What can we say?  These little pleasures actually came with a little packet of sauce attached. We have not yet sampled these peanuts. We’re afraid that we’ll reduce their value if we open their original packaging.

On another note, I found a school bus/truck graveyard a couple blocks from our house. Check out the Old Car Gallery.

Today, we had our last day of Spanish tutoring before we start in with a class on Tuesday. Our teacher, Cecilia, was quite a character although I’m not so sure she’s aware of it. Despite being a language teacher, her English wasn’t so hot and we had a difficult time asking her complicated questions about the lessons. In addition, she’d do things like, we’d be going over how to describe nationalities (Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. Soy Americano, etc) and, as a way of prompting us to say something like, “El es de Japon,” (“He’s from Japan”) she’d pull at the corners of her eyes and make them all squinty. We sort of blanched at that, recognizing that motion as the ubiquitous children’s gesture for mocking Asians. But she did drop a totally priceless gem on us. During our first week, she made a hilarious distinction. Well, maybe the distinction is ultimately more useful than hilarious, but the way she put it to us was off the fucking charts!

So, she says to us, “When it’s hot out, you can say, ‘Esta caliente.’ And when you’re hot, you can say, ‘Tengo calor.’ But never say ‘Estoy caliente’ because that means you want the sexo.

Aside from a few hiccups like that one, the classes went really well. The downside is that when our classes for the whole month of May start next week, there won’t be enough enrolled students to necessitate an afternoon class so we’ll have to be up for the 9am class. That’s not so bad except for that fact that it looks like we’ll have to start back at the beginning of the book that we’ve almost completed in the two weeks of tutoring. And even if the class can cover the same ground we did in two weeks, that’s still HALF THE GODDAMN CLASS of review. And it’s not like the material isn’t fresh in our fucking heads, either. I kind of wish I had this information before I made a completely non-fucking-refundable payment on the classes.
Poo.

But on another note: Churros.
We’ve recently discovered this heart-stoppingly fantastic Mexican delicacy. I guess delicacy is the wrong word because there’s nothing delicate about these bastards. They’re essentially deep-fried, sugar coated, crispy sticks of corn meal. Here’s a picture:

As you can tell by the way they’re rendering this brown paper bag soggy and transparent, their less-than-subtle flavor is utterly magnificent.
You can buy these delicious sons-of-bitches for less than fifty cents per greasy bag of six. Here’s another picture:

Mmmm… Imagine if funnel cake could do that thing that dying stars do and get ultra dense and consolidated. That’s kind of how churros are. If you took a thousand funnel cakes and turned them into one single gravity vortex of oil, sugar, and fantastic taste, they’d transcend their funnel cake existence and become the ultradense Churro about which physicists would theorize for decades.

And being a physicist myself, I decided to do a little experiment. I called that experiment, “I’ll save a couple in a ziplock bag so I can have them with my coffee in the morning.” I took as a given that anything, when sealed in a ziplock bag, would last overnight and I think that’s a pretty good assumption given the miraculous previous performance of ziplock bags. I mean, wouldn’t you trust just about anything to a ziplock bag? I would. And I did. I put the churros in the plastic bag and left them on the counter. I didn’t put them in the fridge because, being a physicist and not a dummy, I knew that the sweet grease that was already making both the paper bag and my very hands slick and transparent would coagulate and become utterly inedible and repellant as soon as it was chilled below room temperature. So, I left the churros on the counter, in the ziplock bag. I put their original paper bag in there as well, just so they’d feel at home. I went to bed and dreamed coronary dreams about sweet churros. When I woke up in the morning, I saw an amazing sight. The churros had rendered the paper bag entirely transparent! Here’s a picture:

I’ve never even seen fish and chips do that! I mean, that’s what you expect from mopping off your greasy pizza with a thin little napkin, not from leaving your fried dough in a paper bag! Needless to say, I was amazed and excited as I popped those bad boys in the microwave (sans paper bag, of course). Thirty seconds later, the tasty smell of churros and coffee mixed in the kitchen as I opened the microwave door. I dipped a churro into the coffee and took a bite. Much to my dismay the core of the churro was disappointingly inedible. I couldn’t get my teeth through it. I guess the paper bag had absorbed all of the tenderizing grease out of the churro and left the center of it a tough, dry, gristly, corpse. Or, at least that’s how it tasted.
As a physicist, I can now posit what I call, “Hauptman’s Churro Theory” which states that the best churros are fresh churros.

