right, where was i? guanajuanto... stuck around that town for a few days. it reminded me that i had promised myself i would read don quijote this year. they've declared it cervantestown for no apparent reason. i guess they like statues. then i hitched to san miguel de allende and hung out for a bit. another nice town, full of americans though. real estate going through the poorly constructed concrete roof.
language language. i am thinking in two at the moment and i find my notebook is full of spanglish descriptions of what i have been doing, many of which things i have plum forgot on account of thinking too much about language... i forget which one i've been using. it's astonishing how exhausting it is to spend all day actively listening to something you don't quite understand, and it's reminding me how much i take for granted as a literate english speaker. my identity, felicity, are so deeply attached to an ability to use words well that i find it depressing and also delightfully humbling to stumble around in this completely other idiom, which i speak just well enough to sound like an idiot. i told someone the other day it is like living in two bodies at once; i tell my arm to move and my other leg kicks out. my spanish is improving in fits and starts. i believe my english is suffering, but i also trust it will return.
anyway, i went from SMdA to DF, mexico city, which locals call 'el monstruo.' it really is a monster but also was surprisingly easy to navigate. the metro is as good as its reputation. there's a really good coffee place in coyoacán. i went to most of the relevant musems, which was tiring, and teotihuacán, which was cool as there was a storm. the storm kindly waited until i had climbed down off the pyramid of the sun and was safely esconded in the museo (esconded is not a word in english, is it. i apologise). it downpoured (now i´m doing it on purpose). was very pretty to see the pyramids near deserted after the rain. refreshing too.
well i stayed with and befriended a woman from couchsurfing.com (best traveller's device since the 2minute noodle) in DF who was of no small assistance in my enjoyment of that city. we went to peubla together for the weekend and went to another pyramid, a fair, and some random person's birthday party. inside the pyramid there were cool tunnels. i ate a couple of spiced crickets and promptly apologised to their tiny cricket souls. at the fair there was a house of amazing animals that allegedly had a crocodile with the head of a woman and also a gallo pinguino (half rooster half penguin). i wanted to go inside but i decided these things could not possibly be as great as they were in my imagination. at the birthday party there was a car-shaped piñata and a fair bit of drinking, with the usual results.
then i went to oaxaca, which was nice. i ate well. oaxaca has a good reputation for food, despite being the home of aforesaid spiced crickets. more pyramids at monte alban. spectacular, enough said. more rain which prevented me from visiting the local waterhole, hierve el agua (the water boils, which when i translate it gets brendan behan's 'auld triangle' stuck in my head, which is irrelevant). though i did make it to the giant tree of El Tule, which boasts of being the world's largest single-thing biomass. it's a big tree. i tried looking for signs of anarchists in oaxaca but not very thoroughly. activism is relatively invisible. there's graffiti, but not the infoshop culture of the US, Europe and Aus.
i was bored of being a tourist, so i went to the beach. oaxaca's pacific coast is renowned for its beauty but being australian i am a bit spoiled in this regard. it was nice. good to see the pacific again. slept in a hammock. got sea legs and memories of my old flat at austinmer, the sensation of being knocked around by the ocean a sort of punchdrunk. i befriended a mildly annoying local who made me breakfast. he had eight grown kids and they all pretty much hung out on the beach all day smoking ganja, which is a fine life and well deserved after thirty years of working in cornfields for fifty pesos a day (about six australian dollars).
the conditions of life here and the gross inequality are startlingly obvious and horrible, but also familiar to anyone who has spent time in alice springs. it's one life for the bourgeousie and another for the indigenous people. well, i'm firmly in the former camp, not that it's particularly comfortable or i'm particularly wealthy, but here i am. time to drink coffee and read the left-wing papers and bemoan the gross inequality i guess. how familiar our hypocracies.
mexicans are somewhat reluctant to talk about politics because they are scared of the increasingly militarised society they live in. so claim those who will discuss such things. one of whom i was listening to with my eyes about closed becuase he was driving at 150 km/hr on winding mountain roads. which brings me to yesterday.
i got bored of the beach so i hitched to san christobal de los casas yesterday. i've wanted to come here for fourteen years, and am driven by zapatista nostalgia, but find it's a town full of reggae bars and travellers. it was a long way. rides were great. the lawlessness of mexican roads deserves its infamy. i arrived at midnight, found a cheap hostel, went out for a quiet beer, and ended up dancing with a gang of very excitable young mexicans for hours on end, the sort of post-exhausted dancing that comes from a deep reserve of energy. the 'getting it out of your system' kind. it was just what i needed. today is the middle of mexico's independence celebrations. tonight everyone yells 'viva mexico' at the top of their lungs at midnight, as if this country wasn't noisy enough already. as i read in my middle-class left-wing paper earlier this morning, over a comfortable coffee, after giving a few paltry coins to the indigenous children who begged me for change, 'you wouldn't find so many flags in a just country' - a wise statement i thought (which reflects pretty badly on australia too). but then i may have mistranslated it.
oh, i finished don quijote yesterday. it was excellent fun.
language language. i am thinking in two at the moment and i find my notebook is full of spanglish descriptions of what i have been doing, many of which things i have plum forgot on account of thinking too much about language... i forget which one i've been using. it's astonishing how exhausting it is to spend all day actively listening to something you don't quite understand, and it's reminding me how much i take for granted as a literate english speaker. my identity, felicity, are so deeply attached to an ability to use words well that i find it depressing and also delightfully humbling to stumble around in this completely other idiom, which i speak just well enough to sound like an idiot. i told someone the other day it is like living in two bodies at once; i tell my arm to move and my other leg kicks out. my spanish is improving in fits and starts. i believe my english is suffering, but i also trust it will return.
