A note from the bus...(end)

Oaxaca:

I think visiting a place for the second time is better than the first. It felt great to hit town, walk right to the hostel (where they know my name), and start running my Oaxaca errands. The first of the errands was to scout my ticket to the Mexico Norte station, the second was to go have a "Café Oaxaqueño" at a place called Los Cuiles. I still don't know what a Cuil is. Afterwards I played guitar on the street for quite some time and had a good talk with a French guy that happened by. A bed without snoring, fireworks, booming music, or razor-sharp spines facilitated a pretty incredible sleep.

 

In the morning I awoke, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat in one of the hostel's many hammocks conversing with some guys. Lucien, a tall, gentle, dredded Frenchman with a good sense of humor (and who lives in the forest); Peter, a shaggy, wiry professional vagabond from the northwest hitchhiking through Mexico; Evan (who wanted to be called Tyrone."Who forgets a white guy named Tyrone?" he asked.), an eccentric waiter/cyclist who had cruised a huge chunk of the world and was headed for the bottom of Argentina and back up. We four formed a daylong band (the kind that hostels often bring into existence) and went to the ruins of Monte Alban, just above the city.

 

It was a downright enjoyable day. We meandered through the ancient city atop a hill in the middle of the Oaxaca valley, stopping many times to reflect on the Zapotec civilization and life in general, and to eat mandarins. For Peter and me, both having spend a good chunk of time in Mexico, it was a time to speak English again. As we were hitching back to Oaxaca, he stopped mid-sentence and remarked "…this is definitely the most I've talked in a really long time." And it was true. But good. Especially for me, since I needed to brush up on my English before hitting the states. After a while in Mexico I realized that my English was a little less fluid because I was always battling the urge to express things the Mexican way. Like if something was boring, I would know what I was feeling about it, but would be slow in saying it in English because my thought would be "me da hueva" instead of "it bores me," ...and so on. But a morning with these fellas, recounting adventures and learning quite a bit, was more than enough to bring my English rhetoric skills roaring back.

 

A few tacos later, I excused myself to buy my bus ticket and try to find a decent shirt (I'd left my favorite t-shirt out to dry on the rooftop in Pluma Hidalgo). The ticket was a success, the shirt a failure. In the evening, dinner was prepared by the Frenchman while Peter and I jammed out on guitar and mandolin. Our rendition of Wagon Wheel was fun enough to have us headed for the door to take it to the streets, but Lucien finished the main course and we had to stay. I'm not sure what it was, but it was sumptuous. After dinner, having some pesos to get rid of, I invited everybody for drinks on the town.

 

The day in Oaxaca speaking my native tongue and having lots of what I classify as good conversation was a little reminder of what I'll be able to do as often as I want back in the states. In a land where intelligent conversation is as hard to find as tacos are easy to find, it was a breath of fresh air. And though I was a bit jealous at times of their adventures that will continue for months more, I couldn't help but be satisfied to be heading homeward whilst they were heading away.

A note from the bus...(cont.)

Pluma Hidalgo:

The Pluma Hidalgo section began to grow quite large, so I decided to make it a post in itself.

 

In the original plan, Pluma was just going to be a coffee buying stop…get the goods and be on my way. But when I got there I was welcomed so warmly and the people were so insistent that I had to stay. The folks I stay with in Pluma are a family…the late father bestowed a pretty rich inheritance to his (now adult) kids. Each of the four manages their own ranch in the hills below the town and the mother (now the grandmother) presides over everything. All three sons live in the big house with their families and their mom and several other random family members. The one daughter lives an hour away on the coast with her husband. On of the daughters-in-law runs the family restaurant. When he saw me for the first time Chepe, the youngest son and the merry drinker of the family, gave me a big hug and bought me a beer. He couldn't believe that I'd returned. But indeed, it was his idea that I return in mid-December--before I left in September, he rumored a big party going down on 12 December.

