The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...

El Viajezote: A Telegraph From The Peninsula

Lost in the Southeast of Mexico STOP Never coming home this place is too awesome STOP I mean you should see the sky here STOP I have been in the most nowhere town in the world and to pyramid central and in fields of mangos and cactus fruit and dug up soil and evaluated it like a real live scientist STOP There will be uploading of a shit ton of photos in a couple of weeks STOP I miss you all and reccomend that we all go live in Yucatán together and sleep in hammocks and do whatever because let's face it it would be awesome STOP

End Message

Ode to Foodstuffs!

I wrote this on: Saturday, 29 August. Why I never posted it I just don't know.

Today I went to the market in Cuauti, because this weekend I am not going to DF, I'm staying in the Estado. This is a photo of a chile relleno I helped Gloria make at home. It is swimming in sauce.

Have I written about the markets yet?

Every neighborhood or town has its own giant indoor market with a million stands inside selling fruit and veggies, or else giant sacks of sugar, flour, nuts, piloncillo, dried beans or what have you. Some stands sell candy (including candied fruit or candied squash or sweet potatoes), others sell spices and sauces, clothes, piñatas, or songbirds, and still others sell meat or seafood or weird witch-doctor remedies (I'll try to bring something good back for Bryan). And all the vendors are barking at you:
“Que vas a llevar, güera?”
“Hay chayote, hay uva, hay mango, hay chile... que le damos, señorita?”
“Pásale amiga! Quieres probar el quesillo? Manchego? Queso panela?”

I want to eat everything.

I find it way harder to decide what I want in this situation than at home. And most of the food's pretty cheap. The only really expensive things are mushrooms and eggplant. Nobody eats eggplant in this country. Anyway, the other thing there is in these spots is lots of places to eat, little tamale-and-atole stands or comida corrida stands.

Let's break this down:

In Mexico we eat a lot of corn. A ton of corn. Tamales, in case you are not familiar, are these delightful breakfast-foods that you should go to the Mission one morning and try. They consist of cornbread, effectively, but steamed, with a filling like rajas (chopped chile in tomato sauce), verde (tomatillo salsa), mole (which is the best sauce ever and has like a million varieties each with a million ingredients) or dulce, which is just where they sweeten the cornbread and dye it pink. They come wrapped in corn leaves, because that's how they hold their shape when they steam them, in these little corn-leaf envelopes. Atole they tend to serve either out of one of those old-school steel milk tanks or out of a giant cylindrical orange Gatorade cooler. Either way it's this delicious drink made from water, milk and corn starch (which dissolves better than you'd think), usually flavored with chocolate, fruit, or rice (with bits of rice in it, it tastes like rice-pudding). If you want to feel full in the morning you have a tamale and an atole and you're good to go. You don't even want to think about eating after that.

Alas, I think about eating pretty much constantly.

Comida corrida is my new way of life. You show up, and it's like a choose your own adventure, or a dichotomous key: Consommé or cream of squash soup? Rice or spaghetti? Chicken in mole or enchiladas in salsa verde? Pineapple or papaya? And your three course meal PLUS fruit PLUS agua fresca PLUS tortillas costs you 25-50 pesos (<5 bucks in any case) depending on where you are. It's genius. And they're usually clean, pleasant little places. I love it. It's a really good way to avoid eating tacos all the time. And as much as I love tacos, they're greasy little buggers. I will hereby give the rundown on a few foods you may not be familiar with Stateside:

HUITLACOCHE
This is actually a pathogen of corn: it's a fungus that infects the kernels but it's quite tasty and black... It's really good in quesadillas.

ESQUITES y ELOTES
There are little corn on the cob / corn off the cob stands everywhere. They put mayo (which normally I don't like but I can make a big exception for esquites and elotes) chile powder, lime and this odd powdery (a la parmesan) cheese on 'em and it's so damn tasty. You can ask for them roasted or boiled, too.