anyway, i went from SMdA to DF, mexico city, which locals call 'el monstruo.' it really is a monster but also was surprisingly easy to navigate. the metro is as good as its reputation. there's a really good coffee place in coyoacán. i went to most of the relevant musems, which was tiring, and teotihuacán, which was cool as there was a storm. the storm kindly waited until i had climbed down off the pyramid of the sun and was safely esconded in the museo (esconded is not a word in english, is it. i apologise). it downpoured (now i´m doing it on purpose). was very pretty to see the pyramids near deserted after the rain. refreshing too.
well i stayed with and befriended a woman from couchsurfing.com (best traveller's device since the 2minute noodle) in DF who was of no small assistance in my enjoyment of that city. we went to peubla together for the weekend and went to another pyramid, a fair, and some random person's birthday party. inside the pyramid there were cool tunnels. i ate a couple of spiced crickets and promptly apologised to their tiny cricket souls. at the fair there was a house of amazing animals that allegedly had a crocodile with the head of a woman and also a gallo pinguino (half rooster half penguin). i wanted to go inside but i decided these things could not possibly be as great as they were in my imagination. at the birthday party there was a car-shaped piñata and a fair bit of drinking, with the usual results.
then i went to oaxaca, which was nice. i ate well. oaxaca has a good reputation for food, despite being the home of aforesaid spiced crickets. more pyramids at monte alban. spectacular, enough said. more rain which prevented me from visiting the local waterhole, hierve el agua (the water boils, which when i translate it gets brendan behan's 'auld triangle' stuck in my head, which is irrelevant). though i did make it to the giant tree of El Tule, which boasts of being the world's largest single-thing biomass. it's a big tree. i tried looking for signs of anarchists in oaxaca but not very thoroughly. activism is relatively invisible. there's graffiti, but not the infoshop culture of the US, Europe and Aus.
i was bored of being a tourist, so i went to the beach. oaxaca's pacific coast is renowned for its beauty but being australian i am a bit spoiled in this regard. it was nice. good to see the pacific again. slept in a hammock. got sea legs and memories of my old flat at austinmer, the sensation of being knocked around by the ocean a sort of punchdrunk. i befriended a mildly annoying local who made me breakfast. he had eight grown kids and they all pretty much hung out on the beach all day smoking ganja, which is a fine life and well deserved after thirty years of working in cornfields for fifty pesos a day (about six australian dollars).
the conditions of life here and the gross inequality are startlingly obvious and horrible, but also familiar to anyone who has spent time in alice springs. it's one life for the bourgeousie and another for the indigenous people. well, i'm firmly in the former camp, not that it's particularly comfortable or i'm particularly wealthy, but here i am. time to drink coffee and read the left-wing papers and bemoan the gross inequality i guess. how familiar our hypocracies.
mexicans are somewhat reluctant to talk about politics because they are scared of the increasingly militarised society they live in. so claim those who will discuss such things. one of whom i was listening to with my eyes about closed becuase he was driving at 150 km/hr on winding mountain roads. which brings me to yesterday.
i got bored of the beach so i hitched to san christobal de los casas yesterday. i've wanted to come here for fourteen years, and am driven by zapatista nostalgia, but find it's a town full of reggae bars and travellers. it was a long way. rides were great. the lawlessness of mexican roads deserves its infamy. i arrived at midnight, found a cheap hostel, went out for a quiet beer, and ended up dancing with a gang of very excitable young mexicans for hours on end, the sort of post-exhausted dancing that comes from a deep reserve of energy. the 'getting it out of your system' kind. it was just what i needed. today is the middle of mexico's independence celebrations. tonight everyone yells 'viva mexico' at the top of their lungs at midnight, as if this country wasn't noisy enough already. as i read in my middle-class left-wing paper earlier this morning, over a comfortable coffee, after giving a few paltry coins to the indigenous children who begged me for change, 'you wouldn't find so many flags in a just country' - a wise statement i thought (which reflects pretty badly on australia too). but then i may have mistranslated it.
oh, i finished don quijote yesterday. it was excellent fun.
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5 Comments:
Sure wish i new what day you were at the Temple of The sun. Hector was just here and when he was so i drempt that i was inside of it. My only view was one of looking skyward from inbetween four great walls. I waited for the sun to pass through the middle.Hector told me that they allow very very few people deep inside of some of them,and where i was was for ceremony.(((insert twilight zone theme song)))hehe..go figure eh.
on a lighter note, Hector also shared a inside indigenous joke in relation to those pyramids. Apparently tourists and new age wingnuts tend to flock to the wrong damn pyramids for astrological phenomenons like eclipses and such.
which is good in a way considering there's no worries about a crowd muffin' up your ceremony wearing pasta strainers on their heads,and chiming tibetan prayer bowls chanting gurgley jibberish.
dance dance dance
hey Jen
great to hear from you. I'm so jealous. have a great time over there... I will think of you as I read Pablo. & keep charging at those windmills!
It sounds so great. I wish I could be there with you. I am excited for you and your adventures, it's great reading where you are at. Thanks so much for the awesome postcard.Tucson misses you and so do I.Stay alive, have fun.
oh MPB i wish you were there.
the equinox was supposed to be pretty cool at chichen itza last week. the sun does pretty stuff for four minutes in the afternoon. but it rained all day. i wasn-t there.
i have seen people in t/shirts that say 2012:kuyulkan is returning. ooooooo...
thanks for stopping by y'all. love back in all directions xx
jenjen,
am in darwin, soaking up the sweat. so cool to read your journeyings. may a blanket of stars keep you warm and twinkling.
xx
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