Wanderlust

Report from Cuetzalan

2008-08-24T10:52:00.007-06:00

(A Picasa web album of photos of Cuetzalan may be seen at album.) For the past couple of weeks I've been on an itinerary of Mexico City to Tlaxcala to Puebla to Cuetzalan to Mexico City again, but until reaching Cuetzalan I couldn't find the ambition to write a post. Cuetzalan, however, is a first-time experience and a real shot in the arm--a cross between Taxco and Real de Catorce. To be more concrete, it's a town of 45,000, of whom 80 percent are indígenas of the Náhuatl group, located at about 3,000 feet of altitude in the Sierra Norte of the state of Puebla, in the northeast, near the state of Veracruz. There is a second-class bus from Puebla City, which I took (four hours) and a first-class bus that goes to Mexico City (six hours), which I will take from here.

The layout of the town resembles a medieval European city (think Toledo, Spain), the streets that go every which way also going on many different levels, frequently joined by stairways. The zócalo (the main plaza), in fact, is on three levels joined by stairs, the kiosk and two small fountains on the middle level, with the Iglesia de San Francisco and its churchyard on the bottom level. All of the pavements, streets and sidewalks alike, are of very large paving stones. The buildings are mostly white, sometimes with terracota-colored trim, with tile roofs. (I find out from a taxi driver whom I hire for an excursion that the city government gives out white and terracota-colored paint for you to paint your house; if you want another color, that's fine, but you pay for the paint.) The three churches are not colonial, as you would expect, but 19th-century neogothic. (An exhibit in the Casa de la Cultura says that one of them replaced a church that "amenazó ser ruina," i.e., threatened to fall down.) The climate at this time of the year is warm and muggy, with rain in the late afternoon and at night. (The taxi driver tells me that it rains every month but April and May.)

The whiteness of the buildings is matched by the clothing of the indígenas. The women wear a full white skirt and a white huipil with multicolored embroidery around the square neckline and the sleeves. (One woman at the Mercado de Artesanías told me that that part of the garment was woven on a backstrap loom, but another told me it was embroidered, which strikes me as more plausible.) They use multicolored rebozos woven on a backstrap loom or sometimes a white triangular poncho. They sometimes carry their baby on their back in a basket shaped something like a magazine rack with a strap that goes across the forehead. The men wear white pants tied around the ankles, a white shirt worn outside the pants, and a white sombrero. They generally carry a morral woven of some beige straw-like fiber. You can guess which sex wears leather sandals and which sex usually goes barefoot.

I arrive on a Wednesday to stay through Sunday, when there is a weekly market said to be quite special. When I go out just before 9 Thursday morning, to my surprise I find people setting up a market on the two sets of zócalo steps. Asking a couple of people yields the information that the market is twice weekly, but much bigger on Sunday than on Thursday; it turns out that another difference is that at the Sunday market they sell many other things in addition to food. (The following day I discover an indoor market, dark and with no customers.) My approach to a place like this is basically to wander and take pictures, which I happily do on Thursday and Friday. I don't bother to try making use of the map that the tourist folks give out, I just navigate by landmarks and ask directions to the Iglesia de los Jarritos or whatever. (That church is so called because its narrow, pointed tower is covered with clay jars.)

When I am hot and thirsty (I don't like the stickiness of sodas anymore and the warm water I'm carrying with me can be less than appetizing), I find that negociating a lemonade in a restaurant or café works better if I call it an agua de limón rather than a limonada and that it costs between 3 and 5 pesos rather than the 15 or 20 I would pay in a more urban setting. I have a great triumph for my comida at a restaurant where I have read on the Thorn Tree forum that they have crêpes with veggies, which is rather off, but the señor will be glad to prepare for me a veggie version of a guarache, which has a base of a large oval of tortilla, on which is piled beans, cheese, onions, tomatos, avocado, and strips of nopal (cactus), eaten with salsa picante of course and quite delicious. To vary my diet I find a hole in the wall that makes mini pizzas, including a vegetarian version.

I spend considerable time over my first two days locating the one place in town that sells newspapers, which are Puebla papers that come in at noon; I arrange to pay in advance so that the señor will reserve me a copy. On Friday I spend considerable time locating a taxi, which it turns out can be found further down the same street, and negotiate with the taxista an excursion the next day to a nearby botanical garden and an arqueological site. Having the idea that the garden will open at 9 and that it's half an hour away, I ask him to pick me up at my hotel at 8:30. As it happens, we get there in 15 minutes and the garden is closed, but the taxista is resourceful and knows of another botanical garden run by a group that also works with butterflies, grows coffee and black peppercorns, and has cabins. So a muchacho shows me through a garden that is surrounded on all sides and above by screening, to keep in the butterflies, some of which are species that they are working to rescue from the threat of extinction. Then we go to the ruins, modest as prehispanic ruins go, where a muchachito who turns out to be all of eight years old offers to be my guide, which I accept because I have no sense of direction and always have a fear of getting lost in ruins. (Yes, he assures me, he goes to school during the week.)

On Sunday at 8:30 in the morning the town has been transformed--the zócalo and the surrounding streets are covered with puestos selling food, artesanías, clothing, hardware, housewares--you name it. The atmosphere is a quiet bustle; I see a few other foreigners but not a great influx as in, for example, Chichicastenango. An indígena woman approaches me with bags full of artesanías to sell, which of course has happened to me here umpteen times already and I have always managed to resist, but she has an attractive rebozo (black and a sort of mustard color), so I get the price down from 140 pesos to 120 and buy it. I also buy a little packet of delicious nibbles made of crushed macademia nuts.

It will be quite a change to get back to the sound and fury of Mexico City tomorrow.

Mexico City's Living Statues

2008-08-11T14:29:00.003-06:00

One of my favorite aspects of Sundays in Mexico City's Centro Histórico is watching the living statues, men (I have never seen a female one, I regret to report), usually young, usually smeared from head to toe with silver or gold paint, including their costume, holding what look like excruciatingly uncomfortable poses for long periods of time, until someone puts a coin in their box, pitcher, what have you, which sets off a series of movements--the whole point for me being to see how he will move in reaction to my 5 pesos. Yesterday (August 10, 2008), while I was passing through Mexico City on my way to Tlaxcala and other points (reports to come), I saw in two pedestrian blocks (Calles Mata and Gante, on either side of Avenida Madero) the following living statues:

1. A mailman, monocromatic, with leather mail carrier's bag stuffed with small airmail envelopes, except that sometimes he dug in it and retrieved a flattened out small paper bag, when stationary in a pose of frozen movement, when reacting to a contribution reaching into his bag and handing an envelope, with an assortment of gestures, to his contributor. From another contributor I found out that inside was a sheet of paper with a poem printed on it. The paper bags were apparently earmarked for women, because I got one inside of which was a passionate love poem going on about my beauty.

2. A death figure, wearing a black velvet robe with hood, face covered with black cloth, holding a rectangular box covered in black velvet, handing something I couldn't see from the box to his contributors after making various sinuous movements.

3. A clown playing a CD of Strauss waltzes, who moved stiffly, like a wind-up toy, dancing with niñas and señoritas and then handing them back to their parent or novio.

4. An Aztec warrior (I guess), skin totally covered with silver paint, an Aztec-looking thingie dangling from around his waist, an assortment of knives and clubs on the ground by him, who when paid assumed a pose of cutting off the hair or the head of the woman who contributed to him, while someone took her photo or video, and then gave her a kiss on the cheek.

5. The only unsuccessful act I saw, with abolutely no audience, maybe a soldier of one of Mexico's wars, in what might have been a long military coat, but no weapon, just a leather sachel, pointing ahead with one leg behind.

6. With the biggest audience, a Cuban dandy, dressed in purple suit, purple-and-white shirt, purple hat with yellow feather, and purple-and-white saddle shoes, face and hands covered with black cloth. I say Cuban because when he wasn't sitting on a small stool he was playing Cuban music and doing fabulous dancing, alone and with folks who gave him money.

Quite a show for a Sunday afternoon.

Report from Nebaj (Guatemala)

2008-04-24T10:21:00.005-06:00

(An Internet photo album of photos I took of Nebaj and Chajul is at album.) Nebaj is my most remote destination in Guatemala and the only one where I have never been before. It is the fulcrum of three indígena villages that form the Ixil triangle (the x pronounced like sh), nestled in the Cuchumatanes mountains in the northern part of the Western Highlands, the only part of Guatemala where the language Ixil is spoken. This area suffered unspeakably brutal massacres during the civil war, punishment for being the theater of operations of one of the guerrilla groups; I had planned to visit Nebaj during a trip in the early 90s but read in the newspaper that there was fighting nearby, so quickly changed my plans. In recent years it has undergone many improvements, due in part to the arrival of NGOs, in part to the remesas sent by those who have migrated from here to the US. Thus there is a Spanish school and a company providing trekking guides, the chicken buses have largely been replaced by vans known as microbuses, there are tuk tuks everywhere, and the plaza, now quite pretty, recently underwent a renovation.

Nebaj is especially intense because the traje típico, which virtually all the women in town are wearing, is the prettiest I've ever seen. The ankle-length skirts are burgundy with a vertical design in white, the huipiles are various colors woven in distinctive angular designs that you discover depict birds or horses. Then there is the headpiece, a strip of elaborately woven cloth with pom poms at the end that is somehow wound around the head and the hair. A rebozo, also elaborately woven, is also frequently used.

I arrive Monday at 10 by microbus from Santa Cruz del Quiché, two hours away, the drive one curve after another through breathtaking scenery of one level of mountains giving away in the distance to another, beautiful pine forests, also a fair amount of deforestation, and of course near-vertical corn fields. Shortly after I get to my hotel I call Brian, a contact I have made through the Thorn Tree and for whom I have brought several baseball caps for the children he works with. Brian is a one-man NGO who spends eight or nine months of the year here, working with children and working on a stove project. (Traditionally cooking is done on a fire surrounded by three stones to put the comal and other cooking implements on, which wastes a lot of the heat and fills the room with smoke; the stove, built of concrete, uses half the amount of firewood and funnels the smoke through a chimney.) Brian says he and a Guatemalan woman are about to visit a school in the country nearby, so I express an interest in accompanying them and he offers to pick me up at my hotel.

It turns out that Brian is preparing for a visit the following day of a team from a small American NGO that is building schools in Guatemala (something the Ministry of Education apparently doesn't much do) and which he hopes to persuade to build a school in Nebaj and to use him as their contact person. Therefore we are visiting two schools to prepare them for a visit to show the visitors how needy they are--in fact, they aren't exactly schools, they're single classrooms in log-cabin shacks with tin roofs, dirt floors, and minimal equipment. In each the (male) teacher is teaching four or five grades because there are only a few students in each grade. We also visit a nearby vacant lot that the teachers hope to persuade the mayor to buy for a school to be built on.

We return to Nebaj on the back of a pickup truck, standing and holding on to a scaffolding, and Brian and I continue on to the house of a family (indígena of course) where we are going to have almuerzo, the middle meal here. It turns out that Brian, who lives in a cheap hotel, arranges with families to eat in their home for a minimal payment. This family has electricity, meaning bare light bulbs but no refrigerator, running water in the pila (what we call a lavadero in Mexico except that it has three sinks, one for dishes, one for clothes, the middle one a deposit of water), and a sort of outhouse near the house. There is firewood stacked up and a good supply of chickens in an enclosure. There are dirt floors in the two rooms, a kitchen and a large bedroom (the pila is outside). Brian and I sit down with a small table between us but not facing the table, we are furnished a basin of water to wash our hands and then given bowls containing beans mixed with greens and a small omelet. A high stack of tortillas is put on the table; I ask Brian if we eat with the tortillas, he says that is what the family does but we'll be given spoons. To drink we are given something like orangeade but hot.

As we return to el centro, Brian and I arrange to meet in the plaza at 6:45 to go to another house for cena, which he has arranged by cell phone as we walked to where we had almuerzo; apparently there are a lot of cell phones in Nebaj. In the meantime, I unpack, rest a little, and go to one of the several cybercafés here.

By the end of the evening I decide that Brian is either a saint or fulfilling a personal need. After our cena, in a house without electricity, just two candles in the kitchen, getting to which has involved walking on several narrow paths, indispensible the flashlight I have brought, the meal the same as almuerzo except we have atole (a hot drink made from wheat) to drink, afterwards Brian rounds up a large number of children because we are going to go to another house and the children are going to sing. Except that some of the children rebel and have to be rounded up again, and somehow this performance gets delayed more than I am comfortable with, while I chat with some of the adults who have been brought to this house (which has electricity) to hear the children. Finally the children are ready to be put through their paces, Brian always singing with them, and it turns out that all but one or two of the songs are in English or in one case Swedish (Brian is Swedish), songs like "Old McDonald Had a Farm" (with the name of the animal in Spanish), "Jingle Bells," and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." They do a bilingual version of "This Land Is Your Land," for which Brian has done a Spanish translation with appropriate geographical references. The quality of the singing is what you would expect of random kids with no training. Later I ask Brian if the children know the meaning of the non-Spanish words, and he says for the most part no.

During our cena Brian, who talks incessantly, gets very defensive about his upcoming encounter with the head representative of the NGO, whom he wants to choose him as the contact person for the school he wants them to build, but he doesn't feel he should have to prove himself, as if it were a job interview, that's what he came to Guatemala to get away from. Which makes me wonder about his work with kids perhaps providing him with a level of fulfillment that he's been unable to get otherwise.

In any event, on Tuesday Brian is occupied with his visitors, the town of Chajul, another point in the Ixil Triangle, has its market day, so I take a microbus there in the morning. My guidebook says there is a store of a weaving cooperative between the church and the market, which interests me, but it takes asking a huge number of people for directions to find it. In these parts it's safer to ask directions of a man than a woman because the proportion of men who speak Spanish is greater than the proportion of women. In any event, the store is open but deserted and what's in it is in a state of chaos, so I return to the church and the market (the churchyard is above and gives me good views of the market for shooting photos) and am happily taking pictures (of people who I think aren't aware I'm taking their picture--one woman who became aware threw a small potato at me) when I'm approached by a señora who starts talking to me about buying a huipil from her. I have been thinking of buying one of the strips used around the head, so I follow her to her house, which involves walking through a school to get to. She shows me a number of things and I choose a strip that afterwards I wonder if it's used on the hair because it's much wider than most, but in any event it's gorgeous and the colors will go very well on the (turquoise) wall of my bedroom.

I stay in Nebaj through today, Thursday, because Thursday is market day here and my itinerary is based on market days. My last two days are less intense than the first two--I explore the market and the new Mercado de Artesanía, puestos housed in an attractive new building (I buy cloth bookmarks and an elaborately woven strip such as a priest might wear hanging over his neck), wander around shooting photos, and deal with the problem of finding vegetarian restaurant meals (pizza turns out to be my best option).

I should fill in the narrative between Panajachel, where I last reported, and Nebaj. From Pana on Saturday I take a tourist van for an hour to Chichicastenango, spend the night in an overpriced hotel, and go out to explore the tourist market at 7:45 Sunday morning. At 10 I am on a microbus for the half-hour trip to Santa Cruz del Quiché, an indígena town (where the frilly huipiles look like they were made on a sewing machine rather than a backstrap loom) that also has its market on Sunday, spend the night there, and Monday come to Nebaj.

My transition tomorrow to Antigua, my final destination in Guatemala, where I will spend a week, is more complicated than I would like. I take an early microbus to Santa Cruz del Quiché, there get on a chicken bus (recycled US school bus, garishly painted and with a rack on the roof) that's going to Guatemala City, get off 40 minutes before there at the side of the road in Chimaltenango, and catch a passing bus going to Antigua. Ordinarily it's a five-hour trip, but the construction work on the Panamerican Highway will undoubtedly make it longer.

Report from Panajachel (Guatemala)

2008-04-18T16:25:00.009-06:00

(An Internet album of photos I took of Panajachel and Sololá is at album.) The transition by van from San Cristóbal across the border to Lake Atitlán in Guatemala on Monday, April 14 is something of an ordeal, 12 hours instead of the advertised eight. Partly the problem is delays due to construction on the Panamerican Highway, but mostly it is lack of communication between the tour agency that sold me the ticket and the outfit that actually did the transportation, plus logistical mess-ups of the latter--the sort of occasion that makes you want to just forget about it and move on.

Panajachel, where I have been several times, I have always had mixed feelings about, more positive in my old age than earlier. It is located on the north shore of Lake Atitlán, which Aldous Huxley famously called the most beautiful lake in the world, the beauty coming not just from a large body of water 5,000 feet above sea level but from the three stunning volcanoes that loom above it (although depending on where you are, they may appear to be only two), with mountains going off to the side. The effect is to suck you in and lift you up--awesome in the original sense of the word.

Panajachel is something else, something rather bizarre. A mile or so from the lake it is an indígena village, with plaza, church, town hall, and market. In between that village and the lakeshore is 100 percent tourism--puesto after puesto selling artesanía, shops with the higher-end stuff, restaurants, hotels, and transportation services. Since my last visit there are tuks-tuks puttering down Calle Santander, the center of the action--like cocotaxis in Havana but with a full canvas cover and painted red. (If that descrition isn't helpful, they are three-wheeled vehicles that can take two passengers.) This seems to be a very low low season, and the atmosphere is quite relaxed (and the weather marvelously warm).

There is an increasingly tourist infrastructure in some of the other villages around the lake (one of them has long been noted as a hippie and druggie hangout), and now there are boutique hotels with their own landing docks isolated from everything else.

Pana is one of the three best places to shop in Guatemala (the others are Chichicastenango and Antigua), and since I have a camera crisis and the day after my arrival can't take pictures, I pay my respects to the lake and shop. (Apparently I messed up my snazzy new camera trying to insert a new memory card the wrong way, and after visiting two photo shops it appears that a friend of a muchacho in the second one can repair it for an exhorbitant amount, hopefully by late the following day.) Aside from the mangos and avocados I buy in the market and the loaf of banana bread in a bakery called Pana Pan, in short order on the artesanía strip I buy two runners from the same woman, made in Santa Catarina Palopó, one of the dozen or so indígena villages on the lake, and a medium-sized cloth shoulder bag made here.

The night of my arrival I experience an earthquake, lying in bed not to sleep but collapsed from exhaustion, wondering about that sudden vibration, like one of those lounge chairs that gives a massage. Since nothing is jumping off the table, I decide I don't have to do anything. The next day I read in the paper about the 40-second, 5.8-degree earthquake, centered on the Pacific coast but felt in the entire country, without any injuries or damages.

The camera crisis deepens--I entrust my camera to a muchacho in QuickPhoto on Tuesday morning, he says his friend can fix it for Thursday, I plead as earnestly as I can to get it on Wednesday, he leads me to believe that there was a possibility for Wednesday afternoon, I should come by at 4, at which time I'm told to come by at 6, at which time I'm told to wait ten minutes (I go out for ice cream), at which time I'm told it will be Thursday afternoon. So I have no choice but to take the boat ride to Santiago Atitlán Thursday morning without a camera, since Friday, my last day here, is market day in Sololá and I must go there.

Santiago Atitlán is across the lake from Panajachel, and the boat ride normally takes an hour. But this time they're using a much smaller boat than the ones I've been on in the past, one that will hold maybe 20 people, with a roof but otherwise totally open, with an outboard motor. We're much closer to the water and our speed is much greater, so we arrive in 20 minutes. Santiago is the largest of the indígena villages around the lake, really too large to be called a village. The huipiles of the women there are traditionally white with widely spaced lavender stripes and embroidery of birds at the top in between the stripes. The men wear pants the length of pedal pushers, traditionally white with widely spaced purple stripes and embroidery across the bottom, covering both stripes and background. Now one sees many variations on the traditional style, and some clothes that, while still traje típico, don't look anything like it.

Santiago's history is very much entwined with the bloody history of Guatemala's civil war. An American priest who had ministered in Santiago for many years was killed by the army in the early 80s, and his heart is buried in the church, where a chapel is dedicated to him. A historic victory for indígena rights took place in 1990, when the army post in Santiago was forced to leave as a result of an international uproar over the army shooting at a crowd of demonstrators who were protesting the actions of a couple of drunken soldiers trying to kidnap someone, killing 19.

I resist the approaches of two guides but find myself agreeing to go with a third, who has a credential around his neck, agreeing to pay 70 quetzales (down from the original price of 100) for him to take me to see Maximón and to the Catholic church. Maximón, also known as San Simón, is a saint not in the Catholic pantheon but much venerated here and among indígenas in other parts of Guatemala. He is kept in a person's home, changing from home to home every November 1. He has a room all to himself, with fruits, herbs, and papel picado hanging from the ceiling. His head is carved out of wood, and it's impossible to see what his body is made out of. He is wearing a black hat, has a cigar in his mouth, sports a tie around his neck and is so festooned with scarves draped over his shoulders that it's impossible to see his jacket. His pants are vividly embroidered. There's a plate in front of him where one can leave a donation. I ask my guide on the way about my impression that many people here are Evangelical Christians, and he tells me that the majority are, and while seeing Maximón he tells me that both Catholics and Evangelicals come here to pray to him in times of sickness or other hardship.

From there we go to the Catholic church, where a service in which those in attendance are all women is taking place, led by a laywoman. The imagenes lined up by the side walls are all dressed in cloth robes, those on the left being identical and those on the right identical to each other but differerent from those on the left; the clothes are made by different societies, my guide tells me. After paying my guide he agrees to take me to the market for no additional charge; I remember when years ago it consisted of people laying out their goods on the ground in front of the city hall, but now it's a substantial three-level building. Finally, we walk down toward the lake--the walk from the lake to the center of town is lined with puestos selling artesanía--to where there is a small but very well-laid-out museum of the weavings of Santiago, created, it turns out, by an American woman who has lived there 30 years. On the way we pass an Evangelical church, a three-story structure that looks like a hotel or an office building.

