We woke early, too early for anywhere with coffee to be open. In the Zocalo we walked under the arches that square the square, along one side then turn and up the next and turn and up the next until we had come full square. It took about 3 rounds plus one excursion into the cathedral before anything was open. I had my americano con leche caliente. Unlike previous attempts at this normally quite decent cafe, my Americano lived up to its fabled name and was a very watered down espresso (I prefer just a little hot water with mine) and my leche was muy frio and we were accosted by our first Jehovah’s Witness afterwards (she was sweet and didnt push anything and I struggled to stop myself from laughing) so it was an odd morning.  We stopped at the McDonalds in the square for something, anything to eat before our bus to Oaxaca  (again- too early for things to be open) and after waiting 20 minutes for our order, D. reasoned that Mc Donalds had joined the slow food movement. I supposed our hash browns and coffee would be brought out by a mustachiod French farmer and we would eat around a long wooden table in a farmhouse nearby amongst convivial company. There would be flagons of wine and our hash browns would last a good 2 or 3 hours and be fried in fine goose fat and doused with a delicate cream sauce. Alas, no. But there was salsa verde for my fake spud product, and the coffee was decent (better than the watery americano) but all they had was Splenda for sugar so I tried it out (never tried it before) and it was vile and my decent coffee tasted of chemicals and fake sugar. I tossed it. A bad morning for coffee.

We are waiting at TAPU now, the big bus station somewhere outside of town or at the far reaches of town. We came out here at 9:30 to get the 10:45 bus, to be safe. We weren’t safe- only one seat was left and so now we are killing time until the noon bus on a not so posh bus line.  In Oaxaca tonight- yay!- and for a few more days to celebrate the Day of the Dead in style. 

I need a coffee.

Today we walked from the Puebla zocalo up to the 15th or 16th or so of September monument-fort-etc configuration about 4 km out of town because the 4 different independant bus companies that prowl the streets here have yet to conceptualize maps or routes or schedules. It was a good walk though, even though the botanical gardens were shut and weeded over and the planetarium wasnt open til 5pm and the Imagination museum was shut and there were a million school kids screaming around the little square, buying little bags of just fried chips from vendors. Further up at the fort, a bunch of young men were throwing rocks at a wall near the entry gate. We decided to walk back down the long hill to the zocalo. Those 8 km were interesting but ultimately pointless (aside from the other fort we visited at the beginning of the Patriotic Historico area, the Lareto one where they fought off the French ages ago). It’s lovely and sunny here. There is an artisanal barrio near the zocalo that we scouted out before breakfast. Lots of little tiny studios in a row, some open to the street or the square, some with art on display, some with artists too. I want to live ijn a flat above them, with a balcony.  I will drink coffee and read a lot on that balcony. I will.

Puebla is lovely and calm and pretty, in a way that DF was unable to be due to size and girth and population density. Cathedral’d square full of trees and palm trees and balloon sellers and ice cream sellers and fountains and it all looks like a watercolour when seen from slightly afar through the archways that square the square, filled with cafés and more cafés. I ate a lovely carrot cake and cappuccino and watched the protesters atop their old schoolbus, microphones in hand, singing and shouting and declaring their perspectives on injustice. Right on.

There are skeletons everywhere. I like skeletons in public, especially ones dressed up and draped in shiny colourful things. I have seen two themes emerging this week that I am unsure about: There are growing clusters of teenage boys with sticky slicked back hair and baggy jeans carrying around statues of Jesus or Mary the length of their torsos. These statues have ribbons accross their chests, like a beauty pageant, but I hae been unable to catch what is written.  As well, there are growing numbers of stuffed men, like a scarecrow or Guy Fawkes, strung up from second floor hooks, looking quite morbid.  If anyone can tell me what exactly I am looking at, I would be much appreciative.

Here are some photos with a slight Muerte theme.

We went to Teotihuacan this morning, which is that big old archaeological site once inhabited by Aztecs and other fun people a millenia or two ago, full of steep pyramids and big avenues, and huge temples to Quetzacoatl and other fine plumed gods. We climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon and strolled the Avenue of the Dead, eating a coconut Donut of the Dead, checking out the Federal Workers of the Dead digging holes by the side of the cobbly road to the Moon.  Peddlars peddled ornate bird-call whistles and I replied with my own loon call. We expected a horny congregation of Dead Birds to come circling overhead. The vendors giggled. We climbed over tiny, grassy-tufted pyramids en route to Quetzacoatl, imagining opening up a coat shop called Quetza Coatl.  When we reached the temple to Quetzacoatl, we imagined the winged serpent god opening the doors to his home with a lofty, ‘Welcome to my crib, yo? This way to see my wardrobe- I have a plumed headdress for every day of the Mayan calendar!’.  MTV film crews tumble down the steep steep steps of the temple.  Mass slaughter everywhere. Lola stands in the midst of the carage, offering up a mouse.

