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.

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.

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.