Boots in the Oven

Mexican Sendoff

Well, Mexico.  After a month of wonderment and deliciousness and beauty and dust and hammocks and cacti and babies (SO MANY BABIES) and corn, corn, corn and beans and crumbling plaster facades and Coke, we are out to Guatemala. 

We said goodbye to Mexico from San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where we spent two brief days.  The town is at a fairly high altitude, and we shivered as we got off the bus from the beach. 

Pedestrianized avenues still feel quite nice after almost getting run down, repeatedly, on Mexico City's streets.  I'd like to kiss the person that invented timed crossings, because when they aren't there, scurrying across a 6-lane road is immesurably more difficult.

Traveling during Semana Santa, or Holy Week, in Latin America has been both a frustrating and breathtaking experience.  Everything is more expensive and more difficult to come by (especially hotels and transport) but that's been more than balanced by the cultural experiences to be had, especially here in Antigua.  In San Cristobal, the Sunday before Easter, we saw lots of people fashioning woven decorations out of palm fronds and leaves.

We went to the tiny but neat amber museum, and climbed a hill for a view and a corn ice cream (the guy selling the stuff said it was grape and strawberry flavor, but it was definitely corn).

There was strange, heavy, yellow exercise equipment on the top of the hill.  I can't imagine why you'd climb like 700 stairs and then jump on a rickety elliptical machine - perhaps that's why most of the equipment was broken.

Chiapas is famous for its coffee, and we were more than happy to indulge.  At Cafe Museo Cafe, not only did we get to try Chiapecan coffee (brewed with a giant chunk of cinnamon), we also learned about the history of coffee cultivation in the area and about local cooperatives that work with small-farm indigenous producers.  The lesson: there's a lot of very, very hard work that goes into your cup of coffee, and in the past, people were treated extremely poorly so prices would remain low.

Of course I felt a little guilty about my cuppa.

And yes, we stopped by the markets.  The amount of salted, dried fish on offer was staggering. I'm not sure if this is a Lent thing or what.

Lots of chicken, too.  Here head-on, unrefrigerated style (just like the eggs - well, the unrefrigerated part, not the head-on part).

Of course, we ate - this at a comida corrida place already discovered by the NYT called El Mercadito.  Comida corrida means that the food can also be had to go, which actually might be the more popular option; people show up with buckets and get them filled with albondigas or adobo or what have you.  The meal of the day is a steal at 55 pesos, that is, if you get a main and a side... we also ordered a couple of fritters (plantain and chicken - called tortaditas, apparently) and an extra main.

I got all intrigued when one of the sides on offer was described as "sopa fria", or cold soup.  Guess what that turned out to be?

MACARONI SALAD.  Complete with chunks of pineapple and ham.  I felt like I'd stumbled into my childhood cookouts.  Went great with my meatballs in chipotle sauce with plantains, though!

So a big kiss goodbye to Chiapas and its tasty coffee.

Thanks for making booking onward travel to Guatemala such a breeze, even if it did involve three separate vans over the course of a 13-hour travel day.  And it's totes not your fault that the Mexico/Guatemala border crossing is such a bizarre, not particularly regulated to-do (I still don't know how the driver knew to pull over at that nondescript building so we could turn in our tourist card and get our passport stamped out of Mexico, but I'm glad he did).

And I'll just have to blame the sidewalk builders of La Antigua for the theatrical, arms-windmilling-and-legs-kicking fall I took yesterday directly in front of our hostel. 

 

Back from Zipolite

Hey, reader people!  You may have noticed the radio silence of the last few days or so, because I'm a bad blogger who totally dropped the ball.  Or, more accurately, we were on a beach 6 hours from Oaxaca city, purposely avoiding the Internet.

That beach is called Zipolite, and we reached it via a van ride over insanely twisty-turvy roads from Oaxaca.  There's not much to DO in the town (well, we took a snorkel trip one day), so we mostly sat around eating seafood and failing to protect ourselves adequately from the sun.

We stayed at a very cute place called Posada Mexico, where our room looked out directly onto this:

There was no a/c, but we had a mosquito net (which totally failed to keep out the mosquitoes until we sprayed the whole thing down with permethrin).  The shower was one of those camping showers, where you pull a handle to start the flow of water, but the temperature was always perfect.