On the bus back to the city, we were serenaded by a man with a guitar, who stood in the aisle singing sad songs in spanish (and a gratuitous ‘Til There Was You’ by the Beatles, interestingly phoenetic) and who was replaced at a random stop by a large, mustachio’d man selling hand creams out of a bag (with fish oils for softness! And antibacterial!). 

A few days ago, in the midst of some street protests that filled many avenues in the centro, there was a truck trying to make its way down a clogged street. At first the driver spoke into his little microphone, asking the people to please move aside, delivery coming, please move, please. The crowds didnt budge, so he paused, then into his microphone he blurted out a fine Road Runner ‘Meep Meep! Meep Meep’ and the crowds parted.

Random note: at the Burger King here, they have squirty things for kechup, salsa verde and salsa roja. I ate my fries in salsa verde. It was marvellous.

We went to Frida Kahlo’s Blue House this morning, which was lovely and blue and full of greenery and rainbows and some marvellous papier maché skeletons. The neighbourhood is full of walls and tiles walls and bright orange-washed walls and palm trees and lush flowers flowing over the wildly painted walls. You can’t actually see most of the houses, but you can see the doors the inhabitants slip out through, quite inconspicuously. It was very calm. We ate quesadillas in a street market, surrounded by skeleton costumes and black-haired small children trying on wings and veiled gowns printed with spider-webs. There were three kinds of salsa in the bowls. The air was bright and flowers cast fierce shadows on the walls.

We went to the zoo at Auditoria afterwards- I can´t remember the last time I went to a zoo, if I ever went at all. The pathways were teeming with saturday excursioners and the animals looked quite bored but resigned to their situation. The bison were pretty pissed off. The giraffes were posing. The elephant was alone and utterly forlorn. The oryx was chilled out. The lion was nowhere to be seen. Couples made out against the railing of the antelope habitat. The hippos showed off their fine buttocks, airing their backs in the hot sun. I had had enough of the heat and crowds and we made our way back through even thicker crowds to our hotel for the camera uploader cord. I´m just finishing up adding them to my album- will link below as soon as it finishes.

At some point this morning, on one of our many metro rides, we were serenaded by the Dalai Lama´s twin brother, the musical one who didn’t go into spiritual politics. He had huge bifocals and grooved his way through our car with a ridged bottle and two sticks, tapping and ripping out a rhythm and shuffling his feet, from seat to seat, shuffle shuffle, mambo mambo, grin grin. He stopped to groove and sing near us and at the end of his song presented me and the old lady next to me with a bootlegged copy of a cd he had made of his music. Very cool.

PHOTOS OF 3 DAYS IN MEXICO CITY (SO FAR)

As we rode from Allende to Tacuba this morning, en route to the museum of anthropology, our car was a thoroughfare for a stream of blind sellers with stereo systems built into their backpacks. As they felt their way through the car, shouting out their sales pitch, their fingers worked a discman in one hand to demonstrate how utterly marvellous their particular bootlegged cd was (only 10 pesos!). When one finished his or her pitch, they moved on to the next car, feeling their way along. The next one took their place with a whole new genre of music. At first, we were serenaded with Hits of the 50s (Oh Donna!) then it was Romantic Hits (syruppy and spanish) then it was Enigma and Enya then we got off and changed trains. Our second train only had a cookie seller.

We walked approximately 5km through the museum (or so say the pages I photocopied from the library’s 2006 Let’s Go), up both sides both upstairs and downstairs.  It was quite impressive. We ate lunch in their overpriced ouitdoor cafe, stared at by Olmec statues in the nearby garden, surrounded by whinging Brits on an escorted tour, with a resignedly horrified guide listening patiently to their nit picky dissection of the bill and discussions about how peasants arent as interesting as they used to be, back when they hadn’t set up tourist cafes in their villages. We ate chipotle chicken tostadas on fresh, home-flattened tortillas, fried just enough, doused in a vat of salsa verde and laden with avocados and red onions and lovely plump tomatoes. They were very good.

Our mental-hospital-corridor lodgings are still cozy and calm and pleasant, in spite of being up in the unseen attic, far from the normal people wrapped around the courtyard. Our reinforced metal doors add a certain level of security in a city that so far seems so calm that the doors reek of hyperbole. The shower is marvellous.

Still not sick of tortillas.

