The Tianguis in Jardín Balbuena

Need a bra? Tianguis. Need sewing needles? Tianguis. Need your sugar high? Tianguis. Need groceries? Tianguis. Need breakfast? Tianguis.

Soy totalmente del tianguis.

Mondays and Thursdays are tianguis (GPG: TYAN-geese) days, and I'm not a religious tianguis-goer since most everything can be found cheaper at Mercado Jamaica, but it is a hell of a lot closer, a mere 3 minutes' walk from my bed, compared to the 15-minute schlep to Jamaica. Whatever, the tianguis remains awesome, because you get some sunshine, they sell clothes hella cheap (I mean 15 peso cheap, in the case of my work pants...) and blankets and shoes and other such second-hand essentials, these things being the exception to the everything-cheaper-at-Jamaica rule. Anyway, the tianguis has a distinct aesthetic advantage, being as it is a trippy tunnel of color with natural light and thick crowds of people (and of course, with Darach in mind, I must mention the magnificent sound collage of barkers barking, ladies chit-chatting, parents scolding children, children screaming and running around, dogs panting and yapping, comales (GPG: co-MAHL-es = basically a griddle or skillet) spitting and steaming, and tamale- or agua fresca-sellers wheeling their carts around, ice clattering in its jars.

There are several specific details worth mentioning:

1. Mexican candy is amazing. Like, really amazing. Because they sell it out of little colorful plastic buckets or baskets bulk-style, or maybe because it comes in every color texture and flavor you can imagine (though I will be the first to admit that the Mexican obsession with mixing fruit and chile will never cease to turn my stomach [especially after my barfy disaster with a chile-powder coated tamarind ball in La Reforma, Sinaloa two years ago], though regardless of my opinion it is an institution and not going anywhere). Or maybe because it's so cheap, obviously resulting in my future case of major diabetes (damn sweet tooth...). I just can't shake the feeling of happiness that scoops of rainbow-colored, multi-flavored candy brings to the deepest reaches of my soul.

2. Clothing. From old-lady bras to majorly fashionable shirts, hyphy funky-colored Nikes, hippie woven or leather bracelets, socks with cartoon characters, and huge piles of secondhand clothes with barkers screaming Bara bara bara bara baraaaaaaaa! (Cheap! => short for "barato" => GPG: bah-RAH-toe). So many damn colors, styles, patterns, fabrics, textures, and brand-fakery, you could never lose interest.

3. Pirated everything. Need I say more?

4. Food, glorious food! From basic foodstuffs, sacks of corn, sunflower seeds, flax, little bags of blue and white tortillas, tlacoyos and sopes (GPG: SOH-pays => fat tortillas with a tiny little rim of dough around the edge, for piling up with deliciousness), to arrays of leaf-on radishes, stacks of nopalitos (spines removed, of course), piles of pears, heaps of guanábana all spiky and green, hiding white sweet sticky pulp and big buttonlike seeds inside (often seen with plastic cups of pre-extracted pulp in little pyramids in front of the displays), ruffly bales of squash flowers, and fingery piles of carrots... mmm, oh and let's not forget the pollerías, the chicken stands, where they sell the emblematic yellow chickens of Mexico. Incidentally, the chickens are yellow because in the last stage of their lives they are fed the flowers of cempazuchil, the Mexican marigold, which imparts that sunny hue to their skin.

5. Finally and probably most importantly there's the element of the immediately edible: the food stands. Lots of vitamin T of course: tacos, tlacoyos, tlayudas, tortas and the like. Special food includes cemitas poblanas, which are effectively giant circular sandwiches on amazing sesame-dusted rolls with piles of Oaxacan string cheese, and a lovely little herb called pápalo (GPG: PAH-palo) (Porophyllum ruderale) which tastes, yes, like plant, but with kind of its own zing. Then there's the pre-cut fruit of every color you like, and the carnitas, the barbacoa, the seafood... okay, I'm going to bed before I drown in my own saliva.