 

 I got there on the evening of the 9th…mere hours before the festivities commenced. The 12th is the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe…basically the virgin Mary, but this version showed up in Mexico and has since taken on a life all its own. And in Pluma Hidalgo she's a bigger deal because she happens to be the town's patron saint. This seemed to translate into a longer, more frenzied, more colorful celebration.

 

As per the September rumor, the morning after I arrived all hell broke lose (don't tell them I used that particular turn of phrase). Fireworks filled the sky and live bands busted out Mexican classics as I followed a grinning old man named Pedro several miles down the mountain for a tour of one of the family coffee ranches. An hour of hiking later he said "Aquí está el rancho!" ("here is the ranch"…really more like "this is the ranch" in English) The tour mostly consisted of him showing me the process and looking back at me like a dog who has killed a mouse and wants to show you what he has done, smiling ear-to-ear and cocking his head to one side. "Aquí está el rancho!" he said again. A few minutes later he was surveying the place and, with a profound nod of his head he said "Aquí está el rancho." On about the twentieth "Aquí está el rancho," I politely made my exit.

 

When I stumbled up onto the main plaza, it had been transformed into festival mode--a collection of tarps held over vendors' booths by a network of cheap cord and rope, bands setting up their equipment in every nook and cranny, and six pick-ups being decked out for the evening's parade. I went to get the guidance of my nine-year-old friend José Maria as to what was going on. I met José in his family store last time I was in Pluma. We made paper airplanes for a while and I impressed him by telling him I have a friend who is a pilot. When I returned, he was happy to see me and questions poured from his brain like a fire hose. Not things like "where did you go" and "where are you from" (the  normal, everyday questions), but things like "what is snow like?" and "what did you feel like the first time you flew in a plane?"

 

In the evening, the parade started. In the back of each truck, local kids recreated scenes from the story of the virgin of Guadalupe and half the town followed behind as they rolled one way down the main street, doubled back out to the edge of town, and returned again in the plaza. It all felt terribly cultural…like one of those movies they show in an anthropology class…long, drawn out, with music and colorful ribbons and mothers carrying babies with mustaches painted on them. During the walk, I attracted a fairly large following of the Pluma kids, all asking me crazy questions and showing me their airsoft guns (which is kind of a big cultural thing there for some reason--reminded me of the good old days in and about Haw Creek).

 

I was hanging out with the kids and watching a cool dance in the plaza (cool because the dancers throw candy at you) when "los negros" arrived. The four black guys, three from the states and one from Mexico City, had come into town for the basketball tourney that was to be held the next day and all the boys wanted to go meet them so we went and camped outside their hotel. "Todos los negros en los estados unidos son malos, verdad?" (all the black people in the US are bad (or evil), right?) asked José, as earnest as could be. I had to laugh at the blatant political incorrectness of the question, but then I explained that what you see in the movies and hear from ignorant, possibly racist Mexicans is not true. They were surprised to hear that I had black friends who were really cool and weren't gangsters. My daily contribution to global human rights complete, I went to greet the jugadores de basquetból.

 

 When they found out I was from the states, they were really happy to see me and invited me to dinner. Over a scrumptious mix of rice, hotdogs, and eggs I learned about life on the Mexican basketball circuit…not an easy one. Two of the guys had just arrived a month before. Larry from Oakland, a top recruit in the bay area who got in trouble with the law before graduation, voiced his distaste for the Mexican diet saying "I want some Mac and Cheese!" They invited the pack of boys in as well, but José Maria was the only one who ate anything. This vexed old Larry. "I like to see kids eat. That's my heart."

 

I arrived again at the town square in time to see the beginning of the yearly dance where a bunch of boys and men dress in drag (complete with large, strategically-placed balloons) and Halloween masks and break it down, much to the enjoyment of the general populous. Chepe waved me over and paid for me to don what I think they were calling a mono…or something like that. It's basically a huge man suit…maybe ten feet tall. You kind of get harnessed in and the pants come up to your neck, then they put the top part of the giant man on and you just dance around, the arms flopping at the sides. It was more than a little surreal, peeping out of the porthole (about where the belt buckle would be), seeing throngs of grotesque-faced, scantily-clad, fake-women going nuts on all sides to the pounding beat of a Banda roll, with fireworks lighting up the night and startling all the babies and grandmothers sitting around watching.

