well heck i made it home in one piece & managed not to catch a single amoeba or dysentery or giardia or decapitation or anything until my last night in DF, but i'll get to that in a minute. Or so, this is a long email. Make some tea & come back & settle in.
so forgive me, it's been a week or so since my last confession. i last wrote shortly after arriving in chiapas i guess. well i loved san cristobal de las casas. i wanna move there. after i last wrote, tory & i found our way to a salsa club & i realized it was the first time i'd heard live music since being in mendocino balkan music camp two days before leaving the estados. i also realized celia cruz's "la vida es un carnaval" is a bit overplayed in latin america. thence after two meager margaritas for tory & a coupla cheap beers for me, we happened upon a little upstairs bar that felt like we were walking into a friend's party, it was so comfortable & packed with people & there was a trio performing which reminded me a bit of briana & john's group except that i've never actually seen THEM perform. it was turntable, electric violin, and guitar/vocals & i was so happy to hear weird music i'm not really sure whether they were good or not, but i suspect they were cos everyone was having fun. especially after the bartender (who clearly liked tory a good bit) started giving us mezcal shots to go with every drink we ordered.
so yah, we took a while to stumble home that night. on the way a guy stopped us, perhaps scottish judging by his accent, asking if we knew where zapateros or zapatias was, he couldn't quite remember the name, and he'd just escaped running from a cab driver who had attempted to abduct him to the police station because he'd tried to buy unspecified drugs from the cabbie. we didn't know, so we asked someone else who didn't know but pretended to & gave vague made-up directions, we made sure the guy thought he was going to be ok, and we sent him on his way. of course we still couldn't remember which way to stumble ourselves, so we took a cue from the other guy and guessed, and eventually managed to wake our very sweet hotelier at 3am to let us in.
the next day we lunched at an organic restaurant that makes its own yogurt & tofu & who knows what else & i loved it. tory would have loved it except for her hangover-induced nausea. then the market. ok it's beautiful. people make & sell amazing things in there. including, thankfully, little dolls of subcomandante marcos on keychains. but i have to say that tory & i have very different levels of interest and/or patience when it comes to shopping. i thought i was being indulgent & generous after an hour & a half, but after three hours i didn't want to see another beautiful, embroidered, hand-woven thing ever. luckily my eyes glazed over & then dimmed completely until i was in a sort of somnambulent sensory deprived stupor & tory just kinda prodded me toward the next shiny booth. i don't remember the rest.
the next morning i went to get money from the atm (where'd all my money go & where'd tory get all those beautiful embroidered hand-woven thingys? hmm...) and knew i'd won (i always feel like i'm winning when the slot machine er atm gives me money) when upon exiting the booth a brass band starts up. just like in Underground or Black Cat White Cat or something. my favorite part was the guy standing in front of rest of the band playing cymbals. everyone else is reading or inventing this complex arranged music & he's playing a cymbal crash every four beats or so & looking so completely focused & intent.
we also climbed the big hill (really big hill, so many steps and pilgrims on all of em) to the cathedral where there was a festival for something. the cathedral was packed utterly & the jesi on the walls were backlit with red & green neon. very tastefully done. outside there was marimba music and a full scale carnival wherein the most common thing for sale in the booths was olives. 10 pesos bought you a plastic cup full of olives. i opted for pancakes with orange marmalade while tory had a vodka & soda, no ice of course what are you crazy? she videotaped the marimberos a bit until being accosted by a couple of little boys intent on getting in her shot. of course she happily obliged & now is the proud owner of lots of footage of blurry digits, noses, & ears against a backdrop of spinning san cristobal carnival skyline.
in all i think i saw live music 10 times in san cristobal. that's a big part of why i wanna live there someday. and zapatista dolls. and atm machines that don't eat my cards (more on that later too).
ok oaxaca wasn't as exciting as tory had hyped it up (to me and herself) to be. i mean, yeah nice market, been there done that got the guaravera. art, too, and museums that were more beautiful than the art within. but the town felt kinda sterile in some way. couldn't really find the interesting things happening. it seemed a little like noe valley in SF, like everything was pretty but too carefully arranged & people were uptight you might put the ashtray back in the wrong place. nice cathedral though. we found a nice silversmith as well but by then i was panicking about money so i didn't buy a dang thing.
mexico city (reached via our second all night bus ride in three days) was, well, an experience difficult to encapsulate. arrived at 7:30 am at the apartment of the son of a friend of tory's dad's. he's an art collector & also a very strange man. we napped. we met him for lunch & he drew us a map with all the museum names in english so of course when we asked people on the street to interpret this vague impressionist bit of cartography, they of course knew no better than we did that "fine arts mus." equals "bellas artes". anyway so we finally found it & there were some intense murals by orozco, diego rivera, and some other famous dudes whose names i'm now embarrassed to say i've forgotten.
on arriving back at the apartment, we open the door to find a guy from san anselmo (the town where tory grew up) on the couch, and our host's brother sitting on the floor, panicked from a dizzy spell. i asked if perhaps he wanted some water, and he really thought that was a brilliant idea. i mean, he really was impressed & thought that was brilliant. so, i got him some. he couldn't wait to be in a doctor's care. ok, i'm just gonna come out and say it: the guy was either the biggest wuss i've ever met, or utterly crazy. i mean, he'd gone from acapulco (sea level) to DF (9500 feet) in a couple of hours, eaten questionable food on the street, then ascended 6 more stories to his brother's apartment, and he didn't understand why he might be light headed, couldn't think to get himself a glass of water, and thought he urgently needed to be in a hospital.
there, i said it.
