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National treasures

It's Friday, so time to pack another oversized suitcase. Am going back to Chicago in the morning, sadly without my new Christmas toy. It will remain in my basement, in swaddling bubble wrap, until I move back to the U. S. in the summer. 

While saying goodbye to my Hamilton Beach PrepStar™ food processor this morning, I felt that no item could better symbolize my frustration with the distance between Michigan and Mexico. Only in Mexico can I buy five bell peppers of varying colors, a jalapeño, an deceptively spicy habanero (it looks like an apricot!), a head of garlic, and bouquets of pumpkin blossoms and fresh cilantro, still clung with the dirt from which they were yanked, for under the cost of a Happy Meal. But only in Michigan do I have the tools to transform all that into a gazpacho in under 30 seconds.

Merry Christmas from Mexico

While I'm celebrating this one in Michigan, I've tried to inject a little bit of Mexican cheer into our family Christmas carols with the help of a new vihuela. 

Here is a clip of its maiden voyage, back in Mexico City, as a friend's holiday party was winding down. Thanks to our baritone for making this video, a series of snapshots of Mexican Christmases Past.

That's sprawl, folks

To celebrate the culmination of my first project in Mexico, and to clear my mind before before diving into the Chicago winter, I decided to take a day trip yesterday.

When I left the apartment, carrying a purse containing a camera, bottle of water, and post-it with some scribbled directions to the bus station, I realized that I am 23 years old and have never taken a trip abroad by myself. I pondered this while stepping over a stray dog and someone's half-eaten quesadilla on the way to the subway, and decided I could blame this on the fact that I've only been to places where females are discouraged from traveling alone.

But then I realized that hasn't stopped many of my girlfriends from boarding buses, boats, and burros by themselves, or lending me their Lonely Planet guidebooks (which I've hardly opened) marked up with highlighters and asterisks and, most intimidating of all, check-marks.

And so, sweating in the unventilated subway car, I was forced to face a fact about my personality that I've sensed for several years now (starting four years ago when I flew all the way to Hamburg to visit one of my best friends, only to suggest upon arrival that we skip the museums and watch the entire Der Herr Der Ringe trilogy on DVD instead).

I am extremely unskilled in planning and motivating myself to travel. Exactly once every four years since high school, I have been satisfied, exhilaration-wise, with neatly folding my sweaters in foreign closets. Until yesterday, every side trip I've taken while abroad was a piggyback on someone else's itinerary. Any badass travel photos of me that might suggest otherwise were, more often than not, were taken by the person who singlehandedly got us there.

Yesterday's destination of Tepozotlan, a "magical town" to the north of Mexico City, was of course not my idea, but rather a suggestion from one intrepid female traveler (and excellent storyteller of a) friend. The town is known for it's Museum of the Virreinato (the Spanish viceregal period), which meant there would be lots of fabric, jewels, bibles, and Virgin statues—in other words, everything necessary to jack myself up on Christmas spirit.

I am not going to bore you, or myself again, with the details of why my trip was a bust. Let's just say that I made a series of bad public transportation choices, opting for a cheap city bus instead of a swanky direct one (that's what intrepid travelers do, right?), which resulted in a long, slow slog out of an endless Mexico City. Having to pee, I eventually gave up and and asked to be dropped off on the side of the highway, a decision which I immediately regretted.

Two buses and hours later I finally arrived to Tepozotlan, a colonial fairyland shielded by monasteries from a highway choked with Wal-Marts and junkyards. I decided to grab lunch before visiting the museum. It was 1 p.m. (3 hours after leaving my home, which I sensed was only about 15 miles away), so I had plenty of time to make it to the museum before closing time. 

I sat down in a little cantina tucked behind a tortilleria and a primary school, where my fellow diners were an elderly woman and a sixth-grader in his uniform. While watching Cartoon Network en español, together we plowed through our bowls of consomé de pollo, rice and lima beans, washing it down with several glasses of fresh tamarind juice. ("Caray, this juice is good," observed the señora. This constituted our entire lunchtime conversation.)

I thanked the owner and put down my 35 pesos before heading out the door. I was finally starting to relax after my loud and rickety journey down one of the world's smoggiest highways. The Museum, housed in a 16th-century Jesuit monastery, stretched out before me in the sunlit central plaza. The sight seemed all the more beautiful when compared to the castle-like oil refinery that I had passed a few hours before.

I closed my eyes and tried to erase the image of fresh-brewed smog spewing out of the refinery's smokestacks and hovering over the nearby Sam's Club. I replaced it with one in which the harmonious voices of Indian children, singing devotions to Mary, wafted out of the monastery walls and mingled with the crisp mountain air. Meanwhile their plump Jesuit teachers painted prayers in squiggly Latin and glued gold leaf onto shrines, topping them religious relics. All of this I would behold 400 years later and at a student discount.

"Museum Closed This Afternoon for Annual Employee Christmas Party," read the sign at the ticket counter. My gasp echoed, nun-style, through the arched hallway.

Hearing my distress, a round man with a mustache peeked out from behind the coat check. "Please come back another day," he said, returning to something I could not see but assumed with some anger was a christmas present. I stood planted on the cobblestone floor, in what probably came off as stubbornness but was actually sheer dread of going back to the highway.

