Mexico City, For a While

June 30, 2017

A lot depended on whether or not I liked Coyoacán.  And I’ve fallen in love with Coyoacán.

I’ve decided to spend three weeks here in Mexico City studying Spanish.  I’ve signed up for an intensive three-week class that meets Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to noon.  It starts next Monday, July 3.

It’s hard to write blog posts about personal decisions, of which this is a big one and into which many thoughts factored.  But of course the main piece is that I want to know Spanish better.  As a tourist I can get by at hotels and restaurants with the usual few phrases and gestures, but otherwise I’m continually behind that barrier, on the other side of which are conversations, the opportunity to learn about people’s lives, a greater participation.

I don’t expect miracles from a three-week class, especially since, after all the study I’ve already done—with CDs, books, the DuoLingo app etc.—I still placed in the rank beginner class per their entry test.  But focused daily study has to help.  And in the meantime, this is an unexpectedly fine place to stop for a while.

In my original itinerary I wasn’t looking forward to Mexico City at all, beyond the one day I HAD to spend here to visit Trotsky’s grave (see my previous post).  Credit that for directing me to a hostel in Coyoacán, and credit perhaps my bad timing, arriving on the day the Casa Trotsky was closed, to give me the chance to stroll around.  But Coyoacán is a wonderful neighborhood: a haven of wide, quiet, leaf-shaded streets and pretty houses, with coffeehouses, pastry shops and funky little restaurants at every corner, and at the center a lively square full of shops and music.  The vibe here is intellectual and sophisticated, the young people with glasses and interesting T-shirts, the older generation with a quiet, twinkly-eyed mien.  I credit the spirit of Trotsky and Frida Kahlo (the latter perhaps more, as it’s considered an “arty” neighborhood).  It's been a pleasure to get to know it leisurely and, after a life on the move, to become almost a "usual" at my favorite coffee houses.

Coyoacán is not exactly Mexico City, which exists just beyond the stark border formed by Universidad Avenue with its snarl of gridlocked cars intersecting at three angles and all honking.  A block beyond that and you’re into malls and auto dealerships.  Alas, my class isn’t here in Coyoacán, but out in the “real” Mexico City, in a region called Roma Sur that I must take the Metro to reach.  

Mexico City has a solid, modern, crowded and boring Metro system, which is very cheap (about 25 cents for a ticket) and sometimes fast.  (When I took it yesterday it wasn’t, but later I learned that the station at the end of the line had been flooded by excessive rains, so it wasn’t a fair test).  It’s true that on my first ride I went the wrong direction, but I blame that less on being a hapless American than on this New Yorker’s long exile in subway-less Seattle.

As for Roma Sur, as far as I can tell from my one visit it's a typical mid-city residential neighborhood: aging apartment buildings and faceless office towers, with its share of quirky shops and spaces along the cobblestoned streets below.  It’ll be an interesting area to explore when “school is out.”

But this points up another reason to spend some time here: there’s an enormous amount to see just in Mexico City, never mind on weekend side trips in my car to the outlying regions.  I definitely want to visit the ruins at Teotihuacán and the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl.  So those following this blog for exotic travel destinations will not be disappointed in the next few weeks.  (My next post will feature some Mexico City exploration that I’ve already done.)

But what does this spell in Mexico City spell for the larger trip—the goal of driving my Miata to Tierra del Fuego?  That remains inconclusive, and in fact encouraged on both sides.  On the one hand, having a better command of Spanish would mean a better and safer drive.  On the other hand, three weeks chopped out makes the remaining timetable iffy.  I’ll be figuring that out over the next few weeks.

What remains for some reason fixed on my compass is the desire to visit Buenos Aires.  To be honest my goal for learning Spanish has less to do with Mexico as with arriving better equipped there.  How that plays out, and what form this adventure takes, is still to be determined.

For now, the hostel I’m staying at has an actual private garage (!) in which I can safely park Pepin, and though I’ve used her for shopping expeditions, driving in Mexico City is a nightmare and I’m quite happy to let her sit quiet while I take the 25 cent Metro and stroll Coyoacán by foot. 

And learn Spanish.

Visiting Trotsky's Grave in Coyoacán

I’m not a headstone-hunter, but in my life there are three graves I have gone out of my way to stand before: Thomas Jefferson’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, and now Leon Trotsky’s.

I believe I’ll leave it there.  I can’t think of anyone to add to this list who would improve it.

For Trotsky’s grave, of course, I came by far the furthest out of my way: he is buried where he was murdered, on August 20 1940, by an agent of Stalin who had infiltrated the household where he spent the last years of his wandering exile, in Coyoacán, Mexico.

