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.