animal insanity

It's been a while since I posted, and this time I swear I've barely sat in front of a computer for two weeks. A fact, which, I'm slightly ashamed to say, seems so damn strange.

A lot has happened. My cousin Matt came and G and I took him up to Palenque and then over and further into the jungle. We also showed him all around San Cristobal, of course, and dragged him around Tuxtla some. Sadly, he is a working man and missed out on the beach trip that followed. With our Belgian neighbors, we decided to go farther than we had to to reach a beach so we could get to a really, really sweet beach. We spent four full days in Mazunte (with a delightful overnight bus trip on each end) and were back in San Cristobal just this morning. I will most likely post about the jungle and the beach in the coming days, so as not to forget.

But for now, I am lazy and will just make a list. Typified by surprise encounters like one when we got back to our casita today with the (furry and slightly less than palm-length) spider in the above picture, this summer has been rife with animals, among them:

every size and color of ant you can think of from small white ones to black flying ones,
worms for eating,
in the jungle: huge roaches, striped mosquitoes, a pet monkey we played with, plenty of dogs, tiny fish in the water nipping at my ankles, so many butterflies for some reason attracted to gravel,
crocodiles: big ones we saw in the canyon from the boat, one snapping its jaws behind a fence at a preserve, one somehow out of the mangrove and into the sea, reported sightings at the beach in mazunte,
a spider monkey i got to shake hands with,
talio, our neighbor's amazing rescued street dog, who turns up on the street still, met us once when we were having wine on the sidewalk,
chango, our other neighbors' new kitten, a tiny guy, growing by the day, climbing over, scratching up everyone,
circus animals going through the street in cages (i only saw a pic of that),
some rodent that was too quick to identify in the dark but huge and ran across the ground where we stayed at the beach, scurrying just under our beds,
and also at the beach crabs of varying size and color, especially at night and in the dark, some as big as my fist and bigger,
chickens: clucking, pecking, some in that strange phase between chick and grown, some having their necks wrung in the church at chamula,
in the pacific, a few kilos from shore: sea turtles, some swimming, one we got to swim with in the deep, deep sea, and then many turtles mating--pairs of them floating, the female's flipper flapping to keep them floating--dolphins--young and fast streaks out of and back into the water, newly dead and giant fish caught by fishermen we talked to, boat-to-boat,
birds, birds, birds,
hummingbirds in our garden,
spiders,
bats,
barking street dogs, mating street dogs, sleeping street dogs,
bees--one stinging my friend as he jumped and screamed,
huge wasps,
fleas,
fruit flies,
strange little beetles that retract their legs and turn into tiny pellets,
bright green iquanas and other lizards, including
geckos, of course.

Daytripping

Yesterday, we got up early, about seven. I remembered how much I truly am a morning person. We walked to the bus station and caught a bus to Comitan, the largest city near the Guatemalan border. There, we took a combi to Monte Bello, where we checked out four of the 59 lakes they've got there. The weather wasn't perfect lake weather, a cloud scattered sky playing hide and seek with the sun, but it was beatiful--the lakes we saw clear turquoise with the sun shining on them. They were selling all sorts of random things from Guatemala there, like cigarettes called After Hours,and cardamom gum with Arabic writing on the package, and Guatemalan beer, which I am swilling, above. (More pics here.) It's called Gallo, which means "rooster". Yup. The landscape between Monte Bello and Comitan really struck me on the way back, flat land, overed in flowered brush, cows grazing, random little shacks selling tacos and yard ornaments. And Comitan had one of the most beautiful zocalos (the inevitable square in each city) I've seen in all the cities I've gotten to see in Mexico this last year. This zocalo had amazing fountains, well-pruned trees, beautiful cobbled streets surrounding it. With all that bus-riding I was able to get 100 pages into Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", which is fantastic. And we got back to San Cristobal just in time to be the first customers at mariscos (seafood) night at this amazing quesadilla hole-in-the-wall we've recently become obsessed with. My favorite was the squid and broccoli in cream sauce. Or maybe the crab wrapped in bacon. Or...