The house has been preserved as a museum, and it was a short walk from the hostel where I’m staying, as is the house/museum of Frida Kahlo in the same neighborhood which had lines around the block and pink-and-white taxis continually pulling in and away on the pretty tree-shaded street.  Far fewer pilgrims go to the Trotsky House, which for one thing is on a sort of access road alongside the roaring main artery, a grey no-man’s land of niche shops, graffitied walls and barbed wire.  The museum appears as a solid red building set slightly back from the street, and I was the only person in view as I walked in and bought my ticket.

You don’t walk directly into the house, but first pass through a simple museum foyer of a few white rooms, featuring many photographs and a few artifacts from Trotsky’s life.  The emphasis is on his last years here in Coyoacán: a dapper leprechaun-like figure in tweeds and round eyeglasses, with his pointed beard white and a big shock of white hair brushed back from his brow.  He is seen together with his artistic friends (Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera among them) and his wife Natalia, and in typical domestic scenes, tending his garden, picnicking with Natalia.  I spent a lot of time here before proceeding to the house.

To those who don’t care about Trotsky, none of this would have much meaning, but it’s true that Trotsky shares with Jefferson a sympathetic, small-scale old age, a rarity among earth-shaking statesmen: puttering in the garden, tending to grandchildren, writing.

The difference with Trotsky, which makes his life invaluable and his name still dangerous, is that in this life he was a man on the run, Stalin’s number one enemy, exiled, chased around the world, sentenced to death in absentia, and finally assassinated in his home.  If a man be measured by the quality of his enemies then few shine brighter in history than Trotsky.  The biggest lie of the 20th Century, that Stalin’s Soviet Union was the ideal Communist society, as envisioned by Marx and intended by the Bolsheviks (and many still believe it) remains fatally undermined by the life, opposition, and fate of Trotsky.  To the extent that history lowers a damning judgement upon Soviet Communism, as it should, to that exact same extent rises again the figure of Trotsky, spokesman for an untried alternative and a better revolution still to come.

Trotsky’s house and gardens have been preserved within the compound, which is appropriate as they themselves were a compound, complete with guards and defensive fortifications.  (There were previous assassination attempts, involving machine guns, before the successful one.)  For all that, the old Mexican house with its small homey rooms is beautiful.  You approach it through a green high-growing garden, in the center of which is the simple obelisk of the gravestone featuring the name and the hammer-and-sickle icon.

                                                   

Inside, you can walk through the rooms (kept separate behind low plexiglass), including the study where Trotsky was murdered at his desk by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. 

I found I was using my camera differently than at any point on my trip so far.  Gone was any concern for getting a “good” photograph.  Instead I just had the simple urge to document: to record that I was there, to preserve what I was seeing.

In the house one feels dramatically the double nature of Trotsky’s household in his last years.  The rooms are small and tidy, the beds low with woven blankets, the kitchen primitive but filled with colorful Mexican ceramic pots and crockery, a closet where some of Trotsky’s and Natalia’s simple clothes are hung.  At the same time, the house is bursting with books and periodicals in multiple languages, and the office contains desks, radio, typewriters and Dictaphone for a hard-working staff.  Trotsky’s home in exile was also the nerve center for the world anti-Stalin left; it was in these years that he testified before the Dewey Commission and founded the Fourth International to oppose not only Stalinism but Nazism. 

One feels something else here: that Trotsky was the last of the great INTELLECTUAL world leaders—like Jefferson again, someone as famous for his ideas, writings, encyclopedic knowledge and borderless curiosity as for his actions on the political stage.  Stalin, in contrast, was ignorance personified, and as for the world leaders today, I can’t name one who even puts up a pretense.  We lost a lot when we lost Trotsky.

It was hard to pull myself away from the old house and the green garden.  I admit that they do have a café on the grounds, which I didn’t patronize, but I don’t mind saying I bought a Red Star T-shirt at the ticket counter on the way out.

***

P.S., For those interested in Trotsky’s ideas, the Fourth International that he founded is still active, and puts out a daily online newspaper with superb writing and analysis from the Trotskyist perspective, at www.wsws.org.

P.P.S., There will be another post soon in which I put in more information about myself and my trip!

Quick update

June 27

Hi all,

I'm in Mexico City, staying at a hostel in the pleasant suburb of Cuyoacan.  I'm here primarily to see the house and grave of Trotsky, but it was closed yesterday, so I spent the day doing some shopping.

I'm also thinking about stopping here for a while to take a Spanish class.  I still haven't made up my mind, and I'm comparing options, prices, and reviews online.

I'll write a longer post when I sort it out...

--Matt

Tula: Moods, Moments, and Monuments in Time

June 25 1017

I stopped en route to Mexico City to visit the Toltec ruins at Tula yesterday, my first exposure to the great archeological sites that dot Mexico. 

