Nearly 1000 photos have been shot to bring you just a few from the event. Not everyone sees the same thing in a photograph. Some will like a picture that others will not. But, I think people universally like to people watch. Here are some people watching photos I liked. Perhaps there will be some you enjoy. They all can be enlarged to see some nuances that otherwise might be missed.
I supplied a few comments as well along the way:
Good looking young people can not take a bad photo. (ENLARGE)
The family that clowns together stays together. (ENLARGE)
Sometimes it is about the colors. Men dressing like women – whatever floats your boat. (ENLARGE)
Paul an Englishman living in Xico. He lives in our Hood in Ursulo Galvan. (ENLARGE)
Sometimes it is about a moment and a glimpse. (ENLARGE)
Green hair will always get my attention. (ENLARGE)
Mexico is about family – Mothers and Daughters. (ENLARGE)
Cell phones in a public setting can be disturbing or just attention grabbing. (ENLARGE)
Our neighbor in the red hat with her friend and son – waiting out the rain. (ENLARGE)
Did not like any of these? There are more to come. Give me another chance. Please Stay Tuned!
We are in our sixth year here in Mexico and the writing of this Blog.
A lot of water and tequila over the bridge in that time. We still don’t drink the water, the tequila – well – we still do.
The Guapa Senora Calypso reminds me that this is about the time I start to get antsy for change. She has weathered five 5-year cycles qualifying her as an expert on that. We did recently make the change to living in town – so a move was made pretty much on that schedule.
Mexico feels like home even though we are strangers in a strange land. Some locals have embraced us, few extranjeros (foreigners of our persuasion). We are OK with that.
Today it is back to cold and mostly gray causing me to grumble a bit.
A few minutes ago Anita apprised me that the Army Ants were cruising through our front yard. Back in November of 2006 we had already been here nearly two years however, we were freaked out by a path of ants the thickness of a garden hose that were traversing through our yard in Ursulo Galvan (read about that here) – no longer.
We were more than startled by those fast moving ants, where as now we know what those Army Ants are up to. We also know a whole lot more about the Mexican Army drug barricades. We know more about getting passports, visas, buying property in a foreign country as well as buying a car and registering it here in Mexico. We know how to pay our property taxes, our electric and water bills. We think we know how to pay the phone bill (more on that later). We can stand in line with the best of them and we know how to elbow out line breakers.
We know how to avoid most transito (traffic police) attempts to mordida us (put the bite on). We are not afraid to walk or drive down the Mexican streets at night. We negotiate our big truck down narrow roadways as well as scoot our little blue Chinese scooter through Xalapa’s curvy, confusing, maniacal highways.
The nerve endings that can be upended when a foreigner first comes to Mexico barley flinch after six years.
We are not intimidated by Mexico.
Yes there are robberies, hi-jackings, kidnappings and murders that happen here – like they do in the United States. We have encountered a number of United States warnings about visiting Mexico.
We have experienced two earthquakes and weathered a hurricane or two.
We have lived the ups and downs of daily life in our adopted country for a while now. It feels more like home than does the United States; or perhaps Mexico has made us people without a country as we are continually reminded (mostly by gringos) that we are just visitors. And we need to conduct ourselves as such.
We certainly feel more like a foreigner in our country of origin – go figure that one out.
Mexico is not perfect, far from it. But, the love affair continues. Perhaps this is somewhere between love and sex. Mexico is sexy. It is a country that wears many masks.
Masks of Mexico
I still complain about the trash, graffiti, poor education, corruption, environmental destruction, occasionally the Catholic Church and more – but then I had most of these complaints in the United States.
No se puede vivir sin amor
What is not the same is Mexico doesn’t scare me. I can go nose to nose with a uniformed 18 year old brandishing a machine gun as well as going toe to toe with a gordito policia oficer trying to get me to give him lunch money and maybe enough additional for a new dress for the wife or mistress.
I now have bravado; blustering and swaggering my way around Mexico. I suppose I am Malcolm Lowry-esque in this regard — alcohol, literature and Mexican life with some misadventure. Those shoes fit.
I can be late like a Mexican. I can say yes no matter what I really mean like a Mexican. I can be patient and impatient like a Mexican.