 

In time, I was extracted from the giant and the sweat I'd worked up began to chill in the crisp night air. Donning my trusty sweater, I went to check out the basketball court which they were renovating in anticipation of the tournament and talked to my friend Paco who was busy coordinating it all. Then I went to bed…but not to sleep, due to the other-worldly snoring of the guy in the next room.

 

The next day held more fiesta, the black guys dominating at basketball, a little more hiking around (this time up instead of down), and a huge dance party on the bball court (which was prohibitively expensive for me) which lasted, no joke, from 9pm until 6:30am. It was cool because the fireworks (also going until 6:30) woke both the snoring man and me, but I got to sleep before he did. This made for a restful night's sleep, despite the two pointy springs that poked up through the mattress.

 

On the 12th, the actual day of celebration, things were already winding down. In the early afternoon, I said my goodbyes, packed up my coffee, and boarded a delightfully futuristic mini-bus for Oaxaca.

 

 

A note from the bus

Alright then. I'm coming to you (not live) from a half-crippled bus racing towards Mexico City. Crippled as in the AC keeps breaking down and this large, possibly mentally handicapped German man keeps taking his shoes off and everybody keeps telling him to put them back on. Yeah.

 

Almost every time I get on one of these buses, I'm astounded at what low-quality cinema they screen. Right now we're watching The Prince and Me II: The Royal Wedding. I mean, come on now. The normal fare is about on par with this one…something with Sandra Bullock, Kevin Bacon, or just off-brand romantic comedy. Like, these are the films that you watch for a few minutes and wonder who in the world shelled out the dough to actually make them. Mainstream Hollywood churns out some pretty poor work, but the second rate stuff just makes me want to jump out of one of these big emergency exit windows and roll as a bloody mess into the much more interesting dust on the side of the road.

 

My time in Mexico has basically come to an end. A few days to hang out in Monterrey and that's all she wrote. Though I was pretty apathetic about my return before, the closer it gets, the more excited I am to get home for the holidays. The last ten days or so of travel in the have been fun--relaxed, even, which is something I was not expecting. But with the end of the journey coming up quickly I've been feeling a bit restless to finish it off…I don't know why. It's like the clock is ticking and I would rather it just end so that I can pick up another clock with a less urgent time frame and start a new adventure.

 

Despite the urgency factor, my time in the south has been a real blessing. And I believe I'll recount a little bit of it to give you an idea of what I've up to. (random thought: Eric Clapton really doesn't sound like a Brit when he sings.)

 

The Last Days:

The last days in Cuernavaca consisted of a lot of revisiting of people and places. The nights were filled with goodbye parties and movies with the family. During the free days I developed a reading habit. I would go into town in the morning to a sweet coffee shop above a artsy theatre, open up the old laptop, and read philosophy to possibly the best soundtrack I've found in Mexico (Moby, Emmylou H., Band of Horses, Nora Jones,  Manu Chau, Sufjan Stevens, Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire…). Now as some of you know, I've never put much stock in philosophy and certainly never had the compulsion to read it for pleasure, but I figured that it couldn't hurt. And if I was going to knock somebody like Plato or Hobbes, I decided I ought to at least know a little bit about why I'm knocking them. I stumbled upon a website run by some professor that made it really accessible so I've been having a ball poking , prodding, taking notes on (and yes, learning from) a pretty interesting list of folks.

 

After the morning lectura, I would go to a restaurant on my short list of awesome places to eat, eat, and thank the folks for feeding me during the semester.

 

Taxco:

This former mining town now renowned for it's silverwork is a peaceful, if touristic, spot not far from Cuernavaca and the perfect first step south. I stayed at a cheap hotel where I found an eight-ball of cocaine under my bedspread. I thought to myself what a deal the 70 peso room would have been if I was a coke addict and briefly considered finding a buyer for the drugs, thus financing my stay. But I didn't. I left it in a whole in the wall for the next lucky person.

