Day of the Dead Redux

All right chav@s, we've survived another year and now the time has come to hang with those who haven't. So, this means a few things: a little Ofrenda in my house, first of all. Just a little thing, on my nightstand. Marigolds, "cockscomb" flowers, some pears for my granpappy ol' reliable (who, okay, maybe never wanted to see another damn pear in his life, being a pear farmer, but give me a break, I never met the guy) plus tangerines, sugarcane, a little water, a little salt, some grapes (who doesn't like grapes?) a couple candles... and a little incense thingy that I couldn't figure out how to use properly despite technical advice from many angles. I successfully filled my house with smoke, but that's about it, to be honest.

Anyway, the epic aprovechamiento of the Day of the Dead began on sunday, when we did a mad-dash grocery run followed by an attempt to go to the town of Mixquic (at a bus stop where the bus never came, but on the other hand there was a very cute puppy). We saved the day by jumping on a shortbus to the center of Xochimilco. We got in and there were people EVERYWHERE. In the plaza they were just barely starting to put up a couple of ofrendas in the first plaza (here it's common to put up colossal ofrendas in the plazas as display pieces), and in the second plaza there was a honey fair, where oddly we bought coffee and pan de muerto ("dead guy bread") and this circular bread covered in pink sugar (so it looks like fungicide-coated seeds, so I call it "pan de fungicida", though I remain ignorant of its true name, and which, by the way, I've only ever seen in Xochimilco and its surroundings). Then, passing the honey fair, we found the main square of Xochi, where they had some colossal ofrendas, and, like last year, a life-size pulquería diorama, including drunken papier-mache skeletons, witty sayings, pulque-extraction tools, a real-live agave in a heap of soil and educational labels explaining the history, process and culture of pulque. We got there a bit late but in the early afternoon they have pulque-tastings and such things. There's also a giant list of all the pulquerías in the Xochimilco area.

Then, crossing that plaza, we encountered the Dance of the Silly Gachupines ("Gachupin" is a derogatory term for Spanish person here in Mexico) which has a real name but I don't actually remember what it is, but the concept is that (in this case they were mostly schoolchildren) dress up in big, elaborately decorated velvet robes, giant inverted-truncated-cone hats, and bearded wooden masks and dance around in circles in the street. Originally this was to make fun of the Spanish, who, for mala onda ("being jerks") never invited the indigenous people to their parties. So, the snubbed indigenous people took it upon themselves to make an elaborate satirical ritual of it. The band and the dancers (the smallest of which was a kid of no more than six years, who continually got distracted and had to be repeatedly dragged back to the group by older kids) were followed up and down the streets by firecrackers and photo-snapping crowds. Thus was traffic impeded and were many children and grownups amused.

As it began to get dark-- the power went out! So we were on our way out of Dodge when we passed the darkened, candle-glowing market and I insisted we go in. Candles wedged among piles of tangerines, burning pieces of sugarcane stuffed between fans of bananas, illuminating (or not) the vendors, who continued as normal, barking their goods in the darkness. It was pretty cool.

Then, we stopped in at a prehispanic restaurant which we'd seen on the way into Xochi, where we had a delicious grasshopper soup and corn-smut pasta, with tiny mugs of mezcal on the house (I'm pretty sure we were drinking from a dollhouse tea set) with grub-salt, and an agua-fresca with lime and chía seeds. It was a pretty tasty dinner. Furthermore there was this awesome ambience because of the power outage, just listening to the festival on the street outside, the evening breeze through the window, watching the candlelight move around on the paintings on the wall. It's a very beautiful, and only slightly expensive restaurant that I highly highly recommend to tourists.

Then we went home.