I can: barter with Mercado vendors; blather with some homeboys about futbol; and get boisterous when I feel put upon by some inefficient public minion.
A man without a country – maybe. But right now Mexico is where I hang my sombrero and I am OK with that. Stay Tuned.
Resuming our lives in Xico – the current primary residence, home. The weather has turned warm. We are a land of three seasons going right from winter to summer with no spring in between. It was over 80 F yesterday and is predicted to be near 85 F today.
No complaints here.
Traffic in the Hood
Playing catch-up with laundry, banking, and getting some of winter off the BIG white truck and the Jetta. We are visiting too.
Anita and I stumbled into a warm-up party being held by several of Guapa Senora Calypso’s amigas. They were celebrating Javier’s birthday (he by the way was still at work).
Party Girls – Warming Up for Javier’s Birthday
We spent some time with our friend Veronica checking out the progress of her pharmacy construction. The building is huge by our areas standards – the rooms remain long and narrow – the Mexican way.
New Pharmacy in the Hood (The light pole is leaning. This is not a parallax problem)
I am sorting through photos. Yesterday I came upon a ‘hack’ for my Canon 400D camera. I am amazed at what some people will do to entertain themselves and then bless the rest of us with their playing with bits and bytes.
My Canon is more than two years old – in digital engineering time that is a old.
The hack provides several features that give the old picture taking box new life! I am excited to be able to get additional ISO values including double the fastest from 1600 to 3200! (ISO values tell you how fast your camera reacts to light. With a high ISO you can take photographs with a slower shutter speed, which is often an advantage – in low light situations, for example, or for exposures with flash or telephoto lenses.
I don’t mean to turn this into Photography 101 but, I am excited to have many more ISO options and an additional focus option - a spot meter feature that had been lacking. There is even a new special menu that heretofore was only available to Canon techs. I was able to see I had 13,517 shutter releases (shots) since my Canon was new. That is a LOT of exposures!
My photography aficionado amigo John Paul who I just had to tell about the hack asked if I really needed ISO 3200 being that the digital photos are noisy (grainy looking) at that high of speed. The short answer is yes. I will use it and the 1000/1250/1600/2000/2500/3200 ISO’s in as much as Xico and the other cities in our area come to life at night. I love to take night time photos. Recall the photos I took at 3 AM of Boulder Dam construction.
I have to put my camera aside and pay bills that were waiting patiently for our return. Stay Tuned for some night time pictures.
The other day we drove into Xico to pay our property taxes, check on our rental and have lunch at our favorite cocina economica, The Tias. During the drive and subsequent moving about the town of Xico we noticed a lot of new graffiti markings. I even saw a truck with the canopy marked by paint can graffiti.
It looks as if graffiti is endemic to Mexico, but then the U.S. certainly has its share. Here in our area I would suggest that graffiti is now at an epidemic level. This quite simply boggles my mind. In the latter part of the 20th and now into the 21st Century the earth is scorched with the markings of restless, mindless youth. The billions of dollars spent on education are doing what for society?
Across the street at our Casita in Ursulo Galvan a block wall and a wood door have been marked by the pubescent nina that lives there. The apparent plan is soon the door is to be replaced and the wall stucco’d. But in the mean time these areas have been tagged to provide entertainment for the restless young girl – all in good fun.
We know the circumstances because when we started to commiserate for the travesty the mother explained it is all in good fun. But do all the youth and parents for that matter here in the Colonia of 1700 know this is just good fun, or do the children see inroads to this trashy barrio identity crisis and their parents accept yet another insult to respectable living?
Why would a parent allow this activity as some sort of release because it will be covered one day – and perhaps not too soon as the wheels of construction over there run very slow? There are two casas in various stages of construction, and have been for the last five years. Is it not a training ground for future tagging?
Until they do get that wall and door covered we will be entertained by these barrio markings, as will the rest of the Hood. We and the neighbor to our east have long walls directly across from this barrio blackboard – ours are bigger and certainly more inviting.
Six months ago if you turned off the main road between Coatepec and Xico to head up to our Colonia and further in you would have noticed a distinct lack of barrio markings; but it started creeping up from the turn then and is now there in the Hood.
