been doing these past 3000 years. Needless to say, whilst Rob has been plugged in to his ipod furiously trying to learn Spanish (via linguaphone), I have been swotting up on Mayan culture and getting over excited about the many 'theories'surrounding the rise and fall of this great civilisation.

I hate to break this to you, but according to Mayan prophecies the world will end on 22nd December 2012 (I knew there was a reason we were spending all our life long savings). We are apparently coming to the close of the '5th age'(the 4 ages of water, wind, fire and rain preceeded ours), where the current world will be destroyed before a new and different world is reborn.

We saw the original Aztec calendar used to record time and documenting these 'ages' in the anthropology museum and it's a pretty imposing circular stone engraved with hieroglyphs.

Many of the theories behind the Mayan and Aztec prophecies are linked to the sun and it's magnetic field. According to theorists we're currently in a period of low'sun spots' which is a bad thing.

Rob, reckons it's a load of hocus pocus but the Mayan's named this the age of 'movement'and with all the hurricanes and eathquakes going on at the moment it makes you think they might just have been on to something.