some things about Mexico

Noise

Mexican life is loud. Music comes from every shop, every house, every taxi. It´s not unusual to see massive sound systems in supermarkets, corner shops, hairdressers and particularly in pharmacies. The pharmacies of San Cristobal de las Casas give the local nightclubs a run for their money as dusk descends and they crank up the banda music. They even put on a light display and there is a guy permanently stationed outside, dancing in a huge foam costume in the sun. People shout at one another over the racket and cars have to honk especially loudly to warn pedestrians bewildered by conflicting dance tunes. When you visit the mayan sites, the guides like to demonstrate the amazing ancient acoustics by making more racket, giving ostentatious displays of clapping, and Mexican tourists warm to the idea and bellow to their infirm, grounded relatives from the tops of the temples. Take a video of us standing still on top of this pile of rubble, mama. It´ll make great viewing back for the folks back home. Merida was quite possibly the noisiest city on earth, the hubbub amplified by the cavernous avenues, great corridors conducting sound, and the cobbled streets.


Mexican conversations
There is a definite pattern to the conversations I have had in Mexico. Most of these have been with taxi drivers or men who have fallen into step with me walking down some city street. This seems to be how my interlocuters have approached things:
Establish nationality
Establish level of Spanish comprehension
Establish suitable level of appreciation for present location
Discuss linguistic ineptitude of Anglophone visitors and importance of having a go at the beautiful, and widely spoken Spanish language
Issue proposal of marriage
Issue proposal of polygamous marriage
Optional - congratulate Dan on his general good fortune
Obtain assurance of Meso-American cultural superiority
Proceed with business of selling hammock/poncho/garishly coloured sombrero

Mexican pavements
Lethal death traps. A way of keeping the population at reasonable levels. Obviously not working in Mexico City but if they can get rid of a few flip-flop wearing tourists, then all to the good. Sometimes, if you stand at the edge of the pavement at a crossroads, on the part that slopes to the road, you slide all the way into the gutter. As it´s now officially the rainy season, the situation has reached one of constant peril. All our shoes are useless in the face of the greasy, slick marbled walkways. We cling to each other as we stagger around the towns, hoping if we fall, we´ll land in a friendly fruit stall and not in the great, suspiciously grey lakes the streets have become.
And the pavements are so uneven, so narrow, so full of junk and rubble and stray, unsightly animals. Do you look at the exotic Mexican buildings, or keep your eyes to your feet? Last week we saw a dead kitten on the pavement, laid out as if sleeping, drying out in the sun.

The wildlife
I´ll start with the exotic. Iguanas. I´m not a huge fan of reptiles but can cope with lizards if they are small and not touching my feet. Have positively affectionate feelings towards geckos, they made good companions in South East Asia. I appreciate the iguana, it is a strange and fine creature. They do like to hang out near ruins, nonchalantly creeping out the tourists. At the Mayan ruins at Uzmal, there are more iguanas than tourists, or so you´d like to think. More iguanas than the plastic bottles left behind by the tourists. They lie in the sun, stick themselves to the trunks of trees, sit on the temple steps, and skitter about when the tourists come near. They move as if they´re trying to make everyone around them laugh, opposite front and back leg off the ground at the same time and then a quick change and for a second, it seems like they´re completely airborne. You might come across the end of a tail, sticking out of a crack in a temple wall. Sometimes it will have an owner as the discarded ones dry quicky in the sun. So much bigger is man and so much scarier than an iguana. But my instinct tells me otherwise and I wouldn´t hesitate to use Dan as a ladder if one came too near me. He said he saw one as long as his arm, and as fat as the burritos we ate in San Francisco. I wasn´t looking, but I practised my bunny hop to make sure I could perform the piggy back when the time came. In Tulum, they´ve the biggest iguanas of all the ruinas or so I overheard someone say at breakfast one day.

For something more domestic, there are dogs, in great numbers. Mainly mangy, flea-ridden creatures, all destined to be harbingers of rabid doom in weeks to come. All exhausted by life in Mexican cities and so seen in various states of collapse in the middle of the road, under cars, on roofs. Those that are not exhausted are all evil rotweiler/doberman/dog of hell crosses, guarding private places with all their might, and certainly, every last bit of bark. All these dogs follow me. We´ve regularly tried to outwalk a mangy mutt, but they always reappear, lurking nearby, stopping by our bench to lick their nether regions or sniffing at the backs of our ankles at a bus stop.