Have we adults all gone nuts? Have we given up on our neighborhoods to our children? Apparently the repercussions for such behavior are in no way a deterrent.
I know trying to reason with teenagers is often a lost cause, but has anyone suggested some mass media programs to let these taggers know they are ruining their own inheritance. That the buildings and neighborhoods that they are defacing will one day belong to them; that the costs involved in cleaning up their mess eventually gets passed back to them via higher taxes and parents who have to buy $45.00 gallons of paint instead of those $300.00 sneakers they are wanting.
Might we suggest that by turning their neighborhoods into trashy looking slums might reduce the support and investment made by government and business? The houses they live in lose value as they convert their middle class neighborhood into the likes of a low end barrio.
It would seem that even if you have not yet enough sense to come out of the rain that you might be able to do the math that equals defecating in one’s own nest as not smart.
Here in Mexico they haven’t been able to stop littering – it also is at epidemic proportions here. We are enough generations into littering here that quite simply the adults seem to have no care to stop it – soon there will be second and third generation taggers. There seems to be no stopping any of this.
There are a whole lot of people on this planet now and seemingly few that care about the future of it. People here in Mexico are starting to go to the gym and exercise – they are running and buying jogging outfits – getting real first world ideas. But, they won’t do any deep knee bends, squats or toe touching to pick up the trash in their neighborhood; and they surely aren’t going to disrupt the happy family unit by beating the tar out of little Jose or Mary for defacing the neighborhood.
What do we do when we find something wrong, when someone is acting against what we believe is right, moral or ethical? More often, the answer is – nothing. And here in passive Mexico that is written in stone.
How long this can go on is anyone’s guess. Graffiti has increased by a magnitude in the short few years we have been here – there is no end in sight; quite the opposite. Now when I say this is paradise to a future resident I qualify it with when you look past the litter and graffiti. Stay Tuned!
Two years ago about this time we wrote a Blog entry (Theory of Relativity) about how cold it was:
“The relative temperature here is COLD. At 8 AM it was 49 F or 9.5C
Surprisingly it is almost the same temperature in Pueblo, CO. although at night it is in the 20’s (-4 C)
46 F (8 C) was the coldest it got here overnight.
But 50 F / 10 C and colder is bone chilling ‘round these parts.”
That weather report was two years ago. Now in January 2010 we are experiencing a cold snap expecting some sub 50F temperatures tomorrow through the weekend.
A Yahoo headline this morning read, “Frigid weather hits Midwest, -52 wind chill in ND.” So we are not alone in all this. But for us living in Mexico, take away that “-“ and utter 52 F or 11 C and shoulder blades close, necks sink below collars and faces grimace. “That’s cold!”
Obviously not a lot of people in North America will have sympathy for our cold plight. Somehow even knowing that there are others suffering in far colder regions, I was unable to feel better about the current 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 C) as I sit here with cold fingers tapping still colder keys.
Most have no heat what-so-ever here in the tri-city area (Xalapa-Coatepec-Xico) so sub-60F inside temperatures is common place this time of year. But for us sissy extranjeros we will retreat to our nine foot Lance camper blocked up on our Casita property in Ursulo Galvan and crank up the little forced air heater to 65 as the temperature goes low (maybe even 67F and live a little!).
I remembered that during my courting of Guapa Senora Calypso I had promised to always keep her warm – this vow was reiterated while we snuggled in front of a fireplace in Bend Oregon where we spent our honeymoon skiing and things.
I can tell by the look on her face when we got up to 57 F in the house that maybe I was slipping on that promise. So tonight we will head to the Lance camper and warm up – with our 20th anniversary not even cold I am bound and determined to back up that promise; and my butt to that force air heater. Stay Warm and Stay Tuned!
Our last entry asked Carlos Slim if he could hear me now after describing some difficult circumstances relating to our getting a phone line and dsl Internet installed. Well I am here to testify someone from Telmex was listening. I have to bring flowers and candy to get as much attention from my Guapa Senora.
Slim has been quoted as being unfazed by criticism: “When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”
And yet Monday morning following my Sunday Blog entry I received comment from Jaime Duran working at Telmex in México City. Per his request I sent an email and by late afternoon I had an email from Telmex’s Head of Unit Quality in Customer Service in Mexico City. She asked me several questions which I stumbled through replying in Spanish via email. She emailed back:
“Mr. Calypso,
We thank [you for your] attention, your Spanish is very good….”