Plus, we had our very own hammock, where I got to catch up on my reading (thanks to everyone who sent book suggestions on Facebook, and most especially Danielle for emailing me all those wonderful Kindle reads!  Everyone should go find A Visit from the Goon Squad).

We sat on the beach and drank mojitos.

And discovered El Alquimista, which let us use their extremely nice beach chairs for free (unlike Italian beaches, where you pay for the umbrella).

 

Zipolite is a clothing optional beach, by the way, so you're lucky Logan took this pic before the man in the background suddenly divested himself of his shorts.

The food in town was decent, but nothing much to write home about.  But you couldn't beat the view!

Unfortunately, we had to eventually leave, so we took a twelve hour night bus to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where you'd find us now.  Tomorrow we head to Guatemala, which will take much of the day.  Travel right now is kind of tough - they take Semana Santa very seriously here, so getting a bus out of Zipolite (and a place to stay in San Cristobal, not to mention Antigua Guatemala) was a bit more difficult than it would be normally.

Poor Logan, though - I hated to drag him away from the beach.  He really didn't want to leave.

Off to get us some Chiapan coffee!

 

 

 

The Not So Naked Ape. What We're Wearing: Mexico City

Oh fashion. Why are you so strange? Why is looking at what people wear so oddly engaging? It's funny how easy it is to develop geo- and chronocentric views on what is perfectly acceptable to be seen in and what is totally ridiculous. Men in heels, women in short pants, full head wraps, nothing but tats from the waist up, grandmothers with long neon ribbons in their hair, metallic embroidery, and bedazzled anything. All of them are either perfectly normal or absurd, verging on scandalous depending on where and when you're talking about. Well except for the bedazzling. That's just silly.

In an effort to create a little time capsule of what the f*ck we were all thinking in 2011/12, I'm planning on doing some snapshots of everyday peoples in public places from a selection of the various cities we vist around the world.

I honestly don't know how much variation there'll be. I know 20 years ago it would have been pretty extreme. But with the magic Cloud of eternal information engulfing us all and the unquenchable, ceaseless, sleepless, megalodon of international advertising lapping at every hand and foot, is it still the same?

Maybe. But I'll let you know what I see out there.

Without further ado, here are some observations I made on a beautiful April afternoon in the plaza at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City:

In general, the Distrito Federal is a fairly dressy place. Walking around restaurants and most busy pedestrian areas, it was clearly not casual blue jean Friday.

Well except for that guy.

Often though, it felt like we easily could have been in Austin.

Are they wearing the same glasses?

Just dudin' along. You know. Like dudes.

Sporting a rainbow of awesome. With steez.

Not everyone can pull off Mickey and a cardigan.

Yeah. That looks about right.

And like Austin, the hipster contingent was well represented.

Hipster doesn't mean she's not cute.

Continue with your voyeuristic fix after the jump.

Day Trip! Big trees, big archaeology, big PETRIFIED WATERFALLS. Really.

We thought for a minute about not doing a guided tour out of Oaxaca city.  And yes, we probably would have figured out the bus system by ourselves and seen these places (though perhaps not the petrified waterfall, which you have to take a twisty turny mountaintop unpaved road to get to) but hey, the whole tour was 180 pesos, or like $15, so.

Not that I was totally thrilled as we sat for an hour and a half in front of our (new) hotel waiting for the tour van to show up on Saturday morning.  It turned out they had marked us down as being in the wrong hotel.  Since this is the second time something of this nature has happened to us (the first being our cooking class in Chiang Mai), I think I may be heading down the road to being paranoid about tour pickups.

Our first stop was El Tule, a hugely gigantically fricknormous tree with a trunk that's 11 meters in diameter.  Depending on your source, it's either over 1500 or over 2000 years old, so it's definitely a grandfather tree, worthy of respect.  In parched Oaxaca state, they had sprinklers going for it at midday.

I would not be surprised to learn that this tree had its own ecosystem.  Also, I think this is the only tree I've ever visited for which I've been charged admission.

Stop number two was at the Gonzales family's weaving center in Teotitlan del Valle, a town justifiably famous for its weaving.  Unfortunately, this fame has led some of the weavers to use easier, but much less environmentally and personally healthy, synthetic dyes.  The place we went demonstrated their use of traditional methods and dyes; they use marigold for oranges, mosses for greens, indigoes for blues, and cochineal for reds.  He even crushed a cochineal insect in my hand - the red was intense! 