BUT! The Day of the Dead adventure is not over yet. On Tuesday we went to Mixquic, a little bitty town famous for its adherence to traditions. From Tasqueña station we took two HOURS to get there on a two-peso RTP bus, passing the entirety of Tlahuac (which has awful traffic because they're building a new line of the Metro there) . On the bright side, we saw a ginormous skeleton in the center of Tlahuac, which was cool. Anyway, we got into Mixquic hungry and tired, but enjoyed the fair that they had set up around the perimeter of the cemetery before going in to check out the dead. The church of Mixquic is prehispanic in origin, which is to say that it has an archaeological site in the courtyard containing skeletons, carved rocks and ancient statues. It's one of the loveliest churches I've seen yet in Mexico, one of the ones with the outside all stone and serious and the inside drenched in gold-leaf, so beautifully decorated it's sort of hard to cope with. I just sat there in the pews for awhile, staring. In the pulpit there was a long and elaborate ofrenda with all kinds of fruit and candles and everything, and of course on the front wall behind the pulpit was a giant statue of Jesus with, of course, a Virgen de Guadalupe suspended above him. Along the walls were various wooden statues of Jesus in different stages of his life; though as usual, the anguished crown-of-thorns stage appeared most favored.

But outside and all around the church was where it was at. Throngs of people buzzed amongst the graves, composing flowery magna opi to their dead relatives on top of their graves. Whole families, children still bedecked in Halloween costumes from several days before, arranged marigolds, cockscomb flowers, little white flowers that here are called "clouds", candles, sometimes making patterns or designs of the dismembered petals, on the slab of concrete, pile of dirt, mausoleum, tiled surface or whatever that marked the grave.

This, I should mention, is the most tightly-packed cemetery I have ever seen in my whole life. It's incredible. Only one person can pass at a time between the graves, and I suspect that families may bury one person atop the previous on the family site. There is literally zero real estate available in the Mixquic cemetery and I promise you that no grave goes undecorated. For this reason it's a well-known attraction for Chilangos and foreigners alike in this season. And that was how, as it got darker and darker, I became trapped and unable to escape among the graves. The incense smoke rose into the air, clouding my vision and inundating my olfactory sphere. The rumbling of thousands of voices, the silence of the old ladies who sat watching the candles, the sound of camera shutters on all sides... and no escape! I believe I spent a good half an hour twisting amidst the graves after deciding I wanted to leave. But it was nice, actually. Guitars, barkers from the fair, ladies selling cotton candy between the graves... it's sort of weird, really.

Now the one thing we noticed, and maybe you're taking this as tourist advice, so listen closely, is this: there were a ton of police in the fair. So, our conclusion was this: be careful in Mixquic. The fair itself and the cemetery are safe, but definitely watch your back, because if they're putting that much security in place, it might be for a reason. That's it.

Next time: the collapse of Hacienda Mixiuhca. Stay tuned!

So much whatnotting.

HACIENDA MIXIUHCA

The hacienda, due to circumstances described below, has been somewhat neglected of late. Regardless, I'm gratefully pulling tomatoes off the whitefly-infested vines on the daily. I gave one of my Cherokee Purples to my friend Mizraim for his birthday and he was pretty excited. I won't lie-- I talked it up quite a bit... Of course when Marcos found a little heap of them in the kitchen, he asked me if they were purple because they were full of smog. Very funny, Marcos.

The chickens are bigger on a daily basis. They seem to display normal behaviour despite extremely abnormal conditions. The duck is totally neurotic, but she's another story. Anyway, my students and friends are curiously asking me about my weird plans for chicken dinner. The okra is irreparably stunted and still upside down. The upside down cucumber trick was working remarkably well until it sort of dried up (see: period of neglect).

Natural disasters... many times, when it rains, the drainpipe clogs with feathers. This sucks, because my job then becomes chicken-feather scraper (by means of my broom, because I have to do this by half-sticking myself out of a hole in the side of the cage, which I normally cover with a lovely piece of corrugated fiberglass which I found one day on the roof). This means mucking around in chicken-poop mud. Fun and disgusting, all rolled into one. However, this does mean I've got to be pretty timely about sweeping that stuff up. BUT! But my compost bucket is, as of today, full to the brim. I guess I have to get another one? My worms died of chicken shit overload, I think, and so I think anaerobic fermentation is the only option for me. Anyone got any suggestions???