"Señorita," he said with an exasperated sigh, as if he'd dealt with my kind before. (Could he be mistaking me for an intrepid female traveler?)

"I came from D.F.," I squeaked, my eyes brimming with what I assured myself was a just natural reaction to highway dust. "...alone."

After a pause, the man conceded a sympathetic nod. "You have 15 minutes. I recommend you head directly to the chapel."

Inside the chapel, now emptied of visitors, I craned my neck while oohing and aahing over the intricate carvings, the gold leaf, and the saints. In keeping with the day's theme, my camera promptly died after taking my first picture. But this freed me to do nothing but savor the chapel's splendor, a 15-minute sanctuary sandwiched between six total hours of smog and sprawl. Before I knew it, a guard kindly escorted me to the exit, just as children carrying piñatas made their way in.

Audio Postcard: A Christmas Carol

Today we had our first of two Christmas Concerts. We sang a dozen villancicos—Mexican Christmas carols.

Our choir warms up in the Casa de la Cultura

I chose this song to post because it's about the insanity of putting on a Christmas concert, particularly two themes that were big for me today: stage fright and last-minute costume issues.

Me and my girls in huipiles and rebosos, traditional Mexican garb. I had just spent the last 30 minutes running through the nearby crowded marketplace in search of a replacement huipil, because I had overslept and forgotten mine at home. Also my finger was mysteriously bleeding. And I was about to sing my first Mexican solo to a bunch of other people's parents. And when the director announced my name at the end of the program, at first nobody clapped because they didn't realize he had just said a name. They probably thought he was scatting.

 My choir teacher in rehearsal, once again convincing me that he is the Latino incarnation of Jack Black.

This post has little or no nutritional value

Muchas smooches

There has never been anything so beautiful

As when the world first saw you walk.

The night is fresher

The sun is brighter

When your mouth starts chatting me up.

- Excerpt from a love letter, written to me by a classmate with whom I had exchanged less than 20 words total by the time of delivery.

Here it doesn't matter if they know you, or even like you. A lot of dudes just need to date whatever they can get their hands on. No offense.

-A female classmate in Chorus, upon asking me how I liked the music school.

Today I took my guitar back to the craft market to get my buzzy string fixed. When I arrived at the stall, I was surprised to bump into my NFL-sized classmate Mario. He was accompanied by one of our middle-aged and therefore tamer male classmates named Javier, who was at a neighboring stall trying on a hot pink sarape for the upcoming Christmas recital.

"¡¡Katty!!" Mario exclaimed, greeting me with his usual full-bodied hug (made only slightly less awkward without his guitarrón) and cheek-kiss-turned-neck-nuzzle, which always gets worse before it gets better as I wriggle away.

Like several of my male classmates, I used to think Mario had great buddy potential. I chatted with him during class breaks, and had no problem waltzing over and plucking one of his guitarrón strings while tuning my guitar. Little did I know this kind of behavior invites marriage proposals.

I first knew something was up when I brought my then-boyfriend to a school concert at the Museum of Anthropology. Mario was in the audience and caught my arm while then-boyfriend was in the bathroom. 

"Who is that, a boyfriend?!" he asked. I shrugged (the term boyfriend, the same as "groom," seemed a little heavy for this situation) and replied, "I guess so."

"Well you've broken my heart," Mario said, loud enough to be heard over a bunch of 15-year-olds playing the marimba. He turned back to his row of female classmates and, within five minutes, poked one and pulled another's ponytail.

Two weeks later in Chorus, I handed out sheets of music to everyone in the room. When I passed one to Mario, I asked him if he had paid the obligatory 2 pesos for the photocopy. His response:  "You know I would marry you this second, don't you?"

At the same time, another fellow mariachi, José, was apparently having painful dreams about me at night. At least this is what he told me in his four-page love letter, which I unfolded in shock on the bus ride home from class, only to shriek out loud when I noticed that several wallet-sized photos of him in various solemn poses had landed all over my lap.

In that package, which I promptly closed and never opened again, there was also a mix CD. Which brings me to today's issue.

I arrived to class after spending two hours with Mario at the market, which he refused to leave until both he and I were satisfied with the guitar's repairs (which I was at the half-hour mark). As I settled into my classroom seat, José showed up in his usual pinstriped suit with cowboy boots. We are now back to the customary cheek-kiss hello, after many awkward weeks of avoiding each other completely in the aftermath of the Love Package. Not easy, since we both play guitar in the same flipping mariachi.

My teacher, who I should mention is one of my favorite human beings in Mexico despite sharing macho traits a-plenty with Mario and José (namely excessive hair gel and the tendency to frequently and loudly crack himself up), started playing a beautiful song. It was a bolero called "Si Nos Dejan," which he strummed with ease on his abalone-plated vihuela.

"Have you ever heard this song before?" ventured José in a rare moment of conversation, his eyes fixed on some imaginary horizon.

