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.

More Adventures on the Peninsula and Under the Gulf

The world is clouding over again; 4 days of gorgeous sun and running around, but all things must pass, as a great English coleopteran once said.

Back to business...

Part 3 Cont'd: QUINTANA ROO

Moving along from Pet-cakab, we went to see a parcel of pitahaya, commonly known in Gringolandia as ''dragonfruit''. It's a cactus, but in vine format, and they grow it on giant posts. The parcel was owned by a little old lady, and the soil was red.

Part 4: YUCATÁN

A kid from Mérida once told me that the best hammocks are Yucatecan hammocks, and that was the first thought on my mind rolling into Pisté, Yucatan in the afternoon. After food. Because food is always first... so a few of us went out to find food. There are a couple of typical dishes we tried, one being cochinita pibil which is like pulled pork in a delicious sauce, and sopa de lima, which uses a fruit similar to the meyer lemon for flavor in a tomatoey brothy soup with meat and vegetables. After food came the hammock search. Well, I'll go ahead and tell you that there's not a whole lot in Pisté, just motels and tourist shops, and in one of them I found a beautiful cotton hammock and sat around chatting with the little old shopowner, who lowered the price a bit for me (or that was his claim), but it seemed reasonalble at about 25 bucks so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Later, the lot of us went to Chichen-Itza for the Espectáculo de Luz y Sonido, which I very much do not reccomend, because though it's cool to see pyramids at night, they don't let you wander around, they just sit you in one spot and talk at you with colorful lights.

The following day we went to see a henequen (sisal, as it's often called) hacienda called Hacienda Sotuta. We did the whole tour, which included a walk around the giant beautiful Spanish-tile laden, wooden-furnished house, and a ride on the little donkey-pulled carts they used in the old days to move the henequen around. Henequen is funny, it's an agave that they use for fiber, so after cutting off the oldest leaves, they bundle them, move them, unbundle them, smash them, brush out the fibre and dry it, then they make twine and rope and such things out of it. It's incredibly strong material.

This photo of a little old man I took outside the

hacienda, where he was selling his peeled oranges: I'm including it in the blog because he has this cool little springloaded orange lathe which is what he uses to peel them! Fun machines!

Part 5: TABASCO

Ah, Tabasco, land of mosquitos and chocolate. We arrived in Comalcalco in the late afternoon, at the house of a friend of the professors. We were to camp on his porch and in his backyard in his outskirtsy and pleasant town. This friend studied with them at the University in the '70s, but two years ago he got multiple sclerosis and now he's paralyzed from the neck down, in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. But he chatted with us students, and even gave us a little motivational speech on our last night at his house. It was pretty incredible.

We spent three days in the chocolate orchards, looking at problems with diseases, learning about exports, and of course, the process of making chocolate, which is one of the most amazing-smelling things I have smelt in my life.
The cacao tree gets to be about 5m tall maximum (COMMENT: THE CACAO PHOTOS ARE

NOT MINE, I STOLE THEM FROM THE VAST BELLY OF THE INTERNETS), though often it's pruned shorter. There are various varieties, but supposedly the most precious and cocoa-

butter-rich is the creole cacao. It's native to Mexico, and traditionally made into drinks, such as polvillo, a mix of ground cacao, cinnamon and toasted corn. It's delicious... Tabasco is the most important state in cacao production, but Oaxaca appears to be more important inasmuch as the production of chocolate (processed cacao). Let's see, it grows in giant pods, or 'cobs' on the

trunk of the tree, and these pods house about 20-ish seeds per, which are surrounded by a fleshy white pulp that tastes a bit like

a litchi. These seeds are dried in the sun, or fermented,

these processes producing different flavors. Normally the fermented grains are mixed with the dried grains to get a nice mix of smooth and 'robust' flavors. I ought

to mention that it's a shade plant, so they plant a variety of nurse trees, usually banana when the cacao are saplings, later establishing leguminous trees and mangoes, chico sapote (chicle, or gum tree) or other species to not only shade the cacao but also provide other sources of income.

Finally, I'm going to make mention of a tree worth mentioning, the noble ceiba, of which there are several examples in the UCD Botanical Conservatory (though they pale in comparison to the real deal in its rainforest wonderland...). This is a ceiba portrait I took in Palenque.