My friends at home in the U.S. ask me “What do you do every day?” We expats find that a difficult question to answer.
Well, last week I walked all over town to find a rice cooker. I know, I’m spoiled. Wish I had the one that is packed away in my house in Salem…along with all the other stuff. I picked up my art pieces that I had framed and hung them. The apartment is really coming along. Everything is so nice…especially in the evening with Buddah Bar music coming from my iPod powered by the living room speakers and dimmers turned down on the recessed lights that provide a soft glow against the orange and yellow walls. (Recessed lights are a luxury in Mexico…not to even mention dimmers! Most lights are just bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.) Bright blue and purple pillows made from hand-woven Guatemalan huipiles (women’s tops) fill my white suede leather soiree couch. White woven Italian lawn chairs and a Mexican Rustica coffee table sit on big hand-woven earth-colored Guatemalan rugs in the middle of the living room facing the couch. Against the opposite wall is my rustica brown leather covered round table for telephone with big comfy Mexican Rustica reading chair and light next to it. On the end wall is a huge Rustica shelf unit with my metal Buddah head on the top shelf wisely overlooking all. Huge floor to ceiling windows face the veranda and park. Found a huge ceramic flower vase with a big wide mouth for all the lovely flowers found in local markets. Being in a globalized world, it is made in Viet Nam. It is sitting in the middle of a beautiful dining room table that I found in a local woodworking cooperative waiting for flowers that I will buy in the Friday Market in Llano Park. Now I just have to find a small funky table for my long covered veranda overlooking Conzati Park. Conzati was an Italian botanist and teacher who contributed greatly to the city. He catalogued the flora in the park that used to be much more forested than it is now and there is a monument to him there.
My friend Max is giving me, today, a rose bush and some other plants…and I will plant a local vegetable (the Chayote) that will sprout into huge long vines and by the end of the summer will block the sun from the southern exposure. And provide me with mucho chayotes that are good in soup. So I will have to take a bus out to this gigantic earthen pot factory and bring home pots in a taxi. Max’s roommates, Budd and Sandy are back from the states and it will be fun to see them again. Budd worked on a documentary of the fall of the Soviet Union for the BBC and was the photographer who took the famous picture of Yeltsen on the tank in Russia during the coup. He has circled the globe on a motorcyle and they are in the business now of buying motorcyles instead of a car to get around on in Oaxaca. She is 70ish and he is in his 80’s…with 9 marriages between them! Expats can be an interesting lot.
One of the five “neighbors” in my apartment building, Carlos, showed me his new purchase yesterday. He is the curator of the Oaxaca Contemporary Art Museum so I was interested in seeing what he had…maybe something from one of the world-famous Oaxacan painters? No. To my surprise he showed me what looked like a huge antique Chinese urn…made by a Mexican artist up north…and found in an antique shop in Mexico City! I laughed! Serves the Chinese right, I said! In China today, I told him, you can see a pleasure park with all manner of copied Mayan, Zapotec and Aztec ruins and pyramids all jumbled up in one big mess! He sighed in dismay. Actually, I like it (the urn), I told him. It’s kind of funky…made by a Mexican and displayed in a art aficionado’s apartment in Oaxaca. “I like funky too,” he said as he smiled ironically. Then I trotted him over to my apartment where I showed him my big purchase that morning. A beautifully matted black and white lithograph made by a relatively unknown Zapotec artist that lives a block up from me…up a tiny cobbled alley-way. His stark but tasteful adobe one-room home/studio leads out the back to a huge garden with trees, plants and flowers. But he is very poor and I wanted to support his work. You know…the starving artist. The galleries take about half the money of an artist’s sale and makes the pieces unaffordable for me. Now I will enjoy many hours trying to figure out the meaning of this really interesting piece! Actually, there is a story to how I met him. When I was in Kunming several years ago, I met a lovely 35 year old British woman in an internet cafe at the Camellia Hotel and have kept in touch with her since. After leaving China she traveled up South and Central America and stopped in Oaxaca for a month. She is an artist and wanted to soak up the huge local art scene. She hung out here with a local guy, she said, and there on her web page was this gorgeous Zapotec guy…not too tall…about 50 plus…with the typical big Zapotec nose, long flowing black hair and dressed all in white. OMG, I told her…he is beautiful! Then a couple years later I was walking down a street in Oaxaca and passed by this guy. I stopped him and asked if he was Heather’s friend. Yes, he said. Small world, as they say. Sigh…if I were only 20 years younger…
Incidentally, my other apartment neighbors are: a high-priced prostitute who works in the Oaxaca judiciary, keeps her co-workers happy and travels a lot. (This chisme… gossip… is from my funny gay apartment manager from NYC who lives downstairs with his young Mexican consort in a gorgeous apartment he remodeled at his own expense). She is very nice, he says. Then there is a young couple on one side of me…a Mexican woman and her British boyfriend, and a divorced Mexican woman who lives with her daughter downstairs and whose ex-husband uses my unused parking spot with out telling me…much to the consternation of the manager.