FLOR DE CALABAZA
Squash blossoms. My mom puts them in risotto sometimes. They're great in quesadillas. If you don't kknow what a squash blossom looks like you need to get your booty outside more often.

CHAYOTE

This is a kind of squash which in the US is sold in individual little plastic bags. It's tasty and the texture is way better than normal squash.

GUANÁBANA and CHIRIMOYA

Eating these is like eating custard. Try to find it somewhere. It's also a delicious flavor for popsicles. I bet they have guanábana popsicles in the Mission. There's a lovely Son Jarocho song about a guanábana.

MAMEY

This is the king of fruits as far as I'm concerned: it reminds me of an avocado in the sense that it has a tough skin and a sort of creamy texture. The skin is brown and leathery, and the meat it bright orange and super sweet and delicious. It makes an EXCELLENT ice cream or smoothie flavor. This I am certain does not exist in our country. I learned that this is without exception NOT a plantation crop; all mamey growers are small-scale, backyard type growers. I got to encounter a mamey tree when I was in Chiapas last year. It was pretty awesome: it's a huge tree and the fruit drops to the ground and if it splits when it lands they leave it there and these giant green butterflies, like the size of your hand, come and slurp up the orange innards... it was so pretty. I have never seen this fruit in the States. Everything else on this list I'm sure exists somewhere but I have seen no evidence that there is or has ever been a mamey in the US. I am going to start a mamey plantation in Florida or Socal or somewhere like that and get super rich. Just you wait and see.

LICUADOS

Smoothies. It's just that here they throw fruit, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon, along with oats or granola or nuts if you like in a blender and you get about a liter of it (a quart, if you're one of the older folks reading this...) for less than 2 bucks.

TEJOCOTE
It's like a little yellow apple, but with more flavor than a yellow apple, and an orangier color. It's starchy like an apple and sweet. It's the principal ingredient of the drink they call “ponche,” which is kind of an hot apple-cider kind of drink they make around Christmas.

Acting up and Getting out

1. Luz y Fuerza

2. “Fin de Cuentos, es Gringo, y Piensa Como Gringo...”

3. La Marcha y Tlatelolco

4. Indiana Jonesing It

There's a big stink getting made right now over the government shutdown of the power company Luz y Fuerza. Evidently they're trying to implement a scheme wherein some Spanish company is going to own or run the power supply. I am not totally sure of all the details... remind me to look this up. There's a lot of conflict about it, because apparently it was poorly run, but if there's one thing they hate in Mexico, it's Spain owning their shit. And Mexico produces a ton of electricity, in large part from hydroelectric dams. I get the impression that most people here are very nationalistic and would rather put up with poor electrical service than give it over to Spanish people. Which isn't to say that these are the only two options. Clearly they could just change the way they manage the company but this is what I was mentioning in my brief spiel about Calderón, that rata de dos patas who is the president right now, the neoliberal honky-loving traitor. Or that's how he's generally described here. In any case, cool logo, huh? http://www.sme.org.mx/

Speaking of which, they say Obama won the Nobel Prize. Shit, if all it takes to win the Nobel Prize is to NOT be Bush, I ought to get one too. A man in the combi this morning summed it up very gracefully as he talked loudly on his damn cell phone: “What gives?? They've got their troops in Afghanistan, in Iraq and god knows where else. What it comes down to is no matter what color he is, he's still a gringo and he thinks like a gringo. This is total bullshit.”

Two weeks ago, on 2 October, my buddy Peyote (that's his nickname anyway-- he's one of the kids with the funny hairdos et al) invited me to a protest, and I said, well, I'll have to check in with my prof, but she's an activist type so I think she'll be cool with me missing class for such an event. And I'll be damned if I didn't go to her office to turn in my homework and receive the response, “Oh, the 2 de Octubre March? You can't miss that. It's super important...” and she recounted the whole history of it and the whole, when I was in school, schpiel... It was sweet. So my buddy ran around school looking for the banners and such: “FES CUAUTITLÁN / INGENIERÍA AGRÍCOLA RESISTE!” If I find a place to scan negs, I'll post the photos. For the time being I have this image I snatched off another blog. I think it's an appropriate poster because it includes a photo from '68.