Wormy

These are the worms one of G's friends cooked up in our house last Saturday night. They brought them from Tuxtla. Apparently they're a delicacy and it's the season. (Ants, too, which we roasted over the barbecue the next night, but that's another story.) As soon as word got around they were being cooked, the party that had been next door moved mostly to our house. You could stretch the things out, joint by joint, which was what the cook did, to make them cook faster. Fried up, they didn't taste like much, but it was sort of an insane thing, and this pretty girl went around with a plate, offering them. Some people screwed up their noses, but most gave it a try. I'm not sure if eating the things was the reason, but the party got pretty insane. Shall we blame it on the worms? Or the mezcal and tequila? Or my delicious flan?

Rebels with a Damn Big Cause

Last Sunday I got to see a new side of Chiapas when we visited the headquarters of the closest one of five Zapatista Caracols, Oventic. ('Caracol' means snail and applies here to the largest groupings of Zapatista collectives in Chiapas.) In 1994, when NAFTA went into effect, groups of indigenous rebels, led by the erudite and famously non-indigenous Subcomandante Marcos and Comandantes Ramona, David and others. The Zapatistas managed to take the major cities of Ocosingo and San Cristobal, relinquishing them to army battles in later days. In peace talks, they managed to gain autonomy over their own lands and shaky control over certain natural resources. To this day, they survive without any support from the Mexican government, relying on money from NGO's and selling various handicrafts they make.

Since Oventic was established after the nineties uprisings as a new center in a swathe of agricultural lands, it is somewhat small and lacking in life. At the gate we were greeted by a small woman with a bandana covering her nose and mouth. She took our id's and came back to lead us into an office where three ski-masked men bumbled over some forms that were our "permits". We ended up behind the desk of another ski-masked man who sermonized to us about the Zapatista tenets of Marxism, and anti neo-liberalism and capitalism. It was all in Spanish, but I managed to get his gist since Spanish was his second language (after the indigenous language that was his mother tongue) and he spoke in sweeping generalities about his egalitarian and purist ideals. He got a bit muddled when we asked him specific questions about places and technology, and it became a bit creepy to be paying such rapt attention to a man whose mouth was merely a bulge under a black ski mask. Afterwards we took a walk around the village. We were not allowed to photograph people or vehicles, but I took pictures of some incredible murals decorating the buildings there.

Bird in a Bucket

In Mexico, if you have hot water at all, you have to turn it on so that the gas you buy in canisters (to use for the stove and oven too) heats it up. When G was turning off the hot water this morning, he went out back to the switch, and found a bird drowned in a bucket. It's been raining a ton so the bucket kept back there was full and when I went out to see the bird, I saw a gray thing, floating, with it's little orange claw-feet curled underneath. My thought was to throw it away, but G said we should bury it. I let him do it, with a wooden spoon we use in the kitchen, and I hope he put the dead thing deep enough under the surface of our garden soil.

I have been following this whole Iran thing online. Crazy how the NYTimes has been following the blogs and posting Youtube videos. Crazy the new Google Translator. Of course it's not accurate, but damn if it's amazing they just put it up. And for this. In my mind, Tehran is something like a mix of Beirut and Damascus, but with even more rules. How must it be to live in a place where in public a woman must basically be invisible. Covered up and quiet. Or maybe that's not what it's like. And now the streets are a war-zone, with fires and clubs and people chanting their battle cries. I am intrigued by the use of such nomers as "The Supreme Leader" and "The Guardian Council." Makes it all seem a bit like Star Wars. And I can take it as ironically as I want, but of course to a good number of people it's just not. And I can barely begin to grasp whether there might be irony in the physical reality of being there.

