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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.