Brief tragic interlude: the stripiness of the photos has become an illegible blur. I'm so sorry I messed up your camera mom. When I come home I'll get it repaired. Though maybe I can get it fixed for cheaper here-- actually this is one of the things I've noticed, is that since people ACTUALLY repair things instead of chucking them and buying a new one, repairing stuff is fairly cheap. Maybe I'll bring your old SLR down here for fixin' since mister Hungarian fella doesn't want to do it. Long story short + back on topic → I'm taking film photos these days.

So about 15 of us went dashing out of school two hours later than expected, about 6 from Agrícola and the rest from Veterinaria. We jumped a crowded bus to Metro Politécnico and waited about half an hour for the right micro to pass by , and went tromping along about a half hour on foot to catch up to the march. We squeezed in between a high school (“prepa”) contingent and another FES campus, Aragón, and commenced to march. The scene was nuts: more people than you can shake a stick at, to say the least. I think you'd need a few hundred thousand sticks if you wanted to efficiently shake sticks at all of them, though I'm not really sure why we want to shake sticks at people, can anyone explain that phrase to me? Neima? You were always good with that. Who am I kidding, Neima's not reading my blog. Anyway, There were so many so many SO MANY cops. Lines, formations, streams, rivers of cops in full riot gear along the streets we marched through. I lot of citizen-onlookers too, but my god are cops menacing. Supposedly the reason is that there's always vandalism, and I definitely saw a bunch of vandalism, but then again, there's always vandalism... I would say the main reason was intimidation. After being tear-gassed for no particular reason, I now have an opinion on the matter. In any case the student-cop relationship was the theme of the day, and I believe it's the theme of the day every October 2. The crowd's chanting was revealing: “Hay que 'studiar, hay que 'studiar, él que no estudia policía va'llegar...” (“Kid study up, study up—if you don't stay in school you might wind up a cop...”). There was also the UNAM school cheer, the famous GOYA: “Goya, goya, cachun cachun rra rra, cachun cachun rra rra-- Goya, Universidad!” which unofficially ends with the cheer, “Pública, gratuita y para todos!!” (Public, free, and for everyone!) … and in the march even this was modified to, “Pública, gratuita y sin porros/puercos!” (Public, and free of cops/pigs!”). So that sets the stage for me to explain the past a bit. The block print is a pretty famous image now. The artist is Adolfo Mexiac.

Disclaimer: I am going to make it clear that I myself am not involved with any politics. My purpose in going to the march was to see what it was like, take some pictures and nosh on some food for thought.

Now on to my historical diatribe: if you want a more accurate version you should read “The Night of Tlatelolco” by Elena Poniatowska. If you want the Cat version, read on...

So in the '60s there was actually stuff going on outside of Berkeley, believe it or not. In fact, at the National University (UNAM) and The Polytechnic Institute (“Poli”) were just full to the brim with activists. Now in '68, the Olympics were a-coming to Mexico city and the government was busy trying to pretty up the face of the country and sweep all its “social problems” (read also: poor people and pissed off students) under the rug. Well, the pissed off students wound up in a conflict with police on campus (though there is a law against police entering the campus) and I believe they ended up slaughtering a number of students in that scuffle, but afterwards when the students organized an enormous protest in a historically important plaza called Tlatelolco, or the Plaza of the Three Cultures (the three cultures being Aztec, Spanish and Mexico) represented by the presence of an unearthed Aztec city, the Catholic cathedral built with the stones from its ruins, and the ugly '50s style apartment buildings all around. Okay, so that's the spot. But get a few tens of thousands of students piled in there in a time of political tension and what results is a massacre. Probably a couple hundred students were assassinated or “disappeared” (which is the term in many Latin American countries for “kidnapped by the government, tortured and killed without a trace”), though the official government numbers are around 40. There were snipers on the apartment roofs, and assaults all around the plaza. Anyway, so every year, that's what the Marcha is all about. October 2, 1968. And still the Olympic Games went on. It's worth mentioning that the Olympics that year saw a political message from the US players-- there were two runners, gold and bronze medalists, who had the guts to rep the black panthers on the stage thingy that they put the winners on. I think that's pretty inspiring. I'll have to look more into their story and what happened to them thereafter because of course I forgot.