his cousin came & picked him up and victor came back home. our hopes of going out on the town were dashed when victor informed us, ridiculously, that no one ever goes out at night in DF, it's too dangerous. hm, there are 24 million people in that city. some of them go out. some of them were in fact laughing on the street below as he told us this. but additionally his doorman gets off at 10pm & there's no way into the building (except for the way he'd suddenly remember to tell us the next day) after that. so we decided it'd probably be a fine idea to go to bed.
victor awoke us the next morning to drive us to a little mercado for breakfast, where tory spent ten minutes explaining to the kid that really she just wanted plain white yogurt, not strawberry, not full of sliced bananas, just yogurt. to go with the cereal she was gonna buy from the next door girl, his sister. then he caught the bus with us to the area of the anthropological museum, & left us with a strict schedule which would also include the DF MoMA, the castle, the National Museum, and heck something else too i think. We never escaped the Anthropological museum all day. 10am-7pm we were there. We did have an intermission in the museum infirmary (who woulda known) when tory doubled over in pain from cramps (hope she doesn't mind me telling y'all that but it was the high drama of the day). The woman in the infirmary was very sweet & gave a fairly thorough explanation to us of menstruation in spanish which at least served to increase my anatomical vocabulary if not my understanding. She also gave tory essentially some strong tylenol which didn't kick in for a long time. Such a long time that the doctora got excited about the possibility of giving tory a shot. Tory wasn't similarly excited so instead she just curled up in the back for an hour until she could walk again.
Three cups of coffee with dinner at the museum restaurant for me. Bad idea. I'll get to that in a minute. (wow i'm the master of cliffhangers this time around.)
Pouring rain. Taxi back to the apartment. Our last night in Latin America before Tory's 7am flight. She has an errand to make, i go with her & try my luck at the atm. Lost. Ate my card. It's 7:45pm Friday, the bank is so closed but there are people inside. I just want my card back. After much knocking, ringing, dramatic use of the international sign for "please", and of course asking the cleaning woman for intercession on our behalf, hey we learned SOMETHING from all those saint-loving Catholics;), finally a guy comes to the door & starts explaining that yes, in fact the bank IS closed (a point emphasized by the compelling metaphor that the DOOR is also closed, which is why i can't actually hear a word he's saying) & they can't do anything about the ATM no matter what time our flight out of the country is the next day, and would we please just go away. So we did.
Back to the apartment, where i realize i've finally gotten sick but what a strange illness. I'm dizzy & kinda feverish & have such delusions as: 8pm is a reasonable time for bed. Ok! I'm not proud of it, but I went to sleep my last night in Latin America at 8pm. & fevered dreams did I have, yea, & upstairs did they sing flamenco & stomp around & still fitfuly dreamt I on. & lo, swift like the rapture arrived 3:30 A. M., the time of awakening, and of packing all of mine holy crap into the damned backpacke of my torment, and of figuring out how in the hell to get to the Mexico City Airport by the unsaintly hour of 5, count em, 5 horas de la mañana, so that Santa Torita de Santos Anselmo y Rafael could catch her blessed nonstop flight home.
And yet there remains one final chapter of our story. Crossing the border from Guatemala to Mexico by land, as we did, you actually have contact only with Guatemalan officials, not with those handy Mexican officials who give you the even handier tourist cards you need in order to be able to fly out of the country. At 6:30am, after waiting in line for over an hour to get through the completely unthorough bag search to the Continental check-in desk (by the way i will never fly Continental again for reasons too dull to bother you with) I was informed that I wouldn't be able to leave the country without a stupid piece of paper, which I could get from Office 78 upstairs behind the Burger King (this part felt like William S Burroughs for some reason) but not till after the office opens at 7. Shouldn't have to pay for it, she said, since they don't give em out when you cross by land. (If, however, you Do get one & Lose it, it's $42 to replace before you can leave.) Fine for me, my flight wasn't actually till 11am, I'd just gone early to share one last cab with Santa Torita, but what about her & her 7am flight? Well of course I couldn't find her at that point, having left her in the Delta line, so I struck off alone in search of the stupidly elusive tourist card.
Office 78 didn't actually open till 8, & the man inside didn't care Why I didn't have the card, & insisted that I had to pay 210 pesos to get a new one (thankfully about half the $42 I'd have had to pay if I'd had one & lost it). The problem here is that, as I've mentioned, my ATM card was at that moment working its way through the small intestine of a closed Banamex machine on Avenida Insurgentes. Now Tory had kindly lent me another 200 pesos that morning to help get me home, which brought the total of money in my pocket, and indeed the total of money at my disposal, to 204 pesos, 6 pesos short.
God damn i'm being long winded. I was wily. I went through security to the gates. I joined a mob of people getting off a plane & went through Immigration as if I were just then arriving to Mexico, thereby procuring a tourist card compliments of the United States of Mexico. Out through customs, nothing to declare, out of the airport, back into the airport, back through security, back to the gate to wait for my flight & clean my trumpet.
& they never even asked for my tourist card when I was boarding.
Incidentally, Tory succeeded in catching her flight by breaking down in tears for 20 minutes in the little Immigration interrogation room, finally eliciting the pity of the heretofore hardened officer, who upon finally discovering compassion & kindness after a lifetime of cruelty & denying visas & kicking dogs, has now devoted himself to the rescue of abandoned &/or abused lizards & has a good chance of being sainted. Ok that's two jabs at the Catholic Church now & that one wasn't even funny. Probably earned me an extra 10 years in Purgatory. I hear there are lots of clarinetists in Purgatory.
shut up peter
what an anticlimactic ending, and i'm not even drunk