"No," I said, leaving it at that, though not without repressing the urge to scream, "WHY DIDN'T YOU CONSIDER THE FACT THAT WE HAVE TO SIT NEXT TO EACH OTHER FOR TWELVE HOURS A WEEK BEFORE YOU WROTE ME THAT CREEPY LETTER??"

"Oh," he said after a long pause, as if waiting for my mental scream to wrap up. "So I guess you didn't listen to the CD I made you."

I froze. This was his first overt reference to the Love Package since he gave it to me. There was now no more convincing myself that he had forgotten about it, or better yet, that it hadn't happened. I stammered something about needing to blow my nose. I got up and booked it towards the ladies room, where I shut myself in the stall and did about three minutes of EeewEeewEeew hand-wiggles. 

By the time I returned to class, another love song was well underway. After considering jumping out the window, I picked up my guitar and tried to play along.

Prepare to sigh

Pedro Infante sings a goosebump-inducing serenade in "Escuela de Vagabundos" (1955).

Teenage poet

This last week, except for when I was working on my tan in Acapulco, has felt very intellectual. Not for anything I did, heck no (although I did start a reading a book! see below.) More like this week I've come across a number of characters who've reminded me of Mexico City's creative wealth, which I've been so busy chasing down at the music school that I've forgotten to look for it elsewhere.

The main character:  A teenage poet named Juan García Madero in The Savage Detectives. I'm reading about this guy as he cavorts through my own favorite neighborhoods in Mexico City in the 1970s, back before the traffic made a trip between Coyoacán and El Centro a half-day ordeal. His shenanigans are adding a whole new layer of wonder to my daily errands. Maybe moody college dropouts actually DID do drugs and write poems on the roof of the building near the park where I recently listened to Sufjan Stevens on my iPod! 

The teenage poet is also inspiring me to be bolder and more curious in Spanish conversations with strangers, rather than my old habit of getting to the point and scurrying away. 

For instance, last week I was at an acoustic hip-hop show at a bar in the swanky Condesa neighborhood. When I came out of the bathroom, I was surprised to see that most of the bar's patrons were momentarily paralyzed, staring at something on the TV behind my head like I imagine people would an alien disembarking from a UFO. I turned around and realized they were watching the new Britney video. I looked back at the crowd of (mostly male) admirers, and must have shaken my head or something, because one of them managed to tear himself away for long enough to run over and apologize profusely.

"I'm sorry! I can't help it! She's so amazing!" He said, gesticulating wildly in a way that made me think he was Italian. Then I realized that meant he was Argentine. 

I was heading towards my friends, but decided to stick around and see what this guy was about, as the teenage poet would probably do. Turns out this Britney fan is also a multimedia artist living in the superhip/quaint neighborhood of Tlalpan, and happened to be at the bar to celebrate the opening of his latest exhibition. Me and the teenage poet high-fived in my head. The artist and I proceeded to get tacos and while discussing vegetarianism, what ever happened to Straight Edge, and differences between Santa Claus and Baby Jesus in Argentina. That was fun.

A few nights later, I went to a dinner party along with two lady friends. The host was a Harvard-educated Mexican dude who knows how to cook and works at a think tank (pronounced "tink-tank"). When his two equally educated and foxy buddies showed up, one after another, to his chic apartment, I started to feel like I was in a binational episode of Friends. 

We proceeded to have a wonderful night of conversation in which the three dudes listened attentively to us, made no comments about our eye color, and explained that the constant teasing among males is a way of expressing affection in a machista society. One of them drove me home and didn't ask for my number. I climbed the stairs to my apartment beaming, and considered deleting Macho Cheese.

Finally, today's random and life-enhancing conversation was with a security guard. I was passing by Teatro Iris in the heart of the Historic Downtown, where I saw him looking horribly bored. I ducked in and pretended to need a brochure of the theater's schedule. He gave me one. I couldn't think of anything to say, but the teenage poet told me to stick around. 

"There's a museum upstairs," the guard said eventually, pointing up with his finger. "It's free."

So I went upstairs, and that's where I saw this photograph. It made my day in the way that I don't think a photo ever has. If I could write my own verse of "My Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music, and then take a picture of that verse, this would be it.

Audio Postcard: Croonings from Acapulco

While I toil away at an entry for my glitzier blog about my weekend in Acapulco, please enjoy the song that has been stuck in my head ever since I got there and first got a load of this view.

The singer is Nat King Cole, on his 1958 tour through Latin America. He recorded this song on his stop in Rio de Janeiro, backed by a Brazilian orchestra of extremely talented musicians, many of whom sported tiny mustaches.

The song doesn't technically have anything to do with Acapulco, except that it was part of the tidal wave of tropical-themed media that washed over the U. S., Europe, and Latin America in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, etching the tourist-destination destiny of Latin beach towns like Acapulco in stone.

One more thing that they have in common: Both are, in my opinion, fantástico. Wish I could say the same for Nat's accent.

Don't try this accent at home: Nat King Cole learned Spanish phonetically in order to record three Spanish-language albums (Cole Español [1958], A Mis Amigos [1959], and More Cole Español [1962]) and tour Latin America. Considered one of the first American "crossover artists," he was enthusiastically received by Latino audiences and was invited to stay with the President of Brazil during his tour.