Why visit ruins?  As a de facto tourist destination it’s worth questioning.  One doesn’t do it for beauty, exactly, though one expects to be awed; nor for education, though the sites are basically a form of open-air museum; nor in my case for spiritual homage, for the ancient world here rather makes me shudder with its slavery and human sacrifice.

I had cause to wonder all this on the walk from my hotel.  I set out in a bad mood, still grumpy from the theft of my Miata’s license plate the day before, plus the disgusting salad dinner (lettuce with canned corn and mushrooms, no dressing) I’d had in the ticky-tack little town.  It was a hot morning, and I could have driven, but on the map the site entrance was very close, and the girl at the hotel called it a “25-minute” walk; however, that entrance was closed, and I had to walk an additonal mile or so down a highway past auto repair shops and junkyards to the correct one.  I arrived already covered in sweat, moving slow, and feeling both decoyed by the trivial and perhaps resisted by the aura of the dark past that I was trying to penetrate.

But as soon as I was in—which involved a further walk from the museum down a quarter-mile dust road through a graffiti’d cactus garden and a gauntlet of souvenir-sellers hawking sandals, dresses, and Toltec figurines—I found the site amazing, uplifting, and tranquil.  At once my sour mood was blown away by the timeless majesty of the place.

Tula was a functioning city from about 900 to 1170 AD, during which time it had a population of over 35,000.  The site has two pyramids, spread out on a great level plain of felt-like grass that includes several other partial structures and excavated foundations.  I saved the highlight—climbing Pyramid B, with its 15-foot Toltec warrior figures—for last.  Instead I explored the features at ground level, like the Great Vestibule with its forest of broken pillars.

 Many of the structures were simply insets into the field cut out by stone walls, but their geometry reached my imagination, and it was pleasant to walk the level fields tracing their boundaries, wondering what they might have been, stopping to read the plaques (that were helpfully in both Spanish and English), admiring the changing views.

It was a strange scene, strolling around the grounds.  The souvenir vendors were selling little ceramic whistles, and they seemed to be a hit with the groups of schoolchildren, so that a constant high-pitched trilling filled the air on the hot day, like poorly melodic cicadas.  The site was on a high plateau with a view of the town and beyond, and periodically great percussions would roll across the landscape from the refinery in the distance.

Some of the plaques played on the horror aspect of the Toltec society, like the little stone plinth labeled “Tzompantli” which was described (and illustrated) as a place to display human skulls.  But when I consider how long ago this was, and how many human skulls have been popped out and rolled onto the planet since then, a Tzompantli seemed an almost innocent affair.

I did finally climb the steep stairs of the main pyramid and stand among the Toltec warrior telamones, whom I found very austere and impressive.

Finally, at ground level again, I walked the “Serpent Wall” (thankfully shaded) where the relief carvings of animals and faces run in a long line of stone blocks.  Here the eternal magic of art reached undiminshed into the present, and I felt the Toltecs watching me even as I watched them.

And that, I think, is why we visit ruins.  Anything Man makes that lasts carries the spirit of the maker across time, and we go to feel that spirit moving through in its indestructible passage.  Our own world is so unconcerned with things that last, we seem but a shrill buzz and a cough of smoke around the pyramids.  Being small has its own problems, and my human skull fumbled for identity with its toy camera, hoping to leave a little magic behind.  But the Toltec warriors have seen stranger things before, and will again; they look on unperturbed.

Querétaro and a Theft

June 25 2017

I spent yesterday in the town of Tula, en route to Mexico City, to see the Toltec ruins here.  This morning I’m off for Coyoacán, to make my pilgrimage to the grave of Trotsky and to contemplate Spanish classes.  But first I must catch up on my drive through Querétaro, and my first encounter with theft in Mexico.

After three nights at the Hostal Punto 79 in San Miguel de Allende, it was time to leave.  (For all three nights I had been the only guest in the big high-ceilinged room with ten beds: unexpectedly palatial, but lonely.)  In the morning I gathered up all my things, re-packed my Miata, and set out.  First stop was the city of Querétaro, where I hoped to get an oil change.

Score one for the Grease Monkey in Querétaro!  It was listed on Google Maps, it was exactly where indicated, the attendant spoke English (and indeed looked American, with light-brown hair and beard), I sat in a stale tiled lounge in an orange seat just like the ones in the US, and in swift order Pepin had her oil changed.

That was really my only reason for stopping in Querétaro, but since I was there I decided to check out the Museo Regional for its pre-Columbian art and artifacts from the Mexican-American war.  Ironically, when I drove into the crowded heart of the city I opted for pay parking in a secure lot.  It was when I parked in the open-air lot, set out for the museum, and glanced back at my yellow Miata that I saw it.