Thursday afternoon at 5 I am finally reunited with my camera, and of course I rush down to the lakeside to take pixtures--and of course the day is so cloudy that the volcanos, although visible, look like ghosts. So I take some ghostly pictures and resolve to go out before breakfast on Friday. But at 6 a.m. the volcanos aren't really any more distinct (of course the day after my arrival they were strikingly distinct), so I take more ghostly photos. Later on, after breakfast and shower, I hire a tuk tuk to take me to Sololá for the market instead of taking the bus because there's a mirador on the way where I ask him to stop. Well, I will try again tomorrow morning, but I fear my best photos of the lake are going to be film pictures from one of my previous trips.

In any event, Sololá is an indígena town, state capitol in fact, located on a cliff above Panajachel, about 20 minutes away. Both sexes were a traje típico of many colors on a dark blue or black background; the men wear a short wrap-around skirt of brown and white wool over their pants. I've bought some of my favorite weavings there, in a building at the Friday market, most of which is out of doors, but I've also been robbed twice there over the years, so I take precautions--my wallet stays home, money for the bus goes in a little zipper case, money for the tuk tuk goes in the secret pocket of my travel pants, and money for a weaving or two goes in my waist pouch.

The tuk tuk leaves me on the edge of the market, where there isn't a total crush, a good place to get started taking pictures, which is always a challenge in a situation where people are constantly moving and in close proximity. I slowly move through the market in the direction of the parque central, as the main plaza in a Guatemalan city is always called, and as I am happily shooting away there a señora approaches me with an assortment of weavings over her arm. One of them I am tempted to consider--I want to replace a huipil on the wall of my livingroom that I no longer like--although I had wanted to check out what was in the building, so I am in a state of doubt as a second woman appears with an absolutely knock-your-socks-off weaving in just the color I want (burnt orange) over her arm (a huipil in which the center hole has been filled in with cloth and embroidery and long tassels have been added at the corners). This is so gorgeous that it is absolutely impossible to resist, so we get down to the business of bargaining; I manage to get her down from 500 quetzales to 410 (US$55, $4 more than I have ever paid before), think afterwards that I could probably have gotten her down further if I had started to walk away, but that I wasn't capable of doing.

Having made the purchase, my problem becomes that two or three women insist on following me and plying me with their weavings, refusing to believe my insistence that I'm not going to buy any more. Eventually they give up and leave, I push my way into the building because a friend has asked me to buy a weaving for her new apartment (she covets the huipil over the sideboard in my diningroom, but no way am I going to part with that), and after walking past the meat, always difficult for me, I find the section with the weavings, but nothing my friend would like for her wall. At this point I am beat from all the intensity, leave the building by a different exit, find myself at the edge of the market, see an ice cream place, and treat myself to a vasito de chocochip to give myself energy to stay a little longer, before climbing onto a chicken bus (so-called for their occasional feathery passengers) to go back to Pana.

Tomorrow I move on to Chichicastenango, site of a famous tourist market on Sunday that many years ago I stopped going to because the tourist presence was too overwhelming. This time I'm going because it's on the way to Nebaj, about which more when I get there. I will minimize the problem by arriving Saturday afternoon; I can watch the preparations, which is fun to do, and then arrive at and leave the market before the tourist vans arrive.

Report from San Cristóbal de las Casas

2008-04-13T11:11:00.003-06:00

(An Internet album of photos I took of San Cristóbal is at album.) Here I am in Chiapas for the first time in eight years, on my way to Guatemala, having flown on April 7 from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and shared a taxi the rest of the way. Like Guanajuato, San Cristóbal is a tourism-oriented colonial city, but it has a totally different feel. On the one hand, it's larger (population about 250,000, as opposed to 150,000) and brisker (everyone seems to be in a rush), built on a grid with traffic lights (which are unheard of in Guanajuato, where the streets wind and rarely intersect). On the other hand, there's a marked indígena presence, with the various groups from the surrounding villages (speaking various languages other than Spanish) coming to town to sell their artesanía to the tourists, in the churchyard of the Iglesia Santo Domingo and in the zócalo, and selling to and buying from each other in the large, busy market.

San Cristóbal is centered on a square, well-landscaped plaza with a Victorian-looking kiosk in the center, well populated with muchachos selling newspapers and shining shoes. On the north side is the Cathedral, painted mustard color with red borders and white flowers, facing to the west a large open space punctuated by a large cross. The first street to the west has for several blocks been made into a pedestrian corridor since my last visit, tourist-oriented restaurants and shops alternating with everyday stores. Several blocks to the north, the Iglesia Santo Domingo is a major presence with its spacious churchyard thickly populated with indígenas selling artesanía, the municipal market a little further north and east.

Santo Domingo Church deserves its own paragraph, looming above a steep stairway with its superbaroque facade, inside the walls of both sides of the center nave and the chapel to the right one baroque gold altarpiece after another without interruption. The main altar, in austere neoclassical style, looks oddly out of place. There is an enormous space around Santo Domingo and between it and the smaller Church of La Caridad further south, where indígenas have sold artesanía as long as I've traveled here but whose density has now reached saturation. The ex-convent attached to Santo Domingo is the site of Sna Jolobil, a weavers' cooperative founded by an American anthropologist who wanted to encourage native weavers to revive their traditional patterns and dyes, where the weavings are breathtakingly exquisite and the prices are breathtakingly high.

I divide my time between museums, buying provisions (I eat two meals a day in my room, buy fruit at the market and fabulous cinnamon buns and empanadas of curried veggies at a gringo-oriented bakery), looking at artesanía, and wandering around taking (over 200) pictures, with occasional stops for a lemonade or hot chocolate. I do two day trips to indígena villages.

Chiapas being one of those places where amber is found, I go to the Amber Museum and marvel at the delicate sculptures carved out of (not large) chunks of amber--people and animals, even a marimba. (At the church to which the museum is attached, in a former convent, by a side altar with an enormous quantity of artificial flowers there is a large bowl of water on a stand, and a number of indígenas who were kneeling on the floor in front of the altar rub the water on all exposed parts of their bodies and their children's bodies.) The private Museum of Regional Dress Sergio Castro, which requires an appointment, is a good orientation to the variations (for everyday, for fiestas, for weddings) of traje típico of the various indígena groups throughout the state. More along those lines is the Museum of Popular Cultures.

Thursday being market day in Tenejapa, 30 kilometers away, I want to go there, and the morning after my arrival I inquire of the guide rounding up tourists by the Cathedral to go to Chamula if he'll be going to Tenejapa on Thursday. As usual, it depends on a few other people being interested, which as it happens on Thursday, there aren't, besides which, when I learn that the tour would cost 220 pesos (my transportation cost 40) my interest declines, so I set off to find the colectivo that goes to Tenejapa. (A colectivo is simply a taxi that fills up with passengers.) Tenejapa's plaza is crowded with people, and as I wander around I start to see here and there men who must be members of the cofradía, wearing their traje of red-and-white hand-woven wool shorts under a black wool tunic, with an ordinary long-sleeved shirt. Some have long necklaces with what look like large coins but are really religious medals. So I scurry around chasing them, taking a lot of pictures from the back, noticing on the way that most of the women have forsaken their gorgeous red-and-white huipil, woven on the backstrap loom, and are wearing turtlenecks instead, which is logical in that they would be both cheaper and warmer in the chill of the highlands. From the plaza after a while I walk down to the market, simply a long street lined with improvised puestos, and try shooting pictures in a confined space with people constantly moving. After an hour or so, having checked out the church, I take a colectivo back to San Cristóbal.

The following day I go to Na Bolom, a more-or-less obligatory stop for visitors to San Cristóbal, though I must confess that my interest in the inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle is minimal, I guess because their traje típico is so austere. Na Bolom was the name given to their huge house in a former seminary by the late Frans Blom, an archeologist, and Trudy, his photographer wife. For some reason the lacandones became their special interest and special project, so the museum--where I arrived for a tour, but since I was the only person interested, the tour wasn't--is replete with photos and artifacts of the lacandones, of whom Sergio Castro of the private museum has told me there are only 200 left, with a major problem of inbreeding.

I am here until Monday the 14th, really a day longer than I need, because my itinerary is based on market days, and Sunday is market day in San Juan Chamula, an indígena village only 10 kilometers away--and the source of large numbers of indígenas living in shantytowns around San Cristóbal who have been expelled from Chamula for converting to protestantism. I take a tour that goes to Chamula and the nearby village of Zinacantán. In Chamula the main attraction is the church, in which a syncretic version of Catholicism is practiced and the only sacrament a priest is permitted to perform is baptism, which happens once a month. The church has no pews, there are pine needles on the floor and groups of people placing candles of different sizes and colors on the floor, with chickens, eggs, and soda bottles in evidence, all used for healing purposes. Glass cases with figures of saints line the walls. The market area is to one side of the large central plaza, and on another side are cement benches where the mayordomos are in evidence, with their black wool tunics over white pants and shirt, hats with multicolored ribbons cascading from the center of the top. Picture-taking is strictly prohibited of these officials and of anything inside the church. The normal traje for Chamula is blue blouses and black wool skirts for the women, white or black wool tunics over Western clothes for the men. (Our guide's take on the question of the expulsion of Protestants is that it is the fault of the Morman and Jehovah's Witness missionaries who are intruding on the native culture.)

Chamula is an agricultural village; Zinacantán, where we go next, produces flowers for export and is more prosperous. The curious thing about its traje típico is that when I was here eight years ago it was bright pink, but it has undergone a transformation and is now blue and purple, the women wearing a long skirt and triangular poncho and the men wearing a similar poncho. Here the church has the usual pews and the usual service. Here we are permitted to visit a family, the hope being that we will buy some of the weavings they have produced, for which purpose we are allowed to take pictures of a young woman weaving. Personally, I prefer Guatemalan weaving, so I put off my purchases for later in my trip.

Tommorrow morning I get on a tour agency's van and cross the border to Guatemala, getting off in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán. I have five destinations in Guatemala, with stays ranging from a day to a week, then spend four nights in Mexico City.

Photos of Cuba

2007-11-02T15:20:00.000-06:00

I was in Cuba--Havana, Santiago, and Camagüey--from October 5 to 22. Having decided that the ratio of work to recognition was too unfavorable, I haven't written about the trip here, but having acquired a digital camera since my last trip to Cuba, I took a lot of pictures and created three web albums in Picasa. They may be seen at Cuba photos.

Culinary Adventures of a Traveling Vegetarian

2007-03-06T09:00:00.000-06:00

It’s good for my Spanish, I keep telling myself, because I am constantly negotiating. And it occasionally produces a pleasant surprise. “It” is the fact of traveling while vegetarian. There was, for example, the restaurant in Mérida where, when I started my usual explanation of being a vegetarian and therefore only wanting cheese in my enchiladas, the waiter picked up on the vegetarian part, starting saying things like “¿Jitomate? ¿Cebolla?,” I nodding consent, then emerged a while later with three tortillas stuffed with chopped and cooked mushrooms, tomatoes, onion, green pepper, and black olives—a real treat. I did equally well in Valladolid when I misinterpreted a menu as offering a vegetarian burrito and after a confused conversation with the waiter got just that.

At the other extreme was the day of my arrival in Ticul, a small town south of Mérida. I was hot and tired, the pizzería was closed, so I wandered into a restaurant offering Yucatecan specialties, asked to see the menu before sitting down, explaining my limitations, looked at the descriptions and then asked for a particular dish without the turkey. They brought out a plate with tostadas with a number of ingredients, including turkey, I sent it back with a patient explanation, they brought out a container of tortillas, a bowl of what looked to me like black bean soup, much more liquid than beans, a plate of salad ingredients, and, mercifully, a little bowl of guacamole. I tried making a taco with the beans but they were too liquid and ran all over the plate, so I ate the beans as a soup with a spoon, gobbled up the guacamole, and asked for the check. When the check came the second line had been crossed off, I was only charged for the limonada. Horrendously embarrassed, I left as quickly as possible.

Sometimes the solution is to eat totally out of synch with the culture of my surroundings, in Granada (Spain) eating at an excellent Indian restaurant near my hotel or in Havana walking over to the Barrio Chino. Indian and Chinese restaurants are always safe because many Indians and Chinese are Buddhists and therefore vegetarian. Italian is another possibility because there is always pasta with a tomato sauce.

Frequently the solution is to be bored, falling back on cheese enchiladas in Mexico or moros y cristianos (black beans and rice) in Cuba (using the little bottle of salsa picante that I always take to Cuba to make it less dull). Some cities of course have vegetarian restaurants, but these are not a guarantee of good food and tend to lean heavily on textured vegetable protein, which I don’t like. Some not-vegetarian restaurants are sufficiently oriented to tourists and sufficiently aware that some of them don’t eat meat to include palatable meatless offerings in their menus; my best meal ever in my travels was a parrillada vegetariana (grilled vegetables) in Antigua in Guatemala. The chile relleno stuffed with goat’s cheese at an Italian restaurant in Mexico City was almost as good.

We veggies of course don’t have the luxury of being able to take a leap into the unknown and order something without being sure of what it contains. Our vocabulary leans heavily to “¿Qué trae?” whatever and “¿Relleno de qué?” We thank the waiter for a vegetarian main dish and then patiently explain that the mashed potatoes with bits of ham in them have to be taken off the plate. We try not to sound peeved that the world’s restaurants are not more in synch with our atypical tastes. We feel a great relief when we are in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa and can go to a restaurant where the food is not only vegetarian but also excellent. And we wonder: Is it really necessary to eat?

Photographic Trip Report

2007-02-22T20:39:00.000-06:00

January found me spending four weeks traveling in southeast Mexico, three in the state of Yucatán (to Mérida, Valladolid, and Ticul, with day trips to Chichén Itzá and Izamal from Mérida and Ek Balam from Valladolid) and one in the state of Veracruz (Tlacotalpan, passing through the city of Veracruz but not taking any photos worth mentioning). I did not write in my blog this trip (I was relaxing after several weeks of bronchitis) but I did try out my new (and first) digital camera. Since returning I have been working in Google's Picasa software to create web albums of my destinations. If you go to http://picasaweb.google.com/lilander you can access these albums, double-clicking on the photo representing a given album to open it and then clicking on "Slideshow" to see the photos enlarged and in order.

Report from Granada

2006-06-04T12:56:00.000-06:00

Granada, where I arrive by train on Monday, May 29, is the most Muslim part of Spain and is quite fascinating. My first day's trip to the tourist office gets me a brochure about a walking tour, which I take the next morning and which turns out to be well worth the 10€ fee for giving me a real sense of the historical development of the area. After the Muslim conquest of most of Spain in 711, Granada was the last part to be recovered by the Christians in what is called la Reconquista, in which a peace treaty was signed with the Muslim sultan on January 2, 1492. The Jews, despite having largely financed the Reconquista, were shortly after given the choice to convert or depart. Enraged that most of them departed, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had the Jewish quarter destroyed. The Muslims had more luck, since they were the rest of the population, but under Charles V the same order was given. A 40-year extension was negotiated because Charles V wanted to build a palace in the Alhambra and the Muslims had the money and the workforce. Then there was a period when Muslims were Christians outside their homes and Muslims inside, protected by the S-shaped space at the entrance; Philip II discovered this, forcing them to construct a straight hall and leave the door open.

Starting off from the plaza by the Ayuntamiento (city hall), the walking tour goes first to the Corral de Carbón, which originated as a 14th-century caravanserai, to lodge traveling merchants, their animals, and their merchandise, later used as an inn for coal dealers (giving it the name of Coal Yard), then a theater, now restored to its original three-story form with a tourist office and crafts shop at ground level. Then it's to the Alcaicería, originally the Muslim silk exchange, now a warren of tourist shops, leading to the large, rectangular (twice as large as in Muslim days, our guide explains) plaza called the Bib-Rambla, its large central fountain (statues of giants around the central monument) surrounded by flower stalls. From there we examine the exterior of the Cathedral and hear of its tortured, many-centuries history--an arquitect dying, plans lost, architectural fashions changing--and the Capilla Real (Royal Chapel), which Ferdinand and Isabel commissioned to house their tombs. Then it's off to explore a small part of the Abayzín, the old Muslim quarter on a hill opposite the Alhambra (learning that Muslim houses put all their adornment inside whereas Christian houses decorate the façade, Muslims had latrines whereas Christains threw the waste out the window to the street), noting that widespread renovation is underway. Then it's over to the Darro River, more like a creek, with its picturesque stone bridges, and down to the Plaza Nueva, a pleasant rectangular space with fountain and cafés (and my hotel), actually built in the 15th century, from which we note the moorish features (e.g., the tower like a minaret) of the Santa Ana Church.

Wednesday is my day to visit the Alhambra, an enormous complex of walls, palaces, towers, and gardens rising on a hill overlooking the city. Originally a Muslim structure, a 9th-century fortress turned into a fortress-palace complex in the 13th century, the Alhambra was expanded by successive Moslem rulers and then by the conquering Christians. I rush my breakfast and hurry to the bus that leaves from across the street, hoping to arrive well before the 8:30 opening and to be among the first of the 7,000 daily visitors. I lose precious moments trying to locate the line for people who have bought tickets in advance (I bought an all-purpose tourist pass my first day), noting that the line at the ticket window is blocks long (there is an announcement that there are 500 tickets remaining for the morning and 800 for the afternoon) and find myself behind about 30 people.

When the gate opens, I adopt my swiftest New York gait to arrive at the Palacio Navaríes, the gem of the Alhambra, before the masses. Then I am in the Patio de los Arrayanes (myrtles), a long rectangular pool, hedges and trees on either side, a 45-meter tower at the end rising above seven arches with delicate carved stucco, and can shoot photos with only a couple of others present. I have even better luck in the Patio de los Leones, a central fountain made up of 12 lions forming a circle facing outward, a shallow bowl resting on their backs, the sides of the patio an intricate clustering of arches and columns with more lacy stucco work above. Here there is no one but a woman watering the bushes, whom I ask about the fountain when I realize it isn't on, and it comes on a couple of minutes later, spouting from the bowl but not from the lions' mouths, as it originally did. (The lions are slated for restoration, I learn later.)

Then I spend the rest of three and a half hours going from one ohmygod reaction to another, traipsing through halls, remembering to look up at incredible ceilings, climbing up towers, descending into the various levels of the gardens, walking long distances. At the end I get to see a man making marquetry in a workshop and store across the street. My usual afternoon stroll doesn't happen because I am too wiped out.

Thursday, a cloudy, off-and-on-rainy day, is for reconfirming two plane reservations, going to the market (unremarkable), the Cathedral, and the Capilla Real. After the cathedrals in Toledo and Seville, Granada's is nothing special, except for the exuberant gilded carving around the organ pipes, the enormous illuminated choir books, and the huge gold-framed mirrors in the sacistry. At the Capilla Real, built to house the tombs of Isabel and Ferdinand (who died before it was finished), I run into the guide who led Tuesday´s walking tour and listen to her explain how the original intention was to have a simple Gothic structure but that Philip II, Isabel and Ferdinand's successor, was a fan of the baroque and had three elaborate wrought-iron screens and a couple of gold altarpieces installed. The prone marble statues of Isabel, Ferdinand, their daughter, and their son-in-law don't actually contain their remains, which are housed in simple lealther-covered coffins in a crypt below. The walls of the chapel bear a number of paintings, mostly Flemish.

It's clear enough for an afternoon stroll, during which I find myself in a tourist shop buying one of those little six-sided marquetry boxes I have been eyeing, which will end up on the coffee table not far from the wooden box from Havana.

Friday, a beautiful day, is for exploring the Albayzín, the old part of the city on a hill opposite the hill with the Alhambra--and for that reason offering marvelous views of the Alhambra from a mirador. To give me a general idea, I start out taking the microbus on its route through the Albayzín from and back to my plaza, then set off trying to follow a walking tour suggested by Lonely Planet. It frequently is more helpful to ask directions than to follow its instructions, because at midday it's hard to know which way is west and it can be hard to follow Callejón X when the streets are not marked. Here the stone-paved streets are mostly narrow and twisting and the houses are uniformly painted white, with red tile roofs and black iron balconies with multicolored flowers. There´s an arqueological museum, many plazas, and some churches, one with a minaret for its tower, and a couple of miradores.

For my evening paseo I go back to the beginning of the Albayzín to experience a tetería. I sit on a low cushioned stool at a six-sided marquetry table and order a tea from a huge selection, having no idea what it is, and dates. The tea comes in an imitation-silver pot with a little glass on a saucer with a spoon in it; the first glass is gentle, but the third hits hard, at least for someone who normally drinks green tea.

Saturday and Sunday are for visiting two monasteries and some churches, taking my first bus ride here for one of the monasteries.

Winding up my six-week trip to Spain, I feel that I should take out classified ads in the papers of all my destinations to thank the innumerable people who so kindly gave me directions, often going out of their way. I just wish their restaurants would learn to make lemonade, instead of foisting on me an oversweet lemon soda in a tiny 200 ml bottle and changing me 1.80€ (and leading me to switch to iced water). And that someone would explain the apparent contradiction between on the one hand I'm required either to don plastic gloves to handle fruit in the market or the supermarket or to let a clerk there do the handling and on the other hand I walk into a restaurant/bar and the floor is littered with cigarette butts and those dinky little napkins. Not meaning to end my reports on a peevish note--Spain has been fascinating and I'm really glad I came.

My transition to Mexico City, on Monday the 5th, involves a plane on Iberia to Madrid and another on Aeroméxico to Mexico City. If the first one arrives on time (ojalá), I will have three hours and 20 minutes to collect my luggage, get from Terminal 4 to Terminal 1, and check in. I spend a week in Mexico City (from which I will not write a report), getting 20 rolls of film developed and sorted, maybe having some enlargements made, shopping, and visiting my favorite haunts.