Chamula

It can be tough being a woman if you come from San Juan de Chamula. So said our guide during our tour of the village, one of the most distinctive indigenous villages outside San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

When you´re very young you get taught the basic womanly tasks you´ll need to be a good daughter and a good wife, like how to make tortillas, how to make your highly distinctive costume, how to make copies of your highly distinctive costume to sell to the tourists that come to Chamula to look at you. You wear this costume as soon as you can walk, the black woollen skirt as thick and rough as a sheep´s hide, and the shiny, embroidered blouse that all the foreign ladies covet. You also learn how to weave brightly coloured ribbons in your hair. Your brothers might be tearing around the village in jeans, t-shirts, like their fathers, but women keep to the traditions of dress, and some make their livelihoods out of this.

When you reach puberty, your parents might start to barter with other parents for a good marriage. A man in the village might like you, but instead of approaching you and courting you, instead of allowing for the tedious business of love, his parents make an offer. If it´s good, you are sold. There is no marriage in Chamula, even though devotion to traditional catholicism as it is called is a pre-requisite for living here. Traditional catholicism in these parts is unlike the incense and hail mary stuff in the rest of the Catholic world. The great church in town rarely sees ceremony other than baptism, there are no priests, no pews, no sacred spaces off limts to worshippers. People come at all times of the day to clear a space amongst the pine needles that cover the floor, and light candles to heal their sick. The church is a hospital and people will come here before they consult doctors. They consult healers instead who pray with them, and who use chickens or eggs to cure their clients. Every worshipper has a bottle of something fizzy with them, often Coca Cola. Burping is pretty holy here, and you can burp out your sins much more effectively with Coke than with the blue corn water people used to use. Those that embrace new religions, or no religion, are thrown out of the village. The women that wear woollen shirts in San Cristobal have most likely been expelled from Chamula as followers of evangelical protestanism - not protestantism as such, just not Chamula´s way of doing things.

It´s important to marry early and provide children. As you reach your late twenties you are considered old, too old for family life. It´s also presumably politic for you to keep tabs on your man, to make sure he´s not lacking much. Polygamy is rife in the village, according to our guide, who does not come from Chamula. It was positively encouraged by the Spanish when they arrived those few centuries ago. Faced with a small, weak population, and thus a potentially weak position politically in Chiapas, they brought women from the capital and from Oaxaca to marry with themselves, and what was left of the local men who hadn´t succumbed to the diseases the Spanish brought with them. If a man wanted more than one wife, then so be it; all the better to repopulate the region. These customs have since fallen out of favour in the region, everywhere but in Chamula. Our guide was adamant the other villages were open-minded. In Chamula people are closed, he said. It is an oasis of convoluted religious practices, social protocols and entirely a law unto itself. The police, the militia, so evident Chiapas have no presence here. The village authorities only just about tolerate outsiders, particularly tourists. Presumably it is too lucrative not to bear them for a while. All tourists must leave the village at six, though. They can´t stay the night here.

If your husband does take an interest in another woman, you might be forced to leave with your children and fend for yourself. This you do by relying on those skills that mothers pass preciously on to their daughters. Cooking, embroidery, making tourist tat to sell in San Cristobal. Your children pound the pavement all day and long into the evening, selling woven belts, zapatista dolls, bags and blouses and sometimes chewing gum and corn on the cob. Industry starts young. Back in the village the men do their thing in their jeans and cowboy hats.

To prove that Chamula is not like any other village, we were taken to Zincantan, a few kms away. Here, a local family showed us round their home, made us some tortillas whilst our guide plied us with the local moonshine. Thus emollified, we were then invited to shop in their back yard and take pictures of the cute children for a few pesos. It was hard to resist - a touch of the Angelina Jolie´s again - and this is one of the results:

Oaxaca

We`ve been in Oaxaca for five days. It`s a gentle, beautiful city. After Mexico City, it`s been a huge relief. There`s obviously something bewitching about the pace of life, or the vivacious, familial atmosphere. Maybe they put something in the tlayudas, the pizza-like tortilla meals you get here - delicious and cheap. Some people say if you eat a few chapulines, or chilli grasshoppers, a local speciality, you`ll lose your heart to the city. We haven´t tried them yet. We`ve heard so many stories of people who came for a week and stayed for six months, people who come back year after year. It`s a big hit with aged Americans, deeply proprietorial and sniffy about backpackers, and Californians in particular who come a little further south than over the border to escape their winter. If we weren`t running out of money, I`d stay here for a while. We could take Spanish lessons in the morning, read or write in our hotel courtyard in the heat of the afternoon, and mooch around the town in the evening, eating prickly pear ice cream. We`re leaving tomorrow. But I want to come back already.