Pepin’s license plate was gone.

Robbed!  The Grease Monkey?  But no, on second thought, probably not. 

Shelley Cohee, my contact in San Miguel de Allende, had shrieked with alarm when I told her that I was parking Pepin on the street during my stay, and she urged me to reconsider, or at least extract all belongings from the car.  I didn’t heed her advice.  I HAD removed all my valuables, and several times a day I strolled by Pepin to make sure no one had forced entry. 

But I never checked the license plate.

So someone somewhere has a nice souvenir of Washington State.  I was still suspicious of the Grease Monkey.  The question is, was the plate still on when I set out from San Miguel that morning?  One would think that when I put my backpack into the trunk and was standing right there behind the car, I would have noticed it missing.  But it was early, I’m notoriously unobservant, and as much as I wanted to fly back to the Grease Monkey in a persecuting rage I was in a situation where it probably WASN’T them, and anyway I couldn’t prove it.

Fortunately I carry a spare license plate at the bottom of my trunk, so I fished it out and screwed it on, though of course it lacks my registration tags.  Now I’ll have to call WSDOT and see if I can get some replacement stickers sent to me—God knows where—and in the meantime I’ll have to rehearse my story for the cops when I get pulled over and have show them my registration. 

At any rate, despite being all aboil with frustration, self-reproach and the sense of violation, I HAD paid to park, so I bloody well went to the Museo Regional.  Querétaro seemed an ordinary big Mexican city, whose rings of smoking industrial sprawl cosset a touristy downtown square with shops, a few grand stone buildings, and side streets paved in red brick.  The museum began with some 7,000-year-old clay figures and bowls, and proceeded in sophistication room by room through Mexico’s history, in other words through the accumulating record of invasions, liberations, revolutions and bloodshed.  There were enormous oil paintings of cavalry battles, portraits of bygone minor statesmen with superfine coats and worried expressions, soldiers’ uniforms and medals, crinkly pages from various constiututions, many images of Benito Juarez with his big dark eyes and strong flat nose, an etching of Maximilian facing the firing squad, a black iron engine from the Porfiriato.  I was still in a distracted and foul mood, rebuffed by the plaques in Spanish, and I knew just enough of the history to be depressed by the futility. 

But they did have the actual desk at which the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American war with the theft of half the country’s land by the United States.

It seemed an appropriate place to linger.

Photo Essay: The Doors of San Miguel de Allende

Photo Essay: The Doors of San Miguel de Allende

The streets of San Miguel de Allende are so narrow that you usually can’t see a shop, restaurant or other establishment until the moment you’re passing it.  For this reason, the doorway becomes an art form of the sudden and instant appeal.  The rugged frame set in stone streets and plaster walls works like the frame of a three-dimensional painting, crafting an invitation to wonders within.  The effect draws the eye even if what's inside is a pile of boxes.  Indeed, even when the doors are closed, beauty is created.

(Clicking a photo takes you to a window where the arrow keys advance through the gallery.)

***

San Miguel: Big Choices, and the Quest for the Perfect Photograph

I was supposed to leave San Miguel de Allende this morning, but I’ve lingered an extra day.  Thanks to the busy afternoon with Shelley yesterday, my two goals for this city hadn’t been met.  

First, I STILL hadn’t figured out the correct exposure settings to take good photos of this city’s incredible light and beauty!

Second, I needed to come to terms with some big doubts about my trip that have been bothering me for days. 

Fortunately, a day of solitude walking at random and taking photos is also a good way to get some thinking done.  And the thinking preoccupied me so that I just let photos call to the camera and didn’t worry about it.

Click.

In Mazatlan a veteran traveller pulled me aside and told me flat-out that my Miata wouldn’t make it to Tierra del Fuego.  And, he added, when it did break down I would be effectively stranded for lack of parts.  His words rang true against a certain wall of ignorance that I’ve been willfully maintaining.  My lovely Pepin has come this far without the slightest complaint, but I’ve been roadstering on dreams: I’m carrying neither spare parts nor the slightest car repair skill.  Case in point: Pepin is due for an oil change, and without knowing Spanish, anyone to recommend a good mechanic, or how to evaluate the gaping-door junkyards that pass for garages here, it’s a dubious task even to get that done.  (There’s a Grease Monkey in Queretaro that’s my best bet). 

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Most overlanders who choose this road are car-handy enough to overhaul their own engines if need be; not only is it practical, but it adds a dimension of love and interaction to their experience.  In contrast, my lack of those skills translates into a constant formless worry that alienates me from the very road I’m trying to enjoy.

Click.