Been away from San Cristobal for more than a week and it's good to be back "home." Why the quotes? Because this is a temporary home, because the word "home" is problematic in its definition. For me. Meeting so many new people, I have been getting asked a lot where I am from, where "home" is. And because it's most often Spanish and my Spanish is limited at best, I don't give the long explanation I would in English, but I simply say "Estados Unidos" and "Virginia" and, often "circa de Washington." That's it. Yes, we were gone to the lovely university city of Cholula, and then Mexico City, and then Cuernavaca. Since these are all G's places, I met a lot of G's people, including a drama student putting on a play that he'd worked on with poor kids in a nearby town and a group of his drama friends, one kid a drummer living in an apartment with sloppily spray-painted walls; three sisters in middle age who danced flamenco to the mariachi band that showed up as a surprise for G during a lunch in his honor--minus the dancing they reminded me of my mom and her sisters; a woman who has recently opened her own weight-loss clinic using a technique that employs body-sculpting through massage; a woman who had just come back from a landscaping job in Canada; a half-slav, half-British English teacher who has lived in Mexico for decades and made us a desert that involved berries and cointreau and chocolate and cream, as well as her translator-husband who had good stories about Obama and the Queen of Denmark and her basketball-playing daughter; an Mexican anglophile, living in an apartment with modern furniture and lounge-bar lighting; a Basque woman living with her father in a beautiful apartment in the embassy neighborhood of Mexico City; a Basque guy who just got his urban design degree in Berkeley and is about to go back and look for a job; a proudly out (kind of hard here) conservative gay man living in Mexico City's "La Zona Rosa," a neighborhood that surprisingly has a lot of Korean restaurants; a group of artists planning an arts festival in the skeleton of a house on the property where they live, south of Mexico City, in the neighborhood that claims Frida Kahlo; the woman who runs the pulqueria in San Pedro and has been selling pulque more than forty years and was going on and on about it's health properties; and many, many more.

What a varied world we live in. May the bird rest in peace. And hoping some good comes from what's going on on the streets of Tehran.

Does your sex therapist wear a veil and talk Quran?

Talking about sex is taboo, haven't you heard? Especially in the Middle East. An interesting article about how that might be changing a little bit, in today's Times.

Surprize sexism

So I started going to the gym last January and I got pretty serious about it, going pretty much every day. I didn't want to lose the habit so one of our first quests here in San Cristobal was to find a gym. Our first visit to the closest gym to our house ended in a yelling match. Then we walked around the city aimlessly looking for one, asking people who looked like they might patronize a gym where they go. Then we ended up at PSAS, a close bike ride on the other side of the river south of downtown. It's pretty nice, and we got a good deal. We'd have to pay a lot more money to use the cardio machines you plug in (the elliptical and treadmill) so, thrifty me, I've gotten into using the bikes, with G. Generally most of PSAS's customers stick to the weight areas, grunting and groaning away. The cardio room is on the top floor, with big windows looking out over the neighborhood, showing some lovely churches and mountains in the distance. I block out the overhead music with my ipod and go, go, go. It's an idyllic moment, but inevitably I look up at the walls around me, where there are sun-worn pin-ups of extremely muscular men and barely clad women using gym machines. It's weird and kitschy and funny and also a little demeaning. The pictures are all over the gym and apparently all over most gyms in Latin America. The pictures of the women and for the men's enjoyment and for the women to feel insecure, and the pictures of the men are somehow for the men as well, for them to idolize and perhaps feel insecure too. Today in the women's locker room I spotted a poster that breaks out of that mold. "A hard man is good to find," it says, under a black and white picture of a man with a sculpted, bare, hairless chest, his jeans suggestively unbuttoned at the bottom of the frame. No one that picture is for but the ladies.

of the millions of words

One of my projects here in Mexico this summer is that I'm reading "Ulysses". I'm about a third of the way through. It's intense! There's a lot more to say but I have to save that for my own notes. Some quotes to whet your appetite:

"The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sexual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both."
--James Joyce, according to Andrew Powers

"In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and war someone is."
"Love loves to love love."
"And says he [Bloom]:
--Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God."
--James Joyce, Ulysses