******


My Spanish is experiencing some technical difficulties. I still automatically add Italian prepositions and exclamations to the confusion of everyone. I can`t remember much in the way of verb conjugation, although I´m good with grammatical terminolgy which seems important to me but infuriates Dan. We`ve had a few heated discussions about it and he puts it down to years of formal language learning on my part which has made me inflexible and precious about grammar. He is mostly right. Lecturing Dan on the uses of the preterite and subjunctive tenses might make me feel clever but it doesn`t allow the lady in the local laundry to understand me when I`m making basic, polite inquiries about my washed knickers.

My most sophisticated conversation so far has been with a man in the the Museo de las culturas de Oaxaca. He accosted me in a corridor and embarked on an intense discussion about the richness of Mexican history and culture. I was cornered, but I launched a few randomly remembered preterites and a good deal of Italian vocab at him and we sustained an odd little verbal battle for about 40 minutes.

He spoke minimal English and I spoke minimal Spanish and yet we managed to cover some heavy topics such as comparisons between the ancient Maya and Aztec civilisations and the Romans and the Greeks. But do you have anything like this where you are from, he kept asking me, sweeping his arms to indicate just about everything and anything that enfolded us. The craftmanship and the great cities and the civilasations, I suppose this is what he meant, although he wasn`t specific. He wasn`t satisfied until I`d expressed my incredulity at Mexico`s general fabulousness. No we don`t have anything like this at home. I´ve never seen a zapotec death mask encrusted with a million mosaic pieces of mother and pearl and jade. The civilisations of ancient Britain didn`t, as a general rule, sacrifice hundreds of specially prepared men, women and children to appease their gods, until the steps of the temples and the streets ran red, until the cities stank of death, as London stinks of the tube or drains. We don`t, in short, have Mexico at home. But it`s what you can`t say in those situations that kills you. No, I`ve never seen any of this, but what I have seen and what I do know and all those stories of where I come from, you cannot begin to imagine as I cannot to begin to imagine yours. And so he was the proud Mexican and I was the incredulous foreigner.

He was wearing his work clothes, with the word Bimbo embroidered above his breast pocket. This was distracting. He had a warm, if unsettling smile. I wondered vaguely about his motives in talking to this clearly incoherant foreign woman, trying to give hime the benefit of the doubt. I didn´t want to believe he was just another man interested in my fair skin. So I tried a few times to talk about mi marido to draw some boundaries, Dan having been permanently elevated for the duration of our Mexican stay to the position of husband. This didn´t seem to register, even when I prefaced ever scentence with `mi marido` like some demented stepford wife. Even when Dan crept about in the background, eyeing me pointedly, he carried on with his questioning. But did you ever see the like, do you have all this where you are from? Well, no. This unending, disconcerting, but intriguing form of social interaction, no, I don`t often get the pleasure of this at home.

****



Yesterday, the teachers marched in the centre of town. This was the cause of much trepidation for citizens and for tourists alike. Ever since we decided to come here, last year, we`ve been following the local political situation closely. In the way that we seem to be jinxing every place we visit on this trip (leaving variously, several typhoons, a bush fire, a city riot, two coups, great floods, and even a bombing in our wake) Oaxaca descended into civil unrest shortly after we decided to visit last May. The annual teachers strike coincided with contested national elections and led to several months of barricades and protests and riots with a few molotv cocktails thrown in. It was an unfortunate situation, a tragic situation when you come and fall in love with Oaxaca, and almost impossible to imagine walking these lovely streets full of strolling families. If you look past the prettily painted houses of the centre, you see the town is covered in graffiti, hastily painted over here and there. The night before the demo, handmade posters appeared near the zocalo - Think of Oaxaca, don`t destroy her - Long Live Liberty - the anarchist A. A group of women had been seen carrying placards urging demonstrators to be gentle with the city. We decided to visit the local ruinas the day of the march, to avoid any trouble. When we got back to town, we saw the same strolling families, eating ice cream, cakes, nothing much going in. The march had been and gone. A crowd had mustered and a few men with megaphones had urged them to sing and shout a little but nothing much materialised. A little shuffling of feet, a few half-hearted choruses of a rousing hymn. The cops and the military personnel hidden in side streets so as not to frighted the people. They spent the morning lazing in their open backed trucks in the sun, eating yoghurt, chatting. No big stories to tell of being trapped in a warring provincial city. A huge relief for us, obviously, but then we often think we`re the centre of the universe, when in fact we have no business doing so. A bigger relief for Oaxaca.