So, a bit more on Easter: Mexicans like explosions. That is the conclusion I have drawn from witnessing Easter here. I have begun to see their point of view on the matter—explosions are sweet. On Saturday night (while watching War of the Worlds, funnily enough) we were startled by the sound of fireworks. This is sort of strange because we have become rather accustomed to the fireworks and even learned to sleep through them. We went to the window to find that a huge party/ceremony of some sort was going on at the church at the end of our block. The bells were tolling loudly and really bright, beautiful fireworks were being set off on the church lawn (perilously close to onlookers, might I add). There was also some kind of procession accompanying the noise with a big glowing Jesus ( I think..), but we weren’t really close enough to see the specifics of it, as we were observing the whole spectacle by hanging out of our bedroom windows. I think the fireworks and bell tolling must have gone on for a half hour. We got ready for bed later that night with anticipation about what Sunday might have in store for us.

We decided to go to the square on Sunday morning to see if there was anything going on. When we got there, it was packed and everyone seemed to be congregating on one side of the park. As we walked towards the crowd we saw the piñatas. There must have been 15 or 20 of them, all to human scale and likeness. They were just dangling there on clotheslines, garishly painted, some clad in actual fabric, with big hoops attached around their midsections. At noon, the bells of the Parroquia began to toll and the first clothesline was pulled down to the ground and a piñata person was lit. Once released, the papier-machiet figure vaulted up on the line and spun furiously in space. The hoop fuse was glowing bright orange. Finally the figure slowed and halted. The fuse made a few crackling, sputtering noises. Nothing. The disappointed crowd sighed. The clothesline dipped again and another piñata came up spinning. Again the spinning stopped and the fuse coughed, but this time—BLAM! It was like artillery ricocheting through the square, and the piñata person was obliterated in a shower of paper-machiet body parts. The crowd cheered and clapped furiously. So it went with the rest of the figures. Some exploded, some were duds. The crowd reacted animatedly. One piñata failed to explode but caught on fire. The crowd whistled and cat-called as it’s clothing burned away, revealing its crude paper-maché body. After about the first eight explosions, we got the idea and sore ears, so we decided to head off for a walk. Everything except the tourist spots was closed. On our way home, we passed several people, young and old, tourists and locals carrying dismembered parts from the piñata people. An old gringo man was proudly displaying a head he had snagged from the carnage. It was gruesome and hilarious. I found myself wanting to go home and put marshmallow peeps in the microwave, but alas, there wasn’t even a single chocolate bunny to be found here… oh well. Mexican Easter was great anyway.

I was feeling much better Wednesday morning, so the first thing we did was go out to the grocery store and get the fixin’s for French toast. We were a little worried cause we only had 80 pesos. We got a loaf of bread, half a dozen eggs and maple syrup for 35 pesos. Yeah, that’s like $3.00 for breakfast. It was so delicious. If anyone has any doubts in their mind about French toast, use the Bimbo bread. Similar to Wonderbread and with the nutritional value of iceberg lettuce, the stuff basically acts as a sweet sponge to soak up all the egg batter. As Jon was making himself some bacon to go along with the French toast, he was struck by a moment of cholesterol genius. He cooked both of his pieces of toast in the bacon grease. He said it was amazing, but that he could hear his heart weeping in his chest afterwards.

After breakfast, we went on a long walk with the camera. We are finding ourselves a little perplexed in the areas past the town center where the street grid really breaks down. So, we went exploring. We’ve uploaded new pictures from a neighborhood past San Antonio (that’s where we live) as you are heading out of town.