But I do know that I love you

Note: Monday is Mexican Revolution Day (didn't we just have one of these?), so no class for me. Therefore I am taking a last-minute and probably undeserved trip to the beach. 

Dear Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa,

Before I go to the beach for a three-day weekend, I want to say a quick thanks for the Revolution of 1910. I can't go into greater depth about it because it was extremely long and confusing and I get it confused with other revolutions. I also don't want to look like I'm taking sides on such a bloody movement, which resulted in lots of people (including you) getting assassinated, and 70 years of single-party rule. 

I have to admit that even though I wrote a paper on your uprisings in my Latin American History course, I still get you guys mixed up. It's the mustaches. People here seem to be divided on whether you were well-meaning guys or bandits. But they keep naming subway stops and restaurants after you. So it's hard to imagine what Mexico would be like without you.

Villa and Zapata enjoy a quiet moment together in the Palacio Nacional in 1914, after their armies converged in Mexico City. Villa sits on the presidential throne where Porfirio Diaz sat for 34 years, while Zapata is cool with just savoring the historic photo op. Otilio Montaño, professor and the David Axelrod of Zapata's Tierra y Libertad campaign, is wearing a head bandage on the right.

And Mr. Villa - I went to a restaurant downtown where you reportedly walked in and shot your gun at the ceiling. Was this before or after you ate? I thought you'd be pleased to know that the bullet hole is still there, and since then someone has drawn a circle around it.

Sincerely,

Me.

C'mon, feel the NAFTA

My crush on mariachi music can probably be traced back to a single source: Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944). My brother won a copy of it in a coloring contest at the supermarket, when he was 6, and I was 4.

It wasn't till college that I learned that this flick, which I had memorized down to every last one of Donald Duck's Brazilian booty-shakes, was propaganda billed by F.D.R. to promote his Good Neighbor Policy. It took me awhile to get over this. Apparently he hoped that the U.S., Mexico, and The Rest Of Latin America (represented by a cigar-smoking Brazilian parrot) could be BFFs* like these cartoon birds. 

*so that the United Fruit Company and the U. S. Military could keep on exploiting and occupying Latin countries. SLEEPOVER!!

Dream wedding

On Friday I woke up on a couch in Miami as a Boston terrier named Twiggy licked my face. I heard voices speaking Swiss German in the kitchen, giggling over the sound of techno music and frying eggs. For a second, I experienced a complete reversal of my first few mornings in Mexico, this time waking up and freaking out about not being there.

Slowly I got my thoughts together. I spotted my yellow high heels heaped in the corner and suddenly [kinda] remembered the bachelorette party. Oh my god, I was home in the USA! Felt like a dream.

and my brother was there...

And it KEPT feeling that way. My visit was weird, a surprisingly smooth mixture of familiar and foreign. In many ways it felt too good to be true, and it was over in a flash.

If your dreams are like mine, they bring together people from totally separate spheres of your life. This wedding was no different. I was riding down sunny highways with my brother, long-lost cousin, and two college roommates who know me well, but hardly know each other. I decided that the only logical missing character in this dream was my mariachi teacher. 

So when mariachis surprised us at the wedding reception, blowing into their trumpets from the balcony of the bride's childhood home, I froze. Where was I? Even more bizarre, we guests (Swiss cousins included) enjoyed the serenade from below the balcony, not on it. The mariachis were up there in our place, their sombreros silhouetted by the moon. A total switcheroo. Typical dream stuff.

After rolling off the couch with Twiggy that morning, I had chatted with my hosts and then sat out on their front steps while they got ready for their wedding duties. Unshowered and still dressed my club clothes, I was a greasy speck in middle of a pastel-painted and sun-saturated suburb. 

I took a walk under a line of palm trees towards the Intercoastal. The sidewalk was so smooth and blemish-free that I walked around the block barefoot. I thought about Mexico City's sidewalks, which are considered fabulous for simply existing. They look as though they've been through a series of earthquakes—which, come to think of it, they have.

Prior to this trip, I had been nervous that I would love Florida too much. I was afraid it would somehow awaken the spoiled American in me and make me dread getting back on a plane to Mexico. But it turns out I had underestimated both countries and myself. So instead of awakenings, I just enjoyed a quick recharge of my batteries in the English-speaking, blue Florida sun.

That was the dream, and my 7:05 Sunday flight back to Benito Juárez International Airport was reality. At the gate, I made a last-minute round of calls from my American cell phone before turning it off for another six weeks. I kinda felt sad about not feeling sad about what a big deal it wasn't.

I boarded my plane and opened a copy of Archaeología Mexicana, a wildly popular bimonthly magazine that reports on the latest archeological finds and Mexico's cultural curiosities. It sells alongside Spanish-language Playboy and Cosmopolitan at most Mexico City newsstands.  The latest issue happens to be about where Mexican music comes from.

I hunkered down and forced myself to read in Spanish, circling words I didn't recognize, planning to look them up when I got home. I needed to warm up, I told myself, if I was to avoid being a clumsy mumbler when I went through immigration. When I eventually landed and reached the officer's desk, though, I was happy to discover that I slipped back into neighborly conversation with ease. I knew where I was and felt wide awake.