my ears are bleeding

how quickly love turns to indifference. or maybe something stronger. All that talk of loving this city and speaking Spanish and all the history. what a day we`ve had in Mexico City. I`m writing this from the youth hostel round the corner from our hotel and there is a band playing hardcore, thrash/death/hellfire and damnation metal so loudly I can feel the base in my belly. i`m not sure if I can think properly. I can`t hear anything but a short mexican guy screaming from the depths of his poor tortured and surely doomed soul. It`s a fitting end to our third, and hopefully last day in Mexico City.

It`s not that we haven`t had fun, seen many wonderful things and eaten some good food. It`s just the low level irritations of walking in the late afternoon downpours in slippery flipflops, never knowing where you`re going and hating looking at your map in public, being on constant pickpocket watch or bandidos watch, rationalised the advice of hysterical, paranoid American tourists we meet, and most irritatingly, ignoring the incessant calls of guapa, chica, linda, bonita and all the leering and pushing and groping that goes with it. The guide books say you should never stay for too long here. You need to come up for air every now and then. And I am looking forward to catching that bus to Oaxaca tomorrow morning because I am sick of being stared at because I am blonde, and only because I`m blonde and this fact making me every man`s property. The friend we are with is even more blonde than me and the attention she is getting, from everyone, even the policemen, is quite impressive. I knew it would be like this, but come on! The most well-dressed, respectable metro passenger turns into a disrespectful animal in a full carriage. What would their mothers, their sisters and their daughters say?

Tomorrow will be a better day no doubt. Not that today hasn`t had its good moments. We`ve been to the Anthropology museum, a megolithic temple to mesoamerican history. The collection is stunning, the interpretation comprehensive, even for non-Spanish speakers. We went to the ancient city of Teotihuacan yesterday, so today`s trip was appropriate. And the museum itself was pretty handsome. The waitress in the cafe was a surly miss but we`ll overlook that. It was a brilliant way to spend an afternoon and I could now tell the difference between a Mayan and an Aztec in the unlikely event of meeting one. Also got a taste of the temple visits to come.

We also had a good taco outside before the mammouth four-hour visit. We`d ski`pped lunch yesterday and there was nearly a Dan mutiny, so the taco was a winning move today. Changing our tickets at American Airlines this morning was also painless and free, although we managed to get a dinner invitation too from a very amourous fellow customer just by standing in the queue. Dan`s presence doesn`t seem to dissuade the attention. You`ve got to admire some of these men for their audacity and their doggedness.

According to a very friendly policeman we met today, Oaxaca is perfectly safe to visit now, despite the advice of an American teacher at our hotel who said it would be peligroso despite any concrete evidence of this. This teacher led a group of his teenager students into a red light district yesterday evening and was surprised to find a bit of bother there. I`m not sure about his powers of judgement. He spends a lot of time smoking in the hotel lobby in a dodgy cowboy hat.

So, bye bye big bad city.

Spanish lessons

We landed in Mexico City late last night. Another one of those delicious cultural jolts. All the stories of the big, bad megatropolis with its shanties and pollution and bandidos - you anticipate something wonderously terrifying. So far, it´s been big, it´s been busy, but it´s been good. It´s been a new experience to walk down streets that feel as if they have layers of history under the very earth- certainly true of the Zocalo , the central square with the cathedral built on the Spanish-made ruins of an Aztec temple. After Auckland, Sydney, LA, this sense of history is comforting.

But really, it´s all about language. For most of our trip, English has been the default language. We tried to speak a bit of Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese but struggled with pronunciation and script etc. Didn´t get much past thank you, that´s was delicious. Here, English is not the lingua franca and people do not immediately launch into our language to make it easier for us. Why should they? Doesn´t most of the world speak Spanish anyway? most of the US does surely? And it´s amazing how far a 13 year-old GCSE in Spanish can take you. Especially, if you´re fired up by rescuing damsels at the airport and raging about lack on in-flight entertainment and refreshments.