MY BORING LIFE

Since my last post I've gone through a series of iterations of a daily schedule. I'd taken a job with another company, teaching an advanced English class at the National Polytecnic Institute's Centre for Investigations and Advanced studies. I loved the class, a bunch of scientists: a physicist, two geneticists, a couple of biotechnologists and a few scattered others. It was a really fun class to teach and I learned a few useful things from that school's teaching method. However, I happen to think sleeping is really amazing, and it simply wasn't working for me that I was getting home at ten or eleven at night, and waking up at 5 to be out of here at 6 to get to Politécnico at 7:30. I just wasn't going to hack it anymore. So, three weeks of working that gig (see also making some good money—at triple the pay rate of my current job, I certainly couldn't complain about money!) just about did me in. But now I'm giving private clases to this Argentinian dude, who, (are you ready for an AMAZING COINCIDENCE?) in fact, is working on a documentary about the Ginger Ninjas. Yes, the very Ginger Ninjas that biked into our backyard in Davis, camping out in various of our beds, amusing us with their bicycle-powered music, amazing us with their crackpot journey to the southlands.... so, yeah, that's cool.

Okay, you ask, but what about my free time? And I respond, “WHAT free time??” That's right, folks. Working six days a week pretty much kills any “life” you may or may not have had previously. Regardless, I try to take advantage of the scraps they throw me as much as possible. Chiefly this takes the form of adventure-grocery-shopping (1), wanderings in the center of town (2), and eating, nerding out and sleeeeeeeeeping (3). Later I will recount the doings, seeings and beings of the only trip I've taken out-of-town in many moons, but for the time being let's stick with the quotidian.

The Merced (GPG: Mehr-SEHD) is a big damn market. The following is a collaborative piece by Ricardo and yours truly. We wrote it together on the way to Morelos last week. On your mark, get set, go!

The weather's clear and fresh. It's about ten in the morning. We're groggily going towards Mixiuhca station. Instead of sinking into the metro, however, we catch a shortbus heading to San Lázaro. From on the sunny, bumpy ride to San Lázaro we're laughing and talking in Spanglish, both of us pretty lazy about choosing just one language to speak. Then we jump over some puddles to get to the station, flying down th stairs just in time to watch one of the orange trains disappear. Merde. Well, now we have to wait. It feels muggy in the Metro. Some announcements on the bulletin board call my attention. I'd like to attend some of the events posted, and even firmly promise myself I will. However, I won't; that I can take for granted. God bless the 48-hour workweek. The next train has arrived and we get on it. People generally stare at each other like mortal foes on the Metro (says Ricardo), and I try not to be a part of it. Then a guy selling pop CDs breaks the silence. Cat of course starts to dance, which is more than a little embarrassing, especially when she tries to act like she's with me. We get off in the next station, and again we can see the sunlight.

It filters through the multitude of grimy skylights in Merced Station and we maneuver through the masses and rotating gates, ever closer to the throbbing center of barkers, vendors, pickpockets and shady types, old ladies, pirate goods, housewivery, and deliciousness that is La Merced. Tacos de Canasta, fly sneakers, peanut butter, raw meat, plastic everything-you-can-imagine mah-day en cheena. Anarchy: capitalist anarchy at its hairiest. It's this sort of twisted freaky commercial paradise vacation at a toxic waste pond. This photo is of the feet of a clown and his ever-so-many fans in the center of town.

We more or less know where we're going: first to the old lady in the middle of the shoe part, who sells from buckets of multicolor mole, pastes of every kind, a shrewd grandmother with braids who shovels spoonfuls of the stuff into polyethylene sheets by the quarter-kilogram. We get our PB from her, and snake around distracted

clients clogging the passages to buy some cemitas. The Cemita is the holy grail of Mexican bread products: a circular roll, perfect for these amazing deli sandwiches they make in Puebla. Oh god, they're way way way too delicious.

It's a lazy sunday, of course, so then it becomes extremely necessary to dilute the coffee sloshing in our stomachs with some greaseball tacos from the stand with indifferent and snotty taqueros (GPG: tah-KEYR-ohs) but amaaaaaaaaazing food. I order some carne enchilada tacos, and load them down with fried potatoes, salsa, onion and nopales. Then I merrily proceed to stuff my face.