We stopped for a coffee in  a lovely inner courtyard somewhere in the middle of somewhere en route to something.  It had floors and floors of balconies circling over us, with lovely rich paintings hanging in midair from the railings. I ordered a cafe de olla, because it is pronounced a bit like Cafe de Oya, and in Turkish Oya is the name of a woman and also a kind of lacework. I like linguistic coincidences, so I ordered it, crossing my fingeres that it wasn’t something like nescafe stewed in tripe.  One never knows. But it wasnt nescafe stewed in tripe- in fact, the Turkish coincidence extended itself just one step further, with the coffee being a fine, strong, sweet thing that tasted like Turkish coffee but without the mud at the bottom. I googled it and found this:

Mexican Cafe de Olla
An earthy mixture of Viennese-roast coffee, cinnamon, aniseeds, and piloncillo (Mexican dark brown sugar).   This drink is traditionally prepared in a earthenware pots called Ollas. The earthenware lends some of the special flavor to this drink. 

Serves: 4

I N G R E D I E N T S
4 cups water
1/2 cup piloncillo (or dark brown sugar)
4 cinnamon sticks (canella, a shaggier, flavorful cinnamon)
2/3 cups freshly ground, dark roasted, coffee beans.
Aniseeds (optional)

I N S T R U C T I O N S 
Heat the water, sugar and cinnamon in a medium saucepan, stirring frequently.  Bring the mixture to a boil  making sure to stir until the sugar is dissolved. Continue to boil for 20 minutes until the mixture is reduced by a quarter.  Add the ground coffee and stir until the mixture returns to a boil.  Remove the pan from the heat, cover and allow to stand for at least five minutes.  Strain the mixture using a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth.  Pour into mugs and server while hot. Top with a few aniseeds if you like.

I dont normally care for sweet, black coffee but this one was quite decent. I would have halved the sugar though. I’m not such a fan of teeth curling drinks.

We flew all day yesterday. I had never seen North America from the air before, at least not on a clear day, in daylight. We flew down over veiny leafed flatlands, like imprints of giant fossilized nervous systems somewhere in the South West, with cracks and fissures spreading out quite extensively. Later on, amongst sonar-screen circles of farmland rose up slim and stretching animal prints of land- lithe shapes coloured in leopard print and tiger print.  Huge craters. Long rivers. Freshly risen mountains with even fresher bits cracked off, bright in their newness.  There were a few whispy clouds suspended in the clear broth of sky, casting parallel shadows onto the very empty, very golden brown earth. It was pretty.

Mexico City arrived in turbulence. We circled a few times, saw houses creeping up to the base of several empty hills until it became to steep to creep. They looked like swarms of ants. The pilot seemed to enjoy freaking out the passengers by suddenly dropping in altitude then regaining composure with a silent but understood giggle. We landed well, got through customs and immigration without a blink of hassle. When we hit the scary red button of chance at customs, we both got the green light. Our taxi to the Zocalo was sane amongst the horns and fluid traffic. Our hotel is old and quietly dignified, with three floors of pretty, tiled central courtyard ringed with rooms with white wooden double doors with glass windows. Our room, the cheapo one with shared bath, is up on the unseen fourth floor, the long-corridor´d prison block with reinforced metal doors and small ventilation windows open to the courtyard about a foot above our heads. It is clean though, and the bed is lovely and the sink is clean and the tap works and the loo works and there were thoughtful gifts of loo paper and plastic wrapped new soaps.  I have never stayed in a 12 dollar hotel before that provided any of the above. Its good.

We walked to the zocalo this morning before 8, with the light still filtered. The protest tents were being assembled in the square. We investigated the presidential palace and the Diego Rivera murals and the lovely cactussy botanical gardens. There were little cats amongst the cacti, in the shade of the huge succulent leaves that bent down with wet weight. We checked out the tilting, sinking cathedral in three parts that lay over the ruins of the Aztec temple and then to the side where a few bits of temple still lie. They had been quite razed. We are now in a little internet cafe with impossibly slow ancient computers, after a fine breakfast of fresh papaya and coffee and squeezed orange juice and eggs scrambled dryly with lots and lots of chilies and chorizo and a few spoonfuls of lovely black beans. D. had enchiladas again (it was also our dinner last night, elsewhere) but this time with salsa verde not roja. Last night I spooned about 5 dollars worth of salsa verde onto mine, by Canadian supermarket prices.  I would spoon it onto my cornflakes if I could.

We are going to some of the art museums later. Slowly slow. It is all fine. The air is good.

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test …

Simple, Progressive, and Sensual

2 Ukiyo-e, 1 Islamic, -2 Impressionist, 1 Cubist, -2 Abstract and -7 Renaissance!