Report from Seville

2006-05-28T22:05:00.000-06:00

Seville, where Asela, my Cuban friend, and I arrive by plane on Monday, May 22, has complications. The day before we leave Valencia, I notice that Lonely Planet (I have photocopies of its pages covering each of my destinations folded in half-size manila envelopes) says that hotel prices in Seville are double those in other parts of Spain. Therefore our 74€ double room (78€ on weekends, reserved through the Bookings site) turns out to be centrally located in what is a backpackers' hostel that includes some rooms with private baths--but almost no furniture other than the beds, just a rudimentary bedside table. Luckily our room has three beds, so the extra one becomes a catch-all. Also luckily, we get free continental breakfast (to which I add a tangerine from the supermarket) and the room for storing backpacks has a computer with Internet connection in it, which guests are free to use. I find myself doing email before breakfast because that's the only time the computer is free.

Another complication is the fact that my envelope with the Lonely Planet pages disappears the first day; I remember taking it out of my bag in the restaurant to check the list of veggie restaurants from the Happy Cow site, but when we return to the restaurant the next day, no one knows anything about my envelope. Luckily the hotel hands out an annotated map and there's a tourist magazine in the computer room. And yet a further complication is that Seville is building a metro and therefore its main avenue and a couple of its most important plazas are all torn up.

Despite the above, we early on locate (in the old part of town, where the street layout is like Toledo's) a restaurant offering the unlikely combination of Cuban and vegetarian food, both quite good, and I find myself photographing charming patios behind lacy wrought-iron doors. And in our wanderings we run into a museum too new to be mentioned by Lonely Planet, the Museo del Baile Flamenco (Museum of Flamenco Dance), which we discover the next day offers incredibly wide-screen videos of dancers demonstrating the various types of flamenco, exhibits of costumes, too much to read, and the chance to watch a class, which has me heel-and-toeing on the other side of the glass, attempting to imitate the teacher. There I pick up a little free publication with cultural listings and learn of a flamenco performance to take place later in the week in a bank's cultural center near our hotel, to which we go that afternoon to buy (front-row) tickets.

The performance, of the Compañía Blanca del Rey, is thrilling and inspiring because Blanca del Rey, who dances alone, is pushing 60, announces her retirement at the end, but is enormously vigorous and intense. Her second dance is with the bata de cola, the gown with a train, which whizzes around as she turns, stomps, and kicks, and her third and last dance is with an enormous fringed silk shawl (black with gold embroidery and fringe, her gown black), which at the outset appears to be attached to her gown but turns out not to be and which she swooshes and twirls, at times like a toreadora, with incredible facility. A man young enough to be her son is the company's other dancer (I have read a book on flamenco that says the most authentic performances are of a dancer dancing alone), who impresses with his turns as well as his tapateado, there are two guitarrists, who at one point do marvelous solos, and three male singers whose hands clapping are another instrument. The theater is small, and sitting in the first row we are only a few feet from the performers, and quite exhilerated from their performance.

Speaking of silk shawls, I have decided to buy one to hang on the wall, but having also decided that my limit is 100€ (and I actually pay 35€ more), what I end up with is a lot more modest than Blanca del Rey's, a triangle rather than a square and half of what would be a smaller square, black with multicolored embroidery (done by hand) in colors that include the salmon color of the paint on the wall.

The two big tourist attractions in Seville are the Cathedral and the Alcázar. We get our first glimpse of the Cathedral before hours when we get there before it opens to tourists to discover a door open for those going to mass. So I can sit and gaze at the enormous hunk of sculpted solid gold, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, that is the main altarpiece while pretending to be Catholic, and I can hear the booming of the organ. I have a parochial interest in this Cathedral because it claims to be the world's largest Gothic cathedral, and for many years I lived in Upper Manhattan around the corner from another cathedral that makes that claim, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (Episcopal). Seville in any event wins out for impressiveness for having been constructed 500 years earlier, which gives it incredibly elaborate sacristies with gem-encrusted gold altar accessories and chapels with 15th-century sculptures. (We come back when it's open for tourists so as to have better light and to see the sacristies.) It also wins out for the Giralda, a high square tower built as part of the mosque that was destroyed to build the Cathedral, which was spared and adorned at the top with a belfry. It is easy to climb because there are 35 ramps instead of stairs, this so the caliph could ride up on his horse to call the faithful to prayer. The view of course is fabulous.

The Alcázar is a grouping of palaces based on a Muslim fortification built in the 9th century, expanded after the Christian Reconquest in the 13th century, with changes continuing into the 16th century. It is full of horseshoe arches and elaborately carved stucco, includes a room with a long rectangular pool flanked by sunken gardens, surrounded by arches. The gardens are extensive, with many fountains. Unlike the Cathedral, there is of course no way to enter before tourist hours, and although we get in line before it opens, the crowds are quite oppressive and get in the way of the view. Most of my pictures are of the upper half of the room to avoid the tourists; I find that waiting for a group to leave means only that another group will enter. (I am beginning to suffer from tourist fatigue, not being tired but being tired of being a tourist.)

We do an enormous amount of walking--south from the Cathedral to the Plaza de España, an enormous semicircular three-story structure of brick, tile, and marble constructed for the 1929 Iberian-American Espo, another day cross the Guadalquivir River on the Triana Bridge to wander in the neighborhood of that name, visiting ceramics shops, I shooting photos of church towers and flower-filled wrought-iron balconies, discovering that in the market the space above the stalls is covered with tiles in elaborate designs. By the Torre de Oro (Gold Tower), a defensive tower built by the river during the 13th century (a Muslim period), we board a boat for a one-hour cruise, not a resounding success because there are about a hundred kiddies on board, you can only hear the commentary if you stand directly in front of a speaker, and what you can see is mostly bridges. Walking by the river turns out to be more rewarding.

I am returning to train travel to get to Granada, my final destination in Spain, on Monday the 29th.

Report from Valencia

2006-05-21T12:33:00.000-06:00

Valencia, where I arrived by train on Monday, the 15th of May, was a welcome change from the claustrophobia of Toledo--wide avenues, palm trees, plazas with fountains, attractive 10-story buildings with curved façades and wrought-iron balconies. And for the first time in four cities I found myself in a hotel room bigger than a monk's cell, with a carpet and a minibar for me to refrigerate my cheese.

But I came to Valencia not for the city but to see Asela, my Cuban friend, whom I met in June of 2003 during my first trip to Cuba when I rented a room in her house in Santiago, who has sent me an email almost every day since, and who is in Valencia visiting her three children, who live here because her ex-husband married a Spanish woman from here. This provides me with financial and culinary relief, as I can use the computer in the apartment of her elder daughter, where she is staying, and I can eat home-cooked meals there, not having to struggle to find something meatless.

Asela and I fall into a pattern of sight-seeing together mornings into early afternoon, then taking the bus to her daughter´s apartment (in a neighborhood that reminds me of Queens), where she cooks while I use the computer. We are a good pair for sight-seeing because she has a sense of direction and I am fearless about asking directions--most of the streets in central Valencia are on the diagonal, so it is easy to get disoriented. I discover that this region is bilingual in Spanish and Valenciano, which may be a dialect of Catalan or may be a separate language, it depends on whom you ask, and that things like street signs and the explanatory notes in museums are in both languages, or maybe just in Valenciano. (Valenciano reminds me of French in that it has the accent grave and the ç, but a lot of words end in t, as in institut.) Asela's daughter tells me that from grade school to university you can choose which language you want to study in.

We discover that the National Ceramics Museum, in the baroque Palacio de Marqués de Dos Aguas, has incredibly elaborate baroque stucco work surrounding its entrance and sumptuous carriages and room furnishings in the two floors below the (historical) cercamics exhibit. In the Plaza de la Virgen what looks like an enormous carpet appears on the outer wall of the church by the exuberant fountain whose central reclining figure representrs the local river. It turns out to have been made of dried flowers and represents the Virgen de los Desamparados, to whom the church is dedicated. The Cathedral, a misture of architectural styles, has its main altar shielded by a dropcloth and its dome concealed by scaffolding, undoubtedly in preparation for the visit by the Pope for a conclave on the family here in July. In the plaza near the Cathedral is a branch of the chocolatería in Salamanca where I discovered the joys of their incredibly thick hot chocolate with churros, which of course I introduce to Asela. The central market is enormous, an Art Nouveau work of cast iron, brick, and glass. Across the street is the Lonja de los Mercaderes, a 15th-century building whose interior is an enormous colonnaded hall, once a commodities exchange, now a free tourist attraction. Another stunning Art Nouveau structure is the train station, for some reason called the Estación del Nord although it is at the south end of the city center. The Barrio del Carmen, the oldest part of the city, has narrow streets going every which way, a café that serves green tea and two vegetarian restaurants, and from all the renovation going on is clearly in a state of rapid gentrification. The botanical garden is a green oasis of peace and relaxation.

One afternoon Asela´s oldest daughter drives us to the part of the port set up for the America's Cup, a three-year event happening here, and then through a nature reserve to a lagoon that combines the salt water of the Mediterranean with the fresh water of the river. On the way back we pass the spectacular super-modern architecture of the new City of Arts and Sciences, a museum complex. Another day we go to Sagunto, a nearby town where Asela´s son lives, and clamber around the sprawling Roman ruin known as el Castillo before eating a vegetarian comida prepared by him, including for dessert the first pineapple and watermelon (also cherries and strawberries) that I have had since leaving Mexico. Yet another excursion takes us by tram to the city beach, where the sand is not white and the water is not turquoise, but it is a very relaxing excursion and gives me an opportunity to say that I have seen the Mediterranean.

The Metro here is super-modern, without advertising, with escalators that don't run when no one is on them but start again when you step on them and with doors that a passenger has to open (which I sort of resented until I realized it was another energy-saving feature, i.e., the doors don't open when no one needs them). In what seems related to my earlier observation of there being no muchachos shining shoes, it occurs to me here that none of my hotels has had a bell boy. Either the man at the desk brings up my suitcase or I do it myself, in either case saving on a tip.

My next transition, on Monday to Seville, is the first of two by air, thanks to a low-cost airline that flies from here to there.

Report from Toledo (not Ohio)

2006-05-14T10:25:00.000-06:00

Everyone says that Guanajuato is just like Toledo, which is why I included it in my itinerary. I don't regret the choice, but I disagree with the characterization. Sure, Toledo is full of little streets going every which way, but it is much more claustrophobic than Guanajuato, its buildings being four or five stories high above those narrow streets instead of two or three, and it's much less colorful, with almost everything being some shade of brown instead of the riot of color that characterizes Guanajuato. And of course it's a medieval city with a pronounced Muslim influence.

I've always said that I have no sense of direction and in recent years no memory but that I get by when traveling by not being shy about asking directions. Here the problem with asking directions is that that passer-by is probably another tourist; I find myself going into stores to be sure that I'm talking to a native. The maze is so bewildering that I generally ask several times between my starting point and my destination, especially since someone is likely to say "Todo recto" (straight ahead) when the street later on forks in two directions.

They call Toledo the city of three cultures (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian), but it´s very clear which culture won out, with a mosque called Mesquita del Cristo de la Luz and a synagogue named Sinagoga Santa María la Blanca. Such places became churches, despite not having the usual shape, after Moslems and Jews were expelled, until some point when apparently for the sake of the tourism that is clearly the city's main economic activity they were restored and become museums.

The main plaza here, called the Zocodover, has an irregular shape, low stone walls that become benches with wrought iron at the back on three sides, buildings with cafés in front on two (a McDonald´s in one of them), trees, two newstands, not especially attractive, especially after the magnificent plazas in Madrid and Salamanca.

The day after my arrival (the day of my arrival having been devoted to finding the main plaza and the supermarket) I check out a tour that is not happening as scheduled, visit a mosque near my hotel that jams an impressive number of columns and arches into a very small space, and then run into a train on wheels (no track necessary) in the Zocodover and decide to take its tour in hopes of getting better oriented. For logistical reasons, it turns out that its route is mostly on the edges of the city, from where one can see what´s really attractive about Toledo--the ancient stone walls, high arching stone gates (one with two green-tiled towers), castles, bridges, country estates called cigarrales, the panorama with the Cathedral and the Alcázar predominating.

In the afternoon I have a small adventure for a practical purpose. One of my preparations for this trip was to order a pants suit from Magellan´s, which turns out to be wonderfully comfortable, of a silky-soft synthetic fabric, a light brownish-grayish color, with a label that insists it be professionally dry cleaned. At first I am worried that it will get dirty on the flight over, but for two weeks I am lucky. Then I note a small stain on the lapel, which Wash ´n´Dry, my travel remedy, fails to get out, so the only thing to do is ask at the desk about a tintorería. Unfortunately, it turns out, the dry cleaner´s two blocks away is closed for renovation and the alternative is to venture into the new part of the city. The man at the desk whips out the map the hotel stocks and traces the route, assuring me it will be a pleasant 10- to 15-minute walk.

After initial fears that I will never find it, I decide this will be my excursion for the afternoon, and I set out just before 5, when stores reopen after the midday meal break. My first landmark is the Plaza de la Estrella, which I had acquired the impression was downhill from the hotel but turns out to be uphill. (Yes, Toledo is like Guanajuato in being hilly.) It takes me four or five attempts, walking down, asking, walking up again, almost giving up. Once having found the Plaza de la Estrella the rest is much easier, and I am soon on a wide boulevard surrounded by everything the old city is not--wide sidewalks, streets in a grid, new buildings, and a sense of spaciousness. I find the tintorería 40 minutes after I set out, dismayed that I will have to do without my beloved suit until Saturday.

The following day I plunge into the maze and the tourist attractions (operating on my own because the tourism folks don't give tours and the commercial ones are very expensive), starting with the Cathedral. Unlike Salamanca's Cathedral, whose exterior is more impressive than its interior, here the outside (Gothic) strikes me as ugly but the inside is overwhelming. My favorite part is the coro (choir stalls), where the intricacy of the carving (wood below, stone above) is extraordinary, as are the organs. The main altarpiece (Flemish Gothic) is stunning, as are the stained-glass windows, especially the rose window. The sacristy is a museum, a combination of art gallery and museum of religious artifacts, including what must be the most massive and intricate gold-and-silver monstrance ever made.

Toledo was the city of El Greco, and seeing his luminescent elongated subjects takes you beyond the Museo de El Greco (where I found myself miffed by his placing the Alcázar on a cloud at the bottom of his view and map of Toledo). You can see 18 of his paintings in the sacristy of the Cathedral and several more in the Museo de Santa Cruz. His most impressive work is in the Iglesia de Santo Tomé, a church that has made itself into a one-painting museum. It´s an enormous work depicting the burial of the Count of Orgaz, a 14th-century beneficiary of the Church at whose burial St. Augustine and St. Stephen are said to have descended from heaven to place the count in his tomb. The opulence of their vestments is breathtaking and its brightness is in great contrast to the ethereal nature of the heavenly scene above.

One of the two remaining synagogues (a church and barracks between 1492 and 1877), with lovely Mudejar decoration, is attached to the Museo Sefardi, explaining and illustrating the lives of Sephardic Jews, which (especially as an ex-New Yorker) leaves me depressed because it treats them as the exotic Other.

The Museo de Santa Cruz is having a temporary exposition of art from convents in Castilla-La Mancha executed during what they call the century of El Quijote (1530-1650). When I go to the permanent exhibition I see a sign about guided tours to the temporary exposition, ask, am told I will have to add myself to a group and that one is scheduled to visit at 1 the next day. What they don't tell me is that the group is composed of 6th graders, who of course aren't capable of being quiet in a museum. I learn about how the different orders of monks wore differently colored and styled habits (reminding me of the different traje típico worn by different groups in Guatemala, according to one theory because the Spanish assigned them) and that members of the gentry financed the monasteries and convents, but I break off and continue to the ceramics exhibit (thinking about the conflict between Dolores Hidalgo and Puebla over which city could call its ceramics Talavera) before the kiddies are finished.

Like Salamanca, Toledo has a Roman bridge, which I go to to photograph and cross in hopes of getting a panoramic view from the other side. Although the Alcázar is prominent, the Cathedral refuses to show itself. (The Alcázar is a fortress--then Muslim--dating from the 10th century converted by Franco into a military museum, now closed for renovation, which is why I haven't talked about visiting it.) Later I ask at the desk of my hotel about where to get a good view to photograph and am told about the Iglesia de los Jesuitas, which has converted its towers into a tourist destination for the view. I go and ascend (being grateful that it's not a spiral staircase, which at that height makes me anxious), take pictures, but stiff feel that's not the kind of view-at-a-distance I was looking for. On Sunday, my last day, I cross the Roman bridge again and go to the right, rather than uphill to the left, theorizing that I'll run into a view of the Cathedral if I walk far enough. I'm wrong because the road (and a well-barricaded sidewalk) veers off to the left, no longer following the river that is the boundry on three sides of the city; I then see people walking on a sidewalk on the city side of the river set into the side of the hill and think that might lead to something interesting, so I cross back and walk on it, but there's nothing to see but the other half of the river, so I decide to consider it all a pleasant walk on a pleasant Sunday morning.

Odds and ends: It turns out there is a terrifying aspect to Toledo--walking down one of its narrowest of narrow no-sidewalk streets with an SUV coming, pointing its side-view mirror at you. It reminds me of my first visit to Taxco (another city without sidewalks), only more so. I would like to get polished the dressier of the two pairs of shoes I brought, shined in the Jardín in Guanajuato just before I left but now showing signs of wear. Evidently the Spanish shine their own shoes or just don't bother--the man in the cybercafé tells me there are muchachos shining shoes on the street in Madrid (I didn't see any) but not in Toledo. Or maybe it's a matter of not showing social inequality on the street. I am thinking I need a better souvenir of my trip to Spain than the two long-sleeved T-shirts (one saying Universidad de Salamanca on the back) I have acquired because the weather in Madrid and Salamanca was cooler than I expected. After inspecting many store windows I part with 25€ for a miniature clock in the shape of a guitar in the gold-and-black style called damasquinado, this to put on my desk so as to know the time when my computer is turned off. I could of course have bought a suit of armor or at least a sword, on display in store windows throughout the tourist part of town.

I am feeling satisfied with my itinerary of one week in each destination, which gives me time to know the place well and not feel I have to dash to get in all the required attractions. I am also very happy with Spanish train travel--it seems to me to be the most comfortable means of travel I have experienced (that excludes ocean liners), and the bathrooms on Spanish trains are first-rate.

Monday of course is travel day and I am off to Valencia, a 35-minute train ride to Madrid followed by a three-and-a-half-hour ride from Madrid to Valencia.

Report from Salamanca

2006-05-07T12:55:00.000-06:00

With Salamanca (two and a half hours from Madrid by train, arriving midday Monday the 1st of May) it is love at first sight. The Plaza Mayor, designed by one of the Churriguera brothers, creators of the superbaroque style I have so loved on churches in Mexico, is even more splendid than Madrid's, the same type of huge square encircled by buildings four stories high with portales and enormous arches, but this one in sandstone, not brick, with bells and a clock, medallions adorned with busts of the famous, and lots of baroque curlicues--and everywhere you look in this town there are baroque curlicues on façades and spires and domes, everything a color between mustard and beige. Cafés with tables in the plaza of course, my first stop the tourist office for a map and pamphlets, with a negative reaction to the walking tours--here they cost 6€ and have a minimum group size of 14, whereas in Madrid the old-age discount price was 2.60€ and the groups were four or five.

Thanks to a recommendation on an Internet forum, I am staying in a pensión of only six rooms, a renovated apartment one flight up, just 25€, down the street from the Plaza Mayor, a bigger and prettier room (wrought-iron headboards) than I paid 60 for in Madrid, a tiny baño without the amenities.

Salamanca is a university town, the university dating from the 13th century, its most famous feature being a 16th-century carved sandstone façade of plateresque filigree featuring Fernando and Isabel surrounded by religious and mythological creatures and coats of arms. After gazing at the façade you can tour old lecture rooms and the chapel around a cloister, spectacular mudejar ceilings in the halls. Then you climb a stairway elaborately carved on the side to reach the library, dating from 1509, a plastic wall at the entrance of which keeps you from entering, so you peer at the masses of ancient books and the many globes.

The other university, private and religious, the Pontifical University, is a 20th-century institution housed in a 17th-century building erected by the Jesuits, with a magnificent cloister and adjoining a church, La Clerecía, with magnificant chirrigueresque gold altarpieces.

Salamanca is also blessed with two cathedrals, the old and the new, the old built between the 12th and 15th centuries, the new from the 16th to the 18th. The new cathedral (Gothic with baroque adornment), more from the outside than from the inside, is exhilerating and overpowering, with its huge bulk and its delicate stone-carved adornments. It lacks elaborate gold altarpieces but does have elaborately carved choir stalls and two beautiful, gold-encrusted organs, and to the side of the front of the pews is what looks like a wide podium but turns out to be a slanted mirror to see the incredible Gothic ceiling without straining.

The centerpiece of the much smaller old cathedral (Romanesque outside, Gothic inside), which abuts the new one and is entered from it, is a magnificent 15th-century altarpiece of 50 paintings with gold trim (beautifully restored) depicting scenes from the life of Jesus, with the final judgment painted overhead. In between the two cathedrals is an entrance that takes you to a self-guided tour of towers, which gives you a view of this masterpiece from above. As you ascend further you´re on an outside platform with a view of the cathedrals, the city, and the Tormes River, and then continuing up you´re on a ledge (with railing) inside and high above the central nave of the new cathedral.

Near the cathedrals is the Casa de las Conchas, a 15th-century Gothic palace whose original owner had the façade covered with conch shells carved in stone, the conch being used in coat of arms of his wife. The building, whose original patio is still intact, now houses the public library.

Then there are convents--the Convento de San Estéban immense and with a church the equal of the Clerecía, a kiosko in the patio surrounded by its huge cloister, you enter a room and lights go on and music plays, there are many captions about how the Dominicans went to the New World to evangelize early on, the Convento de la Dueñas much more modest, with lots of wood, a pretty patio with lots of pansies within a five-sided cloister, the nuns selling sweets (I buy some cookies).

The mystery deepens as to how Spaniards stay thin--they do chocolate caliente con churros, hot chocolate (which at the Chocolatería Valor is incredibly thick and sticky) with elongated donuts. (My concern about losing weight has vanished since I discovered this mid-morning treat.) They seem more informal, or less elaborately polite, than the Mexicans--when you walk into a store or museum it´s ¡Hola! not Buenos días. On the other hand they raise their umbrellas at the first hint of rain, which a Mexican would never do.