Old, sad white guys

So G is way more into the movie-watching thing than I am, and since I've been in Mexico with him, I've watched three movies in three weeks, which, I swear, is a record for me. Thing about those three movies is they all revolve around an old, sad white man character. It wasn't on purpose that we watched those three movies; it just happened. G had wanted to see "Grand Torino" for a while. I think I actually fell asleep on that one twice before he got me to see the whole thing. "The Visitor" had been suggested to me by a number of friends. And "Crossing Over" was a random choice; something about the movie poster and the plot description drew us in--maybe, too, something about Harrison Ford. No matter how silly his movie's get, he's hard to resist. So "Grand Torino"--directed by and starring Clint Eastwood--and "Crossing Over" had the whole aging famous leading man thing going for them. Clint Eastwood was certainly my favorite of the three movies' respective protagonists, playing the very gruff and blunt yet somehow still intriguing Walt Kowalski, a man with a wife newly dead, a family that has a hard time loving him, and also abandoned by his old neighbors to face the Hmung immigrants now living next door. Less interesting by far is Harrison Ford's character, a very sympathetic ICE officer who gets way too wrapped up in his cases. "The Visitor"'s sad old white man is a university professor played by Richard Jenkins (unknown until viewing and definitely lacks the sex appeal of Clint or Harrison). University politics force the widowed Walter Vale to leave Connecticut to attend a conference in New York City. In the apartment he keeps there he finds an illegal immigrant couple who has been living there a few months, paying rent to some fake landlord. And this gets me to the other similarity between all these movies: the abandoned, sad, old white men in them are each changed, in some way, by new immigrants. I won't get too much into the individual plots but to say that "Grand Torino" was most satisfying as a story. "Crossing Over" was sort of in the style of "Crash" or "Magnolia" in which snippets are told of vaguely intersecting lives, and so you are following a few stories as once. It's a risky story-telling strategy because it's likely that one of those stories is stronger than the others, leaving the viewer uncaring about the rest, as in a book when you skip the italicized sections or the flashbacks. "Grand Torino" was also least cheesy of all of these movies. The worst cheese-factor award goes to "Crossing Over" in which the whole proud to be an American thing is slapped at you over and over at the end. "The Visitor" was disappointingly lacking in any real substance beyond the devices of the international/hot-topic plot. And Haaz Suleiman, playing Tarek, the drumming Syrian, was definitely hot. Most of the relationship developments here were a little hard to believe, and I wanted more more more. Another similarity between the three? They all made me cry. But I'm easy like that.

Absolutely No Photos Allowed

Yesterday, we went to a town about ten kilometers from here, a Tsotsil village called San Juan Chamula, or, simply, Chamula, as was painted on the window of the van we piled into along with too many others to get there. We rode at a steady incline up a road that cuts through the hills south and west of here and sloped through some agricultural lands to arrive at a town square covered in stands set up by vendors of various produce and other food stuffs, piles of pants, leather belts in every shade of black and brown. Immediately, it was clear that town was dirtier than San Cristobal, litter scattered everywhere. As we bought condensed milk-drizzled churros I was awed by the sight of a boy start moving on his bicycle through a pile of banana peels. It wasn't an accident either, but something he did as a habit, a commonplace occurrence.

We then went to the dusty tourist office and after a young european-ly stylish blond couple, paid 20 pesos each to gain entry to the church, pictured above. As we passed through the wide, empty courtyard, we saw women and children crowded into a gazebo--getting government handouts, G said. Then two young girls followed us, trying to sell us friendship bracelets. They tugged at our hands and in the end threw a bracelet at each of us, saying it was a gift. As I was running after the little brat that had targeted me, the man taking tickets got my attention, and G and I were subsumed by the church.