Turn the page

A plane crash just a few blocks from my apartment has dampened considerably the election elation in Mexico City. The sounds of sirens provided an eerie backdrop to the Embassy party last night. We stood on a balcony and spotted plumes of smoke rising from the park, while we were served wine, hot dogs and hamburgers by a white-tuxedoed catering staff.

The big screens in the banquet hall switched back and forth between cheering crowds in Chicago, and Mexican pedestrians running for their lives from a plane crash that many suspect was an act of drug cartel terrorism. My friends and I stood and stared, in awe of the complex world that awaits Barack Obama's administration. From the conversations I had with Mexicans my age last night, many of whom are embarking on their own careers in Mexican politics and government, the relief we shared over Obama's victory was only deepened by their overwhelming uneasiness about Mexico's security.

But we couldn't keep from celebrating. I wound up at an expat bar just in time to catch Obama's speech, after calling my parents in a speeding taxi and leaving an extremely jealous voicemail on my brother's phone as he celebrated in Grant Park. When I made it through the door, I stood on a chair, grabbed a random caballito of tequila and started scanning the crowd for my friends, with whom I immediately engaged in a mixture of hugging and borderline crowd-surfing.

And now the moment I've been waiting for, for four whole years. I present you with a fresh batch of online away messages and facebook statuses, compiled today at noon, which can finally replace this total bummer of a list from November 2004.

• This facebooker is estatic. And can't find any copies of the Times.
  
• This facebooker is riding high after witnessing history.
• This facebooker is toasting to Obama: woo hoo!!
• This facebooker is looking forward to the next four years...for once!
• This facebooker can't stop smiling.
• This facebooker is all smiles.
• This facebooker is feeling so solid.
• This facebooker is elated and speechless.
• This facebooker is blown away by the city he loves. Sweet home of Obama. That rally was amazing guys... Mind blowing. I was also on Fox News!
• This facebooker is so excited for the possibilities ahead.
• This facebooker is screaming, "YES WE DID!"
• This facebooker is celebrating...with wine.....and joy....and HELL YEAH!!
• This facebooker doesn't know how she'll get anything done today.
• This facebooker is Amavericka!
• This facebooker feels American again.
• This facebooker is choked-up.
• This facebooker is whew.
• This facebooker needs me some confetti!
• This facebooker is at home in Ohio, politically speaking.
• This facebooker is O(migodImProudOfMyCountry)bama.

Cherish this moment

Today I had to make a rare trip to a payphone in order to call Puebla. I went to the one around the corner from my apartment, next to the fruit stand. When I got there, to my surprise, someone was using it. I had to wait in line. For a payphone. I don't know if I'll ever get to do that again.

El Peso

FINE, I said, as I stomped off the scale at the pharmacy this morning. My premonitions were correct. This time I didn't even need to try to convert kilos to pounds in order to understand the gravity of this situation. But I have since done so with the help of google, and yes, very bad: If I continue to consume tequila, beer, and melted cheese at this rate, I will weigh an amount which is considered a lot even among bench-pressers by the time I come home.

Plan of attack:

1. No tequila (on weekdays)
2. No beer (on weekdays)
3. No melted cheese (more than once a day)
4. Three jogs/week in Bosque de Chapultepec, even when smog is unbearable and all wildlife is hiding.
5. No more street snacks, unless accompanied by a Mexican friend or international visitor (street snacks = street cred)
6. No more Cheetos, even though and especially because they come fully coated in chili powder
7. No more chicharron, for this is fried pig skin. Yet so delicious.
8. Will drink only Leche Light, Mexico's answer to skim milk (only 3 g of fat/serving!)
9. No more blogging about how delicious Mexican food is, as this practice often justifies my indulgent choices. I'm sorry.

So now I will talk about other things, with the hopes that one of them will very soon include the fact that my new purple coat fits me again. 

Kindly ignore the fact that my necklace is a spoon.

On Friday I went to a party at la casa de Mike, who is an engineer fresh out of MIT. I don't mean to stereotype but I thought it very engineer-like of him to lower a string with a key attached from the balcony, so I could efficiently let myself in. He proceeded to throw one of the best parties I've been to here, because it had equal numbers of Mexicans and internationals, not the usual 9:1 or vice-versa ratio which can often lead to linguistic hegemony.

So the party was bilingual, and all the more fun because it was attended by engineers, archaeologists, a pianist, and opera singer, and even a man chronicling the history of the Tabascans (who did SO much more than invent sauce). The result was a refreshing blast of new vocabulary, so neatly and cartoonly contexted in each person's spiel about their job, that at times I wondered if we were trapped the pages of a language textbook. 

I'm Maria, I play the piano and I hate to transpose!

I'm Paula, I study biology, and wow are the ethical issues surrounding stem cells ever crazy!

I'm Beto, I'm an archaeologist and I help people to register Pre-Columbian artifacts that they find on their property, because Mexico is really into cultural patrimony laws!