Eating vegetarian is less of a struggle here than in Madrid. There is a restaurant near the University that offers a menú with gazpacho as the first course and stuffed eggplant as the second, there is another one around the corner that offers platos combinados, some of which are veggie, and when I go off in search of the Roman Bridge I pass a vegetarian restaurant, which turns out to serve a lovely comida. Because the Spanish have no dark beer (the only kind I drink) and because wine is an option with a menú, I am drinking wine with comida instead of beer with cena. In the elegant market it is striking how the stands selling meat or fish greatly outnumber the stands selling fruits and vegetables; in any event, I discover a supermarket with a better selection and with whole-wheat half baguettes. In the produce section the dispenser of plastic bags has above it a dispenser of plastic gloves with a sign asking you to use them to select your produce (I think of the Frutería Torres on Calle Alhóndiga in Guanajuato).

A book fair starts on Saturday, which I tour, but I am pining for some easy reading in English, and I find and buy The Da Vinci Code in a bookstore, thinking of how the movie may never make it to Guanajuato. On my early evening stroll by the book fair, I run into a clown entertaining the kiddies with balloons at a nearby plaza, then hear a band marching by and follow it, only to come upon a second and then a third band, all coming out by a little church called the Capilla de la Vera Cruz, with a sign indicating it is the 500th anniversary of the Vera Cruz. Inside the capilla is a massive gold altarpiece and a large silver cross mounted on a wooden platform with handles, which presumably will be processioned later on.

Crossing the Plaza Mayor at midday Sunday, I hear music, which turns out to come from a man banging on a drum and simultaneously playing a recorder, which it turns out is accompaniament to three 60ish couples dancing facing each other, a sedate dance with occasional turns, one of the men playing castanets. A little later, the platform in the plaza by the book fair is hosting a band concert. And still later, opposite my pensión there is a puppeteer whose puppet is playing the violin (well, not really; the music is recorded) while two little dogs wag their tales.

In a free weekly magazine for Salamanca and environs, I read about a program to find employment for gypsies (the program, translating, "accompanies the candidates to the companies to avoid the feared racist prejudice") and that the Senegalese association of Salamanca is sponsoring its fourth cultural week of lectures, round tables, a photography exhibition, and a soccer game.

Just outside the centro histórico, I should mention, there are plentiful five-story apartment buildings, but built in the same color as the historical buildings, plain with black wrought-iron balconies, all blending in well.

Monday I go to Toledo, which involves my most complicated transition. Aside from having to take a train to Madrid and a second train from Madrid to Toledo, the train to Madrid arrives in one of its two train stations and the train to Toledo leaves from the other, so I will be taking a commuter train in between.

Report from Madrid

2006-04-30T07:41:00.000-06:00

Madrid on the 24th of April becomes my first stop on a six-week, six-destination trip to Spain, changing cities every Monday. Thanks to sleeping almost not at all on the overnight flight from Mexico City, I am able to take the No Jet Lag pills (a homeopathic remedy sold on the Magellan´s site) every two hours, I avoid jet lag totally but of course arrive enormously tired. And frustrated--my first day I am almost ready to turn around and go home: I wait 45 minutes for my suitcase to show up, the minibus to el centro isn´t operating, and my very nice taxista swindles me out of 40€. I have to wait a long time for my hotel room to be ready, and then this 60€ room turns out to be tiny, the foot of the bed at most a foot from the wall, the baño almost as big as the bedroom. The vegetarian restaurant off the Plaza Mayor where I planned to eat is closed for renovation, and buying a cheese sandwich and a lemonade costs me 9€. But worst of all, trying five ATMs fails to get me any much-needed cash--two at the airport and one in town not working, one telling me my card was invalid, another that I had already withdrawn my day´s maximum, neither of which make sense.

The second day starts out on a more encouraging note--the breakfast included with the cost of the room includes tea bags of green tea, sparing some from the supply I had brought. I swipe two whole-wheat rolls for my cena, which I certainly can't afford to eat out. My morning foray to the ATMs nets me 210€ at one (it refuses to give me 500 or let me withdraw another 210) and 150 at another, a huge relief. (But I change my plan to pay for everything in cash to avoid the currency-exchange fee; with these hassles, I am going to charge whatever I can.) The 10 a.m. walking tour from the tourist office in the Plaza Mayor (I have been together enough to pick up the list my first day) on Medieval Madrid is fun, all about the Muslim wall, the Christian wall, and 14th-century towers, but mostly it gives me a chance to walk around Madrid without being concerned about where I am. I would have liked to ask how much those apartments rented for, but of course I don´t dare.

I am getting to like a city that strangely reminds me of New York, despite the different architecture, the lack of a grid, and the almost-total homogeneity of the people, but the sophistication and the trophy dogs are the same. I am going through reverse culture shock, not having been to the US for three years, once again drinking tap water, flushing toilet paper, showering in a bathtub, having a radiator in my room, being indistinguishable from the natives (the tour guide at the outset had said, "Todos españoles, bueno"). I especially take to the almost aggressive relaxation of the Plaza Mayor, that enormous 17th-century square enclosed uniformly by what in Latin America we would call colonial buildings, four stories high, punctuated by enormous arches leading to streets going every which way and half filled with the round tables and umbrellas of the cafés.

Our tour ends at the Mercado San Miguel, the city's oldest in an elegant iron building, where I buy two tomatoes and a small bunch of grapes--all expensive--can´t get cheese but run into a supermarket across the street and buy some. I have two small whole-wheat rolls from breakfast, I brought a small plastic bottle of olive oil, and I will make sandwiches for cena in my room, grapes for dessert with chocolates I have brought.

Day three I do the obligatory El Prado, that is, the El Grecos, the Velásquezes, and the Goyas. I listen to other people´s guides, as I certainly can't afford the 40€ the guide who approaches me is charging. After a couple of hours (I arrive a little after the 9 a.m. opening) the size of the crowd becomes oppressive and I leave. I think of going to the Museo Reina Sofía to see Picasso´s "Guernica," but I find myself at the Royal Botanic Garden and then find myself with a group being given a guided tour. I'm impressed that the garden is 250 years old and that traditional roses have only a few petals and a very flat appearance, but I wish the cute little fountains, no longer used for watering, were functioning.

Eating my middle meal has become a problem: My first day I settle for a cheese sandwich, my second day find myself at a place near the Puerta del Sol that sells vegetarian Middle Eastern fast food (everyone under 30 except me and a middle-aged woman covering her head with a scarf). My third day I am alarmed that I am losing weight, my pants are practically falling down, I must have a real meal. I don't have the patience to find the little side streets where Lonely Planet or Happy Cow says there is a veggie restairant, which may be out of business or closed for renovation, so I go the Plaza Mayor--by now I am addicted to the Plaza Mayor--vaguely remembering a place that advertized various kinds of paella, including a veggie version, but I find myself scanning the offerings of a so-called menú, a set three-course meal, and decided that this trip I will eat fish, which I stopped eating a while ago. The thick rice-and-lentil soup is heavenly until I find a piece of meat in it, but I shrug and eat around it; the fish is bearable, and the raspberry mouse is delightful. My fourth day I eat another menú with fish, starting with menestra, an interesting vegetable dish including artichokes. The fifth day I eat the veggie paella, which apparently is mass produced, as it's advertised on a poster with many varieties and a brand name; it's very greasy, the artichoke hearts are very hard, the proportion of veggies to rice is off. My sixth day the veggie restaurant that I discovered being renovated my first day is finally open, and the food is exquisite, so I go back my final day.

From Thursday through Sunday I do the tourist office's walking tours, at 10 except on Friday at 5, when the subject is old businesses and taverns. On Thursday it's Madrid and the Hapsburgs (making Madrid the capital in the 16th century a ploy to counter the power of the Church, based in Toledo, but on the other hand, the cathedral--requiring a bishop--didn't start construction until the 19th century); on Friday taverns (really one) and traditional businesses (at the world's oldest continually operating restaurant, certified in the Guiness Book of Records, the specialty is suckling pig, the piglets fed only on milk and killed when they're 24 days old, served with the head); on Saturday, traveling by bus, it's modern Madrid, residential areas built on a grid, an area of high-rise office buildings billed the Manhattan of Madrid (an exaggeration); and Sunday (the order is off) Madrid of the Bourbons (Alfonso XIII needed hotel accommodations for his wedding guests, so he arranged for two luxury hotels to be built across from each other).

The Friday tour not starting until 5, I go to the Reina Sofía Museum, of modern art, where I marvel at the impact of the "Guernica" and decide that I really like the sculpture of Miró. Coming back to downtown by a city bus after Saturday´s tour, I discover a chocolatería that serves a hot chocolate the equal of that sold in the Museo de Chocolate in Havana.

On Sunday when the tour ends, after making a pit stop at my hotel I head south looking for El Rastro, a long-established flea market, described as selling junk and antiques, that takes place every Sunday. It must have expanded since my guidebook's writer was here, for I quickly run into what looks like a New York street fair, except for the ubiquitous fans--clothes and bedspreads from India, T-shirts with stupid slogans (NYPD = Nervous Young People Design), crafty jewelry. The crush becomes too much before I find the antiques so I head back to the Plaza Mayor.

Admission politics: At El Prado I ask for the old-age discount my guidebooks says is available and show my INSEN card, only to be told the discount is only available for citizens of the European Union, so I pay 6€; at the Royal Botanical Gardens I just give my age and get in free; at the Royal Palace I just give my age but they ask my nacionality, so I have to pay 8€; at the Reina Sofía Museum I give my age and they ask for an identity card but don't charge me when they see it's Mexican; for the walking tours I just say I'm retired (they bill their discount as being for retired people) and get the discount.

Assorted impressions: The obesity problem hasn't arrived here, Madrileños are almost uniformly thin despite the big desserts their restaurants provide in their menús. Before I left people warned me either that I would have trouble understanding the Spanish or that the Spanish would have trouble understanding me. As it happens, we all understand one another quite well, the Spanish just say "Vale" where the Mexicans would say "Sale," and more so, and in fact for Sunday's tour (after Tuesday I have had the choice of an English- or Spanish-speaking guide and have chosen English) I prefer a Spanish-speaking guide because the ones speaking English have to struggle and come up with weird translations, such as "party day" for "día feriado" instead of "holiday."

On the side streets there is no curb, the only thing separating the sidewalk from the street being a row of posts or sometimes trees, and walking in the street is quite common. For crossing streets where there is no traffic light, there's a system that Guanajuato would do well to imitate: Wide white stripes delineate a walkway, where if a pedestrian steps out onto it, the cars are obligated to stop.

Monday morning I take the train to Salamanca, to the northwest, and will report from there in another week.

Not a Trip Report—On Lifting Weights

2005-08-28T10:27:00.000-06:00

I walk in and count muchachos, one here, two over there, two more up in the mezzanine, not too many. There are three differences between me and the other users of this gym—sex, age, and nationality—an aging American woman lifting, sweating, and breathing heavily among young Mexican men lifting, sweating, and breathing heavily. (Occasionally a muchacha shows up, usually for a short time and usually to work on her abs and legs, whereas my exercises are for the upper body.) Fewer muchachos means feeling less outnumbered and not having to compete for a particular barbell. But having no one there is not so good either, for their serious intensity is a welcome accompaniament and an incentive, and besides, I need help getting down the barbell that’s usually at the top of the rack, not that it’s too heavy but that it’s too high for me to reach.

I started out a couple of years ago at Pablo’s Gym, in the former train station, at that time the only gym I knew existed in Guanajuato, an enormous, dark space with aging equipment. I had worked out with weights off and on at home in New York (where going to a gym was unthinkably expensive), at different times using two different books on weight training for women. But here I was, doing up to 15 repetitions instead of 12, three sets of reps instead of two, exercises I had never done before, at the end of the first session I felt that I was about to collapse on the sidewalk, urgently had to find a place to sit down. But I kept going, though there was no place to change clothes so I wore my tights under my jeans, and the bathroom there was unthinkable.

Eventually I learned of the Boss Gym, then on Calle Alhóndiga, because its owner started writing a column for the Chopper, our weekly magazine. It was smaller but with more light and newer equipment and a decent bathroom for changing in. Raúl listened to my story of back pain, probably related to doing situps on a slant board (exhilerating but very stressful), said we would work on my back, and gave me an adaptation of a list of exercises he had prepared—back first, then shoulders, then biceps and triceps, finally chest; for the abdomen he showed me exercises that I did at home because no equipment was involved, although later I discovered that little swiveling circular platform with the hand grip and started doing the fun exercise for the waist on it.

At first I decided I didn’t need to work on my legs, with all the walking I did and living up 75 steps; later on I had a bone-density test, which reminded me of my osteoporosis and made me think I should do exercise implicating the hips, so for a while I did deep-knee bends with a bar on my shoulder and an exercise on a machine. Then it turned out that strengthening my legs was interfering with my yoga—strengthening a muscle shortens it, whereas yoga is all about stretching muscles—so yoga, my first love, won out.

Then there was a crisis with the Boss Gym, when the rent was raised and Raúl was losing money, the solution to which was to empty the living room and dining room of his house and put the equipment, what would fit of it, there. His house was cute but really small; as a private gym for one person the space was adequate, but with one or two others it became quite crowded, and if I walked in and there were three muchachos working out, I had to leave and come back later, a very unhappy state of events.

What saved the situation was another bout of back pain, for which thanks to a Mexican friend I learned of a doctor who was a sports-medicine specialist, one of two who worked half days at the gym of the University of Guanajuato. Aside from an instant cure effected by an instructor brought over by the doctor who gave me the most intense back massage imaginable, I discovered the fact of this gorgeous new gym, an enormous women’s bathroom with lockers and showers, and began to maneuver the bureaucratic labyrinth to be able to use it as an outsider. (“You know,” Elsa warned me as she registered me, “there will be muchachos in the gym.” Yes, I knew.)

There have been complications—the gym closes according to the University calendar, and a few months after I started using it the building with the weights was closed for renovation for a couple of months. After some false starts (going back to Pablo’s Gym only to find that the city had taken over the building, spending a high monthly fee to go only twice to a gym with a very limited schedule that totally conflicted with my schedule for living) I found the New Body Gym, much nearer my house than the University gym but inferior in being smaller and dingy, and the muchachos there tend to stand around and shoot the breeze, a distraction, whereas the muchachos at the University gym come, do their routine, and leave. But I go there and pay by the visit when the University gym is closed—I know from my travels that discontinuing working out and then going back to it can be a difficult experience.

All of the gyms here are designed for men, not women, much less elderly women. This means that a given barbell or dumbbell may become too light to be useful but that the next heavier one may be too heavy to lift. This then means a not-very-happy transition in which I struggle to lift the heavier weight two or three times and then continue the set with the lighter weight, until eventually, much to my relief, I can do a decent number of repetitions with the heavier.

Because of my experience with back pain, after getting my curative massage I discontinued one of the three back exercises I used to do, having found a website that told me it was quite stressful, especially for older folks. But I spend 55 minutes to an hour doing a dozen exercises, mostly three times, the ones for biceps and triceps four, with a number of repetitions that I find frequently decreases after the first set.

Lifting weights can be painful but it is always intense, and somehow the intensity is an attraction and outweighs the pain. And being stronger can be quite convenient; when I first moved to my house up one hill to get there and then steps climbing up another hill that it’s perched on, I would drift down toward town and then take the bus back with my groceries. After a spell of weight-lifting I found myself trudging up the hill with my groceries on my back (I have a large tote bag that converts to a backpack), at times panting and sweating but feeling relief to get away from the buses crammed with schoolkids at the early-afternoon hour when I run my errands. I have yet to fulfill what I told Pablo at the outset was my goal, to be able easily to lift a garrafón full of water (19 liters and a lot of pounds), but at least bringing one in from the patio de servicio to the kitchen is not the torture it used to be.

Report from Cuba

2005-05-18T10:15:00.000-06:00

One doesn't spend long periods in cybercafés in Cuba, the cost is too unthinkable (I was paying 8 pesos convertibles, more or less dollars, the hour in a hotel bar because the connection was much faster than in places charging 6, only there could I open multiple windows, and only there could I print). The point being that this report is being written from Mexico City, where I am spending a week before returning to Guanajuato.

Though they share--más o menos--the same language, Guatemala and Cuba represent vastly different realities, and going from one to the other turns out to be something of a shock. The ethnicity and mestizaje are totally different--Mayans mixed or not with Europeans in one, Africans mixed or not with Europeans in the other. The topography (at least considering the part of Guatemala I travel in, the Western Highlands) is mountainous vs. more-or-less flat. The climate is maybe hot (a dry heat) during the day but always pleasant at night to memories of New York City in August and the tired cliché of "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." (I will admit that May in Cuba is less oppresive than June.) And of course Antigua is a small town and Havana a city of over 2 million. But like the pleasure of green tea and a brownie at the Café Condesa in Antigua, there is the pleasure of walking into the cool, elegant restaurant of the Hotel Florida (they have a veggie page on their multipage menu and serve iced tea) and the tall waiter remembering me from 11 months ago.

My two weeks in Cuba start badly and end brilliantly. I have almost always stayed in casas particulares (a step up from the homestay you may have had while studying Spanish), enjoying the possibility of getting a breakfast and cena to my (vegetarian) specifications. I had stayed twice in the house of a lovely couple with a great location but was looking to improve on a room that shares the bathroom with the adjoining room and that has no windows, which gives me claustrofobia. Through the Internet I have found the house of Humberto, offering private bath and windows, and have made and reconfirmed a reservation for two nights at the outset, a gap of three nights when I will be traveling, and then nine nights. The house turns out to have six rooms to rent, of which four are illegal because the limit is two, the owner turns out to be a 30ish lawyer who can make more money renting rooms than practicing law (especially since he won't be paying taxes on the four illegal rooms), and he also turns out to be a rat.

Late on the afternoon of my second day I am finally able to talk to Humberto, go over my time reserved thinking this is routine, and after much hemming and hawing and spending time on his computer with a very slow (and also illegal) connection to the Internet looking for our correspondence, apparently trying to show that I haven't reserved and reconfirmed my reservation for the nine nights--after all this, it turns out that he has given a reservation to a musical group for the last three nights of my stay. I go ballistic, insist that he find me another house for the whole nine nights, he makes a couple of phone calls and sends me to a house that turns out to be quite pathetic, which I turn down. Given that early the next morning I am going to Viñales, I say I will return to the house and look for another one.

In Viñales, to continue with the housing theme, I call Asela to ask her to call Mercedes to see if the room I stayed in last time will be available. To explain the cast of characters, Asela is a dear friend whom I met during my first trip to Cuba in 2003, when I had reserved a room in Santiago de Cuba and arrived to find that the room wasn't available, that I was going to stay at a house around the corner--very annoying, until I met Asela, owner of that house, who was gracious, helpful, really a delightful person to talk to, which we found ourselves doing for long periods after breakfast and cena. She has email, but not Internet access, thanks to the fact that she was a biology professor at the Universidad del Oriente, work she had to leave for reasons of health, but she has been able to keep her email. We have had an almost daily correspondence ever since. I had left with her the card of Mercedes, in whose house I had stayed last time and which under the current circumstances looked like the best I could do, she had been in contact with Mercedes mutually referring guests, so since she had Mercedes' phone number and I didn't, besides which it would be too embarrassing to call and say here I am but I haven't been staying in your house, I ask her to call, first to ask if she had room for two señoras, and if so to explain the situation and make a reservation. Which is what happens, a great relief, especially since this trip is different from the other three in that Asela is flying from Santiago to Havana to spend my final four and a half days with me.

To return to Viñales, a town of 10,000 three and a half hours to the west of Havana (my first venture in that direction), it is noted for the unique geography of its surroundings, characterized by mogotes, which are limestone knolls as high as 600 meters with trees growing out of them and underground rivers flowing through them and creating caves. (The caves were frequent hiding places for runaway slaves.) It turns out that the dueña of my house is a guide in the national park, and the day after my arrrival I accompany her on a two-and-a-half-hour caminata (hike), which she offers daily through various of the classy hotels located a short distances from the town. It happens that no one else has signed up that day, so I get a private tour, first on a paved road, then an unpaved one, then on paths on the sides of fields and of houses, the mogotes always in the background. The agriculture is tobacco, vegetables, and fruit, of which I see some of my favorites growing for the first time. I also see the high-peaked houses where tobacco is dried. The agricultural techniques are extremely low-tech, meaning oxen pulling the plows. There are absolutely no cars in sight. The houses of the campesinos have the same porches with columns as the houses in the town but the roofs are usually made with leaves of the royal palm instead of roof tiles. Toward the end of the caminata we stop at the house of campesinos known to my guide, sit on the rocking chairs in front and eat pink guayabas offered by our hostess.

My second day in Viñales I explore the most user-friendly of the caves, hiring a taxi to take me there, wait for me, and bring me back. With a group of Germans, their Cuban guide translating to Spanish for my benefit, we walk for a while through the tortuously shaped environs, until we arrive at the river and ride in a boat until we exit, a profusion of vines hanging down from above.

I return to Havana on a Saturday and move to Mercedes' house on Monday rather than Wednesday, as reserved by Asela. Humberto greets me on my arrival with open arms, not to tell me of the house he promised to find for me, but because he needs a foreigner to go somewhere and sign a contract for a cell phone. Thinking this will happen nearby, I say OK, in 15 minutes, after which he introduces me to his cousin, who is going to drive me to Playa, a municipio about three municipios to the west of Havana Vieja, where I am. I immediately back off, saying I thought it would be close, I have to do email and go to the Gran Teatro, and besides, I don't owe you a favor because you're throwing me out. At breakfast the next day--the guests pay daily, and the employee who makes breakfast has little slips of paper with the charges for each room--I discover that Humberto has raised the price of my room from 25 to 30 pesos convertibles. This sends me to a pay phone to arrange to move the next day.