So that's your Mexican history lesson for the day. Let's get back to the present for a minute...

Pamela's boyfriend is an Indiana Jones fan, and I think that's how we wound up climbing a random mountain this weekend. I met up with Pame at the church in Cuautitlán and from there we found a micro headed for Tepotzotlán. A bumpy half-hour later we were at the church in Tepo, and we went wandering a spell before winding up in the museum. The story goes that the church was a seminary school, and the place is huuuuuge. It's hard to navigate, with lots of stairs and gardens and hallways and creepy paintings of child angels. The main sanctuary is very impressive though, all sculpted walls drowned in gold-leaf, right up to the 20-meter-high cupula-ed ceilings. Anyway, we were wandering around and we ran into Pame's boyfriend who was looking for us. He's a good-looking guy with a goatee and slicked-back hair and a feather tied to the hair at the base of his head. Anyway we go up to the lookout deck of the ex-convent and we're looking at the view when Humberto points off in the distance. “Hey guys, what do you think of climbing that mountain?” Yeah, sure, why not. How do we get there? “Well, I think we just walk that way.” So we took off, stopping for provisions (a cup of coffee, a snickers bar and two liters of water) and the town dwindled around us and disappeared into the country, and as we climbed the foot of the mountain and the high-tension power-lines loomed above the wildflowers, we took a look around with great gusto and pushed ahead into the spiny frontier: dogs with spiny teeth, cactus with spiny spines, huizache with spiny thorns... the red tunas are ripening on the wild nopales, and I started to miss Davis, thinking of the times I went tuna-robbing in the arbo with Tom, with Jordan, with Chris Salam. Looking back at the shrinking town of Tepotzotlán I felt a little better. Be here now, right? Crazy giant spiders were waiting in their crazy giant webs to freak us out and get caught in our hair, on our legs, on our faces... Humberto and I are both somewhat arachniphobic and so the sounds of our cussing (in Spanish and English respectively) echoed over the mountainside as Pamela quietly laughed at us and took note of my groserías for future utility... as the dusk drew creepily near and we were still a ways from the top, we took a moment to contemplate our options. Do we keep going, and possibly get caught by darkness and rain? Or do we turn back, get ourselves a nice elote (corn on the cob that they sell on street corners, eaten corn-dog style, which is to say on a stick, usually covered in lime juice and chile powder) and a dry place to have a nice sit? Well, you know how it goes. Spiders, darkness, snakes, coyote-poo and rain be damned! We will make it as close to the top as convenience allows!! So we split the snickers bar in three, ate it with determination, slurped some water, and marched ever forth. The view from the top was pretty sick. We weren't all the way at the top, but we made it to the base of a sheer rock face, which we attempted without success to scale (partially because falling meant basically landing on an iron maiden of overgrown wild nopales (→ big spines) and huizache (→ mean thorns). We scrambled down the mountain as night fell, wandering back into town, eating a nice elote and floating back home on janky bumpy buses.

The above photos are of stencils I liked.

The end!

IN TRANSIT: now with statistical analysis!

