bisha ka'aba

it has obviously been un buen rato since i wrote anything here, but i just got back from my semana santa 11 day adventure to the yucatan a week a go and i needed to write something to justify the time and mosquito bites. i am in the middle of a bad homework cycle, but i will write something now and save the rest for later. we went to mérida from puebla, in spanish called la ciudad blanca because of all the limestone buildings which are truly gorgeous. its an unbelievable city and it seems a world apart from puebla. the city is a fascinating mix of urban, traditional, maya, and a weird motley crew of north american, caribbean, latin american, and european expats living in a very hippy comune vibe. they busk in the city center and braid hair and smoke weed, seeming entirely out of place yet oddly at home in the capital of mayan mexico. and one day, we went to celestún. all you need know is that i swam with cocodrilos, which cutely enough means crocodiles and is almost the same word with rearranged letters (also, see: átun, which is tuna. its a weird pig latin conspiracy). technically, i swam with fish but DID see a cocodrilo in a body of water that was varying degrees of attached to the one i swam in, the story remains unclear. you go to celestun to see the flamingos, but you stay for the... actually, you dont stay. you go and its pretty then you leave (this is not fair. the place happens to be quite stunning and it was the river and beach that coined the term "ecotourism," but mexico's prettiest beaches happen to be on the other side of the yucutan, which is actually quintano roo. its all very confusing.).



i'll save the rest for later, but one last thing. while there, we learned many words in maya, then forgot all of them except for three randos. so'oki, which means i'm done. dios bo'otik, which is like thank you, and bisha ka'aba for what is your name. a lot of people speak yucateca maya (one of many) in yucatan state, many many more speak it in quintana roo. more than there is not one united states there is truly not one mexico. the country registers more than 50 languages still spoken as first languages, and parts of the yucatan absolutely feel like a different world. the maya in yucatan or the nahuatl speakers around here are not simple or traditional or naive, but much about how they see the world is profoundly different. i dont know that culture is ever really lost, maybe forsaken or adapted but its all very complicated to me. what is curious and interesting is to see what makes it down through the centuries and millennia. for instance: día de los muertos, having taken on a character a lot like halloween with more pozazz and food and sitting at graves, is descended from many cultures including totonaca festivities honoring mictecacíhuatl, la "dama de la muerte." in-ter-es-ting.

¡Esto es Carnaval!

i got back from carnaval in veracruz two days ago and have yet to put my pictures up, but it was an experience to be had. once. veracruz itself is sort of awesome in a terrifying industrial/post-colonial/edgy beach city way. it was where cortés landed and was the first spanish city in new spain, but today it is mexico's main oil port which has created a thriving and exciting urban nightmare on the water's edge. I hear that the city is generally fairly mellow as most beach towns are, but carnaval is anything but. i will put up pictures eventually but over the weekend i sighted trannies, masks, crowning the queen, huge/loud parades, sol (the beer and the sun), fights, dancing, the pemex hq, and a pay toilet where i had to give an attendant 50 cents for the privilege pee against a wall in a stairwell, and believe me when i say i am underselling that story. seriously, though, veracruz is intoxicating, even minus the alcohol, and i'd gladly go back sans carnaval to wile away some days on its beaches or malecon cafes in a technicolor city that definitely does not dress up for visitors.

this is the link

i forgot to put the link to this article in the last thing, which makes it substantially less interesting and more confusing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world/americas/07mexico.html?hp

aaaaaahhhhhh

in the middle of all the talk about scary mexico tumbling towards being the somalia of the americas, i think this is something interesting.



mexico city is about to become more progressive than most of the united states. mexico has issues, but it is not collapsing. an article we had to read in foreign affairs said, "esta histeria nubla el verdadero reto: la creciente violencia es efecto de la democratización de México —y la única solución verdadera es continuar fortaleciendo la democracia mexicana." she means that when mexico was supposed to have been safe, it was essentially a dictatorship, and that the violence is not about drugs but rapid democratization. it is a very interesting time to be here for sure. mexico has a good sense of humor about its 20th century, though. in spanish, a dictatorship is una dictadura, but in mexico they call the PRI's rule for 80 years the dictablanda because it was the most boring dictatorship in latin america

¡Feliz Dia de la Constitución!

today is a monday, but as is obvious i didn't have school thanks to constitution day, that well know mexican celebration where you...i guess just don't have school. it celebrates the mexican constitution's ratification in 1917 and is easily in my list of top 5 mexican state holidays (fun fact: article 123 guaranteed an 8-hour workday, the right to strike, and gender and race equality, all in 1917. very progressive. they're still working out the kinks.). it is the last day of my four day weekend in which i saw a good deal of puebla and cholula. these cities are quite amazing and wildly different. puebla was one of the first european colonies in the americas, and cholula is the oldest continuously inhabited city in all of the americas. these facts might seem boring, but in fact im nerding out just thinking about it. i saw forts (where the battle commemorated on cinco de mayo was fought), cathedrals, and colonial houses, even a museum about fear which was bizarre but awesome. also i took a picture of popocatepetl the volcano, which reminds me of all the good nahuatl i've been learning. in the smaller cities around here people still speak nahuatl and a lot of the words have crept into colloquial spanish and english. por ejemplo, a tomatl is a tomato, ahuaca-molli is guacamole, and a coyotl is a coyote. fun stuff.