Arriving at Mercedes' house, I confess to Jorge, her husband, that I had wanted a room with private bath, he shows me to my previous room--and comes back a few minutes later to say that in the afternoon, when another guest leaves, I will be moving to another room that has wider beds and a bathroom that is "más independiente," which turns out to mean that they shower in it when their guests are out and use a half bathroom otherwise.

In the meantime, on Saturday I have been able to experience one of the joys of Havana Vieja, a concert of chamberr music at the Basilica Menor de San Francisco de Asis, a former church and convent gracing the Plaza San Francisco, now used as a small concert hall and a museum of religious art. Cuban musicians and dancers, I have found, are dependably excellent, even brilliant, as is the case with these three duos--violin and piano, two pianos, and cello and piano. I am especially impressed by the young cellist, who plays sonatas for cello and piano by Shostakovich and Miaskovski without a score.

Once my lodging problem is resolved, I can relax, enjoy the leisurely pace and arquitectural unity of Havana Vieja, wonder what happened to all the jineteros who used to molest me, sip lemonades while listening to musical groups at the Café Mina, discover the new Museo de Chocolate, whose café serves a hot chocolate that is like drinking a Hershey bar--and plan for Asela's visit, a project much wished for and long in the making.

Except for the ordeal of staying up until 3-something in the morning awaiting her taxi (Cubana offers certain types of flights for Cubans at extremely low prices but sometimes extremely inconvenient schedules), the visit goes brilliantly, starting with our arrival at the Café Mina just as my favorite group (Raices Cubanas) is getting ready to play. Asela is tireless, soaks up everything, raves about Eusebio Leal (in charge of the restoration of Havana Vieja), and adapts well to situations that as a Cuban she has never experienced--eating in an elegant hotel restaurant, using the bathroom at a least four classy hotels, sipping lemonades in cafés meant for tourists. (It helps that Asela doesn't look Cuban, even has blue eyes.) Going into museums, on the other hand, she reverts to being Cuban to take advantage of an entry fee in pesos corrientes (24 to the US dollar) instead of the pesos convertibles (now slightly more than the dollar) that I have to spend.

My program for our four days together is two days exploring Havana Vieja's four plazas and attractions on and between them, one day seeing the churches and convents in the southern part of Havana Vieja and the Alameda de Paula, and one day along the part of Centro Havana adjoining Havana Vieja. The second day we make an unscheduled trip to Vedado because it turns out that Cubana insists on reconfirming in person and since we're there have lemonades and use the bathroom at the Hotel Nacional.

The climax of our time together is a performance the night before our joint departure in the Gran Teatro de La Habana, a neobaroque marvel, of the Compañía Flamenca Ecos. The performance is electrifying and also innovative--one dance features six dancers who start out sitting on straight chairs, another has the dancers using canes to supplement their tapateo.

Report from Guatemala

2005-04-30T09:12:00.000-06:00

Here I am in Antigua (La Antigua Guatemala to be correct), a place I come to (this is the 18th time) out of nostalgia, winding up the first stage of a three-stage trip--two weeks each in Guatemala and Cuba followed by a week in Mexico City.

The nostalgia is because when I first came here, in 1989, Antigua was not the San Miguel de Allende of Central America, as it is now, with delicatessens selling products such as cheddar cheese and Chinese cooking wine, not usually found in these parts, cafés featuring bagels (I refuse to eat a bagel outside of New York), and restaurants of multiple nationalities. I have to admit to enjoying my afternoon green tea and brownie at the Café Condesa, but the cost is high, with ever more traffic clogging the cobblestone streets, making it increasingly hard to appreciate the lovely pastel-colored houses with tile roofs. The only regulation of traffic seems to be the closing of Quinta Avenida (5th Avenue), the main drag, on the weekends. The number of travel agencies and tour operators has to exceed what's in San Miguel, and in every other block one can find a cute little hotel.

Despite all of the above, Antigua remains a place where one can happily just be, without feeling the need for an agenda. For my purposes, it remains a place to happily photograph (when the cars don't get in the way of course), for the ample population of indígenas in their colorful traje típico who come in to sell their crops at the market or their artesanía at the artesanía market or on the street, or to wash clothes in the tanque público, for the colonial chimneys rising above the tile roofs of the pastel-colored houses, for the ruins of convents and churches, flowers against crumbling stone. Normally it is also a place to photograph volcanos, three of which loom over the city, but the weather has been almost continually cloudy (sunny of course at the same time, and hot except early morning and evening) and the volcanos have pretty much disappeared.

Antigua is a city of colonial ruins, having been almost destroyed by an earthquake in 1773, as a result of which the capital was moved from here to what is now Guatemala City. The marketing of the ruins has progressed over the time I have been coming here. When I first came the admission was 25 or 50 centavos. Then at some point a national distinction appeared, and it was 1 quetzal (the currency, also the national bird) for natives and 10 quetzales for foreigners. Now there is a multitiered system--30 quetzales for foreign tourists, 15 for foreign students with credential, 10 for Central American tourists (students get no discount), and 2 for Guatemalans (again students get no discount). Luckily, at three ruins attached to churches everyone gets in for 3 quetzales. (Due to the decline of the US dollar, this trip I get only 7.5 quetzales to the dollar, whereas the exchange rate had been 8 to 1 for many years. Luckily my hotel here sets its prices in dollars, so there I don't lose out.)

The single cultural event of my stay is a concert of two youth orquestras combined, out of doors, a platform having been constructed in front of the Cathedral and plastic chairs placed on the street facing it. The massed strings do all right, but sometimes a percussionist is a little off.

At the beginning of my stay I take off for Lake Atitlán, leaving Thursday and returning Sunday. The base of most people's stay at the lake is Panajachel, a somewhat bizarre combination of indígena village built a couple of kilometers inland and tourist strip between it and the lake, with puestos selling artesanía lining the street. The same cloudiness that's in Antigua is here, apparently a common phenomenon just before the rainy season, and the three volcanos that loom above the lake and are responsible for its breathtaking beauty have been swallowed up in the mist. Luckily I have been here several times before and have taken a collection of photos of the lake with its volcanos, and luckily they reappear the morning of my last day, too faint to photograph but clear enough to remind me of their impressiveness.

I come on a Thursday because I want to go on Friday to the market in Sololá, an indígena town on a bluff above the lake. The market is an enormously intense affair, partly for the ruthless crush of people, partly for the uniformity of the traje típico of the indígena women, and some of the men--at the beginning I feel like I'm going into a trance. For the first time I notice hand-kissing, first a man kissing a woman's hand, then a woman kissing a woman's hand, then a man kissing a man's hand. I have debated long and hard as to whether to bring my camera, having been robbed twice over the years in this market, but I decide I'd like to do portraits with the long lens, like I have done at the market in Antigua, not realizing that it won't be possible because here the plastic coverings on the puestos make it impossible to get a view from a distance. In any event, I shoot a lot in the parque central (as Guatemalans call their central plazas) and at some selling spots that are uncovered.

The market is mostly out of doors, but selling also takes place inside a building, in a corner of which weavings are sold--I have a lovely silk rebozo hanging in front of my stairway from there. Of course I can't remember where the building is, and I have a terrible time finding out by asking; finally a man who overhears me asking another man says "Two blocks that way," which it isn't, but I turn a corner and there it is. Then there is the problem of finding where they sell weavings, which I originally walk by to get away from the meat, but a woman rescues me and I end up buying an orange huipil (blouse) with elaborate designs, which may get draped over a trunk for lack of free wall space. When I walk out of the building by another entrance, I realize I am right by the church.

On Saturday my agenda is a boat trip to three of the dozen or so indígena villages on the edge of the lake; our captain, the volcanos being invisible, is wearing a compass on a cord around his neck. The tourists are quite varied, Germans, French, Italians, and one other American; I chat with a German couple who are traveling for a year in their camper. At San Pedro La Laguna things are very modernized, with cybercafés even, the women wear a normal blouse with their corte (wrap-around skirt), and there is a sizeable gringo population, a tradition started by hippies in the 70s who came to hang out and smoke pot. The Protestant inroads in Guatemala are visible here in Christian slogans painted on walls and several pastel-colored Evangelical churches.

Santiago Atitlán, our next stop, is at once more traditional, with its uniform traje típico, including the striped and embroidered shorts that the men wear, but more tourist-oriented, with artesanía stores lining the route from the dock to the center of town. We end up at San Antonio Palopó, where I came once for the annual fiesta; the tiny village is much more shut down now than then, but it has opened several shops of weavings and ceramics to sell to the tourists, almost everything blue, like the women's huipiles.

I have a ticket for tomorrow, Monday, from Guatemala City to Havana, reserved by email correspondence with a travel agency here (not having it in hand caused me some problems in the Mexico City airport), on a not-exactly-world-class line called Tikal Jets, which has to be better than Cubana, the alternative, which I refuse to fly. There are many agencies in Antigua offering transport by van to the Guatemala City airport (I also went that way to and from Panajachel); I have to take a 5:00 a.m. shuttle, as they're called, for my 9:30 flight because the next one leaves at 7:30--the rush-hour traffic is too impossible in between.

Report from Jalapa and Mexico City

2005-01-10T16:48:00.000-06:00

Well, it turns out that the 6:05 bus to Jalapa is coming from somewhere else (Cosamaloapan?) and it doesn't arrive until 6:40. But at least it takes 15 minutes less to get to Jalapa than the three and a half hours I had been told to expect. I buy my ticket to el DF in the terminal and get my taxi to the Mesón del Alférez, a colonial mansion converted to hotel, totally charming but kind of dark--I buy two 100-watt bulbs the next day.

The best things about Jalapa are the Parque Juárez and the Museo de Antropología. The plaza principal, the Parque Juárez, is built on a hill, like the city, and therefore operates on various levels, with various institutions tucked into the slopes--el Ágora de la Ciudad, a cultural center where free of charge I see "Baraka," a strange documentary without narration or dialogue that seems to be an illustration for Anthropology 101; la Pinacoteca de Diego Rivera, a small museum that used to house a few of Rivera's works but now has an exhibit of ceramics, somewhat interesting; and the Italian Coffee Company, a delightful café where I can get Earl Grey tea and a brownie. Above, the Parque offers flowers, huge trees, small fountains, and five (!) balloon sellers--can they all possibly make a living? In the afternoon there are an abundant supply of little kiddies chasing pigeons, which kiddies everywhere seem to love to do.

The Museo de Antropología, a 20-peso taxi ride from downtown, is a jewel of architecture and landscape architecture, all beige marble, glass, and greenery. Set on the side of another hill, the route of the exhibits has the visitor descending three marble steps every 10 meters or so. What the visitor is seeing are gorgeous stone prehispanic sculptures, including several mammouth Olmec heads, for which the museum is noted, all found in the state of Veracruz. To the right every once in a while one finds a large glass-walled patio, with more sculptures, surrounded by trees and enormous plants, almost giving the effect of a jungle. From the patios one can drift to the outside grounds, a large expanse of lawn, flowers, and trees. The effect--especially since I have come early and apparently no one else knows that the museum opens at 9--is enormously tranquilizing, as well as awe-inspiring for the beauty of the sculptures and the beauty of their setting. The museum alone is reason to come to Jalapa.

My final day in Jalapa I explore the Parque Paseo de los Lagos, a large wooded space with an apparently artificial lake made to look like two, with geyser-like fountains gushing up. Then I tramp around looking for interesting facades to photograph--Jalapa speaks of a centro histórico, but what is histórico takes looking for--climbing the hill to the market and beyond and discovering stairways leading to a lower space where, conveniently at comida time, is a vegetarian restaurant that was somewhere else last visit.

Back in el DF the next day after five hours on ADO GL (wishing they provided headphones like ETN so one could avoid the movies but discovering that a Dracula movie is a satire on English high society), I focus on getting 13 rolls of film developed, then rediscover that Tlacotalpan is enormously photogenic, the next day have several enlargements made (also of Veracruz and Jalapa) while I shop (vitamins, pajamas, clothes for the gym, my bus ticket home, provisions at the Mercado San Juan).

Concerts seem to be suspended at this time of year, but at least I can do museums on my final day. The Museo Franz Meyer has an exhibit of photos of Mexico City's Centro Histórico taken in the period 1920 to 1940, from which I can see the in 1925 the Zócalo was beautifully landcaped (though, oddly, without benches) and an exhibit of posters in which I can see the controversial poster for last year's Festival Cervantino. The museum itself provides a marvelously pleasant setting sitting in the patio café, with the gurgle of the fountain and the soft Baroque music having a totally relaxing effect.

From the Franz Meyer I cross the Centro Histórico to the Museo de la Ciudad de México to see an exhibit of absolutely incredible sculpture by Victor Hugo Núñez, a Chilean exiled in Mexico since 1974. His large-format sculptures, mostly of people and mostly of iron, are simultaneously realistic and phantasmagorical, inspired by Mexican and Chilean artesanía. I am able to buy a small flattish barro figure, signed by the sculptor, for 50 pesos, after which my photo is taken, to include in a mural of owners of these figures, and I am asked to write a commentary in a book on the fact that I own one. After such an intense viewing experience, more museum-hopping is out of the question, so I eat and wander (buying on the street a purple baseball hat, something I've been seeking for a long time to go with my Guatemalan jacket) until time to get organized for my return home.

Report from Veracruz and Tlacotalpan

2005-01-03T16:46:00.000-06:00

The city of Veracruz, el puerto as they call it, is the first of three stops I’m making in the state of Veracruz, to be followed by Tlacotalpan and Jalapa. To break up the distance, I first spend two nights in Mexico City, where on my one day there I walk from the Centro Histórico to the Zona Rosa, admiring the newly renovated Paseo de la Reforma and the series of nacimientos (creches) displayed along it of many different sizes and styles. I rest in a café and stop in two Fonart (government-run artesanía) stores, which I always treat as museums because the objects are exquisite and the prices high. For the first time I see a movie in Mexico City, the Colombian film “María llena eres de gracia,” about a 17-year-old fed up with her job dethorning roses who decides to become a mula, earning big bucks swallowing small packets of cocaine to fly to New York. After many complications, including the death of another mula, the ending is more or less upbeat.

From el DF to Veracruz is a little over five hours on ADO GL, during which I try to focus on the gorgeous scenery rather than the enormous man looming from the next seat. In Veracruz I settle in at the Hotel Colonial, much too expensive but I have decided that a room with a balcony overlooking the zócalo is essential to the experience of Veracruz I want to have. Which can be an interminably musical experience—on one side of the zócalo, under my balcony and extending further east are the portales, arches within which the diners at a series of restaurants and cafés are entertained by a variety of musical groups, many based on the marimba. I bring earplugs because I know from a previous trip that the entertainment will last well past midnight.

The great advantage of this location comes my first night, when I hear the music accompanying the Ballet Fokclórico de Veracruz, rush downstairs, and see a delightful performance of Mexican tapateo (vaguely related to flamenco but much less sophisticated), including the dance in which the señoritas put glasses on their heads (in this case with votive candles inide) and the dance in which the couples use their feet to tie bows in a sash. At 8, it being Tuesday, a band takes over the platform on which the dancing has taken place and below couples, just folks, start to do the danzón, a sedate sort of fox trot especially favored by the over-50 crowd.

I’ve come to Veracruz to warm up from Guanajuato’s chill, and I do enjoy feeling the heat of the sun in my tank top and sandals, but downtown Veracruz I find to be dirty and deteriorated. There’s the Malecón, a paseoa by the Gulf of Mexico featuring huge tankers and schlocky souvenir shops (the boats giving harbor tours weren’t when I felt like one), which is dwarfed by the Malecón in Havana. There’s San Juan de Ulúa, a warehouse for Spanish traders when Mexico was a colony, then with towers added a fortress against pirates, finally a prison of very ill repute before becoming a museum, which is worth shooting a roll of film but is less impressive than El Morro in Havana. The market, where I buy provisions for my in-the-room meals, would have been fascinating before I moved to Mexico but is now ho-hum. The fish market is nothing much compared to the cast-iron one in Manaus.

I dutifully spend my three days in Veracruz tramping around seeing the other tourist sights, and I enjoy the exhibit of photography at the Fototeca and the scale model of the walled city at the Naval Museum. I find myself returning daily to the Malecón to stroll and shoot pictures.On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve the number of tables outside the restaurants in the portales is doubled or tripled and that whole side of the zócalo becomes an enormous party, with continuous music. At 7, as the party continues, the Ballet Folclórico performs for the third night in a row; I watch briefly from my balcony while I organize my possessions for my departure the next morning. At 8 I notice that the party has thinned out and that there are many stacks of chairs that were occupied earlier. At 8:30 I realize the music has stopped; maybe the musicians have gigs elsewhere? Then I realize that all the people have gone, except for a cluster of perhaps 30 at tables off in the direction of the street. I decide it will be possible to sleep before midnight and leave on the 9:30 bus, and I celebrate the New Year eating olives I have bought at the supermarket down the street while watching the ball drop at Times Square, 11 p.m. Mexican time, on my TV. But sleep is not possible because a little later sappy recorded music breaks out, at midnight the bells of the cathedral go wild, people are singing, and I reset my alarm and decide it will be the 10:30 bus after all.

The bus is asecond-class line (TRV) leaving from the first-class section of the bus terminal, which causes me considerable confusion and scurrying around with my luggage. In between its innumerable stops to let people on and off, we see the Gulf of Mexico on the left and then Lake Alvarado, quite large, on the right. The lake is the mouth of the Río Papaloapan (Nahautl—Aztec—for butterflies), a river that forms the western border of Tlalcotalpan, my destination. I am going to Tlalcotalpan on the emphatic recommendation of José Luis, who owns the paletería I patronize almost daily to buy an agua de fruta to propel me up the hill I climb on the way home from my daily errands. It’s the only city I haven’t yet visited of the nine Mexican cities on the Unesco list of Patrimonio de la Humanidad (World Heritage Sites). The bus conveniently drops me in front of the Posada Doña Lala, my hotel, which is across the street from the river.

With Tlalcotalpan it is love at first sight—all over there are houses (not restaurants) with portales, painted in the most magnificent colors, blue with apricot trim, aquamarine with fuschia trim, chartreuse with yellow trim, a photographer’s dream. The windows are seven feet tall with metal rejas (bars). There are two churches on two lovely plazas, although the kiosk in the Plaza Zaragoza is being destroyed to be rebuilt. There are two museums not worth mentioning. There is no grafitti and no trash lying around.My hotel (painted peach) gives me a room whose balcony has a view of the river, which I can also gaze at from the back of a string of riverfront restaurants (taking shots of the sunset, of course) and more immediately taking a paseo in a little boat with outboard motor, good for seeing palacial riverfront mansions owned by former politicians.

Various aspects here are reminiscent of Cuba—the tall windows with rejas, the mahogany rocking chairs one frequently sees, the accent dropping the final s, even the food I end up eating, rice and beans with fried bananas. A vegetarian not really purist who has been known to eat fish, I find the prices breathtaking at the seafood restaurants, so I decide against paying more than I want to for something I don’t really want to eat.The other Cuba-like aspect is the lack of a newstand—a man carrying a newspaper tells me they are sold by muchachos roaming the streets, whom I don’t encounter. I’m suffering news withdrawal from the lack of a paper, the lack of CNN en español among the cable TV channels in my room, and the lack of a cybercafé that’s open on New Year’s Day or on Sunday the 2d. But perhaps the news withdrawal is appropriate to a place as relaxing as this.

I have a transportation dilemma as to the transition from here to Jalapa. I can go back to Veracruz on the same second-class line, which leaves hourly, and from there take a bus to Jalapa (of which I don’t know the frequency) or I can take a first-class bus from here direct to Jalapa—leaving at 6:05 a.m., the only departure. Which after some internal struggle I decide to do. (To be continued.)

Mexico City and Me: A Personal, Incomplete Guide

2004-12-10T07:49:00.000-06:00

Despite its noise, filth, and relentless crush, Mexico City, specifically its Centro Histórico, has since I moved to Guanajuato come to fulfill for me a number of purposes: It offers museums and concerts unavailable in Guanajuato; it offers tangible items either unavailable in Guanajuato (heavy-duty two-face tape, hoisin sauce, bridge threaders), cheaper in el DF (Distrito Federal) (film, photo processing and enlargements, tea bags of green tea), or of which there is a better selection there (clothes and vitamins); and it of course offers the vitality of a real metropolis and for me houses certain places (the Museo Franz Meyer, the Mercado La Merced, the Catedral Metropolitano) that I find myself returning to almost every time I go, which is several times a year.

From an esthetic point of view, Mexico City’s Centro Histórico has become something of a disappointment since I have come to know Havana’s, which is much superior in its intactness, and which has the advantage of offering cafés where one can relax and hear fabulous music. Although there are a large number of absolutely stunning colonial structures in el DF’s Centro Histórico, unlike Havana, here there is no continuity of architecture, and buildings that are not just modern but also ugly (notably the Torre Latinoamericano, which is taller than anything else) are a major distraction from what is worth looking at. The other problem is the crush of humanity and traffic and in many places the incredible density of ambulantaje (selling on the street), which can make it difficult even to get a look at some of those gorgeous palaces and churches. (What used to be one of my very favorite places, the Plaza Santo Domingo, has since been ruined for me by an invasion of ambulantaje.) For this reason it turns out that the best way to appreciate what is beautiful in the Centro Histórico is to walk around early on a Sunday morning, when everything is closed and the streets are relatively deserted.

When I go, it is generally for a long weekend, leaving Thursday and returning Monday (or arriving in el DF from a trip somewhere else usually Thursday). As soon as I arrive I head for a newstand and spend 7 pesos on a copy of Tiempo Libre, a newsprint magazine that comes out every Thursday and offers listings of all kinds of cultural happenings for the coming week. On Friday morning, when I buy La Jornada, the national newspaper I always read, I consult the cartelera that it publishes on Friday, with information on events for the weekend. I find that some events will be listed in one source and not the other. One frustration of pursuing cultural happenings in el DF is that it is very hard to get information in advance on what will be taking place in the future, so that on some visits I will find three or four concerts to go to and on other visits only one. One exception to that difficulty is the website I recently discovered of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, at http://www.inba.gob.mx.