I walk a couple hundred yards to the main road, the mighty Carreterra Cuautitlán-Teoloyúcan. Here pass all the camiones (buses), micros (short-buses) and combis (volkswagen vans), which go to many useful places, but mostly to Cuautitlán and Teoloyucan... however, there are also quite a few that take the high road to the autopista (freeway) and go to other useful places, like the CITY. So if I'm going to school, I look for the Cuauti-bound micros, which I know are Cuauti-bound because there's a little placard in the window that says CUAUTI, and usually other useful details like XHALA FESC-4 , which is my school: Xhala is the town, and FESC is the school, and 4 refers to it being Campus 4. There are several other campuses of the FESC scattered around the area. I haven't been to any of them; I doubt their as cool as Campo Cuatro. Anyway, so the transit guy is waving on cars, hollering, whistling and taking notes. He sees me, waves, and stops all traffic so I can pass, like he does every single day, and we greet each other, just like every single day, and he asks me where I'm going. I tell him I'm off to Metro Toreo. So I look for the camion with the placard that says M TOREO. I will mention that this is confusing, because the station is actually called Cuatro Caminos. This comes with a funny story. Pamela is from a town about an hour out of the city, but about two hours from school. Anyway, I met up with her, Jacobo and a couple other friends the other day because there was a forestry expo in the city we wanted to go to (it fits to mention that in Mexico, it's the agricolitos that are entrusted with the nation's forests-- I guess it's a bit like how the Forest Service is a part of the USDA). I'd already figured out the Toreo-Cuatro Caminos equivalency because I had taken this bus before, found myself at Cuatro Caminos, and upon scouring the Metro map realized that there was no station called Toreo. Clearly, when the bus says TOREO, it means Cuatro Caminos. So I was cool with that already. But we get there and Pamela and I are waiting on Jacobo. I call him and he says, “Okay, so somehow I wound up at Cuatro Caminos, and I'm trying to figure out how to get to Toreo...” and I say, “Dude, no sweat, you're already here! Come find us at the turnstyle!” I tell the girls, he's already in Cuatro Caminos, he'll be here in a couple minutes. Pamela gives me a funny look and goes, “Where's Cuatro Caminos?”. The buses all say TOREO, but on the maps and in the station it only says Cuatro Caminos: there is no means of translation except personal experience. That's how confusing the damn transit is here. I love it, it's so unnecesarily complex...

Anyway so I get on the bus and I say, “Good morning! I'm going to Toreo.” And if the driver says 15 pesos, I give him a funny look and say, isn't there a student discount? And he thinks for a second and says, “12 pesos,” or “13 pesos”, depending on his mood. They're all men, sorry ladies. So I've saved nearly 20 cents. The guy gives me my change (on the camiones, micros and combis they give you change, and also on the peseros in the city. The only type of transit that won't make change are the new RTP buses in the city, but at 2 pesos per ride, who can complain?).

There are a few important characteristics of these big suburban buses that one ought to recognise:
1.They fuck up your handwriting because the roads suck
2.Jesus decals, 100 percent of the time
3.Playboy bunny details, approximately 56 percent of the time
4.Loud radio 95% of the time
1.Cheesy pop, 10% of total loud radio
2.Disco, 5%
3.Salsa, 15%
4.Norteña, 65%
5.Other, 5%
5.People get on board and try to sell you stuff (about a quarter of the time its to benefit their AA branch or drug-recovery institution)
1.Candy and peanuts 45%
2.Potato chips with Tapatio-type salsa 8%
3.Gelatin/Flan 14%
4.Motivational books 3%
5.Religion 30%

“Te han asaltado?” is a question I'm asked with relative frequency. I am aware of such events having befallen my friends and acquaintances. In Oswaldo's case (don't you love his name?!) he was walking home from the bus stop after dark. They took his wallet and cell phone and he was kind of shaken up. In the case of Itzel, Lili and Gloria, their bus was indeed jacked. This leads to the point, which is that in fact the big janky buses do from time to time get assaulted. They say the key is to keep your backpack out of sight and keep a 20-peso note in your pocket to hand off to whoever is doing the assaulting. At night the combis are perfectly safe (because it's super hard to rob people if you can't even stand up all the way, and furthermore it's not worth your trouble to rob 1-8 people. They say the Metro is super safe at night too, because there's security cameras and stuff. I'm not totally sure that security cameras really make anything safer, but whatever.