Thank you Google Translate.
Tuesday, our friend and neighbor in Xico SKYPE’d us in Ursulo Galvan to let us know Telmex was on the phone wanting to meet with us at our casa in Xico. We had given our friends phone number as a contact point when we were visiting the Telmex office in Xalapa.
We set up a meeting for 11 Am Wednesday at our casa there in town. A snazzy Telemex service truck pulled up in front at around 11 am. Two very serious, well dressed in Telmex uniform, employees came to check our line and connection quality in our casa.
After some checking they changed out the micro filter that the telephone and modem plug into (the dongle). They also changed our line down the road from a secondary feed to a primary in order to assure a clean signal.
It was pointed out that our two newly purchased Emerson telephones were noisy and should be returned to where we bought them in the U.S. – not sure about that since they sell essentially the same phone “Telefono Trim Class” in their Xalapa office.
Two Telemex Professionals in Our Living Room
The two men answered my Internet speed questions and seemed to be checking our connection carefully. Later someone called to ask about connection quality and still later one of the two fellows came again to check on things. He said they were calling and there was no answer. We explained we were out. And that we didn’t realize there was a need for us to be here. We had been distributing Three Kings gifts to some ninos in the Hood as today January 6th is THE day for gifts to the Mexican children.
The serviceman called and was called back and all was good. We had been showered with attention. In all instances the Telmex people we encountered have been professional and polite.
All this checking of lines and equipment was a surprise as our complaint centered on the details of the process of acquiring a telephone line and a WIFI modem in hand.
The questions that had been emailed were in fact all related to that process. I am in hopes we will hear more about that. But, we certainly got Telmex’s attention. We now know they are listening – or at least reading this Blog Did you know Carlos Slim is dating Queen Noor the Queen Mother of Jordan? I think they make a nice couple. Stay Tuned!
This time of year almost all “extranjeros” Bloggers living in Mexico will be writing and showing photos about the celebrations. There are a lot of them. If you want to read and see photos about the season you have but to look over to the left on my Blog site and visit Decembers past.
Here in Mexico by the end of November through February second it is virtually non-stop celebrating.
Streets get closed; some will be ‘painted’ with colored sawdust designs; some adorned with shrines; some will have firework laden wooden framed ‘toros’ darting and dodging about with colorful rockets exploding in all directions, and still others with have real live bulls terrorizing borrachos (those in various stages of inebriation) within erected fence lined streets.
There will be music trucks with gargantuan speaker boxes driven by huge fire breathing amplifiers – dancing in the streets. Groups of the faithful in numbers that crowd and block streets as they follow behind hoisted plaster Madonna’s like mice behind the Pied Piper.
In each procession there is one or more young hombre in charge of igniting rockets lifting off from meter length sticks. A breathy whoosh and three or four seconds later a report that can be heard for a mile – more perhaps. The blasts start by 5 AM and continue until just a few hours before it will start all over again.
Dirt floor clap boarded shacks to the classiest casas display colorful shrines honoring the Madonna and occasionally even the birth of Jesus by way of a nativity scene.
This year we are touring around Xico on our little scooter stopping for the parades and looking into windows and open doorways to see the beautiful, colorful alters – it is really something to see the results of the energy, effort and faith.
Today is still more special. December 12, 1531 on a hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image appeared miraculously on the cloak of a simple indigenous peasant by the name of Juan Diego.
That milargo is one of the high points of the season. The Mother of Jesus, her likeness emblazoned on this simple hombre’s coat on a hill in our adopted country lo those many years ago.
I woke up early this special day prepared to celebrate; to watch the running of the bulls in Ursulo Galvan and later the running of many fiery wood framed rocket launcher toros in the city of Xico. As I lay in bed I started thinking about our unlikely hero Juan Diego.
Since I wasn’t around back in 1531 I can only imagine how the fame might have affected Juan Diego. I mean here was a simple guy, a peasant, cast into apparent perpetual fame. If this event were to have happened in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century instead of the sixteenth century I imagined we would be seeing Juan Diego on Ed Sullivan or Oprah. There might be a line of jackets carrying the Juan Diego brand name and the Holy Mother’s image.
