Hello again!
Quick note on pictures in this blog o' mine. I suck, and I don't know how to resize in an affordable amount of time. So please excuse the humongousness of some of the pictures I have posted until another nice internet cafe employee takes pity on my dumb ass. I am posting a lot of pictures later than I am posting the entries so feel free to go back and check for some cool shots every now and then. But I digress.
Cuernavaca was a nice little diversion from my Mexico City. The city of eternal Spring was truly Springlike, and charming - without wanting to sound like a cheesy guidebook. But it is actually the perfect town to be featured in cheesy guidebooks...it has that style - whatever that means. I stepped into a more relaxed pace after first heavily social travel surge and it provided me with the much needed time to tune and play my guitar for the first time on this trip. I have been playing regularly now, and am getting a little better each day. It was a big goal of mine to start writing music again on this trip, and it looks like that may allready be happening, which makes me happy.

There was a youth music festival happening in the Zocalo for the duration of my stay, and it was a blast to sit on a bench at dusk and watch various 17 year olds butcher Nirvana songs. Unfortunately I also had my first slightly scary travel encounter during my second night there. I was sitting by myself, silently chuckling at some horrid singer when this guy who had been staring at me for a while sat down beside me and started to chat me up. Within the first 15 minutes of our conversation it became clear that this guy was a racist fuck. He was gushing hate speech and kept scooting closer and closer to me, grabbed my arm and exuded a pretty high level of creepyness, at which point I excused myself and started to walk away. He seemed a bit upset that I was rebuffing his advances and looked like he was going to follow me. I dodged into a shopping arcade, circled around for a while, and managed to lose him pretty quickly. In the end I thought it would probably have been fine to just stand somewhere else, but my little safety first rule moved me to go back to my hotel and make an early night of it. This is the one thing that is kind of a pain about travelling alone as a woman - or maybe just alone period. Situations that would be scary-funny with a friend are just scary alone. It just doesn't seem prudent to be taking risks with aggressively affectionate racist fucks when there is absolutely noone to back you up. I ended up missing some cool fire jugglers and questioning my paranoid reactions for the rest of the night.

On Thursday I went to the Robert Brady museum. On the way I saw this...and lots of pretty things. Also I had the cheapest and most delicious street tacos ever. I thank my lucky stars for my family's stomach of steel genes - no bad reactions to Mexico at all. Back to the story...The Robert Brady museum is the former personal residence of Robert Brady, an artist and art collector from the United States who moved to Cuernavaca in the 70s. He died in 86 and left his house as a museum to the city. It is absolutely one of the most beautiful houses I have ever walked through. Everything; the location, the design, the building materials, the furniture, the art was incredibly well put together. Eclectic, tasteful, beautiful. I want to live there. Besides Brady was obviously a big queer, which made me feel even more drawn to the place :o)
On Friday I took a quick jaunt through the palacio Cortez. Bla. Old pots. I am finding that archeological museums don't really do it for me. It's not that I can't appreciate the incredible age and human connection these pieces represent, but I have trouble getting excited about pottery fragment number 36 being different in that it was found in Veracruz instead of in the Yucatan. There was however one redeeming factor - yet another Rivera mural, but different from the ones I have seen in that it was so much more direct and brutal in its depiction of the Spanish conquest. Indigenous people hanging from trees, being whipped, abused, enslaved. I was struck by the violence in this mural, but felt like it was one of the most honest pieces of work I have seen on Mexican history so far. On the way out I ended up running into creepy racist fuck dude again, and decided it was a good time to buy a bus ticket.

I took the bus back to Mexico City and made my way to Sandra's house once more. We met some friends and drove to Plaza Garibaldi where we had dinner at a Cantina which played host to four different ten piece mariachi bands. All were playing at the same time in different corners of the restaurant entertaining birthday parties, engagements and what not. It was a glorious chaos of sound, and very very loud. Good times....and good tequila.

