Videos on the Road

Here are some baby videos taken while we were driving to Zacatecas

Some Loving, Some Blog Hating & Nature Photos

One of the reasons that this blog didn't start up until Ben and I realized we were just disappointing our future selves by not documenting this trip, is because I have a really difficult time with negotiating my liberal arts degree of 'critical kindness' towards all things new, different or unique; and my desire to write out, document and share my love of small handmade and hand delivered stories to other human beings.

To casually display the fight against the existentialist struggle.

I told our host, Gaby, in Monterrey, that I was working in my head on my 'What I Am Going to Say About Mexico That is Honest, Not Stereotyping; Kind, But Critical.' This is part of that series of thoughts. 

Today, via my college email address, I received a bulk-letter from one of the administrative bigwigs at Tulane, my alma mater, telling students to use caution, and check the state.gov website for travel information about going to major Mexican tourist areas and the Mexican frontera. Drugs, death, violence, pickpockets and rape! Frankly, short of Tijuana, all of the cities listed on the website seemed charming compared to New Orleans, New York City, Chicago, and sure as heck better than Gary, Indiana. What are we (Americans) telling ourselves about the outside world? Are we writing these blurbs about our most dangerous cities, when all of those out-of-state college students just showed up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year?

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Right now, Ben has the whole darned motorcycle apart, up the street (Carlos and Nasul's house is located on the hillside, and the immediate surrounding blocks are pedestrian stairwells only, paved with large stones held together by cement and loosely attached, somehow, to the mountain), so we haven't been driving anywhere for the last couple of days. 

Therefore, every few days we walk down to the markets and go to buy groceries. Zacatecas is an old town, and it is difficult to build modern day grocery stores into the city--there are no streets that run straight and buildings, stairwells too, tend to just pop out of nowhere, built on top of other buildings, buildings that are dug into the sides of the mountains surrounding the main valley of the city.

These markets tend to be mixed results for us--sometimes three days of delicious groceries or an incredible lunch comes for less than three dollars (or 45 pesos). Other times, we are ripped off--less than a pound of rice for 20 pesos, or a $1.33. This may not seem like a lot, and in a way, it isn't, either economically or emotionally. But in some ways, it is. We watch and listen, as we get ripped off by someone--we know whats going on and they know that we know. Everyone is clearly aware. What we're paying for is more than just some white rice, we're paying for years of bad blood between two countries, for a child's education, our stilted Spanish, for our blue eyes. In this is the critical kindness. I don't blame this individual for overcharging me, and I let him do it, willingly. It is easy enough to say no. But it doesn't help him if I say no, and it doesn't help me if I say yes. Overall, no one is winning in any of these situations. How do you call someone out on this without skirting around the obvious reasons that you are being ripped off? 

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One night, my friend Anna and I were waiting for the streetcar in New Orleans. A woman came up to us and asked us for money for a cab. Her boyfriend had just beat her up and kicked her out of the car. We gave her everything we had short of the small fare for the streetcar back Uptown--did we want to be scammed and do the right thing or not give her money and possibly let this woman try to walk home by herself in the middle of the night?

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It makes me really nervous to fall into the travel blog/travel writing hole of essentializing groups of people and blaming them for historic, political and social events outside of their reach, or summing them up into quaint exoticized moments in my life. These stories may seem negative, but they're really about the difficulty of walking a fine line between forgiving, comprehending, and criticizing. How do you humanize a person, a place or a country without generalizing or being unfair (in either a good or bad way)? How do you write a story about something without taking advantage of the person who made the story--the climb up the hill or the noteworthy news?

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I spend a lot of time, looking at the florae and the terrain on our trips. A lot of the time on the motorcycle is spent between towns; it makes the metropolitan area from New York to Boston seem claustrophobic. It is hard to catch pictures of plants while we're moving, 

most of the on-motorcycle pictures tend to be of distant objects (ok, mountains). 

So I've been trying to take pictures of interesting plants more often,

so that I can show at least what some of the plants are like, the more "exotic" ones that catch my eye.  

I wish I could give names for these plants, but you'll just have to appreciate them for what they are. Included are some photos of the mountains I've loved, too. Just so you can start to feel the expansiveness of Mexico, the rolling desert plains and mountains we've been travelling through since we left the United States. 

We had to slow down for these sheep. I would say that half of the animals we've seen have not been penned in. But they tend to be a little smarter, the cows, the horses, the chickens, etc. and they realize that there is no food to be found on the road.

 

I actually was able to catch a picture of one of small dust whirlwinds that suck up the dry ground. Everytime we crest a mountain, there are dozens of these to be seen on the horizon:

Grapevines in the desert for Ryan:

Mardi Gras! Mardi Gras! (Anticipation!)

Everyone seems to love videos. So here is a video and text and picture post; everyone wins.  

Ben and I are regularly lying to ourselves about 'getting in shape.' 'Getting in shape' is antithetical to our love of food and our now typical hedonistic New Orleans lifestyle. It is also pro-antithetical (yes, that's right) to the fact that yesterday's 'lets walk until we drop' day was Mardi Gras Day. 