I imagined just what a good agent might do for a simple peasant like Juan Diego – even his name has a certain ring to it; T-shirts to cereal boxes to major endorsements this guy would be going places.
We don’t know if Juan was married. I imagined how different the holiday might be if our unlikely hero got caught cheating on his esposa. The endorsements might dry up and perhaps the entire holiday tarnished from his bad behavior?
Juan Diego was lucky to have fallen into fame before the paparazzi might have exposed his life to the public in an unsavory light – Hallelujah!
Our unlikely hero’s part was minor, his plaster statute is always smaller than that of the Madonna; yet here nearly 500 years later this simple indigenous peasant maintains his lofty place in history. I am glad for that because today will be a very good time here in Mexico – wish you were here (well at least for a visit). Stay Tuned!
Some years ago when we were new to the area a fellow that had been here a couple of years took me to task for remarking about the amount of trash cast on the sides of the road and the holes and generally poor condition of the roadways between Coatepec, Teocelo, Xico Viejo and Xico.
This person suggested something to the effect that if I didn’t like it I should not consider living here. Of course we now do live here. His suggestion fell on deaf ears. There are many good reasons to be here without maintaining a blind eye to the things that are not so good.
BJ and Carlos are here once again from NOB. They have been staying with us while they have been finding a rental and now getting moved in. Sunday the four of us took a ride to Teocelo to get shrimp cocktails and beers at one of our favorite haunts.
It is not far, about 7 miles from Casa Campanas in Xico. The restaurant is at the entry of town. After we decided to head into the center of town and beyond. We drove through Indepencia and then Monte Blanco. I took advantage of the fact Carlos was driving to enjoy the scenery.
However I was greatly disappointed in the fact that the road was in terrible condition. Carlos remarked that the towns were not appealing. I think chiefly this was due to his needing to be diligently looking at the path in front of him to avoid huge, tire damaging craters. In more than a few places we simply had to slowly drive through the gullies as no relief was in sight.
Not having any knowledge about road building I remain confounded as to how the roads in our area are in simple terms horrible. On the surface it seems that a great deal of effort is expended to maintain these thoroughfares and yet they are almost always in disrepair?
The roadway from San Marcos de Leon all the way to the far end of Monte Blanco is simply awful. Sadly the worst stretch is within the center of Teocelo. As we driving out of Teocelo proper we spotted a new friend Rob who we had met during a real estate search. Rob is an artisan guitar maker who I plan on devoted an entire entry on soon.
Rob spotted we honked and both vehicles came to a stop. Rob and I got out of our respective vehicles to chat. Early on in conversation I asked, “What is going on with the roads here?”
Rob had his theory as to their lack of attention. Whatever the reason the road conditions create a very shoddy appearance especially in that they are the introduction to the area – it is very sad.
While lacking any knowledge about what it takes to make and maintain roads, I can write that the poor construction and maintenance of the roadways will lead to less interest in the community.
Carlos brought an extra set of shock absorbers with him from the U.S. This while the current set on his vehicle is about a year old. While this may seem unusual, I think cars here get longer service from their windshield wipers than their shock absorbers.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time watching the road in front of you when you visit our area, and if you can look past the road conditions Teocelo is a charming place to visit. Stay Tuned!
A couple of dawns ago a neighbor in the Hood had a house explosion, an entire meltdown of everything other than stone. A poor but giving group of friends and neighbors gave items for this woman to begin rebuilding her life. Everything she owned went away with the explosion and subsequent fire.
Shortly before the sad event Anita and I had been talking about the dangers here in Mexico with propane gas.
In all our areas neighborhoods, poor and rich, stake bed trucks slowly cruise around like stalking cats. There is always a hombre riding in the back with the tall bottles of gas banging on a spent gas canister to let the surrounding area know propane gas is available.
In the poorer neighbor hoods most folks turn the valves on the tanks to open only when they need to heat water or light their stoves. Pilot lights are lit twenty minutes before showers so the gas lasts a little longer – pocket book conservation. The two sizes of tanks available last from 15 to 60 days.