I found myself trying out my own new terms from the mariachi world, like chamba (party where Mariachis are a required ingredient), callo (finger calluses), and huapango (a particular song style, strumming pattern, and type of party, the defining details of which I'm still figuring out). These new words we shouted to each other over David Bowie songs and cups of sangria (this is ALL I'm gonna say about the sangria: it had the usual ingredients, plus figs and cinnamon... I will leave it to you to conclude how delicious it was) and chocolate candy skulls, which have flooded the shopfronts and roadside stands in recent weeks, as Mexico gears up for Day of the You-Know-What.

Macho cheese

Things I enjoy about machismo and its ramifications:

• Sweet talk
• The fact that PDAs are allowed anywhere, at any point in a relationship
• Drive-by poetry
• The fact that two men fighting over you in a bar can actually happen outside of your fantasies
• The chair-pull-out in restaurants, though I was never properly trained on my half of the procedure and this often results in awkwardness
• The fact that if I close my eyes while on the back of a motorcycle, I can easily pretend I'm on horseback (either as a Spanish countess or girlfriend of Pancho Villa, depending on my mood).
• Every Mexican love song ever written
• Dancing skills and willingness
• The selection and affordability of hair gel
• This picture

Things I do not enjoy about machismo and its ramifications:

• Sweet talk
• The fact that PDAs are expected anywhere, at any point in a relationship
• The fact that my eye color is considered a more stimulating conversation topic than my career interests.
• The fact that "girlfriend" and "bride" are the same word in Spanish, and "my compliments to the chef" translates to "Now you can get married!" 
• The fact that I can blow an entire dinner party with one sarcastic comment that could be misinterpreted as an affront to my date's sense of honor, or something like that. Same goes for this bullet point.
• The fact that the government needs to pour millions of pesos into an ad campaign that teaches, "Equality between men and women starts at home." The visual aid is a man's calendar, where he's circled the note to himself: "Respect the decisions of my wife and daughters every day."

Adios, amigo

Today my friend texted me that he quit his job in Mexico City, and is going home next week. Reading his message at the roadside stand where I was eating lunch, I let out a loud, American "Oh man" with my mouth full of huitlacoches, which I'm sure my fellow lunchers found adorable.

He's been teaching at an international high school (swank meter: all students AND teachers are required to own a macbook) where he is paid twice as much as his Mexican coworkers for simply being a citizen of the greatest country on earth. One of his duties includes helping kids locate their chauffeurs after class, so they don't accidentally hop into the wrong BMW. Understandably, he is not wild about this arrangement.

I met up with him at an Irish pub to say goodbye, as well as to call dibs on his coffee maker. We split a burger and watched the Rays cream the Red Sox with the volume off, as the bartender's Moby mix provided an unexpectedly awesome soundtrack to the slow-mo instant replays. All of a sudden, I missed the U. S. like crazy.

While I can't imagine leaving Mexico City right now (I JUST figured out where to buy skim milk), I got even more homesick when we went through the list of nice American things he is about to go home to. This included, but was not limited to, The Daily Show, deciduous trees, flannel, and air quality. Sigh [cough]. 

American is to Apple Pie, as ______ is to Mole.

I can't wait to eat myself stupid.

Text message from British friend Jake, regarding our weekend trip to Puebla.

Don't worry. We have non-spicy ones, just for you.

Man selling fried grasshoppers.

Puebla is famous for Mole, that saucy Mexican combination of nuts, fruit, chocolate, and chili powder, which is naturally spread all over chicken. I still haven't developed a taste for it, nor do I get terribly appetized when I bump into mole fixings at the market near my house. But this weekend, after spontaneously hopping a bus to escape the capital, I decided to try everything Puebla has to offer. And if that meant fried grasshoppers, well gosh darn it, that meant fried grasshoppers.

As soon as my roommate Becca, Jake, and I arrived in colonial Puebla, we hit the cobblestoned streets in search of a greasy snack. We were instantly satisfied with these super-quesadilla-empanada-like things. I'm kicking myself for not remembering what they were called, because everyone agreed they ought to be prominently featured on the menu of My Dream Restaurant. Imagine with me for a moment . . . a place where you will be able to order, from the same kitchen, all the dough-wrapped treats of the world. 

We met up with two more of Jake's friends in front of the Cathedral. They said they were hungry, and were instantly adopted into our travel group. We did our obligatory mole tour, and chased it with some churros rellenos in the central plaza. Churros are essentially lincoln logs of fried dough, rolled in sugar and injected with flavored custard (we tried apple, peach, choco-walnut, cheese, and la lechera, a.k.a. sweetened condensed milk [Mexicans have no shame in consuming vast quantities of this and the world could stand to follow their example]). 

As we digested, night fell. We watched the families running around and laughing in the plaza. Probably hopped up on their own churros, smiling parents were shooting giant crayon-shaped balloons at their kids, who scurried around until way past their bedtimes. Meanwhile, some old men played a marimba under a portico.

Audio Postcard: I scream, you scream

I was lucky to land in Mexico two weeks before Independence Day. People were already getting pumped up, hanging flags and rallying around the giant digital clock that counts down the days until the bicentennial on September 16, 2010 (mark your calendars).