If you've never experienced Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans (and I don't mean on Bourbon Street), there is a lot of 'walk til you drop' included in the festivities, as most public and motorized transportation is severely limited by lack of available employees, parades and crowds of organized and not-so-organized people wandering the streets. We spent the entire day walking around El Centro (not in honor of Mardi Gras, but because we wanted to see El Centro), the historical downtown area of San Luis Potosi, looking at the gardens,

the cathedrals,

an interesting decorative cistern with a statue commemorating the men who would carry water to all the homes throughout town,

and trying to get into the Museum of Masks, which was unfortunately closed for structural repairs. So, after a good three hours of walking in circles in the heat, we decided to call it a day. 

I've been mopey for about a week, because as the Mardi Gras season was soon coming to a close, more and more facebook photos of all the fun that all my friends in New Orleans were having was making me a bit emo. So, surprisingly, two blocks after getting on the motorcycle, what do I spy but a Mardi Gras parade!

Heck yes! Ben and I quickly turned through two lanes of traffic and parked the motorcycle to follow the parade for about an hour. There were musicians playing, and they followed the parade for a while, until they climbed up onto the top of a bar and played,

while the young men in costume (few others were dressed up), danced in a circle around another man, dancing with a bull costume over his head,

different guys took turns at being the bull and dancing spastically, as though they were the bulls that one imagines in the bullring of a Hemingway novel.

Eventually, prizes were given out for best costumes, which became a desperate fight to get trophies.

And everyone up on the roof started throwing oranges and bottles of fruit juice at the crowd. After being pegged enough times at parades in New Orleans, by plastic beads, and not oranges, Ben and I tended to duck more than try to catch the throws.

During those minutes when the oranges were being thrown and caught, the air smelled of citrus zest. It was intense, serious pushing and shoving as the circle of guys ran back and forth down the street, circling the bull-man. After about an hour or so, we decided to go back to Aldo's house, as we were already exhausted before finding the parade.

The End!

More Real de Catorce video

This is the cobblestone road up to Real de Catorce. A solid 23 kms uphill. In the town its worse--sometimes I walked while Ben road the motorcycle up and down 45 degree cobblestone roads. Everyone in town knew us the next day because we looked utterly ridiculous, Ben fighting the hills and me running after him with my helmet on.

Real de Catorce tunnel

A little video of part of the 15 minute tunnel ride. Pause it around 10 seconds to see into the shrine located about a quarter of the way into the tunnel ride.

Non-Sequiturs in Spanish

We made it finally to San Luis Potosi, but as we get further into Mexico, I get less interested in blogging about it, and more interested in trying to speak the language fluently. To date, our travels have taken us to Monterrey, Real de Catorce and now to San Luis Potosi (there is an accent mark over the i of Potosi, but heck if I know the keycode for it on this computer). Everyday is emotionally exhausting--speaking in Spanish "es muy dificil" and depending on who Ben and I are talking to, it can be fairly easy, or incredibly hard. Most conversations I start off with "Hola. Lo siento, pero no hablo espanol muy bien." or "Buenas dias. Lo siento, pero mi espanol es asi-asi." which translate to: "Hello, I'm sorry, but I don't speak Spanish very well." or "Good morning. I'm sorry, but my Spanish is so-so." I become incredibly shy when talking to people in Spanish and usually break out into a cold sweat when in a situation where I feel pressured to talk. I cannot think of any other activity more intellectually, emotionally and physically exhaustive than speaking in a language in which one is not fluent.

So hilarity always ensues when I'm talking in Spanish. The last time I had a non sequitur moment, Ben and I were in El Museo del Palacio, originally the Government Palace, where the state congress met in Monterrey. One of the docents took a liking to us, I think because a lot of folks get a kick out of chatting up gringos in the same way that Americans can't get enough of foreigners' accents. He starts talking to us, in fairly difficult Spanish about the neoclassical style of the congress' auditorium "y los otros estilos diferentes" present in the room--the gold leaf on the ceiling, the "mascaras," the masks, located at the corners of ceiling panels, the type of tiling used throughout the building, the original wood dias, the bullet holes in two of the front seats, and so on.

Ok. Repaired bullet holes in the chairs, I can dig that. The auditorium is beautiful. And then all of a sudden, he is asking me, I think, about the Native Americans of the United States. Que, senor? I try to explain, in broken Spanish that there were hundreds of tribes in the United States before most of them were wiped out by colonists and the American government. I am saying that this is unlike in Mexico, where there is a greater focus on the macro-cultures of the Mayan or Aztec people. But, I say, the one thing that all the Native Americans of the United States have in common is that the United States tried to kill all of them. Hilarious, right? The United States! What a cruel, colonizing bully of a nation! Hahaha, or jajaja, as they write in Spanish.

Good conversation, right? Sigh.

Last night, I told our host, Aldo, in Spanish, about two of the most distinct memories I have from when my paternal grandmother died: the memory of aseptically packaged cow tongue sitting for weeks afterward in our refrigerator and eating beef fajitas for the first time the night of the funeral. His family owns a carneceria (a butcher's shop) and we were talking about eating menudo (a soup with cow stomach in it that Ben nonchalantly ordered yesterday at a Sunday market for lunch in Cedral) ad other unusual meats. Presumably, cow tongue tacos taste good. I can't report yet on the tongue tacos, but menudo is definitely an acquired taste.

In short... or perhaps more accurately, in other words, talking in Spanish is like playing a dadaist word game. Nothing makes sense, including the ridiculous things that you come up with to talk about, because in the end, we speak Spanish like babies with big heads.