My favorite concert venues are the Sala Ponce in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado, and the Salón de Recepciones of the MUNAL (Museo Nacional de Arte). The Sala Ponce is a small auditorium, ideal for chamber music, on the second floor of Bellas Artes (Avenida Juárez and the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas), where one can hear the Orquesta de Cámera de Bellas Artes and other chamber groups. The Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado (on Calle Moneda just east of the Cathedral) is a museum owned by the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público in the ample patio of which is presented an active program of cultural offerings; I have seen performances of jazz and flamenco there. At the MUNAL (on Tacuba a little east of the Eje Central) there are frequently free concerts of chamber music at noon on Saturday and Sunday. And of course there is the main sala at Bellas Artes (where I heard a magnificent performance of “Messiah” last year and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa more recently), but I tend to prefer the type of music performed in smaller settings. All events, by the way, come at a discount with the INSEN card. The enormous frustration of wanting to go to concerts in Mexico City is that the city is very horizontal (the opposite of New York, which is very vertical), meaning that excellent offerings may be taking place at venues like the UNAM and the Centro Nacional de las Artes, either of which would require riding an hour on the Metro from the Centro Histórico, which this old lady traveling alone is not up to doing at night.

As to museums, with one exception I relate more to specific exhibits that sound interesting than to particular museums, so on a particular trip I may walk south to the Museo de la Indumentaria Mexicana inside the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana (Avenida Izazaga just east of Isabel la Católica), north to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a museum as well as concert hall, cross the Alameda Central to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera at the western end, venture out to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, in Chapultepec, or go into what I think is the Centro Histórico’s most magnificent secular building, the Palacio de Iturbide (Avenida Madero between the Eje Central and Bolívar), now a cultural center belonging to Banamex (and Citibank) that offers exhibits from the bank’s own collection of paintings. The one museum I keep returning to is the Museo Franz Meyer (Avenida Hidalgo 45, across the street from the north side of the Alameda, in a pleasant sunken plaza with two churches known as the Plaza de la Santa Veracruz; www.franzmeyer.org.mx), a museum of “artes decorativos” based on the collection of a rich German who lived in Mexico in the early 20th century. The permanent collection includes several bargueños, and I happen to get high on bargueños, which I discovered in Ecuador. (A bargueño is a portable desk with a multitude of little drawers and, more importantly, exquisite inlays of mother of pearl, tortoiseshell, or wood of a different color.) There are always temporary exhibits (my favorite of course was an exhibit of bargueños and desks from the 17th century on), and there is a lovely patio with a little café. A place that I treat like a museum although it isn’t is the big Fonart store on Avenida Juárez (the avenue that runs along the south side of the Alameda) a little past the western end of the Alameda. The artesanía is of the highest quality and beautifully displayed, with a tree of life that is at least eight feet high at the far end.

But to actually buy artesanía I go to the mercado de artesanías at la Ciudadela, a large plaza south of the western end of the Alameda at the Balderas Metro station. On the south side of the plaza is El Centro de la Imagen, a cavernous museum of photography (usually too avant-garde for my taste), and on the north side is an enormous and very varied mercado de artesanías, somewhat confusing to navigate because of the multitude of stands, but if you’re looking for something in particular, people are very helpful if you ask. Just don’t go before 11, or you’ll miss out.

I’ve mentioned the Alameda Central in passing, but it’s worth focusing on the fact that this is a very, very lovely rectangle of parkland that starts just west of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and marks the western end of the Centro Histórico, with a large number of 19th century fountains and semicircular stone benches with very high backs, patrolled by mounted police in charro outfits. Across the street from the south side of the Alameda near the eastern end is a Gandhi bookstore and a Sears, noted for a café on the 8th floor that offers a spectacular view of Bellas Artes from above. Calle Dolores, which goes south from the south side of the Alameda close to the eastern end, is for two blocks el DF’s Chinatown.

If you cross the north-south Eje Central—which can be an intimidating experience—from the southeast corner of the Alameda, Avenida Juárez becomes Avenida Madero, something of a main drag of the Centro Histórico. Passing an art deco building on the left, you arrive at the famous Casa de los Azulejos (House of Tiles), housing the main Sanborn’s, where if your feet are tired you can stop at the counter or the restaurant and order something to drink while you rest. The magazine section is very complete, bridge threaders are available in the pharmacy, and the danés de manzana (apple Danish) in the pastry section is fabulous. Whenever I need money, I use one of the ATMs at Sanborn’s because there are always a lot of people around. A little further down the block is a General Nutrition Center, and across the street is the Iglesia de San Francisco, which has a gorgeous gold retablo on the right as you enter, and further down across the street is the already-mentioned Palacio de Iturbide.

Keep on going, passing an area of opticians and stores selling gold jewelry, and in four or five blocks you’re at the Zócalo, the second largest plaza in the world, after Red Square in Moscow. It is also possibly the world’s ugliest plaza, totally bare cement except for a massive flag flying from its center. My mother (who twice lived in Mexico City) told me that the Zócalo used to be beautifully landscaped until someone sometime shot at the president from one of the trees and the president ordered them all cut down. During the administration of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the first elected Jefe de Gobierno del Distrito Federal as a result of elections in 1997, a poll was taken as to whether residents wanted the Zócalo landscaped, and the result was 80 percent in favor. A design competition was held, a winner was chosen, and nothing ever happened.

Ugly as it is, this massive space can be very functional; book fairs are held here, mass concerts are held here, the May Day parade ends with rallies here, altars are exhibited here on el Día de los Muertos, and of course demonstrations and sit-ins for all kinds of causes take place here. To get a spectacular view of the Zócalo, the Cathedral on the north side, and the Palacio Nacional on the east, have a meal at the outside part of the seventh-floor restaurant of the Hotel Majestic, on the northwest corner of the Zócalo. Although not at all religious, I’m a fan of churrigueresque gold retablos and figures, which keeps me visiting the Cathedral to see their selection, wishing that the first chapel to the left as you enter wasn’t always closed and that the lighting was adequate to fully appreciate all those gorgeous angels and archangels as I peer through the rejas.

Across from the Cathedral on Avenida Cinco de Mayo, a block north of Madero, is a spectacular colonial building housing one of my favorite shopping experiences, the Nacional Monte de Piedad. This is the national pawnshop, which for my purposes is a place to exercise patience for the sake of buying gold jewelry at bargain prices. Long stretches of counters, each staffed by an individual entrepreneur, each displays an array of gold rings, bracelets, earrings, watches, and so forth, so that to see, for example, all the earrings it is necessary to peruse the contents of a large number of cases.

For more mundane shopping, I go a little south of the Zócalo on Cinco de Febrero, which forms the Zócalo’s western border, to look for clothes at El Nuevo Mundo and El Palacio de Hierro, department stores across the street from each other; for underwear I go to Diseños Princesa at Cinco de Febrero #14. At the corner of Cinco de Febrero and Avenida El Salvador is the enormous Farmacia París, where in the self-service section I can find a selection of bandaids unavailable in Guanajuato. For classy hardware (a miniature flashlight, a tortoiseshell comb) I go to Bowker on 16 de Septiembre (one block south of Madero) between Bolívar and Isabel la Católica. For second-hand books, I can browse in a number of stores clustered on Donceles (three blocks north of Madero) at the end near the Cathedral. I get photos developed and enlarged for rock-bottom prices at Lucky, Tacuba #74-B (Tacuba is two blocks north of Madero). I once came across a shoe store specializing in comfortable (and attractive) shoes; it’s Soria Zapatería, at Cinco de Febrero #50-B, between Mesones and Regina (several blocks south of Madero).

For looking more than buying, I take the Metro to the Mercado La Merced; the Metro stop La Merced is smack in the middle of the market’s main building. I get high on markets as well as bargueños, and although not as colorful as, say, the mercado in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Mercado La Merced at least is truly immense, the main building several blocks long and two or three blocks wide. It is a wholesale as well as a retail market, and there are stands selling nothing but carrots, nothing but garlic, nothing but mushrooms, huge mounds of mole, and so on. When I need an extra bag to take home my purchases and the photographs I have had developed in, I take advantage of a couple of puestos in the midst of the food that sell a large assortment of nylon bags with zippers, as well as the more typical Mexican shopping bags. In that vicinity, at desnivel (going down), there is a housewares section, although I also have seen an impressive selection of pots and pans outside, along with a lot of miscellaney. I once asked where the flowers were and discovered that there is a separate building for flowers, in which part of what is impressive is that 90 percent of them are artificial. Of course it’s easy to get totally lost wandering around, but it’s also easy to ask where the entrada to the Metro is for the return trip.

Speaking of the Metro, you can get a map at a trailer with tourist information stationed by the Cathedral. When you consult the map, you need to note the destination of the line you’re taking in the direction you’re going so as to follow the signs in the station indicating the platform for the train going to that destination. You pay 2 pesos at the taquilla for a paper ticket that goes in a slot at the turnstile, you walk to the front or the rear where the cars are less crowded, you keep a tight hold on your bag, and you do a lot of walking where it says Correspondencia when you need to change to a different line. My means of transportation within Mexico City are basically walking and taking the Metro; I mostly avoid taxis except for going between the bus station or airport and my hotel (an authorized taxi from the bus station or airport and a taxi called by my hotel to return) because of the crime associated with taxis, and I haven't figured out the buses, besides which the peseros (small buses) are sometimes hijacked.

And speaking of my hotel, I can recommend the hotel itself but must mention that the encroaching ambulantaje in its vicinity has been getting truly oppressive. The hotel is the Hotel El Salvador, Avenida El Salvador #16, between the Eje Central and Avenida Bolívar (four blocks due south of Bellas Artes), (01-55) 5521-1247 and 5521-1008; www.hotelelsalvador.com; info@hotelelsalvador.com. (I make reservations by email and get a return confirmation.) It’s a three-star hotel with 100 generously sized rooms with built-in furniture functionally designed, offering cable TV, parking, a restaurant, and internet service in the cocktail lounge (25 pesos an hour, more than you pay elsewhere); a single room is 290 pesos and a double 350. A room in the front will get you a balcony, a lively street scene (it’s an electronics district), and the accompanying noise; a room at the back will get you quiet and maybe a view of the laundry. What makes me occasionally think of changing hotels is the ambulantaje that is increasingly obstructing the sidewalk on both sides of the Eje Central from Avenida Madero south, including the four blocks I frequently find myself (slowly) navigating to reach the hotel. The ambulantaje there used to be more easily bearable until a street called Corregidora, which runs on the right side of the Palacio Nacional and used to be totally choked with ambulantaje, was cleared and given back to traffic, and that ambulantaje migrated to the Eje Central. Evidently the city administration is reluctant to challenge the ambulantes out of a fear of violence. I have to admit to buying things on the street (my everyday watch, a battery-operated pencil sharpener, black emery boards, a sink stopper, bicycle shorts) and I understand the economic necessity behind the phenomenon of ambulantaje, but I sometimes go out of my way to avoid walking on the Eje Central.

Being a vegetarian, I’m not a good source for restaurant recommendations, except that I recently discovered a restaurant called El Generalito because it’s across Calle Filomeno Mata from a vegetarian restaurant I patronize. El Generalito offers a comida corrida for 35 pesos with four choices of a main dish (including a vegetarian offering) and quite good food. Filomeno Mata is a pedestrian street going north from the north side of Madero between the Eje Central and Allende, which is the continuation of Bolívar. (Street names can cause a lot of confusion because they change a lot in el DF, e.g., north and south of Madero and east and west of the Eje Central, and sometimes with no particular pattern.) The restaurant is on the right and has no sign but does display the comida corrida on a chalkboard outside.

Actually I only eat comida out and prepare my desayuno and cena in my hotel room. I travel with an immersion heater and metal mug for making tea and various other equipment that permits me to have fruit, pastry, and tea for breakfast and either a cheese, tomato, and onion torta (with olive oil) or a stuffed avocado (with tomato and cheese) for cena. I buy my provisions at the Mercado San Juan, which is conveniently near my hotel and which sells the prettiest vegetables you’ve ever seen, especially the tiny little artichokes. (From the hotel, go west on El Salvador, which becomes Ayuntamiento the other side of the Eje Central, passing the Mercado de Artesanías San Juan—not as good as the one at La Ciudadela—walking through the Plaza San Juan so that you’re one block further south, where the funny-looking telephone building is, and then going right a little to the market. If you continue west on Ayuntamiento, by the way, you’ll find yourself first in a lamps-and-light-fixtures district and a few blocks later in a bathroom-furniture district.) For snacking I like the pay de amaranto with various fruit fillings sold in stores of the the Super Soya chain, which you’ll run across on Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre.

For doing email, I recently settled on a cybercafé with a dozen computers on Tacuba between Allende and Chile (would be Bolívar and Isabel la Católica south of Madero), on the second floor, walking up steps that are out of doors by a number of shops. It charges 10 pesos an hour before 1 p.m. and 15 pesos afterwards.

To get to Mexico City by bus, I’m a fan of ETN, a luxury bus line whose buses have 24 seats, two on one side of the aisle and one on the other, a bathroom, seat belts, leg rests, and, best of all, headsets, so that it’s not necessary to suffer through the soundtrack of the movie. It stops in Irapuato, gets to el DF in five hours or a little less, depending on traffic and on how long it stays in Irapuato, and costs a little over 300 pesos or half that with an INSEN card.

Expect to get confused, stressed, and quite tired (I find the altitude higher enough than Guanajuato’s to make a difference), but also expect to return enriched.

Report from Havana 2004

2004-07-01T16:01:00.000-06:00

To be honest, I flew back to Mexico City this afternoon, where I´ll be until Tuesday, taking care of my 23 rolls of photos and doing fun things. By the time I left Havana my travel wardrobe was looking grungy, my dollars were dwindling, and I was starting to get sick of “Quizás, quizás, quizás,” but leaving was painful nonetheless—if money were no object, I’d gladly go to Havana four or five times a year, just to hang out. But to continue the narrative from where I left off:

From Santiago I took the tourist bus to Camagüey, a medium-sized city known as the city of plazas or the city of tinajones, which could also be called the city of bicycles and bicitaxis. Some of the plazas are quite charming, my favorite, the Plaza del Carmen, including, as well as the indispensable church and pastel-colored houses (one housing an elegant restaurant), some delightful life-size sculptures of just folks doing ordinary things—three middle-aged women sitting sipping coffee in little cups and chatting (with one empty chair should you care to join them), a man pushing a cart, a middle-aged man and woman, the man with his arm around the woman’s shoulders, a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. Three curved benches sport tinajones in the middle used as planters. Tinajones are huge earthenware jugs, at least three feet high, that during colonial times were sunk in the ground in front of homes under gutters to channel rain water to counteract chronic water shortages. Now they crop up in plazas and patios, and minatures are sold as souvenirs.

I would also call Camagüey a city of bicycles and bicitaxis because the streets are flooded with them, along with some motorcycles and a few cars. A bicitaxi has the front wheel and handlebars of a bicycle merged with two seats that have two wheels underneath and a canopy above. A small platform juts out at the back to hold your luggage, secured with a bungee cord. The afternoon of my arrival, a bicitaxista was eager to give me a tour of the city. I was able to exploit his eagerness to get directions to cybercafes, one closed, one with a line of people (Cubans, interestingly enough) waiting, then to learn that there was Internet access at the Gran Hotel, to which I let him take me.

The streets of Camagüey are an irregular maze, designed that way to fend off pirates (the city was sacked twice in the 17th century). Luckily there are innumerable signs pointing the visitor to plazas and churches.

I had arranged in advance to get together with Alfredo, whom I mentioned in my last report as requesting copal, blank CDs, and a case for them. I arrived by his house as planned (he is divorced, lived with his mother but she has died—of course I couldn’t stay in the extra bedroom because it’s illegal for Cubans to have foreign houseguests), gave him what I had brought, explaining what I had learned about how to use copal, then as I was expecting him to ask me how much he owed me (he had insisted in the letter making his request that he would pay me), he presented me with three books, a poster-size calendar with photos of Camaguey, and a poster-size print. (The last two have stayed behind.) Apparently that was his payment, for he never asked me what I had spent. (I later discovered that one of the books had marginal notations and another a broken spine.) He also gave me two letters to mail, one to Nicaragua and the other to Switzerland. Speaking of which, the next day I was stopped on the street by a slim 60ish woman who (like everyone) wanted to know where I was from; after telling her I lived in Mexico I tried to move on, but when I heard “carta” I agreed to go to her house, only a block away, and take a letter to be mailed to someone in Mexico City. She gave me a miniature tinajon with “Camagüey” painted on it in return.

From Camagüey I had to get to Remedios, a colonial town of 20,000 that Alfredo had insisted last trip I must see, the complication being that the tourist bus doesn’t stop there. So I took it from Camagüey to Santa Clara, whose only distinction in my mind was being 45 kilometers from Remedios (the guidebooks tell you about the Stalinist-style monument to Che Guevara, but such things don’t interest me). The bus, really a bus from Santiago to Havana that stops at provincial capitals on the way, complicaed my life by arriving in Camagüey 40 minutes behind schedule and in Santa Clara an hour 45 minutes late, thanks to an hour-long supper break that hadn’t been factored into the schedule, so it was after 10 at night when I arrived Tuesday the 22nd.

The following day I arranged with a taxista called by my host to use his services to and from Remedios Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon. The rest of the day I managed to discover two notable aspects of Santa Clara: In a hotel coffee shop I drank the best lemonade I have ever had, made in a blender with the ice, the crushed ice having a marvelously cooling effect. And in the Museo de Artes Decorativos (more antique furniture) there was a lovely bargueño (I get high on bargueños), and the guide opened some of its drawers for me, including a deep narrow drawer for a Bible and a shallower one underneath for a rosary (I’ve always wanted to be able to open the drawers of a bargueño). A bargueño, for those whose lives have not included this peak experience, is a colonial portable desk, generally with exquisite inlays of ivory, tortoise shell, or wood of a different color.

Remedios did not live up to its billing, although the main church had the only gold churrigueresque retables that I had seen in Cua, plus the only known imagen (figure) of a pregnant Virgen. (The old man showing me around said that several visiting MDs had judged from the position of her belly that she was 7 months pregnant, gut I wondered if the anonymous sculptor had had that intention.) Around the main plaza the buildings were quite lovely and well maintained, as was the large house that served as headquarters of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, but almost everywhere else there was an urgent need of plaster and paint.

I hadn’t been able to make a reservation in the only casa particular I knew of, so I ended up at the only hotel in town, a 14-room restored colonial jewel. Upstairs the doors to the hall and between a little foyer and the bedroom were about 10 feet high, panels painted blue and ivory. The ceiling was about 15 feet high before it angled up to a peak, wood painted blue. Double doors led to a balcony over the plaza, hard to open because of the air-conditioning (which, unlike the air-con in all the houses I’ve stayed in, was not Soviet but new). The furniture was elegant, and the TV was perched on a mahagony cube with a frigobar in it, all, I thought, a bargain for $30 in the low season. The TV, via satellite, gave me CNN—not CNN en espanol but the original product—and I felt rather weird watching US television while in Cuba. (CNN sparmed me from starvation for news given that Remedios had no Internet access and therefore reading newspapers wasn’t a possibility—I didn’t even see Granma being sold.)

I somehow managed to shoot four rolls of film wandering around (the horse carts were picturesque) and spent some time at the Casa de la Cultura chatting with a contact of Alfredo’s. He had to tell me all about the parranda, a Christmas Eve blowout (floats and fireworks) for which Remedios is famous, took me to the Museo de la Parranda, and would have shown me a video at his house but there was no electricity that day. And I did yoga and of course watched CNN.

It was back to Santa Clara Saturday aftrnoon simple for the purpose of spending the night and taking a taxi the next morning that my host had arranged to get me to Havana, since I couldn’t bear the thought of repeating my previous bus experience. (It was $50 for three and a half hours.) Saturday night I was seized but what I told myself was an irrational fear that the taxista would not show up at 9 as scheduled, but that’s exactly what happened. My host was the hero of the day, somehow getting me another taxista at the same price (my taxista to Remedios had wanted $100 to Havana) and I was off at 10:15.

The big event of my last stay in Havana was doing something I had thought of doing since my first trip—spending $50 on an enormous and gorgeous coffee-table book of photographs of the before and after of the restoration of La Habana Vieja, with historical information on the buildings pictured. (What probably made the difference this trip was having a nylon tote bag to put it in, which I had used to take three framed enlargements to Asela.) Reading the preface by the city historian, I learned that in 1993 Fidel signed a decree creating a company called Habaguanex, which owns hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related businesses, all of the profits of which go into the continuing work of restoration. (My general reaction to socialism, after experiencing the Cuban version, is that it just doesn’t work--but this scheme I like, and I wish Mexico City had something similar.) The book made me aware of an alameda (a stone-and-iron walkway) and a lovely church that I never heard of, a little out of the way, and in general left me awestruck at the enormous effort of a valient people to preserve the beauty of their history.

Written July 1, 2004 as an email mailing

Report from Santiago de Cuba 2004

2004-06-17T17:35:00.000-06:00

Santiago is the third destination of six on this my third trip to Cuba, so I thought it would be a good time write a bulletin of my travels to date, especially since here I have the opportunity to use the computer of my friend Asela, who has email (rare in Cuba) but sadly not Internet access (almost nonexistent outside of cybercafes for foreign tourists), but at least I can write the report and copy it into an email to myself and then into an email to my mailing list, and save the 5 or 6 dollars an hour charged by Cuban cybercafes, which mostly feature glacial connections.