 

I spent most of my day in Taxco reading in some homey little cafes and walking up to take in the view. I spent a good bit of the night playing guitar around the main plaza. The next day Scott (roommate) and Joseph (Luxembourg)  came up to town and we had lunch before I boarded a bus to Acapulco.

 

Acapulco:

I arrived at dark and found out that the bus to Huatulco didn't leave 'til 2am. This meat Saturday Night in Acapulco. I stashed my gear at the station and went to the Costera with my guitar to see what I could see. I swam in a resort pool, played guitar on the rocks in the bay, watched some bungee jumping, generally enjoyed myself, and ended the night with a coffee, a pen, and a little notebook.

 

San Agustín:

After 12 hours of transit, my return to San Agustín was exactly how I pictured it. I rolled up to Charly's Place and welcomed like a long-awaited hero…that's just how the folks are. In no time flat I was laid back in a hammock by the bay, chatting away with a icy cold Indio in my hand.

 

Whereas the time before I paid for very little, this time I paid for nothing, every night I got several invitations to dinner and/or drinks and every morning I ate breakfast with Charly and his family (who were not there in September). A bonfire, a seaside hike, and several life lessons later, I was on my way to Pluma Hidalgo.

By the way, looks like the the royal wedding went down just fine, but not after some unbelievable hijinks and tear-jerking suspense. 

 

To Be Continued...

En Route...

Alas, it has been some time since I've clued folks in as to my whereabouts and brushes with death and glory. Though I don't have much time, I thought I'd give a very quick update.

-The semester ended without a hitch.

-I made the rounds through Cuernavaca saying goodbye to the folks I've been hanging with.

-The entire administrative offices of the TEC somehow got a hold of my blog and were exposed to that last article. I hope they just looked at the pictures or else I may never get my transcript sent.

-On the 5th, I shot south and east.

-For the past week or so I've been kickin' it around Oaxaca...all the parts and people I came to know and love on my last trip. 

-I've got 3.75 kilos of coffee in my backpack right now.

-The next 20 odd hours are going to be in buses and bus stations.

-I'm looking forward to being home for Christmas.

-The adventure continues.

love,

caleb

The Ascension of Cerro Tec

I was fortunate enough to only go to school three days a week this semester. Every Tuesday-Wednesday-Friday I would share a taxi with a bunch of French people (or hop aboard the Route 20) out to the boonies and into the confines of the TEC. And every Tuesday-Wednesday-Friday I would look up at a clear, green, peak just above the school. And every Tuesday-Wednesday-Friday I would say to myself, or the nearest uninterested person “man, I really want to climb that.”

Well, this Friday my dream became reality. I set off south with Joseph, my good Luxembourgian friend, in his Chrysler Spirit— appropriately named the “Poderoso” (the mighty one). Joseph, or Luxembourg as I am apt to call him, has been a much-appreciated companion over the last few months. A tall, skinny, totally European-looking fellow, Joseph has a gift for languages and a peculiar, hilarious sense of humor. He’s quite intelligent, likes coffee, and shares a lot of my thoughts about the culture within our “prestigious” private university and in Méxcio in general. And he’s one of the few other people from school that think going downtown to have a drink and talk is just as viable a Friday night activity as spending it on the booming dance halls of Cuerna’s hottest clubs. We get along well.

Many times we’ve met to have a beer or a coffee and talk like two old men about the exchange student life in México. Our main beef is about what we call the fresitud of the TEC culture (fresa: well, it means strawberry, but it’s also a sweet adjective to describe someone as superficial, materialistic, fake—something like preppy) Our bulletproof theory is that the lives of the rich Mexican kids at school are confined to 3 places: the TEC, Galerias (the city’s mega-mall), and a handful of exclusive-ish discotecas. Many of my compatriots have been swallowed whole by the TEC crowd, so it’s refreshing to talk to a fellow critic of the lifestyle.  