Merkado de Trueke and the Friendly Hippies I Found There

Things have been pretty mellow around here, just working my butt off and trying to have some fun in the in-between spaces. In the latter effort I have been taking pictures of the few friends I'm able to see these days. In the following pictures you'll see me with Pamela and Lupita in my kitchen (in two lovely portraits with microwaves and water heaters...in which you should also note that my hair has grown long enough to put in two awkward-tiny french-braids! Though I will be the first to admit my lack of braiding skills, resulting in very weird hair situations sometimes), Alfredo (who recently learned to wrap a turban, much to his delight and much to my amusement at his colour choices... and in this photo is featured with a living example of how Mexico City is the public-make-out capital of the Universe) and Marcos, with whom we discovered a freakish double-banana at the corner store, which required a proper digital portrait.

This is Hacienda Mixiuhca's first trip into the wide world: yesterday some hippie group put up a little one-day-only bartering market in my hood, so I dropped in after school (would have brought some plants and participated but I saw on the Internets that you had to be "registered" to participate-- lame!). Anyway I dropped in, as I said, saw the middle-aged guy that runs the cooperative coffee shop near Jamaica, and met some kids who live in this crazy 6-story co-op in a squathouse in a nice neighborhood, with about thirty people, called Chanti-Ollin, which is Nahuatl (language of the Aztecs and related linguistic groups) for something like "Living Movement". They have composting toilets, gardens, bike-powered technology and other bitchin' projects. Worth checking out if you're a domie (or post-domie, though I say that once a domie, you're always a domie, so there's no such thing as an ex-domie, with very few exceptions). Anyway, the point is that I'm finding some good sources of anti-civilization vibes, sweet urban resistance projects, etc...

And then I talked to some kids who live in the Honorable National House for Students, which is a co-op, and houses kids from other states who come to study in the Federal District and have limited financial resources and they have a big hydroponics project on their roof. I visited them today, so the photos you see here are from that particular place. It was built in 1911 for that same purpose, but it, like any co-op, has gone through some rough moments in its history. Regardless, it seems in good spirits today. It's located in the infamous neighborhood of Tepito, a region of beautiful and dilapidated colonial architecture, pirated (insert any noun here)s, and the most barrio of the barrios of Mexico City, supposedly. I've never been scared in Tepito, but I've never been scared anywhere in the city, to be totally truthful. Regardless, it's supposed to be very dangerous. I must emphasize, however, that Tepito is NOT a "ghetto." Ghetto implies an isolation, a desperation, that comes with having no economy. Tepito is a buzzing economic microcosm of illegal everything, but very successful, despite the endemic poverty and rampant violent crime, robberies and other such delights. Anyway, so you squeeze between some street stands selling backpacks and batteries and keychains and other sundries, and knock on the beautiful and seriously degraded old (and gargantuan) wooden door. One of the locks is missing so you can see right in through a sort of accidental peephole. Figures move around within, in the sunlit entryway. The doorframe is a marvelous carved stone affair with images of various disciplines, which you can see in their photostream, which is pretty cool. There's a small plaque at 3m above the ground, that declares the building, buried though it is in a mess of informal commerce, the historic institution that it is (actually, it has been declared a Historical Monument by the National Institute of Anthropology and History). A bespectacled boy with a ponytail answers the door. I explain I met some of his housemates at the Barter Market in Mixiuhca and that I wanted to see their hydroponics project. I indicated that I had brought some seedlings to make it worth their time. He told me he was already headed that way and invited us in. He took us up to the tippy-top terrace, a wiggly-floored brick affair with a view of countless concrete rooves and the plants that grow in their accumulated muck, water cisterns, and two or three old church bell towers. On the kneewall of the terrace were small paintings of mushrooms and things with wings. A collection of tomato seedlings sat around in pots of dirt on one side, and a plastic-enclosed hydroponic system hid behind them. It's constructed of a series of 4-inch PVC pipe with holes in the top. Elbows on one end of each pipe permit each to be filled with nutrient solution, and a connector on the other with a 1-inch elbow sticking out permits the water to drain when directed downward, into another 4-inch pipe, that drains the excess downward into some kind of catchment to be reused. It's really cool! They germinate their lettuces in petri dishes and let the seedling grow up in little tiny dixie cups in some kind of mix of coconut husk and vermiculite with what I suspect is humus mixed in there. Then they stick them in little round holes in the top of the 4-inch PVC. It's pretty genius. The kid said the hard part was coordinating people. Yeah, tell me about it (can I get a witness, domies?). But he was really nice for showing us around, and even though he didn't seem to want my plants (though another kid took me up on my offer of basil plants, I learned that eggplant and okra are not too popular). Anyway, so that was that. I hope to see more of those folks, because it seems like an interesting place.