I was way lucky, though, to spend Independence eve on a bus to the colonial town of Dolores Hidalgo, where Mexican Independence was first declared. It was there in 1810 that Father Miguel Hidalgo, upon hearing that Spanish authorities had sniffed out signs of the upcoming rebellion, issued what is now popularly known as El Grito (the scream) of Independence. The crowd of campesinos who had trekked into town to hear Father Hidalgo say mass, instead heard him screaming a call to arms.

My friend Colleen and I decided to hop the tour bus at the last minute, joining a group of mostly middle-aged and elderly patriots on their way to this otherwise sleepy mountain town. Spirits were high. People couldn't wait to join the crowds in Dolores Hidalgo's central plaza, where they would hear the governor's rendition of El Grito at midnight. Back in the capital, millions of Mexicans were turning on their radios and TVs, and the brave ones flooding into the Zocalo in front of the National Palace, and hear President Calderon scream the same scream.

Here's a postcard from our bus ride, where we got a sneak preview of what El Grito would sound like.

Me: OK. Who wants to be the president?

Bus Tour Guide: Right there, that guy!

Colleen: Ready, everyone?

Me: You sir? Ok, you. Please.

Man: Mexicans! Long live the heroes who gave us both country and liberty!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Miguel Hidalogo y Costilla!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Doña Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Vicente Guerrero!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: ¡Viva Mexico!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: ¡¡Viva Mexico!!

Bus riders: ¡¡Viva!!

Man: ¡¡¡Viva Mexico!!!

Bus riders: ¡¡¡Viva!!!

(applause)

Bus riders: (chanting) Again! Again!

Double your pleasure

On Sunday the sun came out. And just in time too, because I was starting to get nervous that I would never see it again, and that maybe this thing people have been calling the "rainy season" is really just a nice way of describing a period of wet smog. But the sun broke through at last, and was beating down all over the Valley of Mexico, which I'm told will never get too hot, thanks to its mile-in-the-skyness. 

The Angel de la Independencia, a statue who balances on one foot only a few blocks from my apartment, was looking particularly shiny. She stands on top of a giant column, keeping watch over the gazillion cars that circle her each day. 

While waiting at a stoplight under her left wing, Alex and I (again on his moped...this is becoming a regular thing) encountered something that I immediately interpreted as a good omen: a pair of old lady twins, dressed in their Sunday finest, crossing the street in front of us.

They were dressed exactly alike, with the exception of one thing. The colors of their blazers, skirts, and shoes were just a shade or two apart. So one wore camel-colored pumps, and the other the same pair in dark brown. One jacket was red and the other burnt orange. It was like looking at the same person, first with and then without your sunglasses.

The only colors that they shared identically were snow-white hair and fair skin. The foreigner in me, still often caught off guard by the history and diversity of European blood in Mexico, had to remind myself that they were probably not Gringa twins visiting from Houston. Sure enough, they smiled and shouted something to Alex in old lady Spanish. I could barely understand over the roar of the motor.

The light changed and we circled the roundabout, with the statue in the center. I craned my neck because I wanted to get a look at their purses. But by then they were too far away, inching down Paseo de la Reforma arm-in-arm.

Sooner or later

On Wednesdays, movies are half-off in Mexico City. I went with my roommate Khaled, and friend Alex to the Cineopolis Diana right by my apartment. It's named after this huge fountain built to the goddess Diana, a.k.a. Artemis, and exudes enough girl power to make it my favorite stop on my daily commute. 

Since I had just gotten out of class, and Alex out of work, we needed to grab some comida corrida around the corner. Like drive-thrus, only more convenient, social, and tasty, these fast food stalls invite you to stand under a plastic tarp and devour greasy tacos right off the grill, while passing napkins and lime wedges to your fellow diners, who are usually in business attire, with neckties flipped over the shoulder.

The movie was alright, but the real drama came afterwards. I'd planned to help Alex with his masters' application in English, in exchange for him proofreading my Spanish emails to teenage musicians. We hopped on his moped to go to his apartment, located in the quaint cobble-onial part of town near Parque Lira. We circled the Diana fountain on our way, a breathtaking sight after dark.

Alex's apartment building has a central courtyard and a garden, which is eerily populated with white statues of nuns and, surprise, more greek goddesses. When we arrived, he stuck his key in the door and discovered that the lock had been torn out. Within the next 2 minutes, my Mexican Bad Word Vocabulary nearly doubled in size.

His apartment was unusually clean and fortunately did not show signs of ransacking. But his laptops, both personal and from his job, were gone. So much for working on his application. The robbers also took his camera, DVD player, modem, and to really rub it in, his aftershave. He stood in the middle of his kitchen and didn't say much, until he eventually sat down on the couch and sighed. I didn't know what to say, so every now and then I blurted out one of the bad words I had just learned, before forgetting them. That seemed to be appropriate.

I was pretty awed by the whole experience, though mainly the calm resignation with which Alex accepted the fact that he'd been majorly robbed. Estas cosas pasan, he said. These things happen. I told him that if he had watched me discover that my laptop had been robbed, it would have been a scene similar to the one in the movie we'd just watched: a woman sobbing over a man's dead body and sinking into years of depression.