One last anecdote before I go to class: I got on a micro bound for Metro Politécnico one aftern oon, and as the sun was setting we stopped at a gas station to pick up a whole bunch of passengers. The sky was all colors and drama, and I was standing up in the back of the bus, when the rear doors open and somebody starts to get on. I turn around to take a look and it is Jesus Christ, stepping onto the bus in his long robes, angelic pained expression and uplifted hand. After a half-second freakout I realize that it's a life-size wooden statue being shoved onto the bus by a skinny kid of maybe 16. I am still totally confused but completely happy to spend the rest of my bus ride standing next to Jesus, suffering the same pothole-ridden roads and abuses of inertia as everyone else. I tried to take some pictures but it was impossible to do so subtly and they turned out awful. But that's my bus story. Cómo ves...

Danza Lika You Meanit, or, Time to Get Ill, or, Viva México, Cabrones!

This is a more elaborate version of the last post, with various other temporally-related events thrown in. Photos will be uploaded when the Internet sucks less.

I'll start with Friday. Friday was the Feria Agrícola. All last week everyone was asking me, are you going? Are you going? And me, like, “well, if it's AT school, I can hardly be expected to avoid it!”. But everyone kept inviting me anyway, and it was very nice of them. So what they do is they put up a big tent in the courtyard you surely recall from last post's photos and lay out some big tables and all the first year kids sit at the tables and there's one table for some professors they gave honors to, and then they feed as many people as possible (professors and first-years first, or course). There was agua de jamaica (ha-MY-kah: hibiscus juice... super tasty and good for your kidneys. If you've never tried it, go to the Mission right now [for those Davis kids—when I say “Mission” replace it with “El Mariachi” because it's the closest we've got: even if they don't have whatever thing I'm sending you out for, the owner Victor is really nice and would probably explain it to you]) rice, nopalitos, and this dish called mixiotes (GPG: mee-SHYO-teys) which consists, in its 21^st century format anyway, of chicken and onions and potato in this delicious orange sauce whose flavor I just couldn't place... a couple kids from every “generation” were chosen to give speeches and honors and such... and there was a Danza. What on earth is a Danza? (GPG: DAHN-sah) Well, there's a group of kids on campus who do prehispanic ritual dance, specifically taken from the Mexica (who you may also remember as the Aztecs) and they make an offering to some of the big-deal gods, Tlaloc and the like, and burn incense (specifically a native Mexican resinous wood called copal [co-PAL]) and do this elaborate gratitude number toward each of the four rumbos (cardinal directions), each of which represents a different element (not like the periodic table-- think Captain Planet) and they trumpet on conch shells and then everyone starts danza-ing and they're all dressed up and one guy is on the huge wooden drum with the sheepskin on top... it's pretty cool.

Oh, I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that not everyone reading this blog is a stereotypical gringo, and I think of this because of my Gringo Pronunciation Guide. I just want to make sure the reading field is level and that there isn't anybody (read also: my mom...) who is left scratching their heads. In light of which comment I want also to acknowledge that my mom left a message on our answering machine in very well-pronounced Spanish. Good work, you've come a long way since I was in Sinaloa!

So then I have to go to the lab (which was going to start at 12, and then it was going to start at 2, but in reality-world it wound up starting at 4:30 because the prof is a little nutty-- totally knowledgeable and charming but kind of a space cadet sometimes). Anyway we get out of lab at 6:30 and the prof goes, well, I'll see you at El Depo, and of course we all get a good laugh out of that (El Depo is the janky bar where they were having the Feria Agrícola after-party dance hall thingy). Pame and I went with her boyfriend to eat something before shipping out for the Depo with Mara and Richie and I'll be damned if we didn't show up just as our professor squeezes out of the dancefloor all sweaty and beaming with his wife. We got a REALLY good laugh out of that one... Anyway, we're not there ten minutes when somebody grabs me by the hand and drags me to the dance floor-- I don't even know the guy, even though I've seen him around. Tall, awfully cute, and I tell him, look, I can't dance to save my life, and it turns out he's super drunk and goes, whatever, that doesn't matter, here we go! And in fact he's a pretty good dancer but a horrible English speaker, as I discovered when he commenced to speak to me in very broken English upon learning that I was the Gringa. But I wound up dancing for like an hour with various friends and vague acquaintances, and it was really fun despite half of it being Norteña (the music that makes me want to silently take out tuba-ists in the night). I didn't even have time to drink a drop. Mara and I left at about 8:45 because her last bus passes at 9 and I went to keep her company.