So I’m looking at a Plan B: stay in Mexico.  Scrap the larger trip and take more time to explore this amazing country, including parts I was planning to skip like the Yucatan and the Atlantic coast.  Mexico is enough of a car country that repairs are possible, and if a part needs to be ordered, it’s not THAT far to send.  And there’s certainly plenty to see here.

Click.

Now, I hate to make decisions from fear.  It feels wrong to default on my grand ambition before anything has actually gone wrong.  But I have a sort of Plan C.

Click.

Come Fall, I could park the Miata somewhere and fly to Buenos Aires and Patagonia on a standard package tour.  Those are the places I most want to see, and it would be a cheaper way to get there (shipping Pepin around the Darien Gap is a huge expense), not to mention a safer, and perhaps a more social and fun way as well.  Plus, I’d get to keep my Miata.

I would miss seeing Peru, though; that would suck. 

Click.

I had managed to walk myself obliviously several miles out of town, to the point where I was totally lost and the only way back was to retrace my steps.  So as the long solstice evening fell I headed back. 

I don’t need to make the big decision now—but actually I do.  Because I have a Plan D.

Click.

That’s to stop, here in Mexico, for a month and take an immersive Spanish class.  Not being able to speak Spanish has been very isolating, and if I AM going to reset to an extended tour of Mexico then I can afford the time, and enrich the experience.  I was considering stopping HERE, in San Miguel de Allende, which is famous for its language schools.  But I don’t quite fancy spending a month in this tourist town.  My next major stop is Mexico City, and I’m going to look into it there.

A month’s pause would also give me time to actually ADDRESS the fear issue: order some spare parts from the States, maybe learn a few car repair skills if I can find a teacher.  At the end of the month I might find that I’m ready to risk the road to Tierra del Fuego after all.

So there you have it: major changes to the plan are afoot.  Whatever I do, it was good to pull these thoughts out and confront them.  And what do you know—I found my wandering way back into town just as that golden sunset light was falling.

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Meeting New Friends in San Miguel de Allende

“One of my rules of travel,” says Paul Theroux, “was to avoid looking up friends of friends.”  The line comes from “The Old Patagonia Express,” a book about his own attempt to reach the end of the Americas, in his case by rail, that I’ve been slowly reading as counterpoint to my road journey. 

For all that’s superb in his book, I’m glad I didn’t follow Mr. Theroux’s advice yesterday, or I wouldn’t have met Shelley Cohee, courtesy of my acquaintance Bob Greenspun in Seattle.  I joined Ms. Cohee at lunch at the Heche en Mexico restaurant, where she was already deep in conversation with a friend of hers, another resident recently returned from Dallas; with a swift flap of introductions she took this shy traveller under her wing for the afternoon, and in the course of a two-hour lunch followed by a zig-zag of errands and accidental encounters around town she offered me finally a peek into the ex-pat—excuse me, RESIDENT—community (“An ex-pat is someone who’s burned their passport”) of San Miguel de Allende. 

  

We parted at dusk as good friends, but that was under par for her course, as Shelley appeared to be friends with almost everybody we met in the little city, and sidelong greetings became sidewalk café interludes.  That's Shelley on the left above; the girl on the right is Jo, a British arrival now teaching English here; the girl from Salamanca in the middle is Jo’s friend, but by the time we left was Shelley’s too.

Not that I’m entitled to the shallowest of conclusions, but I gathered that the American residents here maintain an at best cautious friendship with their Mexican hosts, one that’s currently under extra strain due to the inter-American civil war over the Trump administration.  For every resident who’s proud to stand on this side of the Wall, there are others for whom America’s greatest president has merely unrolled the red carpet to the ideal San Miguel life.  Never the twain shall knowingly issue dinner invitations, was my impression, and meanwhile I was advised to use code words (or the hand signal for a time-out) for He Who Must Not Be Named Before Waiters, or risk spit in my soup. 

So San Miguel de Allende may be a paradise for émigrés, but the old apple still has a bite in it.  And when Shelley took me behind an unassuming door in one street I could see it up close: a step away from pedestrians fighting for space on narrow sidewalks and Mexican workers buying tacos at street stands was unveiled a hidden San Simeon of impeccable hacienda taste and beauty.  Here lay one of the strange ganglia of the modern world, where eight-foot doors of ancient oak and vaulted brick ceilings are made possible by international genetic-modification technology.  “Listen—isn’t it quiet here?” Shelley said in the butter-walled garden.  I was advised not to post photos.  

Thanks to Shelley for a wonderful and eye-opening day, and to Bob for connecting us!