For lunch we went back into town and towards the produce market. Jon stopped on the way and bought a chicken (yes, a whole one, roasted and in a bag, just the way the Mexicans like it). While he was queuing for the bird I sat down beside some girls who were selling gordita fixings. We had an awkward conversation during which they giggled a lot, but in the end I managed to get some gordita shells and a bag of nopales (cactus salad). Then we went across the street into the market and got an avacado and some tomatoes. We had a semi-natural interaction with the produce lady in Spanish and I felt very good about that. As we were leaving the market, we saw a woman at one of the cart vendors out front was selling churros. We didn’t know what they were, but they looked and smelled a little like funnel cake and were covered in sugar. How could that be bad? We bought a bag of six of them for less that a dollar and ate them on the way home. Oh my dear Lord. As Bon Jovi would say, “It cuts like a knife, but if feels so right”. Turns out they are deep fried corn fritters usually served with hot chocolate, though they are so rich by themselves I am not sure why you need the hot chocolate. (It also, probably hurts so good.)

We made a fabulous lunch. Jon had chicken tacos and I made nopales and guacamole gorditas. I am so in to the cactus salad, but Jon says it is gross because it is a little snotty. I cannot dispute this claim. Cactus does, in fact, have a slime about it. But it is damn tasty cooked up with some peppers, onions, chilies and cilantro. After such feasting, we had to take our customary post-gorging nap.

Allie came over around 5 and we hung out at the apartment for a few hours. It is a strange thing here—there is a lot of daylight, say from 6 in the morning when the sun rises to 9 pm when it is finally dark. I have a hard time figuring out when to eat dinner and go to bed. We were barely getting 13 hours of daylight when we left Philly. Now, it doesn’t seem appropriate to eat dinner until about 8. Allie left to go meet her friend Alice, while Jon and I went to a café with free wireless access so we could read the news and check our mail. My favorite thing about the café is how they like to serve you iced coffee in a brandy snifter. It is like slurping a bowl of coffee. Very swanky.

Our dinner plan had been to meet Allie and go to Tortilan with her for tortas, but by the time we went to meet her, she had a already left for the bus station (and an interesting bus adventure ensued, but I am sure she can tell that story better than I). After much debate, we ended up at Los Faroles for dinner and we were quite satisfied. My dinner, which was something I had ordered there before, was significantly spicier than the last time I’d had it. I really enjoyed it, though it made me turn red and tear up a bit. I feel like I am working on building my tolerance for spice here.

After dinner we went to Blockbuster to rent a movie. I was still slurping on the agua fresca (essentially fruit juice, in this case made with cantaloupe and watermelon) that I had ordered with my dinner when we walked in. In the interest of not being an oblivious tourist, I asked one of the employees in my broken Spanish gesture talk if I should leave my beverage at the counter. He nearly laughed at me and replied that it was not necessary. I got the feeling that I could have fired up a cigar while I was looking for a disc to rent and no one would have blinked. Mexico is fabulous.

April 13, 2006

(bec)

I have passed the torch of sickness to Jon and he spent most of the day bearing said burden. Today consisted mainly me running some errands, getting food and watching a lot of James Bond. Hoo-Ray.

In lieu of an exciting adventure to report, I think I will just sum up some observations I have been making. First: the old, weird gringos. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??? Is this the result of some kind of government project going on in the states that we don’t know about? Cause it really seems like there is a big white van traveling around the country picking up all of the “eccentric” (read: oblivious, curmudgeonly, rude and totally unwilling to learn Spanish) geriatric folks, putting them in shipping container and addressing it to San Miguel. Yesterday we saw an older woman walking her tiny dog in a shady park wearing more make-up than a Broadway actress, a terrible bushy wig in pigtails and a house-coat, carrying a miniature Japanese umbrella that didn’t even cover her whole head. We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Later, we were in a restaurant and I overheard an elderly lady say the following, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I am just so glad that French women are getting fatter!” Again, we had nothing to say to that. As we were leaving the same restaurant, I accidentally knocked over my chair. It made a loud noise and I could tell I had startled a table of nearby retirees. I apologized (even though I hadn’t really done anything to them) and, instead of acknowledging my apology, they ignored me until one of the women launched into a tirade about how she wasn’t going to leave her house anymore. “First the fireworks, then the cars and the dogs, and now this! It is so noisy here!” I almost offered her more noise, but decided against it. I want to get a shirt that says in Spanish, “I’m not with these crazy old gringos!” Seriously, when I left America there were still some normal people there. We are not all like these people. How did they all get here?? And, most importantly, how can I avoid becoming like them when I get old?