The rule for the Iglesia de San Juan Chamula is that tourists can visit and gawk but absolutely no cameras allowed, as in, they will take your camera away and throw you out immediately, G explained. Something seemed odd about it. Sure, I'd been in museums and performances where there was no flash photography allowed, and maybe even places with artifacts that one was not allowed to photograph...but to be disallowed from capturing a live event? Knowing myself, I would likely be too shy to do it anyway, but the fact of the prohibition being and out and out rule was intriguing. So in lieu of the photograph (that I might have never even taken, had I the rules on my side), I made a list of my impressions as I sat inside the church:

no photos allowed
smokey air hundreds of candles burning
chattering chanting
pine needles strewn everywhere, over hard cold floor
scent of pine, the feel of it under the soles of our shoes
the room is lined with effigies of saints
each in his/her own box
each with a mirror around his/her neck
as if we could look at ourselves but they are too high
and only concrete ceiling is reflected
rows of tiny candles lit on tables in front of the saints
rows of tiny candles lit on the floor
where they have been placed melted wax
families (or groups that look like families) gathered to heal
colas and juices liquid in bottles sugar water that heals
one woman chants as she rubs green leaves over anothers skin
behind me they will kill a chicken
i look but the old lady stares back and i feel ashamed
then i look and the man in the furry woolen vest is wringing the bird's neck
but it won't die is still moving and the old woman finishes her off
feathers and flesh lay before them and they are chanting
one empty coca cola bottle and one full sit before them, and chanting
G says a healing ceremony can cost 1000 pesos
children everywhere, the smallest slung on stomachs or backs
the others play with fire, with soda, with each other
what are they saying in that strange language?
like no language i have ever in person heard?
the men drink cane liquor
a man leads a small boy around the room in circles
the child's t-shirt reads "100% Guapo"
all the women here in those heavy, black goat's hair skirts
that old one still staring at me, whenever i look her eyes
the smoke, the incense, the chanted words like liquid all around us
the thousands of tiny flickering points of light
and the smoky air around us glowing

After that, we walked to the graveyard, a litter-strewn expanse of lawn surrounding the ruins of another church, older than the first. Everywhere there were earthen mounds, as if every single grave was fresh. Each mound had at its head colored crosses, in most instances more one stacked against each other, like records, or books or plates.

G and I sat in front of it for a while, in a barely clean patch of green from where we could see the graveyard with the old church, the new church and the town in the distance behind it. To our left, there was a small bar on a side road. Outside of which a young girl in traditional dress huddled on the concrete step sang: "Life is worthless!" I am told by G it is a famous song, and the girl went on and on, singing mournfully, soulfully, off-key and slurring.

(More pics from that day and the one before here.)

About the food here

For days I have been planning on writing a post about how damn good and fresh and cheap the food is here, how amazing the markets and little shops--all in walking distance, all relatively cheap--are, and then the other night G got really sick. And, most likely, the bug that kept running between bed and the bathroom for hours of attempted expurgation before we finally embarked for medical help in the middle of the night came from lettuce he’d bought at the market that day.

The central market where he went is labyrinthine and exciting and reminds me of Cairo or Damascus or maybe even parts of Beirut. There is an outdoor section, where people vend wares on blankets, under umbrellas. Then stalls, made of soft wood, set up under roofs of tarps and corrugated metal. A woman sells batteries, a man sells dried beans out of baskets, a woman sells tomatoes that she has piled in pyramids, and on and on. Then the food section, where a woman sells tamales, some women work behind ovens, scraping at piles of meat, and mysteriously brightly colored drinks in large clear plastic containers, large chunks of ice floating. And all over tiny stools to sit and eat at. Then there is the indoor part, all white ceramic tile and the smell of raw meat--a fish section, a pork section, a beef section. Any part you want. Cow head, anyone?

Besides that, there are tiny stalls a few blocks down the hill from our house, where a handful of vegetables and fruits are on display.

Then there are the special, the organic, the house-made things: a twice weekly organic market in the courtyard of an arts center just down the block where a few vendors sell healthy-looking greens, juicy berries, colorful roots, golden-yolked eggs, the handful of pink lily-looking flowers that still smell fresh after a few days on our dining room table. And a dairy shop, also down the street, where they sell all sorts of cheeses and raw yogurt, their amazing pineapple flavor in our fridge right now. Tangy and sweet and sour all at once. And a coffee place downtown, that's all fair-trade and organic and delicious, where the woman had us try raw cocoa beans when we bought our half kilo last week.