When hailed street side the roving propane service will deliver the tank to the back yard or often even right in a kitchen or other room. There disconnecting and reconnecting hoses with a crescent wrench switch the tanks out.
The more cautious will apply 4 inches or so of white Teflon plumbers tape to the threads of the brass fitting that inserts into the tanks valve assembly. Poor folks merely connect threads to valves.
The still wiser might stir some dish soap into a glass applying the bubbled mixture around the valve looking for expanding bubbles that would indicate a gas leak. But, most simply connect up without thought or caution.
This ever so common practice here in Mexico had Anita and I wondering how many propane gas explosion accidents must occur?
Freedom does not come without responsibility and risk. If there is not a certified person installing the tank risk increases. Granted there are plenty of small propane canisters gassing up barbeques throughout the U.S. but the risks are far less than casual installations of gas pipes attached to often-changed tanks in Mexican casas.
Propane gas is less expensive here and a lot easier to get. Propane gas hoses, fittings and adapters are available at every corner ferretería (hardware store). We are not required to get a building permit to change out a water heater like the city of Las Vegas, Nevada and most cities in the United States. I love the freedom and cost savings, but like so many freedoms this one does not come without the need for personal responsibility and assumption of risks. Stay Tuned!
We haven’t rented a place since – well since I was my son’s age (about 44 years ago). Moving however has been a common occurrence, and I hate it. That is what we are doing now – moving stuff to our newly rented townhouse in Xico, Veracruz, Mexico.
We hope to be settled in before Carlos and BJ show up – around the time of the Day of the Dead Celebration.
The landlords agreed to have the entire house grounded (see previous entry). The electrician, a reasonably competent and very affable fellow is now into his fourth day of perhaps seven total days. I have been helping out where I can and of course overseeing the work.
What’s that old joke: shop rate is $50.00 or $70.00 if you help (you can tell it is an old joke, no way can you get those shop rates any longer in the U.S.).
In our new Hood we have lots of visitors trying to be the first one on the block to sell us handmade tortillas, maid services, water, cheese, or gardening services. While all this is going on we are going back and forth bringing stuff, packing, unpacking – you know the moving drill.
On the first morning that we slept there I was on the balcony drinking coffee as a beautiful day was starting up. There directly south was Mount Orizaba. Not as good of look as from our Rancho del Cielo, but a fine view. The sun felt good as it has been raining a lot.
We don’t have an Internet connection yet. I haven’t decided on whether to setup yet another Hughes Satellite dish or connect to a cable service; still checking the quality of the options.
We can make food, but have not moved the refrigerator yet. We are waiting for the electrician to get finished. We’re eating out a lot – both to learn about the new neighborhood and because we are too tired to think about cooking right now.
Because we are 2.7 miles between locations the trip there and back is less painful than some of our long moving trails of the past, like 1300 miles from Ashland, Oregon to Prescott, Arizona – so I shouldn’t complain – but of course I do – I figure I have earned the right – or so I think.
I had to do some modifications on the gas lines to get the water heater working – but that happened and we can take showers now – so don’t be afraid to visit us in Xico – bring sleeping bags and an air mattress.
From the department of rambling: the weather has been wonderful.
We scooted into Coatepec for pesos and grub. Last night we watched Columbia beat Mexico . The Aztecs simply cannot get anywhere near the net – what’s up with that?
A real surprise was when we connected up the new VISIO HD television to an on the roof antenna. While scanning for channels the two major channels (11 and 13 here locally) appeared with digital HD sister channels! All I can say is WOW! The beauty, well one of many, of digital free air channels is the reception – crystal clear (bad news for some of those heavily made up novella actors).
While we may be in the depths of an emerging country – what a pleasant surprise to see those two HD channels come up on the scan. I had planned on going back to the Hood (Ursulo Galvan) to watch the pathetic futbol game from the Cotton Bowl; but I had to stay and watch on the HD channel. I was able to see Mexicos poor showing in spectacular 1081 HD – try it – you’ll love it!
Last: have you seen those signs for the physically challenged (handicap parking) that include parking for pregnant women – how cool is that! I have yet to see one in the more progressive U.S.
Did you know Carlos Slim is dating Queen Noor the Queen Mother of Jordan? I think they make a nice couple. Stay Tuned!