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October 26, 2002
a lot of stuff to
a lot of stuff to catch up on.
havenīt had a chance to update this, was gonna the other day then the blogger site got hacked. where to start?
lets see, last i wrote i was in guanajuato. pascual suggested we go see a french canadian act, (canada was the invited nation at the cervantino festival, which included performances from tons of groups all of the world) called the grand derangment. here is how i would sum up that group: 5 guys in tight black shirts and leather pants playing instruments and dancing around the stage, plus 2 women tap dancing in time to the music. the music was sorta a mess of nova scotian acadian music, a cross between irish and creol and all other kinds of weird shit, plus the women prancing really reminded me of the lord of the dance, but they were all wearing leather. here is a foto of them, notice how just by looking at them you can sorta tell how much they like to prance around and make dramatic gestures. pascual was really into it, guess itīs a canadian thing, no it was kinda fun, and afterwords after the mexican girls got done rushing the and for autographs and kisses we met them and ended up getting drinks. the head guy was super serious about the band, he had it incorporated and talked about it like it was a business, not a semi goofy stage show, which i didnīt tell him i thought it was. he made sometimes 5000 a show though, so i should shut up.
after that we (pascual the mad french canadian and i) met up with our friends tony and eileen on the street in guanajuato, and they switched to our hotel. they are good folks, tony has travelled through central asia and has good stories, one time he got really sick with typhoid in a jordanian hospital for a week, that sounded quite sketchy. we all woke up the next day, and left to wander around. pascual is one of the best people i have travelled with, he didnīt hesitate to show us his technique for speed walking, of which he was almost a canadian olympic competitor. the site of him hauling ass down a rainy street swinging his hips like a queen was enough to make us fall over in a puddle laughing.
we hooked up with some folks that anthony and eileen had met, some folks with dual citizenship who live in juarez. they were quite fun, and invited us to go on a guided tour of guanajuato. this turned out to be quite funny as well. the most memorable parts of the tour were when we went to the museum of torture, a dungeon like place with tons of torture devices from the inquisition. they had a mexican boy dressed up like a monk, eileen said he had n-sync hair, it was all gelled up. i translated for the non spanish speakers as the fake monk told us about the rack and the guillotine and this weird head screw thing, plus tons of suits of armor and paintings of weird sadistic spanish torturers. then we came to the ending of the tour, where we found a room filled with those 3 dimensional holigram pictures that you can look at from different angles and they look 3 dimensional? there were a ton of these, with such themes as:stuart little the mouse, a woman smoking, a clown type mask, a martian raygun, a lady smoking a cigarette and dracula. this of course was totally out of place and fucking weird, we figured they wanted to add some brevity to all the torturous torture stuff we had just seen. after that we went to a building full of mummies, or better said dehydrated people, mexicans are so obsessed with death and i think itīs cool. it got creepy even for me after about the 80th mummy, they also had the smallest mummy in the world and some french doctors that were mummified. outside i bought a postcard that someday i will show to all of you, it has some of the mummies fotoshopped onto the front of the mummy building, they had different captions, the mother mummy of the smallest mummy in the world was being hit on by one of the french doctor mummies, he called her gordita which means little fatty in spanish, because her belly was distended from where they did the c-section before her death. she replied to his crude proposal at marriage (casate conmigo, gordita) by replying that her stomach hurts. viva mexico, eh?
that night we went drinking with the folks from juarez, and got quite drunk indeed. during the whole drinking festivities i left for a bit, this was when i ran into the heavy metal dude i had met earlier that day at some weird market. he insisted we go for a beer, and we found some shitty bar where they were playing metal. we spoke for a while about such metal bands and slayer, morbid angel and a ton of other ones, i was drunk so i started making up names of black metal bands in my town, bands such as murderer of babies and the demon goat blood. he thought those bands sounded cool. his spanish was muffled cause he mumbled like a mofo, but i could understand him ok. after that i went back and got pascual and tony and eileen, we headed for our hostel but not before all three of them took turns puking on the street and pascual also tried to bring a street dog home with us, it looked at him then ran away. i was secretly pleased. i was the only one not to puke, prolly cause i stayed away from the banana liqueur that pascual had purchased earlier that day, and which he finished that night.
i feel pretty damn good about the spanish, last night in the bus we saw donīt say a word and exit wound, two wanky films that made me cringe yet again for how the rest of the world must view our country. yeah, we left last night, the festival was full of people and we couldnīt deal, so we decided to come to oaxaca. oaxaca is quite south of mexico city, i decided that instead of braving the crowds and hordes thieves that were sure to plague me in d.f., i would instead head overnight in a bus through towards the tranquil beaches of southern mexico, then i would return later to see mexico city before i fly to cuba. the overnight bus was alright, sitting behind me was a viejo of 60 or so years who had just got back from illegally crossing the border with the help of a coyote (those who get paid to smuggle people across to the u.s.) to visit his kids in california. he paid 300 dollars, and said it was a bit harrowing. i just finished reading a book about coyotes by ted conover, it was really good and made me want to read his other books.
we got here this morning at 5:30 and walked to the hostel, all of us tired as hell. here we met ericke, a cool mexican kid who is going to work in zipolite, the well known backpacker style beach town full of folks living in hammocks and tents for 1 dollar a night and lounging on the beach all day. i figure i might head down with him, or else wait here till the dia de los muertos, day of the dead, which they say is really festive and impressive here in the city of oaxaca. ericke took us to a mercado to get breakfast, i had a tlayudas, a mexican pizza thing with beans and avocado. ok thatīs about it, i am gonna take a well needed shower then maybe a nap since i slept like garbage in the bus.
i am doing good at stuffing myself with excellent food that you can buy on the street, all cheap and good as anything.
Posted by bendan at October 26, 2002 10:19 AM
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