San Miguel de Allende

June 21, 2017

My introduction to San Miguel de Allende was on the wings of a classic piece of traveller stupidity.  It was a complicated route from Guadalajara, and I used Google Maps’ navigation feature the whole way.  At last, hot and sweaty, I was entering town, funneled into a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam through single-lane streets that became more improbable as I went.  I was in a kind of medievalist theme park of tiny uneven stone streets wandering uphill through bright yellow and red boutique shops and restaurants; I couldn’t spare a long look because the driving was tight, crowded and dangerous; the Google Maps voice led me around the block on the bouncy, undercarriage-scraping stone streets until I finally reached my destination, found a parking spot, pulled over, and gratefully turned off the engine.

That’s when I remembered that, at the start of the drive, I had simply typed “San Miguel de Allende” as my Google destination.  I wasn’t at my hotel.  I was at some random point in town that Google Maps had selected as representative.

And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t written my hotel’s name down, or its address or phone number, because it was all there in my email confirmation.  But here in San Miguel I had no cellphone service and my phone wouldn’t display the email.  And there I sat, with no idea what or where my hotel was. 

So my first act in San Miguel de Allende was to wander lost and sweaty through the compact, absurdly scenic stone streets with cellphone and notebook, looking for a wi-fi connection to borrow.  Fortunately the “representative spot” had plenty of hotels, and in two stops I found one whose wi-fi worked, whereupon I recovered my email, re-learned my hotel’s name (and wrote it down!), and was able to drive to my ACTUAL destination.

***

I had booked a hotel rather than a hostel out of the desire for some private space for rehabilitation, especially a bathroom to myself.  Within minutes of arriving I had shaved, showered, and brushed my teeth, all things that the skanky shared bathroom at The Roof hostel in Guadalajara had discouraged.  Then I was free to blink and look around.

My hotel—the “B&B Casa Hotel Colonial Centro”—was beautiful, but strangely impractical.  It had a sweet courtyard in fierce red dominated by a huge photo of Frida Kahlo (her theme continued throughout the hotel), and my room had a wonderful large bed and glass doors opening to a balcony over the courtyard.  But the hotel was unmarked from the street and its printed address included no numeral; I had to ask neighbors which house it was.  (It’s the one with the metal gate with the brass knocker ring.)  The room had no desk, table, or luggage rack, so my pack shared the double bed with me; it had no waste basket, so the little bathroom one collected all my car trash; it had no Kleenex, so I had to borrow the toilet paper roll at night to my bedside table.  The neighborhood was pretty but noisy, during the day with shouts and parade-band practice from the nearby primary school, at night with at least seven constantly barking dogs.

The courtyard at the B&B Casa Hotel

San Miguel de Allende is much like the hotel room: beautiful, but impractical.

The whole thing is a construction of tiny stone streets such as might be excused at Mont St. Michel or Tashbaan, but here the Mexicans do it on purpose and then throw a full urban complement of cars into it.  The lines of cars parked along the streets leave exactly one car width down which the moving ones file, and the postcard-pretty cobblestone intersections have neither traffic lights nor stop signs but they DO all have blind corners thanks to square buildings crowding the road, so each corner becomes a hesitant nose-poking business of cars and pedestrians, the latter of whom have no option OTHER than jaywalking.

 A large bus on a small street in San Miguel. 

The pedestrians, in turn, of which there are throngs, are squeezed onto such narrow stone sidewalks that they can walk at best two abreast, and when they meet, or encounter a tree growing mid-sidewalk, someone must step into the street, where there’s just enough room between them and the passing cars, if the space is not already taken by a motorbike passing faster.  Meanwhile, the irregular stone sidewalks, with a steep curb down to the irregular stone streets, make for a paradise of sprained ankles; I had one fall yesterday that ripped the knee of my good green pants.  But I saved my camera—

Because around all this is the prettiest Mexican town you could imagine.  Everywhere is a decorative pileup of romantic terraced homes and shops all in mustard yellows and brick reds, facing each other in a competition of Juliet balconies, iron-barred floor-to-ceiling windows, porthole dormers, stone archways into shady patio courtyards, hanging gardens, lanterns on wrought-iron brackets, on and on down every street in every direction.  The morning sun pours channeled down these streets picking out shadows from the climbing flowered vines on the yellow plaster walls, and it’s impossible for your camera to keep up.

(In fact San Miguel is known as a professional photographer’s dream, and I felt keenly my amateur status.  The little trench streets are challenging: they’re so starkly divided into sun and shadow that I haven’t been able to set my exposure right.  I still haven’t gotten a good San Miguel photo!)