Then we carry our now quite full bellies with us around from one side of the Merced to the other, not listening to the crooning of the sellers. There's one part with mostly fruit, mostly candy and nuts and seeds, another with mostly veggies, another with specialty veggies, and one side hallway which appears to consist exclusively of nopales, giant heaps of cut-off spines accumulating on the floor as the sellers deftly swipe their knives over the surface of the cactus pads.

We come here because it's cheaper, and not so far from my place. Ricardo and I are coöperating on the food front, so into the front lines we go every Sunday. It's kind of exhilerating, between the split-second bargaining, the risk of being run over by a dolly loaded down with ice, carrots or potatoes, the constant worry of pickpocketing or worse, and the general overwhelming goodness of being surrounded by FOOD, glorious food! Heaps of carrots, tumbling piles of tomatillo, buckets of powders, barrels of beans, glass cases of nuts and candy, racks of mangoes and starfruit, crates of tunas, stacks of jars of honey... anything you want, nearly, you can find it. Ruffly, fragrant mountains of leaf vegetables and herbs, delicate displays of oyster mushrooms, fluffballs of alfalfa sprouts.

GETTING OUTTA HERE: an adventure in Morelos with the Usual Suspects.

The last-minute planning, the running from here to there, the dropout. This, the

dramatic backdrop for our Very Rigid Journey. Then we went to my house (happy independence day?) and ate eggplant and drank guava-ginger agua-fresca. It was admittedly not very patriotic of us.

Oh well! Next day we boogied at some early, but less-early-than-we'd-hoped-for hour, dashed off, ate a way-too-spicy taco at Tasqueña station, and jumped on a bus. On the bus I called Lilia, and asked Chato, who picked up the phone, if I couldn't escape from my pals a bit to spend some time with them, at which point he very kindly invited Ricardo and Karen to come eat with us. We then proceeded to miss our stop. We asked the driver “Scuse us, do you know where the next stop is?” to which he responded simply, “Yes.” and left it at that. What a dick. Well, he let us off at the next town, some nowhere place where we threw ourselves in the grass and happily

wasted half an hour soaking in the sun... anyway, caught the next bus back to We ate at this amazing elegant restaurant with a KILLER view of the town, which is situated in this incredible verdant valley, just luscious with vegetation, life spewing with impunity from every foothold. THIS, this this, is indeed paradise! More next time on our adventures in paradise... it's sleepin' time now.

But as a final... thingy, a study in tropical fruit. I dissected a mamey and a black sapote from the Merced on our amazing new electric-blue tablecloth. This is the result of an intensive, even invasive, study of their physical forms. Both are very specifically mexican. The mamey is Enjoy

My Freakin Uniform

Look at how silly and formal I have to look at work. My mother should be proud of me...

Hacienda Mixiuhca Update, plus Hurbanaventuras

First, the bad news. Then, the good news.

It's been a fungal massacre, with all this damn rain. I lost ALL of my basil plants.

There has also been a chicken massacre, and in this way I lost ALL of my salad greens.

Regardless, I still have a bunch of okra, all my tomatos, two of my cukes, and some marigolds (though I did have to sacrifice some of them for reasons of exaggerated competition). I'm trying out this upside-down hanging planter idea that NPR told my mom about. Furthermore I have abandoned the idea of organic ag in the city. It's not space efficient. Ergo, slow-release granular fert from Mercado de Jamaica. Tomorrow: photos.

