Helicopter blades correctly installed and vehicle is ready for takeoff.

I love museums in general, but they can´t all be winners. When I was a kid I was very attached to a "Pirates & Buccaneers" coloring book, which I think is what led me to think going to the Veracruz Naval Museum would be a good idea. After all, a venerable museum in this historic port should be filled with Spanish cannons, old maps, cutlasses, blunderbusses, pirate flags, and so on. Unfortunately, this tourist attraction would be more aptly named "The Veracruz Museum of Falling Apart Dioramas and Blurry Photocopies."

The building is a former naval academy and it is staffed by uniformed women of the Mexican Navy. They operate it as they would any other military bureaucracy, with a curious attention to the minutia of regulations. The attendant watched like a hawk as I filled in each blank of the guest registry, and shook her head "no" when I left one space empty. I didn't understand what the question was asking, so I just wrote my name again. Next, she marched me to the big board to explain the layout of the museum, which rooms I was to visit in what order, and a brief recap of their contents. In some Mexican museums the guards get freaked out if you don´t go through the exhibition halls in the prescribed order. This was definately one of those museums. Naval officers patrolled the halls to shepherd visitors to the rooms they were supposed to go to next. Often they would make curious announcements such as "When this building was a naval academy, the chemistry classroom was here."

The actual contents of the museum were quite dismal. Probably 1 in 30 displays contained an original artifact. Many of them didn't actually say "reproduction", but they clearly were. For example the statue of the Aztec flower god that A) Is actually in The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City B) HAS NOTHING TO DO WHATSOEVER WITH NAVAL HISTORY. Other highlights included photocopies of portraits of Cortes, photocopies of letters to and from the King of Spain, and photocopies of maps. There were, humorously, pirated pirate flags though--the museum staff had clearly made them with black cloth and house paint.

The oddest gallery in the museum may have been the "modern navy" section. The hall used photographs of training exercises and dioramas to try to construct a kind of GI Joe fantasy world where the Mexican Navy was storming beachheads, launching succesful amphibious assaults, and exploring underwater sea caves with spear guns.

The single most interesting thing in the museum was a stained glass window on the staircase that some cadets were covering over with plywood. Probably they wanted to put a giant color photocopy on top of it.

As dull and miserable as the museum was, I felt some anxiety about leaving because I knew that the attendant would force me to write a comment in the guestbook. Sure enough, when I tried to walk past and ask for my bag back, she looked down at the registry, back up at me, and issued a crisp "Sus comentarios, POR FAVOR." I considered "bien lleno de fotocopias" or "este no es un museo," but I couldn´t with her eyes bearing down on me. I knew I had to write something postive and my contempt would have to lie hidden in the brevity of my praise, so I settled on "bueno." It was a little pathetic, this is what Mexicans say when they answer the phone. She was not satisfied; previous guests had composed whole paragraphs of praiseful commentary. Finally I added "gracias," which was enough to coax her into handing my bag back, if grudgingly.