So far all I’ve done here is wander the streets, hang out at the cathedral square, browse the high-end galleries at the Aurora Fabrica art space, and eat at the little boutique restaurants.  I’m happy to report that I seem to be recovered from my traveller’s stomach, just in time to enjoy the superb food of San Miguel. 

a delicious portobello omelet and coffee breakfast at this little place

The restaurants are a little pricey—but then it is a tourist spot, and I felt like indulging.  And it was fine to eat a gourmet pizza at the fancy overlook restaurant when I hiked up to the El Mirador lookout high over the city at sunset.

The town cathedral, La Parroquia de San Miguel Arcangel, from El Mirador

The one mystery is that San Miguel de Allende is supposed to be a haven for American ex-pats, and I’ve yet to encounter a single one.  Indeed, after my noisy night in the nice hotel I transferred to a hostel in town, hoping to meet more fellow travellers—but I was the only guest!  I had the ten-bed bunkroom to myself last night.  It was quieter than the hotel.  But I have a friend-of-a-friend here whom I’m meeting later, so at least I’ll be able to talk to somebody!

Interlude: Tales of the Mexican Road

June 21, 2017

When I’m driving I can’t take notes, or even photos that are halfway satisfying, so I’ve been using my digital audio recorder.  As I roll down the highway I describe impressions of the land I’m travelling through, and aspects of the previous day’s activities that I don’t want to forget.  But these verbal accounts are almost constantly interrupted mid-sentence with “Wait—hang on—more road craziness.”

Driving in Mexico is exhausting.  There is no way to settle into the steady, long-distance highway groove familiar to Americans.  You can’t go more than five minutes, even on the major routes, without having to apply the brakes and react to some sort of interruption on the road ahead.

The most common of these is towns.  Your interstate Mexican highway will suddenly become, for a half mile or so, a narrow street through the middle of a town filled with pedestrians, street vendors, dust, playing children, dogs, horses, trucks in reverse, etc.  To slow the highway traffic down they have, at each end of town, a gigantic speed bump, usually well advertised with signs, that you must crawl over at 1 mph or risk damage to your undercarriage.  Through the town you mosey, over the second bump and out the far end, and it’s back up to highway speeds—for half a minute: then there’s another town.

But towns aren’t everywhere, and especially in the North there are long stretches of road through unpopulated country.  Here, the thing to be wary of is abrupt changes in pavement.  One minute, you’re purring along on smooth, dark, brightly-lined asphalt that looks like it was built yesterday; the next, with no warning, you’re clattering over cracked and potholed macadam that hasn’t been attended to in decades.  Then there are the stretches of recent repair, where the roadway is too fresh to have painted lines at all, and you and the oncoming traffic are free to do full highway speeds at each other on the basis of knowing where the lines SHOULD be.

Of pavement afflictions that make you hit the brakes, the most frequent is the ubiquitous section that is currently under repair, i.e., closed.  Road construction in Mexico is constant and everywhere.  I had one person tell me that they’re rushing to get repairs in before the rainy season, another that it’s an ongoing enterprise in graft.  Whichever it is, if you’re lucky the solution will be a dirt-road detour paralleling the highway, where you and the other interstate travellers rumble along in a cloud of dust for a few miles.  If not, you all come to a complete stop while highway workers take turns letting traffic through on the one open lane.  Since, especially on hills, the other direction’s traffic can include loaded trucks doing 10 mph, you can sit waiting for quite a while.  At least it’s a chance to stretch your legs and take a picture.

Speaking of hills, I won’t dwell on the Mexican highway’s predilection for Alpine curves, because in a Miata this isn’t strictly speaking a complaint.  Your long flat road will suddenly sprout a “Curvas Peligrosas” sign, which you had better take seriously, for the next moment you’re embarked on a two-lane hairpin-swerving gorge-rimming adventure.  The only downsides here are the truck traffic doing it with you (yes, you’re all still on the Interstate) and Mexico’s maddening refusal to put scenic pullouts alongside mind-blowing scenery.  My favorite moment was the hairpin curve with the sheer dropoff on the right, no guardrail whatsoever, and the road steeply cambered so that absolutely the only safe way to take it was at high speed.

But let’s say all goes well: the road is straight, the asphalt is smooth, you’re between towns, construction gangs are in abeyance.  Can you finally relax into a steady driving zone, and narrate your day’s events?

No.

By far the most aggravating aspect of Mexican driving, to me anyway, is the passing lane situation.  Most highways here are two lanes, and like America sport a yellow line that’s either solid or dashed to indicate no-passing and passing zones.  Unlike America, onto these roads they throw shiny Nissans trying to do 90, heavily-laden trucks doing 30, beat-up work pickups with wooden-cage beds doing 20, and farm tractors doing 5.  You HAVE to pass.  So the Mexicans have evolved a very courteous system by which they ignore the yellow line.  When a fast car comes up on a slow one, the slow one slides onto the shoulder, giving you JUST enough room to squeak past with two tires in the oncoming traffic’s lane.  This works fine unless the oncoming traffic is doing the same thing, and I’ve seen four cars abreast on a putatively two-lane road.