Now, Hurbanaventuras:

I helped one friend give a basic bike-repair workshop downtown today, near the Monument to the Revolution, and brought Marcos' grandpappy's bike to fix that sucker up a bit. The plan was then to quickly drop it off at home, then go meet my other friend in the Coyoacan metro station. However, the plan was somewhat derailed when we took too long on the bike, so I had to go straight to Coyoacan, bike and all. Which practically isn't a problem, since on Sundays they let you take your bike on the Metro. Regardless, the problems came after I decided the metro was lame and rolled the whole way there on two wheels (which felt SO GOOD after three and a half months of total bikelessness!!). The guy just didn't show. I however took the opportunity to chitchat with an old man selling tiny pueblan pies and then the Metro police (who are less trigger-happy, fortunately, than BART police...) and suddenly this guy with a funny accent shows up and asks where the center of coyoacan is. I tell him I can help him get there, since I am at this point TOTALLY done with waiting for my no-show buddy. So I give him the mini walking tour of the joint, and he invites me to eat, to which proposal I wholeheartedly agree. He then picks this hella trendy spot right on the Coyoacán plaza, all typical Mexican colors and dishes, all girls with scarves and hip boots and guys with intellectual glasses and stylized hairdos, and we order some of the best chilanga tlayudas I have ever eaten, a glass of pulque (which he found disgusting, though I like it), and a couple caballitos of strong-as-hell mezcal. It turned out he's a Colombian lawyer, and he was leaving for his home turf this very night. The point is, it was this sort of Universe-speaking-to-me kind of moment and it was kind of fun to share some of the Mexico I've discovered with a lost foreigner. It was this weird consolidation exercise... okay. to bed. tomorrow i'll post hacienda pictures... buenas noxes.

I'm Cultured like Yakult, Sucka!

*Note, this post was written several weeks ago, in fact DURING the Argentina-Mexico game, which brought us all to the conclusion that that we needed was for Chicharito to make fewer damn sandwiches and play more damn soccer. ** --The Editor

In light of the iminent slaughter of the Mexican team by the Argentinians, I think I should direct the topic away from fútbol and toward, uh, other pursuits.

Now, onto more intellectual issues. A museum exposition that I saw semi-recently was "The Invisible World of René Magritte" at Bellas Artes. Maybe I haven't posted a photo yet of Bellas Artes' magnificent orange dome, but I shall do so soon. Regardless I have a photo of the facade, and of one of the amazing wooden sculptures in exhibition outside. These 12 giant wooden heads are supposed to be the Apostles. As far as I can tell each is carved from a single piece of wood, which is to say they used some big damn trees to make this project, which makes my inner environmentalist a little sad, especially knowing a bit about the state of Mexican logging policy ("Log the fuckers!!!!"). Oh well. It's also quite close to the Torre Latinoamericana, an impressive skyscraper with a big antenna on top. Furthermore, the electric buses pass right by on Eje Central/Lázaro Cárdenas. Their little antennae fall off all the time just like the SF buses. Ah, a little bit of home right here in Mexico City.

Okay, so the Bellas Artes building is cool for various reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the exterior architecture, very old-and-made-of-stone looking, big, impressive, with the dichoso orange dome. Secondly, it's another prime and excellent example of the amazing sinking soils described in one of my July posts from last year (holy goodness, I've been here very nearly one whole year!!), as the building is in a funny little well. Thirdly, lots of people hang around in its marbly plaza, and I might remind you that México DF is make-out city, so sometimes you have to observe more tonsil hockey than you'd really like. Fourthly, it's right next to the Alameda, the park in downtown that is the subject of an amazing Diego Rivera mural available for goggling in a nearby museum. Fifthly, the interior contains these amazing art-deco-mexica designs and luxurious period interior design.

The permanent exhibit consists of 2 floors of murals: my favourite is the Diego Rivera one which features a serious-looking Charles Darwin hanging with his homie the chimpanzee, as well as various communistic, scientific and artistic figures of the pre-WWII 20th century. Giant cells and such.

Now, Magritte. The art of course was wonderful, because it was absurd, smooth-textured, oddly soothing in that trippy wild kind of way. BUT the coolest part, aside from the detailed descriptions of the artist's social life and personal history, was the interactive absurdist-art section. It was mainly designed for kids but we overgrown kids found it quite delightful ourselves.