LA international confiscated our precious water and Mexicana denied us drink for the first hour and a half of the flight. Then they lost the bag of a lovely girl called Brigid. Maybe it´s still in LA. Maybe it´s gone back to Fiji. The guy on the helpline had no more information. Brigid has no clothes. But in the way of these things, these crises diverted us from the more minor concern of getting into Mexico City without begin robbed or conned by the malicious taxi touts everyone had warned us about. And I got to speak the first extended bit of Spanish I{ve spoken since the GCSE. And I remembered how wonderful it is to try to speak another language even if you are perhaps a little rusty and speak more of a Franco Italian hybrid. The taxi driver was my first test, and I manageds to negotiate some kind of deal to get us to two hotels without further stranding Brigid in the big city. A minor vitory, but I went to bed with a ridiculous sense of achievement. I´ve achieved little other than a good suntan for about five months. Sometimes, active participation in the most banal activities beats a trip to a famous museum for entertainment.

I can´t tell you how happy this makes me, to try a bit of another language. It looks like we won{t be able to afford Spanish classes in Oaxaca so I´m taking my linguistic kicks where I can get them.

escape from the antipodes

We did it. we left New Zealand. And with our dignity more or less in tact. It was only gracious that we should leave with a little bit of sobbing and a lot more regret. We've been looked after so well by everyone, overstaying our welcome just about everywhere. We extended our two months to three and still, I don't think it was enough for Dan. We're still hatching far-fetched plans to get back some day.

It's been a warm and fuzzy few months, and a little bit productive too with a wagon painted and some stories written and those aforementioned ludicrous schemes. I never thought I'd find myself at home in New Zealand. I was convinced I was an old european and would starve for lack of culture or camembert. I thought I couldn't live without cheese and museums. That the petrol heads and sheep shearers and exiled European hippies of my overactive imagination would make the place hostile. Who was I kidding? It's difficult to express how important it was for us to go there, after the many years of Dan telling NZ stories, showing photos of friends. I was nervous about meeting everyone, about seeing these mythical places from Dan's past. Have I said this before? It was a bit of a preoccupation. But when I did meet everyone, I could see how terrible it was for Dan to have left ten years in between visits. On our last day at Old Man Mountain, we walked to the river, the river that ran past our bedroom and couldn't quite believe we'd made it there, and couldn't quite believe we were just about to leave.

The most painful thing that travelling gives you is a sore heart. You leave little bits of yourself here and there. I wonder if you can ever stay in one spot, contentedly, wholly so, having so enjoyed living in another place. Or several other places. I'm obviously completely obsessed with France as I spent all those years there as an impressionable teenager. Dan's obsessed with NZ. Not sure there's an obvious compromise there. I'm a little bit obsessed with NZ now. Are we obsessed with London anymore? Goodness knows how we'll feel when we get back. But, we are coming back. That's one thing settled.

So. We're in the final phase. After NZ, Fiji, and then San Fran (where we are now) and then Mexico. We spent last week recovering from the strain of leaving NZ loved ones on a Fijian beach. My first tropical paradise island with white sand and acqua seas and frangipani flowers in your hair. I celebrated the event by learning to snorkel. A minor miracle as I have always been under the illusion I couldn't breathe through my mouth without breathing through my nose as well. I am also secretly terrified of being in the sea with all its creatures. I have to swim with shoes on if I can't see the bottom.

My first snorkel was no doubt the classic first snorkel/dive experience where even the smallest fish look like jewels and you're pointing at everything that moves. I was so enchanted I forgot to be frightened of the neverending expanse of big blue and the fact that the jewel like fish might swim at me. The next few dives were brief, just long enough to see cuttlefish, parrot fish, angel fish and a giant clam before I panicked and headed for the shore. Someone mentioned the presence of a black tipped reef shark in the bay. Perfectly friendly, but perfectly shark-like. And we sometimes saw rays leaping out of the sea in the evenings. Someone said they only leap out of the water if something is chasing them. I wasn't comforted by this. But beauty and fear equals a sublime experience and that is definitely how I feel about snorkelling. Perhaps it's how I feel about travelling.