He’s going to be here for the whole year and has expressed the desire to find a Mexicana soul mate, so we often talk about how discouraging the pool of Mexican females is at Tec Cuernavaca. The superficiality sucks (you can’t carry on a conversation with these girls unless you talk about Galerias, the movies, gossip, or something related to name-brand consumerism). The spoiledness is often unfathomable (it’s grotesquely common for them to be talking on their iPhone, flipping through the same 21 songs on their iPod touch, driving their brand new VW the mall to buy $2000 peso shoes…you get the point). And the makeup culture is insane (I think that, if the TEC girls ever remove the gallons of makeup they slap on (which is a big “if”), their faces shrink to about half the normal size). 

Suffice it to say that Luxembourg and I enjoy a good chat.

We also enjoy a good adventure, which is where we were headed in the Poderoso on Friday. We parked on campus and set out on foot towards the base of what we call Cerro Tec (Tec Hill). 

Online photo of Cerro Tec from the west side ot the building.

Not 200m from the hive of luxury, opulence, and flojera, we stepped onto the dirt roads of Acatlipa. From the convenience-shop-lined main street, we started to ascend the hill and the further up we climbed, the poorer the living conditions became. From decent middle-class Mexico at the bottom, the houses began loosing luxury features like paint and water reseviours. Later windows and doors became scarce. At the top, the houses were nothing more than piles of rocks pulled from Cerro Tec (I still don't understand how they stayed upright).

We followed Cresta Fresa (Fresa Ridge) to the very top and found an incredible, stonewalled cornfield. Incredible because somehow the plants were growing up through pure rock. 

Corn on the Rocks

We wondered at the sheer labor that was expended to plant and harvest the maiz in such an austere mountaintop and envisioned old men hobbling around on the rocks in the hot sun for 12 hours and making next to nothing. On the other side of the summit, we found what we were looking for.

Miles and miles of countryside...and this. If that's not surreal, I don't know what is.

In the middle of the Morleos "campo" sits Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Cuernavaca. An absolutely space-age building in a country of cinderblocks. It loomed below Cerro Tec like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. We pictured that old working man, coming direct from his stone-pile house, harvesting corn on the side of the mountain and catching sight of TEC--full to the brim with ultra priviledged, ultra lazy Mexican youth, many of whom are destined to live out their days without llifting a finger to do any real work. "Un poco pervertido, no?" Said Joseph.

Luxembourg. The TEC is his oyster.

We stood there for some time, thinking about the incredible contrast that exists in Mexican culture--a contrast played out right before our eyes. "Traes la bazooka?" (did you bring the bazooka?) asked Joseph (Now you see why I like this guy so much).

Where are your Rebel friends now??

In addition to being good exercise, our little excursion served to give me a mental picture of the divide that exists here between the rich and everybody else. And it made me realize that,though I can recommend Cuernavaca as an awesome place to study abroad, I think that my end-of-term report on the school will read something like this:

Though I did learn a good deal (especially in Destrezas Comunicativas with Prof. Sergio), I developed a fairly intense distaste for the school itself which seems to attract the least interesting, least motivated students in Mexico. If you're ok with shallow friendships and reverting back to a middle school maturity level, the TEC is your spot. Otherwise, see if you can find another school where "Fresa" has a negative conotation intead of being a compliment. In fact, ask that question exactly. And if you do decide to go to the TEC, a bazooka may come in handy.

Coffee Odyssey

Well folks, I’ve come to a lull in the fighting—one that should last until January. As of Wednesday the semester is officially over and I’m one week, one paper, one presentation, and one exam away from leaving the City of Eternal Spring behind me indefinitely. Tonight I’m just relaxing and thinking about the things I’ll miss when I leave Cuernavaca…inevitably the 11 peso Americanos come to mind (that’s 83 cents these days, yo). I realized that I’ve made a lot of references to coffee since I’ve been down here—enough to be called a coffee fanatic, snob, and addict. I may be all those things. If so, my apologies…I hate fanatics, have a distaste for snobs, and addicts…well, they’re ok. Anyway, I gave my own personal coffee odyssey this afternoon and I thought I might share it with you—not to justify my fanaticism, but because I kind of want to see exactly what it is. And it may explain some things about me, who knows?