also this weekend, my new friend from school took two of us around the city to see old houses and eat tacos and, perhaps most importantly, visit la pasita. la pasita is unique in every sense of the word. calling it a bar would oversell it, as it is literally tucked in an alley with doors that open directly into the counter. no seating, no place to mill around inside, which means everyone huddles around on the cobblestone street outside, but the conversation is loose and friendly because everyone is somewhere between buzzed and pedo (drunk as a skunk en español). this is because la pasita has been serving for about 100 years its specialty drink native to puebla, pasita. its a liquor made from raisins served in shots with cheese and a raisin, and its delicious. also, the drinks were traditionally sold as '4 cuadros, 3 cuadros," etc, meaning that is how many blocks you would be able to walk after drinking them before collapsing, and they are not far off. the drink is incredibly alcoholic, cheap, and lacks virtually any alcohol taste, meaning that for 100 years this place has been a beacon for poblano artists, intellectuals, politicians, and of course gringo international students.



one last update of note: i am now a regular guest on the radio on tuesdays from 13:30 to 14:30 and fridays from 10 to 11 my time, its very exciting. the radio kids here are super cool and would give any u.s. hipsters a run for their money. i have to do homework now. hasta pronto

Esta luz nunca se apagará

more developments on the smiths/morrissey phenomenon. three days ago i was at a bar (miércoles is the new viernes in mexico) and got into a conversation about mexican music with another student. we talked for quite some about the curious mix of older american classics and modern mexican music that was being cued up on the rocola (or jukebox, now you know) by the mostly young crowd, but as the bar near closing a strange thing happened. the rocola was turned off and the managers began a playlist of the best ranchero music i've ever heard. my friend told me this happens at every bar around closing time, the idea being to wind down the night and get people to leave. i don't know how well it works most of the time, but in this case the oompa ranchero tunes tapped into the beating heart of the bar full of kids my age who an hour ago were perfectly international in their musical tastes. they all started to scream lyrics to song after song when all of a sudden one came on that made me very excited. Its a classic norteño tune, what you might imagine your favorite mariachis playing, called 'cama de piedra,' and here is the point of this story. a lyric out of the song in traditional mexican fatalist baroque fashion is, "the day that they kill me, may it be with five bullets, and may it be close to you, to die in your arms." ridiculous, but now its all starting to make sense. 'esta luz nunca se apagará' is a bad spanish cover of 'there is a light that will never go out,' but hearing it here reminded of that classic smiths song that matches cama de piedra deathwish for deathwish. "and if a double decker bus, crashes into us, to die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die." boom. minds blown. also, i have pictures, after the jump.

here is the university, as pictured from my helicopter. they're cheaper than you'd think here.



and here is the volcano as viewed from my dorm. the smoke coming out indicates it could blow up at any time.



i need more pictures of real puebla, its muy cool. and that virgin mary shrine on the telephone pole outside the gate is calling to me, but how do you take a picture of something like that without everyone thinking im mocking it. i mean, i am, but how do i hide that sentiment? hasta pronto.

fotos (which can conveniently be spanish, or a lazy english version of photos)

i spent today cruising around puebla and saw lots of good things and took pictures of none of them. except these two, but only with my phone because i left my camera at home. the first is of two cool mexican kids wearing what can only be described as the skinniest skinny jeans i've ever seen. the picture from the rear does not do justice to the situation that was happening in front of the pants, but some things are better left unseen. the second is pda a la poblana. had i a wide angle lens for my phone's camera, i would have captured just about the same thing on every bench. making out on a park bench at 3:00 pm would weird me out. doing so two feet away from another pareja sharing an intimate moment would be even worse, but in puebla this is par for the course. in the end i guess i'm the weird guy who took a secret hip shot photo of 4 people hooking up by a fountain.





i will take more photos with my real camera soon, including one i'm dying to get of a shrine to la virgen attached to a telephone pole outside the dorms. and the volcanoes (2) that i can see from the university. one of them sometimes fumes smoke. ¿is this dangerous? the guy who was explaining this to me sad "thats how you know el popo (the volcano) is mad," then he laughed. i'm not a geologist, but i think thats just how you know its about to explode. everyone here is very funny, but its a very dark sense of humor. maybe thats why they love the smiths so much (i have seen many "there is a light that never goes out" stickers on cars, and now recieved an email from a kid who tagged every message with "so you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die." IN ENGLISH, and he didn't even speak it that well. i will continue to report on this phenomenon, it fascinates me. hasta pronto.