I won’t even try describing the trip to the mountain Mescal factory with Max, my friend Paula who is here teaching English, and Francisco and his new consort…Joan. Max, an old sot, got more than slightly inebriated, along with the driver, and Paula, Joan and I threatened to get out of the pick-up and hail down a collectivo taxi. Anyway, Paula and I ended up leaving Max in Tlacalula with Francisco and Joan. It’s sad to see this very intelligent articulate witty man this way. He is very ill and shouldn’t drink but he doesn’t care since he’s really on his way out anyway. Incidentally, the driver picked up a young Mexican along the way. He had been going to high school in the states…illegally of course. His English was perfect so he obviously had been living there most of his life. The police picked him up off the street and threw him in jail for 6 months without charging him and then deported him. I asked him how many others were there like him in jail in the states. “Thousands,” he said. I am furious that tax-payers are paying for jail time for immigrants who instead should just be deported.
All last week I hosted, through couchsurfing.com, a beautiful and gracious young Iranian-American woman who was born in Austria but raised in Berkeley. She speaks Farsi and Spanish (she majored in Spanish/linguistics) and and is now traveling after teaching Spanish in Guadalajara for the last 6 months. Her love is salsa dance and danzon…a beautiful dance from Cuba with choreographed steps…which she had a chance to enjoy in the lit-up zocalo the other night. Afterward, we ran into Willy…my Swiss friend…in a zocalo outdoor cafe and who I treated to beer and mescal…much to his dismay. Willy is such a gentleman and never lets me buy drinks…which he can ill-afford…living on the local economy. Nearby, the nightly marimba band accompanied a few dancers who just couldn’t keep still. One night we joined my friend Judie, who teaches English here in the Lending Library, to listen to her Mexican boyfriend play a wailing sax with his great 3 piece band in a tiny smoke-filled venue. But we wished the rude Chilangos (from Mexico City) would have kept quiet. There is no love lost between the Oaxacans and the slumming Chilangos who are generally considered by the Oaxacan Indios to be rude, demanding and arrogant. But I had a great time with Sepi and miss her…but alas she is not mine to keep.
Yesterday I was supposed to host a French journalist who has lived in Spain many years and is now in Mexico City developing a Spanish language radio web site. But guess he found more interesting ground to till. And the two German girls didn’t show. Ended up in a hostel with other young travelers. Next wednesday my friend Belle, who lived in the last apartment with me in 2006-7 will visit me with her husband and adopted Guatemalan daughter. She recently found her daughter’s birth family by traveling in two buses and on a donkey up to a Guatemalan mountain village. It will be interesting to hear about the visit…her daughter is about eight now. Next month two women ecologists from Estonia will stay with me several days.
Week before last, on Ash Wednesday, found me with my Mexican friends, Mica and Bardo, in Huayapam at the annual Ash Wednesday Fair. Celebrants leaving church were greeted with miniature plastic cups of Mescal. Only in Mexico we often say. The whole town participates. The crowded food stands were great. Mica sold her roasted coffee beans and her mother served up the traditional frothy Zapotec Tajate drink. I enjoyed three chili roja (red sauce) tomales…and the banda music and fireworks.
This is the Lenten season. Every day there have been processions and music all over town. Here is the best to come:
Friday, March 20th – Good Samaritan Day – businesses and homes set up booths and give free drinks to passers-by, thereby, becoming Good Samaritans. Question is…are these soft drinks or Mescal? My bet is on Mescal. 🙂
Thursday, April 9th – Day of Our Lady of the Sorrows – traditionally Oaxacans visit seven churches that day where altars are set up with chía seeds sprouting green out of clay animals (symbolizing the Resurrection) and flowers and Maguey plants. A beautiful one is constructed in the Privada de Alcalá on the Alcalá south of Niños Heroes de Chapultapec.
Good Friday, April 10th – Procession of Silence from the Church of the Sacred Blood of Christ up the Alcalá and returning to the church via García Vigil. Easter Week will find Oaxaca full of tourists enjoying the daily processions and music.
And that is not all…by a long shot. Yesterday my son, Greg, sent me, via UPS, a new iPod Touch for my birthday so now I have a new toy to play with.
Now you know…sort of…what I do every day in Oaxaca…when I am not reading, on my computer, sitting on the veranda…or taking a siesta.
Laughingnomad 