San Miguel is full of women supplied with weapons.
Pass through any mercado, any street corner near a public plaza, and chances are good a woman will be stationed nearby with a stand or a bucket of street food. Order some roasted corn or fresh fruit, and a dark-eyed woman supplied with a knife sharp enough to separate your current thought from your next one will serve it up. Getting some pollo rostizado involves having a woman expertly wield a roasting fork that could double as a spear and a chopped-down machete with a handle wrapped securely in duct tape. Egad. The one thing that should never happen here is a female uprising…
Tails Out of School
I have never been one to really get into the schoolgirl fetish, but I’ve known my share of folks who can’t really party down without a plaid mini-skirt and knee socks. For whatever arcane reason, San Miguel seems to be home to the sexiest school girls on the planet. You can be shopping in town some place, and then 2:30 arrives, and suddenly the streets have turned into some dirty old man’s wet dream. Uniformed girls in knee socks with make up jobs belonging to someone 5-10 years older flood the streets, touching up their hair and bopping along to the bus stop. Dang, it’s ridiculous.
August 19th, 2005
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Last night featured a full moon that was incredible. Out in the Mexican countryside, where things like street lights are practically non-existent, the moon outshone even the stars and lit up the courtyard like a flood light. It was pure magic. All three of us stood outside for several minutes, just watching it.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how the first witches began–just women looking at a full moon and realizing they could do something.
August 19th, 2005
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All over the area here in San Miguel is a painted exhortation in Spanish: “Juntos Somos Mas”. Roughly translated, it means “Together we are more,” meaning something like “we are more working together than separately.”
In practice, what “Juntos Somos Mas” actually means is that whenever it’s possible to split a job that would ordinarily employ one person into one that would employ several, do so. That way, everyone gets a little bit of something. On the bus there’s a kid whose job it is to hand out ticket stubs and help people on and off. In the supermarket, whenever the cashier needs to break a large bill, a second cashier actually runs the bill over to the manager’s table and brings back change.
Alternatively, the piecework realities of Mexico’s economy also mean that if there’s a way to split up something sellable, do so, and more people can get a little something selling it. If there’s a spare spot of roadside, a place to set up a table or a booth, there will be someone there, selling something. In the streets are flocks of kids selling gum, toy vendors, shoe shine salesmen, ladies with buckets full of nopales, salsa, and tortillas. The mercados are already carrying bootlegs of first run movies still playing in theaters down the street. Most booths selling music “discos” carry their share of CD’s of dubious provenance, sporting xeroxed labels declaring the contents to be the “best Hip-Hop of 2004,” or whatever. Stand still longer than 30 seconds in the Tuesday flea market, and someone will wander by with replacement blender carafes, tools, honey products, or anything else. Most startling today was the kids in the flea market trolling the aisles selling insecticide. Each kid had a rolling table, loaded with fly strips (the dangerous kind that should never be used in sealed buildings) and bright red bug killer piled in paper plates, sparkling and glittering like colored sugar.
Joy’s told me a story of an old woman she and Lena encountered in Morelia. In the mornings this woman panhandled change. Then, she would stop in the market to buy limes, which she would quickly turn into limeade and sell during the afternoons. The combination gave her more money than she would get just by panhandling. Few people, as long as they have some way of making a living, wait for handouts. It’s a stark contrast to the homeless panhandlers you see in the Bay Area–I’m often shocked by how many are younger and probably stronger than I am.
August 16th, 2005
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One of the first things for a tourist to notice in Mexico is what appears to be laxer safety standards. Although many safety exhortations are posted by the highway, most drivers take them as “serving suggestions” rather than laws of the land. Similarly, I was shocked to see kids playing in piles of dirt beside the contruction work going on in El Jardin. Walking in San Miguel, for that matter, is very much an at-your-own-risk project. Steep sidewalks, cobblestone streets, and bright sun at altitude can add up to a much higher possibility of falling over than the average American pedestrian may be used to.
Part of the reason for this is the lack of stupidity lawsuits as we have had in the States. Here in Mexico, you own your own mistakes–if you insist on walking on the sunny side of the street at midday, what you get is sunstroke, not any legal settlement for the lack of signs on the streets. Should your car crash because hot coffee spilled in your lap, yep, it’s still your fault.
Same thing applies to shopping. Most groceries come from separate vendors in the mercado, not one huge supermarket. For instance, tortillas are something that one rarely buys in the grocery store–there’s always a woman or her auntie or her grandma just down the road who makes them fresh, daily. Shopping involves a lot of pointing, indicating that you want to buy that particular cheese, or melon, or steak. You choose it, you buy it.
