Mexico City Meandering

Mexico City Snapshots

Woman policeman in the Metro. Very pretty, dressed “to the nines” in a bullet proof vest, knee pads, big gun on her waist. She entered the platform along with a pair of male colleagues. When the group met another officer, the guys all exchanged fist-butts. The woman officer presented her cheek and then kissed the guy’s cheek in turn.

Zocalo. Can’t understand why this is the most famous plaza in Mexico, given the many beautiful plazas I saw just in Guanajuato and San Miguel. Zocalo looks like some St. Louis planner’s idea of a great public space: no shade, nowhere to sit, just acres of stone and monumental views of the surrounding buildings.  I must be missing something.

We walked for miles along streets whose names I studiously avoided learning. There’s something pleasurable about letting the wife control the day and just being there to bark at the children when they are about to step into one of the many gigantic holes in the sidewalk – threatening to send them down to the lost city of the Aztecs.

Amazing how Eve and Vera, when they are getting along, can just talk and talk and talk, play-acting or just making up scenarios. “I have blonde hair with really long braids. My father died, and then my mother was sick with cholera, and I was the only one there to help her, but then she died, and I went to live with my aunt who was a girly-girl in the fashion business and didn’t have any time for me…..”

“Well, I’m you cousin, and I really don’t like you because you are stuck up and only care about clothes….”

“No! I don’t care about clothes. I’m poor and I love animals. I want to be a scientist. It’s my aunt who only cares about clothes…..”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No……”

Eventually we’re all exhausted and cranky. Where is Nicole leading us? Supposedly, according to the guide book, (which we found in the hotel, and happens to be 10 years old), there’s a really good restaurant which is kinda in this direction. She thinks.

We walk through blocks and blocks of sidewalks chock full of street sellers shouting out for you to buy their products. We zigzag through an area in which everyone is selling backpacks. Then it’s two (or three?) whole blocks of people selling nothing but stationary and other paper products. Then a whole block of pens, pencils, erasers, pencil cases. Every seller within a give area seems to be selling exactly the same thing. Can this possibly be rational? Does anyone care? Is ultimately any more irrational than Chesterfield, MO? We buy a pair of colorful pencil cases at 10 pesos apiece (less than $2.00 total).

Eventually we’re right where the supposedly good restaurant is supposed to be. We haven’t seen any restaurants apart from dives. I ask a dude perched on a stool in front of a toy store (we’re now on the toys block). He’s about 20, sleeveless t-shirt, shades. Not exactly the concierge at Hotel Americano. The restaurant we’re looking for is closed on Sundays. So much for the ten-year old guidebook. Our dude however says there’s a good restaurant called El Alandaluz around the corner that is open and points out where to go more or less.

We walk as he directed, feeling skeptical. There is no sign. Nothing in fact to suggest that there’s a restaurant anywhere among the colorful toy shops. One doorway, however, is open, and it seems to lead….somewhere. We follow that. We peer in through a window, which, it turns out, looks in on a men’s bathroom. A cleaning lady smiles at us and points upstairs. “Is there a restaurant here?” we ask. “Yes.” And it’s called? El Alandaluz. More skeptical than ever, we climb dripping wet, mildly smelly stone stairs, and then suddenly we’re in the middle of an elegant restaurant. A man in a suit and tie sits at one table. Two gentlemen are chatting at another. The Olympics are on. The waiters are all men in impeccable white shirts and black aprons.

The best Arab food I’ve had outside of Dearborn, MI or the Galillee (I’ve never been to an Arab country.) Freshly made pita, stuffed zucchini with kibbeh, stuffed cabbage, hand-cut French fries.

A guy at the table next to us was eating a falafel sandwich with a fork and knife, meticulously slicing his sandwich as if it were a roulade.

Back on the street. The search for selling space is so intense that a guy is selling crocs on the tiny island between the entry ramp and the exit ramp of a parking garage, his wares displayed on the garage’s pillar. We actually want crocs, so we stand there for a couple minutes trying to get the guy’s attention and squeezing ourselves together on the island every time a car pulls in or out of the garage. We give up, just as an SUV turning into the garage seems about to pin us all against the crocs. Can one imagine a more undignified death?

Visit to the Palacio National. At the front door, fierce looking guards in fatigues with M-16 rifles hanging off their shoulders. Metal detectors. More soldiers watching us as we walk up the grand staircase to look at Diego Rivera’s mural depicting violence and protest and more violence in Mexican history. Then back down, across an 18^th century courtyard and then out into a perfectly arranged and peaceful garden with giant ash trees, palms, geraniums, and more grass than we’ve seen arriving in Mexico City. Lovely shaded benches arrayed among the paths. And seemingly on every bench there’s a soldier in fatigues sitting with his arm around a woman, sometimes kissing, sometimes with a child or two present as well. A boy of 8 or 9 is running among the benches and sneaks up on one soldier and his girlfriend, teasing them before racing off.

Eve and Vera find a couple giant leaves from a tree I don’t recognize. It inspires some new scenario, and in no time at all they are sitting in the stone walkway, spinning some new tale of girls in woe somewhere in history.

Luddites in Heaven (Guanajuato)

Waited in line at Blockbuster, yes, Blockbuster in Guanajuato for 10 minutes. The signage, the staff, even the candy and bad-popcorn display on the way to the counter were just like ye olde Blokkebuster on Delmar in St. Louis. No shortage of customers here either. I felt like when I left the store that G.W. Bush would be President again, Osama Bin Laden would be hangin’ out in Pakistan, and Britney Spears would still be in hiding. Anyone know where to find the nearest Borders?