Also: the Mexicans seem to know something about family that we, in America, have forgotten. Frequently, I will pass a house and see through an open door a whole family (a dozen or more people) just hanging out. They are all just sitting around laughing or talking. Mexicans seem to have remembered that is ok to relax; better yet, it is important to take a break and be with your family on the regular.

One last observation: Mexican children, by and large, are the cutest little things I have ever seen. It doesn’t matter if they are in their Sunday best or snotty-nosed with ice cream on their faces. They are really adorable. And every so often you catch yourself thinking, “Wow, these kids are good-looking and their Spanish is really good!…Oh wait…”

(Bec)
Monday was a pretty productive day. Jon spent a good portion of the morning on the phone with Cingular trying to get our cell phone situation worked out. I am sorry if anyone has been trying to call us without success. No one ever really told us what the problem was with the phones, but through a series of exclamations and, “Wow! This is messed up!” from the Cingular operators we guessed it was bad. I think we can both send and receive calls and text messages now. We’ll see.

After that fiasco, we met Allie and went over to the Instituto to sign up for classes. We got to meet some of Allies teachers like Elvira and Carlos. Unfortunately the class we wanted to sign for started in the beginning of April, so we bought two weeks of private tutoring until we can start a class in May. Our tutoring begins Monday the 17th. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also thinking of taking a Mexican weaving course in May. Allie’s friend Alice said that she saw some really beautiful rugs and tapestries that had been made in the class.

For lunch, we went with Allie to the gordita place by the biblioteque and gorged ourselves. It was so good! I could only eat one with nopales (cactus salad), guacamole and queso, but Jon and Allie each had two with mole and chorizo respectively. We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and into the library. We browsed for a bit and then Allie went off to tutor while Jon and I came back to the apartment for a siesta; an idea which, by the way, makes a lot of sense. It gets boiling hot here in the afternoon and we are still not acclimated.

(Jon)
On our way home, we stopped and procured a few essentials, one of which was the biggest, meanest can of Raid that we could find. We had a small can of mosquito-grade spray but it didn’t annihilate our small plague of roaches with quite the efficiency and decimation that this battle required. I mean, these are a few tiny roaches (not the big, foot-long ones) and they’re more of a gross nuisance than anything. But if you give them an inch, they take over the entire apartment and try to lay eggs in you. I wasn’t about to stand for that, so when browsing the considerable insecticide selection at the pharmacia, I was pleased to find exactly the kind of roach-killing spray that my arsenal required: Raid Max (with lightening letters). On the side of the label were a series of small icons of insects with crosshairs over them, indicating the breadth of species-wide destruction that the poison could wreak. I was happy to find that the crosshairs included roaches in the veritable menagerie of potential victims. However, I wasn’t totally sold until, further down the list, there was a big, red crosshair barely containing the even bigger, meaner silhouette of a scorpion. That’s right, motherfuckers: Scorpion Strength Raid. The lightening letters alone told me that this was going to make mosquito strength spray look like mild salsa to the roaches but the scorpion icon gave me visions of a sky-opening nuclear day of cucaracha-reckoning.
“Hell-fucking-yeah,” I said as I snatched the big gold and black can off the shelf. Needless to say, we were the Dark Angels of Ultimate Roach Slaughter that afternoon.

So, with no roaches left in our house, our neighbor’s houses, and the greater San Miguel region, we were ready for a nap. After a siesta, we met Allie and a number of her friends at the hotel by the square for the daily two-for-one margarita happy hour that they have. Mmmmm. It’s a gorgeous spot. It’s one of many old haciendas that have been converted into hotels with open-air restaurants in the courtyards. The place is usually dead except for a couple small groups of stuffy looking gringos. After a few too many, we went next door to Ten Ten Pie, a great restaurant where we had too much to eat. After dinner, I went and played some pool at a nearby pool-hall with Allie’s friend Nico. He was kind enough to drive me home on his motorbike (more of a scooter) but riding one of those hair-dryers through the streets of San Miguel was the closest to death that I’ve come since riding in a Beijing taxi.