Havana, to which I flew from Mexico City on the 4th of June, is still one of my very favorite places, mostly due to the restoration of what we who live in Mexico would call the centro histórico, there known as La Habana Vieja. The best part for me are the four large plazas, which range from lovely to exquisite, although it pains me that only in the Plaza de Armas are there comfortable places to sit other than by taking a seat in a café and spending US dollars. Which I find it essential to do a few times a day for coping with the brutal Cuban heat, not to mention the humidity; my coping strategy is to order a lemonade or a soda with ice and before I have finished it ask for a glass of ice, por favor, which I dump in my drink—if I worried about the ice I would never survive the heat. While sitting in a café one can frequently hear absolutely terrific live music, any time of day, free of charge. Whatever plaza one is in, Havana Bay is always nearby, which gives one a lovely sense of openness. Now that I've been here a couple of times I don't feel the need to do the museums—I went into the Museo de Arte Colonial because its balconies overlook the Plaza de la Catedral and I remain hugely unsatisfied with the photos I have taken of the plazas on my previous trips. (Other than the balconies it houses colonial furniture and accessories rather than art.) This time I find myself deciding that Havana is one of those places (like Antigua) where one can just be, one doesn't have to do things (although with my camera I'm at least looking for things photogenic that I don't already have several photos of). It should be said that the one drawback of restored Havana Vieja is the wrenching contrast because its classy beauty and the wretched poverty one can see a few blocks to the south or west.

The way Cuban colonial architecture was designed for coping with the heat by maximizing the circulation of air is interesting. Ceilings are very high, at least 15 feet, and windows start at the floor and go almost to the ceiling. They never contain glass but rather rejas (bars), which were wood in the 18th century and became iron in the 19th. A piece of cloth, sort of a simplified café curtain, is sometimes hung for privacy. Behind the rejas are shutters (usually open) with persianas (slats, like built-in Venetian blinds). The more elegant colonial buildings have semicircles of stained-glass above the windows. As in Mexico, there are patios, with rooms opening onto the patio. I'm not sure if rocking in a rocking chair makes one feel cooler, but the rocking chair has been an essential piece of furniture in Cuba since colonial times.

When traveling in Cuba I don’t stay in hotels but in casas particulares, private homes licensed by the government (and highly taxed) to rent rooms, which aside from the lower (but not low—I pay USD 25 for my room in Havana and 260 pesos, hardly more, for my three-star hotel with cable TV in Mexico City) price offer the possibility of breakfast and cena (supper) fixed to one?s specifications, a great advantage when one is a vegetarian traveling in a very meat-oriented country. I ask for fruit, bread, and juice (usually something like mango, zapote, or tamarind rather than orange) for breakfast, supplying my own tea bags of green tea, and soup and a salad (which tends to be tomatoes and string beans or maybe cucumber) for cena. In Havana I have discovered an easy way of coping with almuerzo (comida in Mexico, the main meal, eaten in Cuba around 1) because the Hotel Florida, a luxury hotel on Havana Vieja's main street, has a vegetarian page on its multipage menu, not to mention offerings on other pages like black-bean soup and fried bananas (of which I am extremely fond). It also, delightfully, serves iced tea, which though not green is for me an essential coolant with the meal (with the extra glass of ice of course). I am delighted that at my first meal after ordering the food the waiter finishes the order for me, this being the third trip on which I have been an almost-daily customer. The off day I go to the Barrio Chino, an infinitesimal Chinatown to the west of Havana Vieja with one short street with nothing but restaurants, where when I explain that I need a meatless meal, preferably picante (an enormous frustration for me being that the Chinese immigrants in Latin America apparently all came from the province of Canton and Cantonese food is much too bland), the waitress comes up with a soup very close to hot-and-sour soup and a dish of noodles and veggies that is quite good.

What is new and improved about this stay in Havana turns out to be the opportunity to go to two performances, thanks to my flukishly having bought Juventud Rebelde, one of the two propaganda sheets (the other of course being Granma) that pass for newspapers in Cuba, which has cultural listings. (I should mention that there is no such thing as a newsstand in Cuba; these papers are sold on the street by little old men and there is no fixed price, you have to bargain every time.) At the Basilica de San Francisco, which defines the Plaza de San Francisco and which is no longer a church but a concert hall and museum of religious art, there is a performance of a group called the Camerata Romeu, which puts the Camerata Juvenil of Guanajuato to shame. (I am told the morning of the performance, when I learn of it, that seats are sold out but that they will sell standing room at the hour of the performance. I get there half an hour before to wait in a long line and end up sitting on the fifth row because apparently a number of people bought tickets but didn't show up.) There are nine string players, all young except the bass player and all women except the first violinist, with a percussionist playing the güiro for the last two pieces. It is all modern music by Cuban composers, surprisingly accessible, and it is all brilliantly played, especially since neither the musicians nor the conductor are using music. The audience is as enthusiastic as Guanajuato audiences, which of course gets us an encore.

The next night I go to the Gran Teatro, whose baroque façade features four towers each topped by an angel reaching upward, for the Ballet Español de Cuba doing flamenco with shades of ballet and modern dance. There is one female star, maybe 35, a younger semi-star, 8 other muchachas and 4 muchachos, plus a middle-aged man who dances a little and is apparently the director. The dancing is absolutely breathtaking, really spectacular (faintly reminiscent of the programmatic flamenco at the Cervantino last year), as are the guitarists and percussionists, and the audience goes wild.

This trip I am taking the bus to cross the island to Santiago, almost at the eastern end, having decided last time that the 40-year-old Soviet propeller craft used by the two domestic airlines are too uncomfortable and too anxious-making. Cuba offers a bus line for tourists, Viazul, with air-conditioning and a bathroom. My first stop going east, on the 8th of June, is Trinidad, a delightful colonial city whose centro histórico is nothing if not photogenic with its pastel-colored houses, tile roofs, and horse carts—the last not to be picturesque but to transport people without using gasoline. Its Casa de la Trova is a place to sip something cool and hear an array of musicians for the price of the beverage. Its Museo de la Lucha contra Bandidos in a former church offers a tower with spectacular views. Its mercado de artesanía specializes in exquisite embroidered goods, mostly white on white with much deshilado (threads removed, I don’t know the English); I buy a dresser scarf for the guest room, telling the muchacha that I would prefer a descuentito to a regalito, and am quite satisfied.

On the 11th I settle in for a 12-hour bus ride from Trinidad to Santiago. I have previously said that five hours was my limit for bus rides, but I find the length of the trip to be surprisingly bearable. The countryside, despite what people are calling a drought, is quite green, I guess due to the always-high humidity, with mostly sugarcane, occasionally corn. In the settlements we pass there are a few houses with thatched roofs and a lot of houses that look quite poor, although most have a portal in front; all have persianas in the windows. What is most striking though is the total absence of cars anywhere in the vicinity of the houses. And we pass very few cars—there are some trucks, including trucks outfitted to transport people, some horsecarts, some also outfitted to transport people (a couple of oxcarts appear to the side of the road), a fair number of bicycles, some motorcycles, but almost no cars.

The first time I came to Santiago, a year ago, I had a reservation in a house carefully chosen from information on the Internet, and when I arrived to discover that there had been a “complication,” that the room was occupied, and that I was being shuttled to another house around the corner, I was extremely annoyed—until, that is, I met Asela, the owner of the house around the corner, who turned out to be charming, gracious, and eager to be helpful, enabling my dream of making my beloved moon tea with my green-tea bags in a pitcher in the little refrigerator that went with my room. And also becoming an instant conversation companion over hour-and-a-half chats at the kitchen table after breakfast and cena. Asela flukishly had email and after my departure became a constant correspondent. By this my third visit to Santiago I am finding that almost the only attraction of the city is the opportunity to see my friend. At first blush, Santiago, the second-largest city in Cuba, should be pretty, with the mountains in the background, the bay, and the tile roofs. But then one notices the industrial ugliness surrounding the bay and the iron lamina substituting for many tile roofs, and that almost everything is shabby and dirty. And that the jineteros are extremely aggressive.

Let me end with a word about jineteros and neediness, because the jinetero phenomenon, it seems to me, is but one manifestation of pervasive Cuban neediness. I encounter other, more benign manifestations in requests I get to bring things. I know that Asela will want the drops for purifying water and vegetables, which are hard for her to get, but then I receive a request from Mercedes, the owner of my house in Havana, for three types of medicine to treat her arthritis and the ulcers her arthritis medicine has caused, which it will be hard for her to get. She clearly feels a little uneasy in her email about asking me such a favor, so she includes a sentence about how she is asking me because she thinks of me as a sister. Alfredo, in Camagüey, with whom I am in touch because I met him last trip (he is a good friend of Asela) and will be returning to Camagüey when I leave Santiago, asks for copal (a type of incense), blank CDs, and a case to store them in. He includes a sentence saying he hopes I do not find his request offensive but that if I do, I am under no obligation to him. (These requests of course I fulfill.) The next step closer to being a jinetero is the middle-aged man in Havana of whom I ask directions to the Malecón, who starts talking to me about how he hates Fidel and then turns out to want me to buy asthma medication only available at an international pharmacy. I turn him down and then of course feel guilty. The more obnoxious jineteros want to be your guide or your dancing partner (the feminine of the word means prostitute) or if female may tell you they need money for milk for their baby when you know that milk for babies is free in Cuba. In most places, the come-on is to ask where you’re from, but in Trinidad I found myself inundated by cries of “Amiga, amiga,” found myself highly irritated by being called a friend by someone who didn’t know me, and at one point found myself saying to an adolescent girl, No soy su amiga, which got rid of her effectively but of course made me feel faintly guilty.

On Saturday I leave Santiago and then have a rather cramped itinerary of three destinations on the way to Havana for another few days, after which I hope to write a second installment.

Written June 17, 2004 as an email mailing

In Camagűey—Can Cubans and Foreigners Relate As Equals?

2003-11-09T07:15:00.000-06:00

Cuba can be exhilerating or frustrating, the frustrations frequently having to do with the walls the regime creates between Cubans and the foreigners who visit their island. It is illegal, for example, for a Cuban to have a houseguest who’s a foreigner, unless the Cuban is licensed to rent rooms and is renting a room to the foreigner or the foreigner is a relative of the Cuban who has obtained a special visa at several times the cost of a tourist visa. More mundanely, foreigners are mostly or even entirely paying their expenses in US dollars, whereas Cubans are entirely or at least mostly paying theirs in Cuban pesos. Cubans and foreigners, in other words, are channeled into different stores, different restaurants, different hotels, different modes of transportation.

So it was exciting, a chance perhaps to relate to Cubans on an equal footing, when Asela said she was going to go to Camagüey to coincide with my stay there, that she had friends there she wanted to visit, Asela being the owner of the casa particular where I was staying for the second time in Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, a small city noted for its plazas, being my next destination on my way back to Havana. But complications, the wall between natives and foreigners, quickly arose around the subject of how to get there.

I talk about the Viazul bus, a line created for tourists, air-conditioned buses with bathrooms, charging dollars. Asela’s reaction is, “Why should I pay dollars when I can take the train paying moneda nacional?” (Apparently the service on the ordinary bus line for Cubans is too atrocious for that to be an option.) My initial reaction is “OK, then I can take the train,” until the following day. Asela then says that she is trying to figure out how we can sit together, and it turns out that Cubans go to one place to buy train tickets, paying pesos for their reserved seats, whereas foreigners go to another place to buy theirs, paying the same number of dollars (at 26 pesos to the dollar) as the Cubans pay in pesos. I throw a small fit, talking about freedom of association being a basic human right, which I think leaves Asela totally confused, and I announce that we will meet at 10 a.m. in Camagüey’s plaza principal, which Asela seems to find amusing, but which in the end is exactly what we do. Before the end it occurs to me to offer to buy the Viazul tickets so that we can go together on the bus, pointing out all the money I have been saving in Santiago by eating three meals a day at her house without her charging me (we have become good friends since my first visit, exchanging almost daily e‑mails), but Asela’s refusal is adament.

Then there is the question of where Asela, and possibly Zoila, her 14-year-old daughter, will stay. Possibly Zoila because at the moment she is in the country taking part in a program held at the beginning of the school year for high-school students in which they harvest coffee; I said something snide about cheap labor, but Asela insists that the program follows a pedagogical theory of José Martí. When Asela visited Zoila the previous Sunday, she wanted to come home, which Asela did not permit because Zoila needed to stay another week to obtain credit, but Asela thinks that this Sunday Zoila might be content to stay yet another week because she is now working in the kitchen rather than in the fields.

I already have a reservation in Camagüey in a casa particular, the type of accommodation I am using throughout my trip, and Asela says she is going to investigate the possibility of a casa particular that charges moneda nacional. This is a distinction I hadn’t known existed, but it turns out that there are houses with a red triangle on the door, as opposed to the blue triangle I am familiar with, renting rooms to Cubans and charging pesos. I subsequently have the inspiration that if Zoila doesn’t come, I can call my casa in Camagüey and ask if there is a room with two beds, because the price in a casa is per room, not per person, so that there would be no extra cost for Asela to object to. Asela agrees, but as it turns out Zoila does come and Alfredo, one of Asela’s friends in Camagüey, offers to put them up in his house. (It seems that he is separated and that his mother, who used to occupy the second bedroom, has died.)

We meet in the plaza by the Cathedral, after I have already spent a day in Camagüey because the French train (referring to the physical train, not the company, which was bought second-hand from France) only goes from Santiago to Havana on even-numbered days, and I was going to Camagüey on the 7th. Alfredo, an extremely pleasant person of about 40, turns out to be a valuable guide; aside from knowing the city inside out, he is a municipal employee having something to do with culture and can get us into museums for free. As well as museums and plazas, we walk through the market, a large space totally out of doors but sheltered by a canopy of enormous trees. It turns out that Asela plans to buy groceries and fix almuerzo (the main meal of the day, eaten at around 1) for us. I wonder if there would be a problem if three Cubans and a foreigner walked into a restaurant--and my guidebook describes restaurants in Camagüey that charge Cubans in pesos and charge foreigners the same number of dollars--and eating out would certainly simplify matters, given that Alfredo’s house has no running water because of a project going on in the street, his refrigerator doesn’t work, and instead of a stove he has a one-burner hot plate. There is also the complication of my being a vegetarian, which could be resolved by my ordering rice and beans. But I am too afraid of saying the wrong thing to suggest going to a restaurant.

The first day Alfredo goes off to work after spending the morning with us, Asela and I (after looking fruitlessly for an apron) make a fruit salad of guayabas, bananas, and papaya, while Asela sends Zoila out for pizza. Which leads me to create something of a diplomatic incident, because it turns out that Cuban pizza--at least the Cuban pizza made for Cubans--isn’t. It’s bought at a take-out window, comes only in one variety in a size for one person, and consists of a disk of bread, maybe half an inch thick, topped with a little melted cheese and a little tomato sauce. Asela and Zoila cut theirs into little squares with a knife and fork. I find it absolutely horrible, really inedible. After struggling through a quarter of my pizza, I cut the remainder in half and plop each piece on one of my companion’s plates. “¿Luisa, porque no comes la pizza?” Asela is astonished. “Porque no es pizza,” I respond sheepishly, helping myself to fruit salad. (The following day, which turns out to be a holiday so Alfredo spends the whole day with us, someone at almuerzo says something about Luisa and pizza, which, as often happens because the Cuban accent is so mushy, I don’t understand, so I just blush and cover my face.)

After eating, and after playing a card game called continental, at which Asela does brilliantly and I do badly, Asela says that she would like to window shop in stores charging moneda nacional, and I happen to know, having been there the day before, that there are plenty of shops on Avenida República. So we set out, but we immediatey run into Alfredo, who has apparently been able to get away from work for the rest of the day, and soon resume making the rounds of museums. Being Cuba, it is insufferably hot and humid, my feet are starting to hurt, and I realize that if I had been alone at this stage, I would have been looking for a café, preferably air-conditioned, where I could sit down and order a soda with plenty of ice. (Cuban museums do not offer eating facilities.) But I don’t want to create another diplomatic incident, and it dawns on me that for the Cubans this is not a realistic option--not for legal but for economic reasons, as the soda would be priced in dollars and would cost a dollar and a half or two dollars. At that moment Asela notices a window across the street selling guarapo (sugarcane juice, at 1 peso a glass), suggests that we have some, and we all troop over. There is no place to sit down, and the etiquette of drinking at these take-out windows seems to be that one gulps the drink down as quickly as possible; I‘m not able to finish mine before the others have walked off.

The problem of sore feet is solved by our returning to Alfredo’s house, the adults sitting around the round table in the kitchen, and somehow Alfredo and I get into a conversation--I almost worry about Asela, who came to visit him, being left out--about my doing yoga, being a vegetarian, having decided in 1987 to study Spanish without knowing why, and how convenient it was to speak decent Spanish when I moved to Mexico 13 years later. It comes out that he’s a follower of fung shui, that the round table, the mirror on the wall beside it, the turtle, and the fish tank in the livingroom are all there because of fung shui. I mention that I have photos of Guanajuato and of my house in my suitcase, and it is decided I will bring them the next day and he will give me a fung shui consultation.

I decide that I’m not going to wait and see what folks are doing for cena, that I don’t want to complicate things further and would rather get home before dark, so I announce that I am leaving and we talk about where to meet the next day. We decide on the Plaza Maceo, where my casa particular is located, but when I refer to the plaza as “my plaza,” Alfredo takes offense and said it’s not my plaza, it’s his, which strikes me as surprisingly uncharitable.

The next day involves more walking, this time to a park and to the Plaza de la Revolución, a massive plaza with a massive monument, such as seem to exist in all Cuban cities for the purpose of holding massive rallies. During almuerzo--Asela has prepared meat, corn on the cob, and okra for the three of them, a salad of lettuce, cucumber, and okra for me (the lettuce a probable reason for my getting sick in Havana a few days later)--Alfredo asks if I wouldn’t like to live in Cuba. I supress the temptation to enumerate all the many deprivations, material and political, that living in Cuba would involve and simply say that I am very happy living in Mexico, but that I appreciate the invitation. He gives me my fung shui consultation, which is something of a disappointment, and gives me a book from his extensive collection, the story of a colony of Americans who settled in the province of Camagüey in the early 20th century.

Later I somehow find myself watching a video in the kitchen with Zoila, then seek out Asela in the livingroom, where she is looking at Alfredo’s books on fung shui, have a pleasant conversation with her about a number of subjects, and decide to take my leave. Saying goodbye to Asela is extremely poignant, as I don’t know when I’ll see her again, so I walk back to my casa feeling rather sad. But along the way I remember what traveling in Mexico is like, how I take the same bus as Mexicans, stay in the same hotel as Mexicans, eat in the same restaurants and shop in the same stores, all along spending the same currency, as Mexicans. I never escape the fact of being a foreigner, but that fact carries less weight, isn’t magnified by all those walls that are forever popping up on the Cuban landscape.

November 9, 2003, written as an email mailing, as a substitute for a trip report

The History-Making Wedding

2003-09-21T15:00:00.000-06:00

Just thought folks would be interested in my sister’s same-sex wedding, as they’re calling it, in Toronto. We expected it to be a 5-minute bureaucratic affair, but it took 15 minutes and was really lovely. The person presiding was of a category called a “wedding officiant,” who turned out to be a Korean woman, maybe 45, with the loveliest sensibilities imaginable. The ceremony was completely her creation (she refused to let the wedding couple see it, but she assured them that she was going to say “spouse” instead of “wife” and “husband”), she quoted George Eliot, she quoted a native American wedding prayer, she quoted a Celtic wedding blessing, she mentioned in passing that they had been together 25 years, it was all quite perfect and I wept throughout.

My sister’s two children and daughter-in-law were present, my brother lives here with his wife and daughter (he and my sister-in-law were the official witnesses and had to sign documents before and after the ceremony), two of my sister’s spouse’s friends came because she has no family. From City Hall we went to the wedding couple’s hotel room for champagne (four bottles kept cold in a cooler with ice) with cheese and crackers, then we went out to a Peruvian restaurant.

Toronto is a lovely place, where I’ve visited two museums, two markets, and the lake—unfortunately it’s a two or three thousand kilometers too far north. Tomorrow I leave before dawn for el DF and Tuesday a little later for Havana.

Report from Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba 2003

2003-07-01T15:13:00.000-06:00

To be precise, I’ve left Cuba and am spending five days in Mexico City, to develop 20 rolls of film and have some enlargements made (assuming the photos warrant it), but internet access was too expensive and too slow during the rest of my trip for me to report on it earlier.

It’s been a trouble-free trip in that I didn’t get sick, didn’t fall down, and wasn’t robbed, the closest thing to a crisis being when the dog stole my shampoo at the house where I stayed in Trinidad. At times I felt in danger of getting sick of mangos and Cuban music, two of my favorite things in life, but it never quite happened. What at times made things difficult was a) the combination of heat and humidity (I have never sweat so much in my life) and b) constantly being a target--of jineteros (hustlers), of beggers, of taxistas. The approach was generally either “Amiga—“ or “Lady—“ or “Where are you from?”, almost always in English. (At one point I decided that I could be a non-English-speaking Italian and just continue walking.) Occasionally the jineteros were useful in that if I was looking for a street or a building when one approached, I could ask directions and then do my no, no, no routine. (Their interest was in being a guide or a salsa partner or something to earn some dollars.) But by the end of the trip I had to steel myself to go out on the street.

What I missed most during the trip was a newspaper that was really a newspaper, not a propaganda sheet, and it struck me that one of the deprivations Cubans suffer is a lack of information. One of the young men asking where I was from, after I said I lived in Mexico but was norteamericana, asked me if Mexico was near the US. A cybercafé I used in Santiago had a sign saying it was for foreign tourists only; I asked a young Cuban who was standing around why that was and he said to prevent Cubans from getting counterrevolutionary ideas. My hostess in Santiago had a computer and email, but for unclear reasons it was impossible for her to have access to the internet. I also missed the innumerable, colorful little tienditas one always sees in Mexico—in Cuba a store is either faded, dark, and dreary, with very little stock (charging pesos) or bright, colorful, modern looking, and well stocked but with people clustered at the locked entrance, waiting to be let in as others leave (charging dollars).