Guanajuato is a journey back to many pasts at once.  People still shop mainly at small family-run stores. Tortillas here, bread and pastries there, veggies around the corner, chicken across the street. Cellphones exist, but are not ubiquitous. I hardly saw anyone texting and certainly not while driving or standing at the cashier. People walk everywhere. Most of the town is inaccessible to cars. Lawyers, doctors, and professors in tidy well-maintained houses live next to marginally-employed workers  in crumbling wrecks with scary-looking dogs and scarier-looking relatives selling something you don’t wanna know about. There’s the super rich, of course, but they’re mostly out of town somewhere. The middle class is never very far from the under class – literally and figuratively.

People here are remarkably courteous  On the streets that allow car traffic, the sidewalks are more symbolic than anything else: a couple feet wide at their most generous, narrowing to one foot or less (usually at the moment an enormous bus is coming to fill  the width of the street and an especially “solid” citizen of Mexico is walking toward you from the other direction). Yet I never experienced or witnessed even a momentary conflict. The young defer to the old; everyone defers to people with kids. The pedestrians make room, the drivers slow down.

For all of the private kindness, however, what’s obviously missing is a sense of civic responsibility. The one playground we were able to find was crumbling from neglect. Stray dogs were everywhere. Dog poop too. On our first day, we saw a boulder in the road leading up to our house. It was small enough for one strong guy to lift, but big enough to cause serious damage to a car. It was in exactly the same place for three days, with cars presumably driving around it. On day-four someone finally got around to moving it – closer to the curb. It was still there when we drove out of town on day 8.  

Mexico - 2012

Arrived in Guanajuato on a Wed night after flying into Leon. It’s fun watching the difference of the place penetrate the girls’ consciousness. Absence of side walks. Men in straw hats walking on the side of the road. Adobe, crumbling brick, poured concrete. All the houses square or rectangular. Weird and wonderful cactus. Stray dogs. I don’t know what they were expecting – but they’d been pretty blasé until the car ride from Leon.

Our rental house is on a steep hill. It’s a beautifully crafted gringo fantasy of Mexico, with bold, bright colors, elaborate carved furniture, interesting tiles on every possible surface, a vaulted brick ceiling. The only thing I can’t figure out is why Mexicans seem to believe that every tread on a staircase should be a different size. It’s not just the incredibly steep and treacherous walk up to the road (“La Panoramica”) or down to the town (on a narrow twisting alleyway more like the Casbah of Algiers than anything I’ve seen in the new world). Even inside the house one feels the urge to cross oneself going from one floor to another. Since most of the doorways are arched and there are numerous places for me to smash my head, I’m always moving slowly in any case. I worry a little about the kids, however.

Vera had her first day of summer school the day after we arrived. She started crying almost as soon as we entered the courtyard. We assumed it must because no one spoke English or simply that she was scared of being left on her own in a new town. It couldn’t have helped that Eve, Nicole, and I would all be attending the same fancy (by Mexican standards) language school across town.  It turned out, however, that Vera was upset by the pictures of Disney princesses stenciled on to the courtyard wall. She thought we’d brought her to a place “for babies.”

Once that was cleared up, she was fine, and had a great day. Turned out that were two kids from Oregon who were totally bilingual, and her new best friend translated for her when things got hairy.

As far we can tell (and, admittedly, the teachers speak really really fast), the primary educational goal at Vera’s school is to introduce the kids to as many varieties of candy as possible, ideally while watching Disney movies in translation. Ironically, the art activities at the school seemed depressingly  babyish to me, but Vera didn’t seem bothered at all. She proudly presented us with a chicken pre-drawn (or printed) on construction paper upon which she had glued a few pieces of yarn to represent feathers. Another day she brought a tiny clay animal of some kind (again, pre-cast) that she’d painted. Preparation for Harvard, it ain’t, but I guess I shouldn’t be so snobbish.

Eve’s classes are very different. She gets 1 ½ hours of Spanish grammar with other American kids, and 2 hours of art class with a larger group that includes local Mexican kids studying English. Enrollment at the school is way down thanks to American anxiety about the violence in Mexico. There are only two other kids in her grammar class, both boys, both nerdy and chatty and very into boy stuff. Generally they tolerate Eve, but she’s clearly the third wheel. The Mexican kids, according to Eve, are “not friendly,” though this could be because they speak hardly any English (which is generally true of people in Guanajuato – even true of adults in the tourist trade), and Eve is ridiculously hesitant to speak Spanish. She likes her teachers, though, and has done some nice art.

Nicole takes a more or less full day of language classes. Her classes too are small, and she’s enjoying the advantage she gets over the other students from having already learned Italian.

I’m getting tutored once a day for 50 minutes. In general, all we do is talk, which is fine with me. Sometimes, moreover, it’s just my teacher talking in 20 minute bursts with me nodding sympathetically and throwing in the occasional “mm…hmmm,” rather like a sitcom psycho-analyst. In fact, our sessions have a lot in common with therapy, since I hear about personal pain and travails, family conflicts, aspirations blocked and fulfilled,  and I thought more than once that I should probably be charging HER for our sessions rather than vice-versa. On the other hand, my teacher gave me a fascinating and rich glimpse into Mexican life. She has the excruciating honesty of a great story-teller, and she’s often quite funny. And then her life is just plain interesting.

Has my Spanish improved? Who cares?