On Saturday Sandra and I drove to Xochimilco, a southern suburb of the city close to Coyoacan where we visited the Dolores Olmedo museum. We got horribly lost for about two hours trying to find the place, all the while chatting away. I am totally used to being hopelessly lost on a regular basis at this point, so I just sat back and appreciated the interesting conversation. I truly appreciate Sandra's deliberate thinking, her intelligence and maturity with which she approaches things, so it was a joy. I am very lucky to have her as my host. When we finally found the museum I was delighted by its setting. It sits in a grand park filled with peacocks, geese and various other feathered creatures. It being Springtime, the trees are all in bloom and the colors are glorious. In addition the peacocks seemed to be having quite a flirty day and were parading their feathers like nobody's business while screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. It sounded like we were stepping into a nursery full of hungry 6 month olds. The collection consisted of Diego and Frida almost exclusively. I hadn't seen much Frida Kahlo since her house is closed, so this was a nice experience. There was a temporary Picasso exhibit, but we skipped it. My favorite part however was the extensive collection of popular Mexican folk art. Amazing paper mache skeletons riding dragons, ceramic trees of life, intricately painted masks, beautiful blown glass. The thing that I like so much, besides the incredible craftsmanship, is that these different types of crafts are intensely regional. Black pottery is almost exclusively made in Oaxaca, whereas the trees of life are sculpted in Estado de Mexico. It is an artistic reflection of the spirit of a very specific place.
After our jaunt through the museum, and another short spurt of being lost, we met up with Sandra's friend Diego in the center of Tlalpan, yet another pretty southern suburb. I like the south. We had drinks in an old school cantina and were joined by Georgina who whisked me off to a birthday party held by her queer friends as her way of showing me around the "scene". Of course, by the time we got there the party was long over, and we merely got to say goodbye, eat some leftover tacos and call it a night. Again, the drive there was the best part, since I finally got a chance to hang with G.

Sunday also started slow. We met Maithe and Chris to go have lunch in a park west of the city. Again, a park with potential to be beautiful if it didn't need to support a few million people a week. I find it fascinating that in a country with an indigenous culture that has such a strong connection between humans and nature, it is difficult to find a green space that is not polluted with massive amounts of trash. Is it funding, education, or a simple disconnect from an ancient value? I don't know. I do know that the folks I met in the city claim to enjoy and love nature, but have very little access to it. The parks resemble amusement parks or greenery drive-throughs. I guess you take what you can get. I'll take a heavy serving of Pacific Northwest Wilderness, please.
We lunched under a huge tent housing about 5 different kitchens. I had a big slab of carne asada with chilaquiles. It was cheap and delicious - the best tasting food I had so far.
In the evening we finally made it to the highlight of the weekend: Las Luchas - a Mexican wrestling match. What drama, what theatre, what ugly, ugly men!! It was hilarious. The best part were the numerous 80 year old, 4 foot tall, ladies swearing at the massive wrestlers. "Chinga tu madre, puto!" (Fuck your mother, fagwhore!) The audience really was quite eclectic. I bought some masks for the nephews and set off to la Condesa with Omar the freeloader, Alvaro and Georgina for a goodnight coffee and goodbye.

This morning I got ready for a 17 hour bus ride south to Puerto Escondido. Uffda, just the thought made me ill. I met G. for lunch in Coyoacan and we had delicious middle eastern food. I believe this may have been the first non-mexican morsel to have crossed my lips during this trip. yum. The afternoon was a very nice send-off to a not so nice trip that wound east around Puebla, then south to Oaxaca City, Huatulco and back west to Puerto Escondido.
We drove through the pine forested hills around Mexico City, some rather mountenous arid terrain going south from Puebla, acres and acres of cacti forests around Oaxaca city and into a lush tropical hillside once we had circumvented the cloud forested mountains paralleling the Oaxaca coast. Of course I actually saw very little of it all, since I was desperately trying to sleep a little bit. The air conditioning in Mexican buses can be brutal, but I was prepared with shirt, sweater and extra socks... Not so prepared however, for the stifling humid heat as I got off the bus. I walked around for 30 minutes looking for a nice place and absolutely sweat my ass off. I found a great little hostel that is pretty empty at the moment. The major seller however is the jet spa tub in the beautiful bathroom, which I immediately made use of to soothe my aching sitbones. I spent the afternoon, walking the length of Zicatela beach watching the surfers. Oh the pleasure of dipping my feet in the bathwater warm Pacific and laying in the sand taking a nap. Ahhhhhhhh. So. I will relax at the beach for a few days before I make any further plans. I send you all a whiff of the currently very pleasant cool saltwater breeze. I'm off to drink a large amount of cold beer.