But that's not all! That Saturday, I got to go visit Irak! He called me one afternoon when I was hanging around in the Agrícola student cubicle with Pame and a second-year kid they call Peyote (one of the alternative-looking kids, I'd say the one with the weirdest looking hairdo: short little dreads on top and back of his head, short on the sides, with a very Poki looking beard going on chinwise and chopwise). Anyway the student cubicle is pretty neat, with a big old banner that says something like “Ingeniería Agrícola: RESISTENCIA” and a mural in progress on the walls, plus old posters from Otra Campaña and traditional medicine festivals. I learned later that there is a rivaling cubicle which is directly below the one with the murals and is very orderly and such... Anyway, so Irak called to let me know he published a book of his poems and that he was going to have a reading and gosh it would be nice if I came. So I went. It was at this yoga studio in Ixtapalapa, not far from Metro Ermita. There was music and Irak's whole family was there... and his poetry was very pretty. But the funniest part was when Gabriel, the fella who gave a lecture in my Mexican history class about indigenous resistance in Puebla, showed up. I was like, man, I'm certain that's the interesting lecture guy. I kind of want to talk to him, but I feel so awkward. So eventually I went inside for a coffee (they were selling coffee) and he was there and stopped me and said, hey, don't I know you? And I said, yeah, you gave a talk to my class. Anyway, we talked for a while and it was super chill. We exchanged contact information, but haven't made contact since. C'est la vie. The coincidence is worth it.

The following Sunday I went to visit my friend Laura in the town of Tepeji del Rio in Hidalgo. Mara and I took 3 buses in order to get there, and it was a beautiful post-rainy-night day and Laura lives in this idyllic little house with her mom. They have a pretty garden and a little orchard and a pregnant sheep and a puppy... we went for a hike in the hills looking for turtles and bugs in the river amongst the nopales and huizache trees...

Of course I woke up the next morning SICK AS A DOG. I got the flu pretty hardcore. It sucked because Tuesday was Independence day and of course I couldn't get out of bed. I let myself get super dehydrated and wound up at the doctor's office... needless to say there was no Grito for me this year.

..But I'm better now! I have a bunch of posts queued up so you should expect to see this blog get updated a bunch in the near future.

Viva México, or Time to Get Ill

This is a mini-post to prove I'm not dead.

It's the season to squeeze everyone into the Zocalo, drink a ton of pulque, and scream "viva México!" at the top of your lungs. It's independence day. Or it was last Tuesday. Really it was Wednesday the 16th, but you do all the celebrating the day before. Then at 11pm (it was modified to coincide with Porfirio Diaz's birthday) everyone gives the "Grito", which is to say he screams "viva México". I was going to go to a house party but instead I went and got super sick and spent the whole time in bed. I watched the grito in the zocalo with the fam on TV. The president gets all dressed up, rings the bell in the Palacio Nacional, gives a little spiel and then screams "viva México". Everyone hates the president, Felipe Calderón, because he was supposedly illegitimately elected and he's got super neoliberal politics, and it's pretty much universally agreed upon here that neoliberalismand election fraud are bad. He's kind of like Bush. They need an Obama I think.

I've been missing home a lot lately, which hasn't been negatively affecting my life as much as you'd think, but still it's pretty lame. So... enjoy California for me, okay?