They were selling their rugs, but they were quite expensive (bargaining started at 1500 pesos, or $128, for the small) and we didn't bite.  When we checked prices yesterday at a different market, the same size rug started at 500 pesos and quickly came down to 250 ($22), but we don't know if that vendor used traditional methods.  Many of the patterns were the same, though.  Hrm.

Our next stop was MEZCAL!  Here's George, our guide, next to a massive maguey heart.  Maguey has to reach 8 to 10 years old before it's harvested for mezcal.

The long spines are then cut from the heart, which is chopped into smaller pieces and roasted in a pit covered with rocks.  After this roasting, it's smokey and sweet and actually quite tasty to eat - like a peaty sugarcane.

This softer, cooked maguey is then ground to get the juices out.  This is how things used to look; somehow I doubt these people still make mezcal using actual horsepower.

This maguey juice is then distilled, usually at least twice, and then bottled (this is young, blanco, or minero mezcal) or put into barrels for anejo or reposado.  One type we hadn't heard of until this trip is pechuga, which means breast - the mezcal actually is distilled with a chicken breast!  It's very smooth.

We tried a large array of flavored mezcals here, but again didn't bite.  I suppose we're bad tour members. 

Next, Mitla!

It's an amazing archaeological site that sits right next to a town of the same name.  The Spaniards destroyed much (but that's OK, they were conquistadores! said our new site guide) but what's still standing is quite intense.

When you first pull up to the site, the decorations on the buildings look like carvings; but no, they are actually amazingly intricate, mortar-less mosaics.  According to our guide, they are impossible to restore, because the mosaics are load-bearing as well, meaning that if a stone is taken out the entire structure will fall.  I like the idea.

There are also traces of the original cinnabar stucco that remain - the first Catholic priest to see the site was said to have written that the natives painted their buildings with the blood of their enemies.  What you see here is a bit of a restoration.

Interior courtyards were painted a blinding white, which bounced the light into the surrounding rooms.  These rooms had no windows, which helped with temperature control but cut down significantly on the lighting.

The site was extremely impressive, if seriously warm, and we enjoyed seeing the very different style of architecure than we'd seen in Chichen Itza.

And then we drove off to see a truly amazing geological specimen, one unlike anything else we've ever seen.  Only two of them exist in the world, and to reach this one currently means a 45-minute drive up a mountain on unpaved roads that are sometimes too narrow for more than one car. 

I'm talking about Hierve el Agua, which means "the water boils".  It's a petrified waterfall. 

Seriously, it is a massive limestone formation that has slowly formed over the millenia.  Water comes from an underground spring slowly enough that minerals are deposited at the end of the waterfall (rockfall?).

The site just took my breath away. And that's not an altitude joke, though it is rather high up there and there was a bit of climbing involved to see the best views.

And you can SWIM there!  The spring has been cut into channels, which fill refreshingly cold pools before the water works its way down the mountainside.  It's like the most spectacular infinity pool I've ever seen.

Hi!  (Logan's dad GQ requested more pictures of happy us.)

Unfortunately, we were only able to stay for 45 minutes before we had to start our hour and a half trek back to Oaxaca.  It was barely enough time to jump in the water, climb to see the waterfall, gasp at the top, and hornk for breath back to the parking lot.  My words fail me here - what a wonderful place.  And you can stay there, too, if you'd like - there are some rustic cabins just outside of the waterfalls.

On the way back down the mountainside, we were briefly stuck behind a few cows.  I was a bit worried when a larger truck came roaring up behind us - more worried for the cows than us, actually.

The rest of our return to Oaxaca passed without incident.  All in all, I'd say it was an extremely sucessful day. Even if the next time we do a tour, I'm going to have a panic attack if they're three minutes late.

But Hierve el Agua... I think I might know what I want my little piece of heaven to look like.

Oaxaca, Day Two (subtitled, I am extremely sleepy)

Guys, here's the thing.  I am really tired.  We've had three days in Oaxaca so far that have been just awesome, but have all been very long and tiring.  So I'm going to go to bed.  But I do want to share with you the pics from our first full day in Oaxaca, during which we:

were surprised at the number of water collection devices we saw everywhere - but hey, we are in a desert.

Were totally wowed by the church of Santo Domenico. Amazing three-dimensional decorations.

Thought about getting our nails did.

Snappy observations and pretty pics continue after the jump.