I hope to be able to visit Chanti-Ollin next weekend, so you'll probably be seeing shots of that crowd next week.

Hurbanistorias

Mi Rancho

Well. Here I am, center of the Universe, Mexico City, Mexico. Land of deaf-dumb subway singers, endless environmental disasters, lost lonely people from anywhere else, hundreds of years of history, swank hipster hangouts, yuppie rent-a-bike, one of the richest men in the world, starving drunks, singsong accents, and uncountable other oddities. It's the land of constant stimulus.

I live in a neighborhood called Jardín Balbuena, actually a very pleasant place to exist in the bourough ("delegación") Venustiano Carranza (see map), a block away from the metro station Mixiuhca, across the four-lane Eje 3 Sur from Jardín Balbuena, a big park where they put a big tianguis every Monday and Thursday, where you can find anything from forks to blankets and curtains, 15 peso pants, used digital cameras (and good ones!) to produce, tlacoyos and raw chicken (whole or in pieces!). I'm also within walking distance from the Olympic Velodrome they put up in '68. It's a funny neighborhood because though rent's relatively cheap, we're just a couple blocks from some really nice houses. Must be the screaming of landing airplanes...

My roommates are graphic designers. I actually only know one (the one with his name on the lease), because the other one's been in Guadalajara for the last few weeks apparently. I don't even know that one's name. Well anyway, the one I do know is called Marcos, a very San Francisco boy with rectangular glasses and a sort of reserved demeanour (till you get half a bottle of wine in him anyway). He keeps the place very clean and hangs out with me when I get back from work all grizzled and tired. Smiles a lot.

La Chamba

Oh yes, work. The thing that permits me to stay here... I found a job doing the most obvious thing possible: teaching Ingrish. I'm teaching at a private company in the neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec (=> Cha-pool-teh-PEC), which is kind of like Pacific Heights on a Dubai acid trip, all colonial and modern mansions with jararandas in bloom, shiny cars, and glass-and-steel high rises hovering around. Writhing masses of three-piece suits. But the place I'm working at is by and large okay; my co-workers are funny and interesting, the pay is all right, and I feel like I'm doing something useful.

The Metro is my friend. I clock into work just before 1pm every day except Saturday (when I start at 9am) and Sunday (which is obviously God's day of rest so I don't go to work), so I have to go running out of the house around 12:45. Fall down the stairs, two stories down to the door of my building, sprint across the parking lot/playground (go figure) open the front gate and hundred-yard-dash to the Metro stairs, past the fruit stand with the middle-aged guy who greets me every time ("buenas tardes güera!"), the torta stands, and down into the belly of the Metro, that swallows me up as I slip my ticket into the slim silent mouth of the turnstile, disappear into the gum-on-the-ceiling tunnel that leads me to the other platform, the Tacubaya direction platform, where an orange train will sweep me away to the next stage of my trip. Every morning an adventure, the same vendor selling Danzón CDs (I already bought one, but still I always want to dance when he busts out his Benny Moré and Pérez Prado...). Seven stations later I'm in Tacubaya, scuttling around the twists and turns, following the orange arrows to transfer to Line 7 toward El Rosario. Two stations later there I am in Auditorio, probably the deepest station in the damn Metro system, and I'm bounding up shit-tons of stairs, embarrassingly tired as I reach the top, panting like a dog in the summer, and crawl out into the world and onto my Palmas bus, which ten minutes later has me spilling out onto the sidewalk next to the Iglesia Covadonga and the taquero who greets me every day as he unloads his delicious fare from his truck. "No vas a comer tacos hoy, güera?" "No señor, hoy no puedo, voy con prisa, pero mañana seguro." Crossing Palmas is the last dangerous task of the afternoon (provided I have no kids classes scheduled for the day...) and then I wave through the glass door and Rogelio lets me in with the buzzer-button, usually greeting me with some sassy comment or other.

All images come from the Internets. The station symbols are from the Metro website: http://www.metro.df.gob.mx/ and the map is from Wikipedia (the brains of society...)