First it featured a shelving unit for mislabeling things (as Magritte enjoyed doing in his day...). It contained everyday objects with profound or ordinary words pasted on labels in front of them, with a kid-friendly explanation that you don't have to call something what it really is, but that you can also use it as a placeholder for another idea. Cool, right?

The next part had a desk full of magazines, with instructions on the wall to cut out words at random and make absurdist poetry. Past that there was a series of giant plywood cards with pieces of images on them: fish head, horse shoulders, lady chest, business-suit crotch, chicken knees, mermaid tail, etc. which you were supposed to use to create physical non-sequiturs on your own body (for the photographic enjoyment of your friends and strangers!). Then there were mirillas, little diorama-boxes built into the wall with the tiniest peephole to see the tiny universe within, sometimes a little figure, or a rock, or whatever. Then , the ginormous blackbord. whereon you were supposed to draw figures. Finally, there was the wall of birds: in the center of the room was a long table with colorful pieces of paper and pencils, with instructions to write and/or draw about a dream you once had and cut out the piece of paper into the shape of a bird, and stick it to the wall. It was pretty cool, seeing little kids' dreams all over the place. I can never remember my dreams so I cut out a bird shape (okay, a duck, really...) and handed it off to marcos, who commenced to draw cockroaches with eyes on their backs (a super cool image, which later he created realistically in photoshop...). This we stuck to the wall.

Now of course for the life update. I'm still working like a dog 6 days a week, trying to live it up on my half-weekends (boy do I feel robbed!) but it's all good. My colleagues are awesome and so are most of my students; today I had an interesting mixture of students: an 18-year-old Nepalese girl and an army liutenent (who's one of my favorite students because he's just so out of control-- he's freakin' hilarious, even in his half-English). I teach kids pretty much every day for at least an hour, and they use this book called All Aboard, which is a pretty cool series, actually. Most of the adults use the book "Interchange" which is a sort of general-purpose life-English, with lots of stupid dialogues and things. Then there's "Market Leader," a British book about business and shit like that. They give me a lot of those classes because they're really into the jive of "hey look at us we have a Gringa! Aren't we special?" But it's cool; most of those students are pretty advanced and there's sometimes cool readings and interviews to listen to; and I can find cool stuff on the internet to supplement the book's hella square attitude (like the other day when I gave one student a short reading on Grameen Bank and microloans, and to another I gave an article about Gross National Happiness... you know, things like that).

Meanwhile, the fowl are getting fowler, fatter, and more sexually dimorphous. I'm bummed to announce that El Morado is indeed going to be a rooster, which means probably eating him younger than I'd like... and that means deciding how I'm going to do the slaughter and fast (where the hell can I go that nobody will see me?? Yargh). The tomatos are tired of growing and although they're small I think I'm going to go ahead and let them flower, throw on some more of the old NPK and see what happens. Next post I'll go on with my special fish-waste/crushed-corn prepared feed which is going to go on hiatus due to the fact that it makes the apartment smell like ASS even though it saves me a bucket of money. Le sigh.

Ah, last bit, tying chamba together with hacienda: the school is offering a summer day-camp in which there are about ten kids who I spent my friday teaching to garden, making little milk-carton seed beds, learning about plant anatomy, guessing plant smells, generally frolicking with dirt, and daring them to touch worms. All told, a pretty successful event that kept the kids rapt for a good hour and a halfish.

Okay, I send long-winded nostalgic greetings to California and all the many people I love who are still there. I toast the pecan-pulque I am currently guzzling to all y'all. Goodnight!

Viva México, Cabrones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czDDfAh67gs

Mexico 2, France 0. Take that, First World.

All the kids were running around during the first goal (62nd minute), which was an amazing clean goal, and I had invaded another teacher's classroom to watch the magic happen... his student didn't have homework for that very reason (they had made a bet: if Mexico wins the game, I won't give you homework). The guy who scored is called "El Chícharo," or, "The little pea", and he's very popular with my kids. The second was a penalty kick by Cuauhtemoc (GPG: KWAO-te-mock) Blanco, also lovely but a lot less exciting than an in-game goal, don't you think?

Guess what?

Chicken butt!