G's sickness lasted a very painful eight hours. It was the kind of sick where you feel like you might die, I think like the way I felt in Egypt that time after the koshary in the desert--or was it that time after the baba at the fancy Lebanese place? It was awful. But now after finding a decent all-night clinic, getting a shot, and taking some pills, the thing that possessed him is gone, and we're eating normally again. Big meal in the middle of the day, amazing smells coming from the kitchen now, as you see pictured above.

Meandering post, I know. Just trying to get some fluency going. Stuck on an awful short story rewrite these past couple days. It's killing me. Or at least it feels like it.

Visiting the Big City

Last weekend we descended the 2,000 or so meters and made the 1-hour bus-ride to Tuxtla, to visit G’s family and friends. While Sancris is colorful and airy and stone-built, Tuxtla is haphazard and hot and concrete. Not to say it wasn’t fun, but, all in all, this is where I’d rather be.

While we were away, we spent an afternoon with G’s niece and nephew, taking them for the most beautiful handmade popsicles I’ve ever seen. On a galavanting, meandering night with G’s friends, we went to a couple of a certain type of party, where people our age fill the front courtyard of a house with plastic tables and chairs and serve food and drink a lot of alcohol. Pretty bad reggae-tone music at the first, awful karaoke at another.

For lunch one day, we ate what is pictured above. In a “snack” bar with impossibly loud music and then a mariachi band, and all sorts of men singing along and everyone drinking, we feasted on a plate of slow cooked meat in adobo sauce, amazing black beans and fresh, hearty flour tortillas to go with. Before that we had a plate of fresh tomatoes, cilantro, and onion, as well as dried shrimp. Too salty for my taste. All washed down with a few shared pitchers of Sol doctored with lime and chili.

At amazing restaurant, G’s friends put one of the flip-flops he’d casually slipped off his feet into a crate of beer bottles on the ground. When we realized it was missing as we got ready to go, it was nowhere to be found. Shoeless, G took me to the home of some friends of his, a married couple who have shared a house for thirty years. From the street it looks like a concrete wall with graffiti, like a forgotten place, but inside it was filled with art and plants and books. They were nice.

G’s parents took us to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, Mexican style. We were resistant but it was pretty damn good. I recall a past when I could do three or four plates at an occasion like that, but this time only managed one and a half.

Other than that, some insane cab rides, amazing street art, and finally seeing marimba park, a place full of people dancing G has always told me about. But we missed the people dancing part. We got there when they were milling about, but the gazebo in the center was cool, all the ancient benches lined up and facing it, like sun’s rays. Maybe next time.

More pics of our Tuxtla weekend here.

From the Land of Swine Flu

[photo from nytimes.com, by way of Reuters]
On the birthday card my father gave me four days before I left for Mexico and two days before my actual birthday, he had pasted a carefully cut picture of Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs. “The Swine Flu welcoming committee,” he wrote beside it. We had gotten past being scared of the Swine Flu. The main problem, we decided when mankind’s newest plague began making appearances on the headline news just two weeks before my take-off date for a summer long trip that had been months in the planning, was if the airports closed. And it became quickly apparent that Obama’s approach to this would be—unlike Egypt’s slaughter of thousands of pigs, Afghanistan’s confinement of its only one, Cuba’s absolute restriction on travel to Mexico, and the decrees that I was crazy if I went by certain of my acquaintances—rational and his plan of action would not involve any sort of travel restrictions because the flu had already spread past Mexico, and far past its origins, whatever they were. Encouraging was news that the new disease was most often easily fought off by the body, that it wasn’t spreading as quickly as scientists had feared. I went to my university’s student health center, and had a nurse who, very evenly told me that I should be cautious down there but swine flu was the least of my concerns. In addition to Relenza, she prescribed Cipro and malaria pills. I only purchased the first—which comes in an odd inhaler form and is not to be taken as preventative but only when symptoms appear—and relented to a flu shot and a typhoid shot. For the latter, I was apparently three years overdue.