"Naah," he said. "You're in Mexico City now. Plus, check it out -- they didn't take my passport or my television!" He seemed genuinely relieved at that, and taught me another handy phrase: the Spanish equivalent of what are you gonna do.

You and me and everyone we know

Oops, sorry for CCing rather than BCCing everyone who got my blog birth announcement. Please don't spam each other.

Audio postcard: Trabalenguas

Here's Alejandro, from Monterrey in northern Mexico, as he tries to teach me his favorite trabalenguas, or tongue-twister. 



La ciudad de Parangaricutirimicuaro
Está parangaricutirimicuarizada.
El que logre desparangaricutirimicuarizarla,
Buen desparangaricutirimicuarizador será.

(The city of Parangaricutirimicuaro
Is parangaricutirimicuarized.
He who manages to un-parangaricutirimicuarize it,
Will be a great deparangaricutirimicuarizer.)

Food pyramids

After three days of eating rice, beans, and stale 7/11 biscuits for breakfast, I decided it was high time to check out Mercado de la Merced. It's a wholesale market downtown, selling anything you could dream of, including 120-count muffin tins and buckets of marmelade. It also specializes in large burlap sacks filled with things that you would have previously thought inedible. 

Like dried sardines - didn't know you could eat those. I made the mistake of making eye contact with them while walking by, which led me to stop and gasp and thereby convince the the stall owner that I was a closeted dried fish lover. He rushed over and dug his hands into the sack, allowing the sardines to rain through his fingers while giggling. I got the feeling he wanted me to do the same thing. Instead I blurted out something about needing avocados, and ran away.

Sweet Mary, the avocados. When I reached that stall, the first thing the lady asked me was, "When do you want to make your guacamole, today or later?" I just stood there and blinked...for a brief moment I felt I had met my soul mate. By this point I was already weighted down with tomatoes, squash, potatoes, limes, bananas, peppers, and a bouquet of cilantro. She took one look at me, and while holding my astonished gaze, began to squeeze various parts of the avocado pyramid surrounding her. She presented me with a bag of eight perfect, instant-guacamoleable avocados, and charged me 25 pesos, or $2.50.

For the same price I also bought a wooden cutting board, and 2 kilos of almonds, cashews, granola, and oatmeal. With plastic bag handles digging into my forearms I staggered over to a busy cheese stall and added one final bag to the mix: my new favorite cheese, a stretchy variety that behaves like string cheese, only it comes coiled up in a giant super-rope of endless cheese-peeling fun. 

I also asked for yogurt. The guy pointed behind him to the wall, which I realized was built of yogurt containers. "All we have is buckets," he said, raising one eyebrow in what I took to be a dare.

Sweeeet

As I was walking home from mariachi class this evening, one of my classmates beeped at me from inside his white Ford Fiesta. "Hola, quieres un ride?" he asked, leaning out the window. He was accompanied by Sandra, the girl who had just been forced to sing a duet with me in our Canto workshop. She waved at me from the passenger seat. Awesome, I thought. She doesn't mind being seen with me in public! I threw my guitar in the trunk, thanking god for the opportunity to have an extracurricular conversation with these two, since my classroom vocab has been pretty much limited to, "What?" and "I will continue to practice."

We dropped Sandra off at the subway before I had time to apologize to her for what happened earlier (I accidentally sang "Cuando vulva a tu lado" instead of "Cuando vuelva a tu lado.") But she didn't seem to care. After she left, I moved up into the front seat so Mario wouldn't feel like a chofer. He turned up the mariachi music on his radio. He's a really good guy, probably the jolliest person in our class. It might have something to do with the fact that he plays the guitarron, a guitar so huge it makes even NFL-sized men like Mario look like garden gnomes. 

Anxious to show him that I have a life outside of music class, I decided to do what I often wind up doing in Spanish-speaking situations:  I talked about myself, even when it had no relevance to anything. The reasoning behind this is that everyone will hear me screw up the grammar of what I say, no matter what, so I'd might as well screw it up on a topic that I at least know everything about. Then if I accidentally mention a vulva, for example, I am the only one who has to pay for it.

After telling Mario about my weekend and favorite foods, I mentioned that I needed to buy a birthday cake for my roommate. Well, I initially said I needed to buy a birthday sandwich, then Mario corrected me. He told me he knew the perfect place, and it was on the way to my subway stop. 

Following my conversational lead, Mario told me he sings in church as part of a choir, where they all wear medieval costumes, including tights. This made me extremely happy, not only because I'd gotten an NFL-sized Mexican man to admit to wearing tights, but also because I just discovered over the weekend that this is a widespread phenomenon in Mexico. More on that later.

Mario dropped me off at the mini-pasteleria where I was greeted by a lady wearing a pink apron and a 19th-century nurse's hat. She handed me a tray and helped me pick out tiny cakes and sweet rolls with a pair of tongs. I bought three masapan cookies and a miniature cake the size of a soda can, decorated as a soccer field with two plastic players on top. It had the word ¡Cool! scrawled across the front in blue frosting. It summed up my mood pretty well.