Someone asked in response to my report from Havana if I was able to discuss politics with my hosts, to which the answer is yes and no. In Havana I got mixed signals: When I first arrived, Elvia and her mother were all excited that the next day there were going to be demonstrations at the Spanish and Italian embassies and I should go and take pictures. (I said I wasn’t aware of what Italy or Spain had done lately, though they both had right-wing governments, and got no response.) On the other hand, a few days later at breakfast Elvia was complaining about the flies that always clustered around my fruit and said, ironically, “Es la culpa del bloqueo” (It’s the fault of the embargo), to which I replied, “Sí, todo es culpa del bloqueo”—wishing later that I had followed up by saying that the embargo was an idiotic policy because it gave Fidel an excuse for all of Cuba’s problems. In Trinidad, Luis was eager to talk, even babble, but his accent was so thickly Cuban (Cubans, for those who didn’t know, speak the world’s worst Spanish) that he was excruciatingly difficult to understand. I did gather that he was under great stress because the rules of the game for renting rooms keep changing. (The regime seems not to like the idea of people having foreigners in their homes, though it profits greatly by charging a tax of $150 per month per room rented.) He indicated that he was afraid to talk freely over the phone because it might be tapped. And he said that people have to be dishonest in order to survive (people who make cigars stealing tobacco and selling it on the street, a worker telling his boss he needed to buy two kilos of cement when he only needed one), that there was a black-market economy parallel to the official economy. He used the word “lucha” (struggle) a lot, as in life being a struggle. Asela in Santiago talked about people lining up at the Spanish Embassy and the US Interests Section so they could leave the country and “respirar un poco” (breathe a little), and then, unfortunately, the doorbell rang.

To report a little on my two other destinations: Trinidad, a town of 50,000 five hours by bus from Havana (on the dollar bus line, as opposed to the peso bus line, with air-conditioning), is a charming colonial setting of high-ceilinged pastel-colored houses with tile roofs, along cobblestone streets, punctuated by palm trees, with the Sierra Maestra hovering in the background. (Trinidad itself is at sea level and if anything was hotter than Havana.) Aside from museums featuring very elegant colonial-era furnishings, it offers easy music-listening opportunities at the Casa de la Trova, where CDs and percussion instruments (I bought a pair of claves to accompany my Cuban CDs) are sold in front and musical groups of five or six perform all day in the café at the back.

But my favorite music-listening experience took place in someone’s livingroom, across the street from the restaurant where I was trying to cool off with a soda and lots of ice (my survival strategy being to ask for mucho hielo at the outset and then request un vaso de hielo, por favor, when it started to melt—I was too desperate for something cold to worry about the quality of the ice). Leaving the restaurant, I followed the music I was hearing to an open door, inside which a group comprising electric piano, trumpet, guitar, bass, bongos, güiro, and solo singer was playing. The piano player motioned me inside to an easy chair next to him, facing the other musicians. After a couple of pieces, brilliantly done, the trumpeter handed me a CD, one of two copies sitting on a miniature chair by the door. I asked how much, he said $10, and after the next piece I haded him the money and left, not feeling at all bamboozled beause the performance was so good.

Santiago de Cuba, at the eastern end of the island, which I flew to (in a plane with propellers) after returning to Havana for one night because I could’t bear 15 hours on a bus, is Cuba’s second-largest city, of about 400,000, and site of the beginning and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. I liked it much better from above than from street level. From the Roof Garden Bar of the Hotel Casa Granda or the balconies of the Museo de la Lucha Clandestina Santiago is quite picturesque, with church towers punctuating tile roofs, the harbor and the mountains in the background. At street level it becomes somewhat oppressive, due to an amazing number of (noisy) motorcycles that tear down the streets, which have either no traffic lights or inoperative ones. Somehow Havana, with four or five times the population, manages to be much less frenetic than downtown Santiago. Like Trinidad, Santiago has a Casa de la Trova, but here the groups of five or six performed at 10 p.m. (when I wasn’t inclined to be out alone) and those performing during the day were duos, not especially enthralling. I did see a fabulous performance of Afro-Cuban dance with percussion accompaniment at the Museo de Carnaval. The great advantage of Santiago for me was that my living arrangement (an independent entrance and a private bath in a lovely old house) included a small refrigerator and an extremely accommodating hostess, who lent me a pitcher so that I could make moon tea and have my beloved iced tea twice a day.

A word about shopping: I was sorely tempted by a $50 coffee-table book showing before and after photos of the restoration of La Habana Vieja (really breathtaking), was stopped less by its price than by its bulk and weight. I spent $20 instead on a book of the movie “Buena Vista Social Club,” with essays, photos, the autobiographical statements of the performers, and the lyrics of the songs, so that now I can sing along to “Chan Chan” while playing my claves. I also bought four CDs, the usual commemorative T-shirt, and an exquisitely made dresser scarf (the kind of work where they take away threads), made in Trinidad.

Do I plan to go again? To Havana, absolutely, and they tell me that if I liked Trinidad, I would love Baracoa, so I must look into that and other possible destinations. And after all, Cuba is one of the last places on earth where you can travel without running into a McDonalds!

Report from Havana 2003

2003-06-17T15:19:00.000-06:00

I'm winding up a week in Havana, to be followed by trips to Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba (two and a half weeks in total in Cuba), plus a few days in Mexico City to develop and enlarge photos. I'm loving Havana but at the same time feeling very split, as it's nothing if not a very dichotomous place.

With apologies for insulting the intelligence of those who know all this, Cuba since the mid 90s has been practicing a form of economic apartheid. Foreigners, for almost any transaction, pay US dollars, as opposed to Cuban pesos. Cubans who get paid in dollars--eg, a bellboy in a tourist hotel who gets dollar tips--are much better off than Cubans getting paid in pesos (26 to the dollar)--eg, a doctor. They also have access to dollar stores, where they can buy consumer goods unavailable elsewhere. An elderly woman in a plaza who was in fact a very intelligent beggar (those with a direct pitch--and there are many--I walk by, shaking my head) struck up a convoluted conversation, the punchline of which was that her pension was worth only 6 dollars a month, at which point it became impossible to shake her off until I had given her a dollar, wondering how many other tourists a month end up doing the same thing. To complicate matters further, there are pesos convertibles, which are worth the same amount in dollars (in Cuba, that is) and which appear in change for items purchased in dollars.

So there are, it turns out, three forms of CocaCola, or a reasonable equivalent. There is the original product, imported from who knows where, a can for $1.50 or $2.00 in a cafe, there is Tu Kola, a Cuban product, for 50 cents less a can, and there is a cola-flavored refresco gaseado bought for a peso (less than 4 cents) at a window opening up on the street, where the (glass) glasses are lined up with a layer of syrup in them and the senorita adds carbonated water from a machine.

I am saving my dollars--Cuba is more expensive than Mexico in terms of lodging, food, and things like T-shirts--by staying in casas particulares (private homes), which in Havana means renting a room in an apartment, paying 20 dollars a night, including breakfast and Internet access. (The family has a computer because the husband works with computers; they're only available used on the black market.) Information on casas is readily available over the Internet, and I have reservations in casas in my two other destinations. Here my casa is in La Habana Vieja (Old Havana), the colonial core of the city, which is as dichotomous as the economic apartheid.

To the north of me is an area including four large plazas (and many smaller ones), ranging from lovely to exquisite, each with a very different character, the colonial homes surrounding which have been beautifully restored in pastel colors or are in the process of being restored--scaffolding is all over the place. (The city government has built temporary housing for people living in buildings being restored.) Classy hotels, high-end shops, restaurants, and cafes (all charging dollars of course) fill in the streets between the plazas. To the south of this area, where I am staying, looks totally devastated--the streets a mass of potholes, the apartment buildings peeling paint, mostly colorless except for the laundry hanging in the balconies, many of the buildings empty hulls, some being used for parking. The building I'm in looks a wreak from the outside, and the intercom and mailboxes have been destroyed, but the apartment itself (where the two bedrooms are producing income and the couple and wife's mother are sleeping in the livingroom) looks recently painted and houses a new TV, as well as the computer.

My favorite plaza, because of its relaxed atmosphere and because it's always full of Cubans, as opposed to tourists, is the Plaza de Armas, a grassy square centered on a marble statue of an independence hero, four small fountains in the corners, surrounded by an iron railing, then a wide stone walkway, then continuous stone benches with iron grillwork at the back, finally stands displaying second-hand books for sale, Wedesday through Saturday. Across the way is a large cafe where three different musical groups play (not at the same time) at the two parts outdoors and the part indoors; my favorite group includes a flute and violin, as well as guitar, bass, and assorted percussion instruments.

Perhaps the most impressive restoration was of the Plaza Vieja, because it required destroying an underground parking garage built by Batista. Here a lovely white marble fountain is protected by a high wrought-iron grill, then surrounded by a wide space of paving stones that frequently appears to be used for gym classes, Sunday morning was the site of a market selling birds (including homing pigeons), with absolutely exquisite colonial houses, most with portales, long balconies above with shuttered French doors topped by half circles of stained glass, all around. The other two major places are centered on churches, the Plaza de San Francisco more successful than the Plaza de la Catedral because the open space at the side of the church (now a concert hall and museum) is perhaps four times greater than the space in front of the Cathedral, mostly filled with cafe furniture, besides which it sports a fountain and usually a carriage or two, making it extremely photogenic.

I've mostly been walking the streets taking photos (10 rolls of them so far), shaking my head at everyone who says "Lady" or "Amiga," stopping fairly frequently to get something more appealing to drink than the warm water in my daypack. (Aside from the refresco gaseado, one of the few things I've been able to buy in pesos--50 centavos--is guarapo, or sugarcane juice, also at a window on the street.) One of the best things about Cuba of course is the music, and I've discovered the easiest and cheapest way to hear it is to sit in a cafe and order something to drink--cafes all over the place have musical groups performing.

I had to take taxis my first full day to and from Vedado, a high-end, tourist-oriented area, where I had to go to buy my plane tickets to and from Santiago. My first taxi was a bicitaxi, a bicycle with what looks like a two-seat horse carriage in back, the other a cocotaxi, two seats in back of the driver all almost enclosed in a partial sphere in yellow plastic; the fare was 4 dollars plus tip each way (a Cuban would have paid pesos).

I've been by Havana Centro a couple of times, which features the Capitolio, an uncanny replica of the US Capitol, and the Paseo de Marti (formerly and still usually known as Prado), an elevated promenade with trees meeting above and continuous marble benches, the buildings on either side in all stages of collapse and rebirth. I've also taken the tunnel under the harbor (in a conventional taxi )to El Morro, the 17th-century fortress frequently seen in photos of Havana, whose 19th-century lighthouse gives panoramic views of the city.

Eating has been easier than I expected, Cubans tending to eat a bland, meat-centered diet. After having two comidas in Italian restaurants (pizza and spaghetti with tomato sauce), I discovered to my delight that the restaurant in the Hotel Florida, a high-end place near the Plaza de Armas, has iced tea (the menu says te frio o caliente, so I order te frio con hielo--this computer has an English-speaking keyboard, so I can't do accents), to which I'm addicted in hot weather, plus vegetarian dishes such as vegetable soup and canelloni stuffed with veggies, and other side dishes I can eat, such as moros y cristianos (black beans and rice) and fried plantains. I also found an Arab restaurant with a vegetarian plate. In the evening, I eat fruit bought (with pesos ) at an agro--mercado agropecuario, where privately grown produce has been allowed to be sold since the mid-90s--along with a pastry and maybe some nibbles I brought from home.

The newspaper situation is of course dismal--Granma and Juventud Rebelde, the dailies, may be the only papers that report how many people will march in a demonstration before it takes place. There is, however, a page in each (tabloid) of (different) international news. They are sold on the street by elderly men who pay 20 centavos for them and negotiate whatever the market will bear from the customer. Luckily, I can read La Jornada and the NY Times on the web.

As to weather, think New York during an August heat wave ("It's not the heat, it's the humidity"), except that the sun of course is much more intense, so that I've gotten sunburned despite using sunscreen. Obviously I stop for a cold drink a lot and ask for extra ice for my iced tea. It's the rainy season, but it mostly rains at night when I'm home.

Tomorrow I spend 5 and a half hours (or so) on a bus to Trinidad, a real local that makes five stops before it gets there. To get to Santiago de Cuba, at the eastern end of the island, the only way I can bear to go is by plane, the drawback being that I'll have to return to Havana (Sunday) to do that, as there no longer is plane service from Trinidad. I will probably be off-line in Trinidad, but my house in Santiago offers email.

Report from Real de Catorce (Mexico)

2003-04-21T13:54:00.000-06:00

Real de Catorce is a fabulous place, with an intense, stark kind of beauty--but don't wait too long to visit, for it is on its way to becoming one of those places (like the Sunday market in Chichicastenango) of which people say, "Oh, I stopped going there because it became unbearably touristy." Perched 2,750 meters-9,000 feet up, in the north of the state of San Luis Potosí, Catorce is all stone and steepness--stone walls, stone buildings, cobblestone streets, stone sidewalks, everything steeply up- or downhill, including the kiosk-center plaza, nestled on a hillside. Always looming in the background is the Sierra Madre Oriental, an enormous, hulking presence. Nopal cactus abounds, and almost everything is brown or green, with the flowers on the nopales providing occasional touches of pink, orange, and yellowe. Horses are more plentiful than cars, and then there are the burros, which, unlike the quiet burros of Guanajuato, are frequently braying.

The town used to be a thriving mining center (silver, gold, and copper), with a population reaching 40,000 in the late 19th century. Possibly because of a drop in the price of silver, it went into total decline, becoming almost a ghost town, now has a population no more than 1,000. The "Catorce" in the name, according to a friend who was born there, refers to 14 escaped prisoners who discovered silver in the embers of their campfire. "Real" comes from the colonial name, Villa Real de Minas de Nuestra Señora bla bla bla (9 words) de Catorce.

Some of the town's tourist-oriented aspects are positive, such as the attractive and new-looking street signs and the bilingual explanatory signboards at the two churches and other points of interest. And whereas the 2000 edition of Lonely Planet says there was only one phone in town, now you can call or fax your hotel to make a reservation, and you can even check your email at two little cybercafés tucked into artesanía shops (one has only one computer but has the advantage that its home page is La Jornada).

The less attractive aspects of the town's tourist orientation include a double row of puestos running along the east end of the main street, featuring T-shirts, dulces (said to come from San Miguel!), religious pictures, and general schlock. Along the street facing one side of the plaza the hippie version of ambulantaje has taken hold, with the usual jewelry and tie-dyed clothing. More of the same is sold in the innumerable artesanía shops, though if you look hard you can find Huichol beadwork in the form of animals, bowls, and masks.

Services of daily life are somewhat lopsided. There are no taxis, there is no bank, there is no newsstand (there is a man who delivers the San Luis Potosí paper, and I was able to read the copy of the owner of the minisuper after he finished), as far as I could discover there is no farmacia or papelería--but there are four Italian restaurants. (The owner of my hotel claimed that some of the owners are dealing drugs.)

What to do in Catorce? Most visitors seem to end up on horseback, and I turned down innumerable pitches to do a paseo a caballo. My interest being photography, I found being on a horse incompatible with composing halfway decent photos, so I opted for a jeep, which are for hire along the main street opposite the Parroquia. I explained my interest in going up to a point where I could shoot a panoramic view of the town, and the driver said, "Pueblo Fantasmo," a place I had heard of but which a muchacho at my hotel had said was only accessible on horseback. We got there and back, but with much knotting of the stomach on my part--the camino was a jumble or rocks, and we frequently were going up (or down coming back) at something like a 70-degree angle and then had to go around a curve. The jeep was ancient, and my door closed with a bolt. In any event, the view of the town was indeed panoramic, and the ruins of Pueblo Fantasmo were quite photogenic. (The excursion set me back 400 pesos.)

Walking around in town, the Parroquia is worth a visit for the room to the left of the altar full of retablos addressed to San Francisco de Asis, whose imagen in the church is said to possess miraculous powers. These are small drawings or paintings, generally depicting St. Francis and people kneeling, along with an explanation of the miracle for which one is thanking him--frequently undergoing surgery successfully, in one case, copy of report card furnished, getting good grades.

The town's other church is out by its pretty cemetary, 10 minutes north of the plaza, a striking white presence against the brown mountains. On the other side of the road are the remnants of a bullring. On the way back to town is an elegant stone cock-fighting ring (palenque de gallos). Across from the Parroquia is the Casa de Moneda, currently being restored, where money was minted for 14 months starting in 1865. There is said to be a museum down below, but it apparently rarely opens and its entrance isn't marked.

I got to Catorce for Semana Santa more or less by accident. When I was first planning the trip, I decided that if I was going to be at 9,000 feet, I wanted to be there at the warmest time of the year, namely April, which it then occurred to me included Semana Santa, so--to avoid traveling when everyone else was--I arrived the day before Palm Sunday and left the day after Easter.

For Domingo de Ramos, townfolk gather with their palms--mostly leafy branches really--at a point near the cemetary, where the priest says a few words, blesses the palms (dipping his in a bucket of ordinary water), and then Jesus on a burro gets into line following little girls in white dresses, the 12 apostles follow him, and the townsfolk bring up the rear as the procession moves into town.

The next Semana Santa event comes Thursday night, a re-enactment of the Last Supper on a platform erected opposite the plaza, following which Jesus prays by the fountain by the side of the Parroquia, is betrayed, and is captured by an ample number of Roman soldiers, who hold back an angry mob.

Good Friday features the Via Crucis Vivente. Jesus is tried before Pontius Pilate and a noisy mob, held in check by Roman soldiers, at the landing by the entrance to the Casa de Moneda, then sent to Herold, on a long balcony up the (uphill) street, then back to Pontius Pilate, who gives in to the mob and washes his hands. Jesus is then whipped (the whip has what looks like blood on it to start with, but it makes contact with his back) and integrated into a procession--two Roman soldiers on horseback, the two thieves with logs across their shoulders and men whipping them, Jesus accompanied by Roman soldiers and a man whipping him, the mob--for a mile or so to a clearing past the cemetary. Jesus and the thieves are barefoot, which must be painful on the extremely irregular cobblestones, but Jesus is relieved of the cross occasionally and isn't carrying it when he arrives at the clearing, where three crosses are lying on the ground, each outfitted with a ledge to sit on and another to use as a footrest. The hands are tied with rope and an attractive cord goes around the waist. The crosses are raised by ropes attached to the cross bars, which are then removed. Jesus stays on the cross only long enough to utter his last words with brief pauses in between, then drops his head.

Several men in white then come to the cross and take Jesus down, mostly using a long rectangular cloth as a sling, and lay him on the ground, where the two Marys mourn him. Then he is carried off on an improvised stretcher back towards town. Two printed programs I had seen said that the burial was to take place at the palenque de gallos, but the much-reduced procession passes it by and goes into the Parroquia--an anachronism of 2,000 years--where the stretcher is placed on the floor of the aisle in front of the altar. I see a man who has been directing things sitting in a pew and ask him if something will be happening at the palenque de gallos, and he says they will be going there after five minutes of "reflection." A priest appears on the altar and starts speaking, at which point I succumb to being sweaty and hungry--it is now after 2, about two and a half hours after things started (well behind schedule), and I have shot almost three rolls of film--and go off to an Italian restaurant. On the way back to my hotel I stop by the palenque de gallos, where there is a large, rather amorphous-shaped white object, looking to be made of fiberglass, placed vertically in an opening up in the stands.

The Resurrection, oddly enough, is staged Saturday night. At first I thought maybe this schedule was so as not to detract from the cockfight being held at 2 p.m. Sunday (I did NOT go!), but it turned out that the religious powers that be had decided to merge the Resurrection with a kind of vigil service that I had encountered during my first Semana Santa in Antigua (Guatemala). This service starts out of doors, priest and congregants gathered around a fire, the priest says a few words and then lights a very large candle at the fire, the parishoners do the same with the candles they have brought, and all enter the church, which is totally dark. A lovely effect, but as a nonbeliever it struck me as esthetically very unsatisfying to combine a vigil based on someone's death with his coming back to life, and I should think for a believer it would make even less sense. In any event, a fire has been lit in the center of the ring of the palenque de gallos, the priest notes that Catorce is one of the few places that does a re-enactment of the Resurrection, then the large blob that I had seen the day before, evidently intended to be a stone covering the grave, falls with a thud, the Roman soldiers who had been standing nearby prostrate themselves, and Jesus walks out and says a few words to Mary. Then the priest takes over, lights his candle, and conducts a prayer, after which folks file out, lighting their candles, and head down toward the Parroquia--at which I head back to my hotel.

Before coming to Catorce, I had wondered whether I would suffer from the cold at 9,000 feet, but April turns out to be the right month to come for avoiding that problem. Most of the time it was quite warm, even quite hot at midday. The sun was intense, and the afternoon light in my hotel room was radiant. (During the rainy season the surroundings are undoubtedly greener, but I would hate to have to execute the steep streets when the rough stones that pave them are wet.) The one effect I noted of the altitude was that it made me a napper, which I'm not in Guanajuato; I was generally quite tired by mid-afternoon.

Logistics: Being carless, my trip to Catorce involved first going to San Luis Potosí, the capital city, where I spent two nights, enjoying its spacious plazas (two with gorgeous fountains) and pedestrian-only streets and shooting two rolls of film. Then it was on to Matehaula, two and a half hours away, and from there taking a second bus for an hour and a half to Catorce. That bus drops its passengers on the far side of the Ogarrio tunnel, a narrow space through a mountain, created, I was told, by two rich families in the 18th century who were working on separate tunnels from opposite ends--without the aid of dynamite--which happened to meet in the center. This final stage involves changing to a minibus for the almost-three-kilometer ride through the (one-way) tunnel and then hiring a muchacho to carry your bag to your hotel.

I'm now back in San Luis for one night, my trip back much simplified because the owner of my hotel, who was going to drive me to the tunnel, drove me to Matehaula instead, without charge, worth 300 pesos as a taxi ride. From here I'm taking a detour tomorrow to el DF for four nights before going home to Guanajuato, to develop my 16 rolls of exposed film, hopefully have some enlargements made, stock up on provisions like green tea, and enjoy the city.