August 12th, 2005
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One aspect of Mexico that may be hard for some folks to adjust to right away is the extent of its wildlife. Specifically, the bugs, which range in size from just-a-little-ol’-ant to “it came from Cahokia” invasion-size beetles. Then there are the mammals. I’ve already commented about the dogs; but at any given time out here in rancho country, there are also sheep, cows, donkeys, horses, and goats all mooing, bleating, neighing, or otherwise commenting on the events of the day as they see them. A local rooster has apparently seen it as his job to make sure the world stays awake no matter what time it is. Everytime I hear him, I think: “boyo, if this were Kauai, you’d already be in a stewpot…”
Some of the wild life has come to visit us: Lena went swimming one afternoon, only to encounter a small gopher snake. One of the local cats has decided that we put out a decent bowl of chow, and stops by for both desayuno and comida. I’ve also been told there are rats and possums and the like. I felt so good about putting out a bowl of food for a probably-pregnant kitty cat, only to discover that el Raton, and his buddies, and probably getting there first. Oh well.
It’s a Dog Dog Dog Dog World
Dogs are everywhere in Mexico. It just seems to be the way of things. No household yard is complete without its private pooch dozing in the sun. No mercado can be considered well-supplied without its share of the canine population mooching for free hand-outs. Just the other day I had just purchased 2 rostizado (fire-roasted) chickens for the dinner table, only to discover that I would be passing through the plaza with a large, hungry-looking German Shepherd in it….
August 11th, 2005
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The hacienda isn’t located in San Miguel proper, but an outlying village known as La Cineguita. The local buses wend their way along the dusty roads on a somewhat regular basis, most stopping at a major three-way intersection. The intersection itself has no street lights, or even a stop sign. However, if you sit on an abandoned curb facing this intersection long enough, you will eventually see everyone in La Cineguita. And their dogs. And their donkeys. And their cows. With the people, it’s good form to nod and supply a “Buenas dias” as they pass.
Dogs, by the way, are everywhere in Mexico, including inside many of the mercados. The word “mercado” translates as “market”, but doesn’t really get across the sense of it. In a regular “supermercado”, such as CostCo (there is one, an hour’s drive away) or Gigante (the local version of KMart), you have the bright lights and aisles of snacks, cereal, and other things that city folks are used to. In the mercado, what you have are aisles of large booths, offering everything imaginable. You can buy belts with the PowerPuff girls logo, pinatas in the shape of Incredibles characters, fresh vegetables, amazingly ugly acrylic yarn, blacksmithing tools, meat, teenage fashion, music and movies, and of course cooked snacks like huaraches, tortas, and licuados. About two blocks away from El Jardin is one of the main mercados in San Miguel, and next to it is the Artisan’s Market, an eye-popping collection of silverwork, folk art, and even songbirds.
¿Donde esta el sanitario?
As most guides to San Miguel point out, public bathrooms are few and far between. In a country where bus riders are reminded to “No pisar los asientes,” a bathroom visit away from home requires some forward planning. First, look around for a sign marked “Sanitarios,” or the more prosaic (and colonial) “WC”. Once you’ve spotted one, check close by. There should be a booth or a table, staffed either by a very old lady, or some disaffected teenager. Hand over two pesos, and you’ll get in return a prefolded and meager wad of toilet paper. That accomplished, you can select the appropriate entry–”Damas” or “Caballeros”, and you’re on your way to relief.
August 7th, 2005
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San Miguel de Allende is about color and exposed rebar and the art of saying “No,” frequently and politely. It’s about the vegetable stands with onions that glisten so much they look almost like ceramic sculptures. It’s a small bird packed into a mesh shopping bag for sale on the street. It’s a strange combination of wealth and poverty, dust and greenery, Internet and travel by donkey…
I ventured into town with Lena for the first time yesterday, after six days of serious recuperation at a friend’s hacienda. “House” isn’t really an accurate description for something with four bedrooms and an Olympic-size pool fed by a hot spring. The water comes out of the ground at about 95 degrees. In my room, the bathroom is the size of my bedroom in the States, with a ceiling twice as high…anyway, you can see it for yourself in the photo album.
San Miguel’s tourist center is a garden plaza known as El Jardin, which at the moment is ripped up for massive amounts of construction. The tourists still flock there, though–it’s easy enough to tell from the number of t-shirt and tequila glass sellers. Egad. Welcome to Gringolandia. Your best bet for avoiding it is to head away from the Jardin…
The streets are narrow one-lane affairs where trucks, SUVs, ATVs, cars and motorcycles all vie for the same right of way. Joy tells me that somebody in San Miguel must be doing landmark business in repairing side-view mirrors. The streets themselves are lined with massive ornate wooden doors, behind which you’re like to find anything from an expensive fashion shop, a “farmaceria”, a cambio, a computer store, or even a sushi bar. Sushi in inland Mexico? I preferred to take my chances down in the Mercado de San Juan, where ladies in amazingly ugly aprons sell vegetables and serve up tortas. My breakfast was a “huarache”, a slim baked-and-fried tortilla in the shape of a sandal bottom, topped with stewed chicharron (pigskin to you gringos), picadillo (a ground beef mixture) and plenty of ‘roja picante’.
When in doubt, get food with plenty of chile and lime. They’re both natural antiseptics…
August 5th, 2005
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