Today I had lunch with some German friends at the city’s only health food restaurant, a fine establishment where 45 pesos brings a veritable feast to your table. The last course is coffee (or tea) and dessert and, as we sat and sipped our hot beverages, the non-coffee-drinking Germans asked me about how I came to like coffee. So I told them. First off, I was born into a coffee family. As I grew up I watched Mom and Dad become ever more skillful at preparing the stuff and ever more elitist in their tastes. Though I loved the smell, I could never understand how they could like the taste. This continued into high school…I drank a bit with dessert when guests were over, but usually just because I wanted to talk with the adults.

During the last years of school, I started playing guitar with a bunch of honest-to-goodness good ol’ boys at the Black Mountain Center: an old banjo player named Bud Lewis, his middle-aged sons, and their posse of rag tag pickers and grinners (notably the illustrious Mark Bordeaux and this guy from Warren Wilson who played a saw…yep, a saw). Every Tuesday at 7:30 the hits rolled out of that little auditorium like Bel Airs from a '57 production line (boy, GM's wishin those days would come back aound)—mostly old time standards played in a distinct Americana Honky-Tonk style. I think that was where I started to play and sing in front of people—good place to start because the residents there loved whatever you played, as long as it had a good beat. You learn a lot about live music playing for elderly mental patients.

I left every week with a smile on my face and not a little homework to finish so every week I’d head to the Dripolator in Black Mountain (before the downtown Drip days, y’all) to write, read, procrastinate, or what have you until they shut the place down. I started off getting chai lattes and the like, but soon realized that a chai habit was nigh on unsupportable and switched to coffee, the cheapest way to rent space in the Drip’s cosy wood-toned confines. It felt pretty official, studying with the college kids, a steaming cup of Joe weighing down a copy of that week’s Mountain Xpress. In the cold winter months, the warm glow of the shop was a destination in itself. I’d walk in shaking off the cold, order up a round, and just bask in how perfectly ideal my Tuesday nights were. Somewhere along the line, I started to associate the taste of the coffee with the perfection of the Black Mountain Center Opry (not an official term…yet) and the relaxed homework sessions, completed to the rhythm of the Drip’s spot-on soundtrack—how could I not begin to love coffee after that?

That year, I started to understand what all the fuss was about. More importantly, I started to understand why Dad’s breath always smelled like coffee when he whispered to me in church. I started to enjoy the fact that my parents liked to do coffee right. I started to look forward to the big pot that they broke out when folks came over to the house. All in all, I made a pretty smooth transition from the realm of social coffee drinking to that of light coffee appreciation.

Then I went to school. Some people say that Chapel Hill has the largest number of coffee shops per capita in the country and, while that might be a bit far-fetched, I think it’s safe to say that my choice of university did not serve to diminish my taste for coffee. In fact, one of my first quests after arriving at UNC was to find the place that felt the most like the Dripolator—thus ensuring myself a spot to actually get work done. I found it at the Open Eye Café and quickly, without ceremony, became a regular. Again, a cup of hot brew became associated with good things. This time the mug rested on the latest issue of the Indy Weekly or a half-finished DTH crossword, but the vibe was about the same. The Open Eye was a nice little place to swing by during one of my numerous escapes from campus. To stop in and work or procrastinate a bit on the way to/from the thrift store was the pinnacle of any given afternoon.

And now I’m here in México averaging over a cup a day and really able to tell what a good cup of coffee is and what’s not worth my time. It’s an entertaining hobby here in a land of exceptional, largely unappreciated beans (99.99% of people drink instant Nescafé) and one that I acquired second-hand: from the glowing hominess of a little shop in Black Mountain, NC while trudging through the academic mess of senior year. 

All this blabber brings to light two fairly intriguing factoids (awesome word). 1.) Despite having all the trappings of upper-middle class coffee-taste-inheritance, my taste for coffee stemmed from an acute appreciation of workplace comfort. You decide the lesser of two evils. 2.) After thinking through the above journey, it turns out my high school education did have a point to it after all. Who knew?