April 11th:

Early today we hopped in a cab and took a ride up the mountainside to the Tuesday market. As you can probably guess by its name, it’s a market that opens every Tuesday. What its name doesn’t reveal, however, is the sheer enormity and density of this market. Imagine everything you could possibly need being sold by thousands of vendors occupying an area the size of a football field. We were so blown away by our initial visit that we could hardly absorb it. I took a couple photos that do very little to capture the experience. It’ll definitely warrant a second visit and, quite likely, its very own post.

I’ve become totally addicted to tacos, by the way. Since the first night when Allie took us to the taco place up the block with the big women frying the tortillas and cooking the piles of meat, I’ve been looking for every excuse to put more of those tasty bastards in my belly. Since these stands only open at night, I’ve been eating small dinners on purpose so I’ll be sure to have room for tacos! They’re so good that I might have to open a small restaurant that serves only tacos when I get back. Allie has promised to take me on a taco stand crawl one of these nights before she goes back to Philly. I’m hyped.
I’ve also been working on my cooking skills and made some tasty chorizo (spicy sausage) and onions for lunch today. I saw some lady making that dish at a street cart and was tempted to try it but decided that I’d make it myself first as an anti-illness precaution. The food here is simply amazing. The down side is that it’s all really rich and greasy and eating an entire meal causes immediate regret. It’s been taking some getting used to.

I noticed something funny the other evening. Many of the taxi cabs here have had some custom work done to them. I mean, a few of them are totally pimped out! Just last night, I saw a official San Miguel taxi (green and white color scheme, light up taxi sign, official numbers painted on an everything) with a huge spoiler, body kit, big fat exhaust pipe, neon blue lights under the car, a neon license plate frame, and all sorts of flashing red lights in the grill. It was also blasting some Mexican rap music. And this isn’t a rare thing! Half of the cabs I see here, despite being kind of beat up, have something flashy and custom about them. I mean, all of them have some snappy racing rims or fancy sound system. These dudes are really proud of their cabs. Right on. I’ll try to snap a picture the next time I see one. This town is also littered with old cars and trucks that have been worn within and inch of their useful lives and I’m starting another smaller gallery (here) of pictures of my favorite ones.

Right now, we’re hanging out waiting for the water delivery guys to show up (if they even deliver on Saturdays). They just knock on the door and say, “Agua Santorini!” and you exchange your empty bottle and $17 (pesos) for another water-cooler sized jug. We’ll see if they show up or not.
Then, I guess we’ll meet up with Allie and some of her friends for dinner.
And after that, it’s only a few more hours until the taco stands start opening…

(Bec)
Today is Palm Sunday. I’m not sure what is going on today, but I am excited since the build up to Easter has so far included a lot of little shrines to icons that involve tons of fresh flowers, palms, fruit and incense. They cropped up everywhere—in corners on the street, in doorways, in schools… everywhere. And yesterday we were in the Jardin and, on a large raised platform several people “raced” on stationary bikes. A truck parked next to the stage read, “Extravaganza”, so we figured that was what it was. Later one of Allies friends told me that he thought it was fitness day or something. Wow. Mexico is great.
For dinner we went with Allie to a pizza place that came highly recommended by her friend Bobby. The pizza was indeed excellent, and we got to meet the infamous Bobby, whom we have heard so much about. Entertaining isn’t even really the word for the evening. My guts still hurt today from laughing so much, even though I can’t exactly remember what Bobby said that was so funny. It may have something to do with his missing teeth or incessant talk of carnies and hippies. What a crazy dude. Some of Allie’s other friends were there too, like Nico and his friend Vishal. Later we were joined by Allie’s landlord and his wife (?? Maybe). Apparently they all hang out together. Another bar was on the agenda after the restaurant, but Jon and I bowed out and came home.
I’m now in the process of losing my voice due to a sunburn and the dry air here. Oh well… it is a small price to pay for how great this is. For example, a few days ago I saw a man carrying about a fourth of a freshly butchered cow across the street on his back, dripping guts all the way. Now what could beat that, I ask you?