Dangerous, yes, but I can handle it; what gets me is the prompting.  Any time I come up on even a slightly-slower truck, into the shoulder he goes, sometimes flashing his left blinker to helpfully indicate that it’s safe for me to go.  Well, what if I don’t WANT to go?  What if I would rather do 50 behind him than burst suddenly to 80 to go around him?  Sorry, the social prompting is imperious, especially if there’s a car behind me: I MUST go.  Bear in mind that because of road closures, towns, tollbooths, etc., the highway traffic is often coming back to up speed in a clump, and you can get into wild rally-car shakedowns as cars and trucks bunny-hop each other in and out of oncoming traffic to establish speed precedence.  It’s a constant irruption of ridiculous high-adrenaline road combat in what should be a day of relaxed highway cruising.

It’s true that my Miata’s seats aren’t the most comfortable for a long drive, and in the heat I can get pretty sweaty.  But that’s not exactly why I tend to arrive at my destination worn out and ragged after a 4 or 5 hour drive.  And it's why my audio recordings contain precious few complete sentences.

Bathroom Humor

June 19 2017

It’s time to mention an unwelcome companion on my journey through Mexico.  I’ve been suffering from Traveller’s Stomach.

It first hit me in the Copper Canyon area, where I ordered an Arancita thinking it would be bottled, and instead was handed a homemade pitcher of delicious orange juice with floating ice cubes.  It was a hot day and there was nothing for it but to drink it, though I knew perfectly well to stay away from ice cubes (they’re usually made from tap water).  The next day I was suddenly strategizing around rest room proximity.

Now, diarrhea when travelling is always inconvenient, but in Mexico it’s especially so, since in most bathrooms you’re not supposed to flush your toilet paper.  Instead, in each stall they set out a little waste basket.  For an American this is bad enough, but one adjusts; however, the next best thing is to endeavor to leave the CLEANEST possible TP.  It becomes rather a point of pride.  Alas, this was no longer possible for me.

But I had come prepared: I had brought from the States a bottle of Cipro pills for exactly this event.  It was a three-day course of two pills a day, and they seemed to work.  Too well.  The whole time I was in Mazatlan my digestion was at a complete stop.

That at least enabled me to leave a tidy rest-room reputation behind me.  But here in Guadalajara it seems the Cipro has worn off, for despite sticking religiously to bottled water the diarrhea is back.

This led to a funny moment at the Museo Pantalon Panduro.  When I needed to seek out their “Bano,” I was delighted to find it a spotless, large and modern room.  However, when I reached for the stall’s TP dispenser, it was empty.  And a craned neck confirmed that there were no spare rolls in there with me.

Well, I was the only one in the restroom, indeed almost the only patron in the museum, so I risked a quick duck-walk to the next stall over.  But what’s this?  No TP there either!  The third and last stall?  Empty!  Apparently the staff had completely forgotten the loading-up phase this morning.  The sleek modern rest room had no cabinets, cupboards, or shelves where TP might be hidden, and not even any hand towels—they used the blow dryer system.  There was not a scrap of paper in the place.

Back in my original stall I considered my conundrum.  While, thanks to the Trump administration, I don’t mind being a stinking American on the metaphoric level, that’s where I prefer it to stay.  Finally I was reduced to the last extremity: I sacrificed the microfiber cloth I keep in my pocket to clean my camera lens.  And into the little waste basket it went, a bizarre and possibly artistic token from the Republic to the North, but preferable to the alternative.

Now I just have to hope my stomach settles down on its own.  I have more Cipro, but if it’s cyclical it’s one cycle I can do without.  

Photo Essay: Guadalajara

Here's an overflow of photos from my day in Guadalajara (see previous post for the recap).

I cannot explain this building in downtown Guadalajara.  The top says LARVA.

A religious procession outside the cathedral

In the morning I went to the Palacio de Gobierno to 

see the famous Jose Clemente Orozco murals

It looks like the stairs are going down into Hell,
but they're really going up: the face of Miguel Hidalgo
is on the ceiling.

Two details from the same giant Orozco mural:

I then went to the Instituto Cultural de Cabanas museum.
Photography was an extra cost that I didn't pay,
but this exterior statue gives an idea of the contents inside:
modern, and frequently disturbing.

Two random views of downtown Guadalajara on my walk back:

She's GOT to be somebody, right Sara?  :)

More details of intricate ceramic art from the Museo Pantaleon Panduro:

And some larger size ceramic figures I liked:

And finally, Pepin outside my hostel.  One more night for us to survive here--then we're off!