In the meantime, I watched CNN more intently than usual when I was at the gym and was likely one of the most frequent visitors to the CDC website. Then I got bored of all the different types of coverage—some racist, some plain fear-mongering, some interesting, some worth thinking about in relation to my own situation. Then there was meta-coverage—news reporting on the news. Was the media blowing it out of proportion? Were people who took swine flu lightly asking for it? Answers ventured for all these questions were speculative at best. My parents gave me two respirators they’d had from some previous scare. I told G they were for me and him, in case we had to face Armageddon together.

My flight from Atlanta to Mexico City was relatively full. A business man across the aisle wore a surgical mask the whole way, and a mother and son and another man, a foreigner to Mexico like me, put on masks as we landed. In the airport I was made to fill out a questionnaire asking if I’d experienced any of a list of symptoms, and there were people wearing masks here and there. Most of them were casual about it, the blue fabric often draped below their mouths. There was one woman in the restaurant where I had lunch who very gingerly removed one of two plastic gloves she wore in order to better fork her enchilada.

Before I boarded my plane to Chiapas I was approached by a couple wearing respirators (like masks but sturdier, and with some sort of breathing appendages sticking out on either side). The man was American and guessed at where I was going. He asked if I’d share a cab from the airport with his girlfriend, since it’s so expensive in Tuxtla. I agreed. He said his girlfriend was shy about her English, that she works as an epidemiologist in a town near the Guatemala border. He was on his way to another state, and asked if I wasn’t worried. It was strange to have a conversation with these people wearing their masks, so I didn’t say much. As we boarded the plane, I turned to see them pull the things away for a brief kiss.

On the ground in Tuxtla, G found one more person to share our cab all the way to San Cristobal, which would be about an hour up the mountains. I was so happy to finally be here, to see G after so long, and generally ignored the conversation the epidemiologist—who had her mask off all the way now—had with the other dude, but G said they were talking about swine flu the whole time. The state government in Chiapas had apparently just decided it was a problem, and had shut down schools longer, banned public gatherings, etc.

Since I’ve gotten to San Cristobal and been here a few days I’ve only noticed a few people wearing masks. One young guy in a jewelry boutique had a cartoon animal mouth drawn on his. A pharmacy we passed in our walk to the market this morning had a sign saying they were out of masks. We weren’t allowed to enter a wine and tapas place we went to the other night, because, a man with a mask hanging under his chin explained, they were limited to serving 18 customers inside the cozy space at the time. We took a table on the street.

first day, new world

This is a picture of the street I will be living on for the next 2.5 mos. Arrived in San Cristobal last night as the sun was setting. The apartment G got for us is beautiful--full of ceramic and clay tiles, wood ceilings, airy, bright walls. The garden we share with the other houses in our complex:


Walked some around town today, saw the main squares, dipped into the market. The city is small, as far as I can tell and streets sit low under the stone sidewalks and houses that line them. There are too many cars on these ancient streets (G says about 400 years old), and so many old Beetles around, I've already revived the "punch buggy" game we used to play in Lebanon when we were younger, punching each other each time we sighted one of those fanciful-looking cars. It's actually pretty fun since G never played before and he takes their profligacy for granted.

The rest of the pics are here.

pescadillas

Pescadillas might be my new favorite food. Lightly fried corn tortillas stuffed with fried fish. Bought from the most polite little kids you ever saw. They would walk around the idyllic beaches we stayed on in Micoacan for a week over the new year and call out their wares, then come by and sell them for 5 pesos (like less than 40 cents with the current exchange rate) a piece. Then we'd cut them open and generously squeeze on the hot sauce. Makes me hunger thinking about it.

So I am back in Richmond where it is cold, very very cold. The semester begins today so there's a new schedule to figure out and stories to get back to writing. So hard to move Mexico to the periphery of my mind. While away, I read two fabulous books: The Boat, a collection of stories by Nam Le and White Tiger, a new (kind of) novel about India by Aravind Adiga. And finally I started Hakawati by Rabih Allamedine. More about those next time.