(no subject)
Two items of business:
1) In Guanajuato, we got off the bus midmorning, stretched our legs and looked around. We took our pisses in the trees beside the station, avoiding the payment of bathroom entrance fees on grounds both fiscal and moral. Guanajuato was the site of a series of silver mines in the mountains 200 miles northwest of Mexico city. Eventually, the city was built around the mines, resulting in a bunch of steep cobbled streets which wind around each other without any apparent plan, sometimes ending abruptly and sometimes carrying you all the way out above the city, to a road which lays above it. It is wonderful. Patrick, immediately upon pissing, strides up to the group, sizes up a nearby mountain, and says "We could sleep there, you know." And we did, even though I whined about it quite a bit on the trip up. We could see everything from where we ended up camping, and thought ourselves solitude and handsome, a bunch of badasses in on a secret, until the morning, when we woke up surrounded by a herd of cows. Yeah, cows. So we lowed each other up, and gathered our wits for awhile before saying so long to the shepherd and climbing back down to the city. The next night, having enjoyed our bovine friends so much, we returned only to find that the gods had turned against us and decided not only to send a storm, but to arrange our sleeping arrangements such that only a tamale I had ingested in Ciudad Victoria remained dry. It was miserable. I mean, it was great. You know how it is.
2) The house we live in here has no floor, no windowpanes, beds and no kitchen. It has, in fact, no rooms. I have purchased a table and chairs, and Josh a cushion to sleep on. We've made friends with our neighbors, who own a pila (which is a concrete sink/washboard, used both for cleaning clothes and dishes. We live just down the street from a fritanga, which is a table on the sidewalk in front of your house from which you sell food that makes a chele faint with desire. Gallo Pinto (Nicaraguan rice and beans), Yuca, Papas, Manuelitas (pancakes rolled up with sweet cheese crumbled inside), and Frescos (home-made fruit drinks sold in tied-up sandwich bags. What do you do to obtain such heart-stealing deliciousities? Well, you wait in line, you ask everybody how to say things, and then when the woman behind the table calls you amor, you say "cinco de gallo pinto, tres de yuca, y una manuelita. y dame un fresco." She scoops your food into a banana leaf, ties it up, and then you pay. You carry the food home to your house to eat it, and then afterward, I sit at our table (which is wood, white and brown, and beautiful), pull open our door, which is big enough that a car can drive through (you see, our apartment is a garage), and read and write. Usually, though, I´m not at that long until I decide to go outside. Everybody tells us to be careful in our neighborhood, and I believe them. It´s by the bus station, for crying out loud. But there are always people on the streets, walking around or riding bikes, and the gigantonas are always walking around, with boys who beat on drums and sing "dance, gigantona, dance!" It is the mocking of a spanish bigotry that didn't let their daughters marry nicaraguan men. The superior spaniard is the giantess, and the nigaraguan man is a normal-sized boy with a giant-size head. It´s done by boys of 10-13, all over the city, after dark this time of year. We're in Leon, by the way. I like it.
1) In Guanajuato, we got off the bus midmorning, stretched our legs and looked around. We took our pisses in the trees beside the station, avoiding the payment of bathroom entrance fees on grounds both fiscal and moral. Guanajuato was the site of a series of silver mines in the mountains 200 miles northwest of Mexico city. Eventually, the city was built around the mines, resulting in a bunch of steep cobbled streets which wind around each other without any apparent plan, sometimes ending abruptly and sometimes carrying you all the way out above the city, to a road which lays above it. It is wonderful. Patrick, immediately upon pissing, strides up to the group, sizes up a nearby mountain, and says "We could sleep there, you know." And we did, even though I whined about it quite a bit on the trip up. We could see everything from where we ended up camping, and thought ourselves solitude and handsome, a bunch of badasses in on a secret, until the morning, when we woke up surrounded by a herd of cows. Yeah, cows. So we lowed each other up, and gathered our wits for awhile before saying so long to the shepherd and climbing back down to the city. The next night, having enjoyed our bovine friends so much, we returned only to find that the gods had turned against us and decided not only to send a storm, but to arrange our sleeping arrangements such that only a tamale I had ingested in Ciudad Victoria remained dry. It was miserable. I mean, it was great. You know how it is.
2) The house we live in here has no floor, no windowpanes, beds and no kitchen. It has, in fact, no rooms. I have purchased a table and chairs, and Josh a cushion to sleep on. We've made friends with our neighbors, who own a pila (which is a concrete sink/washboard, used both for cleaning clothes and dishes. We live just down the street from a fritanga, which is a table on the sidewalk in front of your house from which you sell food that makes a chele faint with desire. Gallo Pinto (Nicaraguan rice and beans), Yuca, Papas, Manuelitas (pancakes rolled up with sweet cheese crumbled inside), and Frescos (home-made fruit drinks sold in tied-up sandwich bags. What do you do to obtain such heart-stealing deliciousities? Well, you wait in line, you ask everybody how to say things, and then when the woman behind the table calls you amor, you say "cinco de gallo pinto, tres de yuca, y una manuelita. y dame un fresco." She scoops your food into a banana leaf, ties it up, and then you pay. You carry the food home to your house to eat it, and then afterward, I sit at our table (which is wood, white and brown, and beautiful), pull open our door, which is big enough that a car can drive through (you see, our apartment is a garage), and read and write. Usually, though, I´m not at that long until I decide to go outside. Everybody tells us to be careful in our neighborhood, and I believe them. It´s by the bus station, for crying out loud. But there are always people on the streets, walking around or riding bikes, and the gigantonas are always walking around, with boys who beat on drums and sing "dance, gigantona, dance!" It is the mocking of a spanish bigotry that didn't let their daughters marry nicaraguan men. The superior spaniard is the giantess, and the nigaraguan man is a normal-sized boy with a giant-size head. It´s done by boys of 10-13, all over the city, after dark this time of year. We're in Leon, by the way. I like it.