The beach - Sayulita

So this past weekend, we had a pretty cool adventure.

We got some tickets to see The Killers in Guadalajara on Thursday night. We figured we'd make a weekend out of it, since we already were driving 4 hours there. We ended up renting a car with some people from here and drove down on Thursday afternoon. We had made plans to stay in Guadalajara that night and in the morning drive down to somewhere on the Pacific coast. We figured we'd find a cool town on the beach to get some serious sun and sand.

We got to Guadalajara with just enough time to shovel down a meal that, sadly, was one of the best I've had since we've been here. Sadly, because I would have loved to have more time to savor it, but oh well.

Me and M went over to the concert hall, a large auditorium that holds about 11,500. The place was totally crowded with more Killers shirt-wearing people than I had imagined. Our tickets were for the standing room only area right in front of the stage, which was really cool. We were up close and in the thick of it.

After the last couple songs from the opener, The Killers came out, and, I'll admit, totally shocked me with how good they were. I've heard their albums and am familiar with their big songs, but the live show was totally great. A pretty straight-forward rock band with good presence, good live renditions of their songs and an audience that couldn't have been more into it - the ridiculously massive cups of beer could have helped…

It's fun to see people singing along with songs in english when there's a good chance that they don't know what they're singing.

After the show, we met up with the others at an overwhelming bar of Cuban descent, where the music was too loud, and I just wasn't that into it. We headed back to the hostel, which was a pretty nice place. By the time we got back there, I was basically ready to crash, and so we did. It was the first time in a while that I slept in a dorm-style hostel room, but other than the terrible pillow, it wasn't so bad.

We spent a while navigating the one-way streets of Guadalajara, trying to figure out how to reach the Starbucks around the corner, and then got on the road. The hostel guy had given us some info about a town about 30 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta, called Sayulita. He said they have a cool place to camp right on the beach and that everyone he has sent there was happy with what they found. Seeing as how we didn't really have any other ideas, we made that our destination.

We chose to drive what's called the autopista - a toll road that turned out to be freshly paved, straight and relatively empty of cars. It made for a fast, comfortable drive - or at least as fast as our crappy rental car could go. The road passes through some of the most amazing scenery that I've seen in a long time, if ever. Huge, beautiful, green mountains, lush countryside with fields of blue agave growing - at least in Jalisco, where tequila comes from, deep valleys with farms, small pueblos, large fields of black volcanic rock….and so on. Just awesome, especially coming from the high mountain deserts of Zacatecas. The weather also started to change in a good way. By the time we hit the last toll and pulled over for a bathroom break, I needed to change into shorts, tshirt and flip-flops - the temperatures were up close to 90 degrees. Definitely a welcome change from the 50s and 60s of Zacatecas.

After driving for a while after leaving the toll road, and being extremely excited to see the ocean after 3 months (longest I've ever gone without seeing it…) we finally saw the sign for Sayulita. Driving down a smallish, barely paved road, we pulled into town and immediately saw lots of surfer dudes and dudettes carrying boards, walking barefoot and spending lots of dollars.

Signs of it being a small town, no matter how expensive or full of USers: a road bisected by a stream that had to be driven through, no big hotels in sight, nor any condos that were obvious.

After getting a few beers to temper the long-and-crowded-car-ride jitters, we found the camping place and "checked in". It seemed that they were doing some upgrades to the place, so it was kind of like camping in a construction site, to some degree. It was right on the beach, however, so it worked out just fine. As we found out, this was no cheap town, but rather the prices were more on par with the US - they even had ATMs that gave out US dollars. Oy.

After getting our tents set up, and our bathing suits on, we hit the beach for a couple hours, mostly sitting at one of the little restaurants right on the sand. M was about as happy as she could be, finally getting to eat some fresh whole fish, just caught that morning. The water was as warm as bath water - just perfect as far as I was concerned.

Once night fell, we ate again, walked around some and ended up chilling in the town square, beers in hand. The cops didn't seem to care at all, since they just mentioned it once and then didn't bother us again. We were talking to a couple guys we met who were about to open a restaurant in town and ended up going back to their place for some food and drinks. Cool. Most people we met were pretty friendly. It was weird - like in San Miguel - to hear so much english being spoken. It was even almost a bit annoying to go into a store and have the workers talk to me in english. I definitely prefer to try and deal in spanish.

The next day, we got up, hit the beach, and didn't leave until much later. I took a surf lesson (!) which was absolutely fantastic. I was up on my feet my very first try, and rode about 10 waves before my arms gave out. I had no idea just how arm-strength intensive it was. I'm probably really ripped right now, so watch out.

Surfing was really really fun, and I can't wait to do it again. It was slightly intimidating, because there's all these rules and stuff, that aren't exactly clear, and people can get pretty worked up about them. Oh yeah - dealing the US-woman who owns the surf place I went to was interesting - she was slightly racist-seeming, going on about these people this, and these people that…talking about their no-good work ethics, and low levels of morality.

Hm.

After the lesson, I spent a few hours boogie-boarding, which is a lot easier, and pretty fun too. The waves were good-sized, and allowed for some fun rides.

The next day, it was up, packing and on the road. I ended up driving most of the 9 or so hours, which actually wasn't bad at all. The weather got progressively colder, and by the time we were home, the warm was gone and the cold was back.

Next week, we're back to the coast of Sinaloa for work, so stay tuned...

Preguntas/Questions

Here's a bunch of questions I could have gotten from you, my listeners, but didn't:

How was Aguascalientes this past weekend? Has it gotten any better since the you were there last and declared it one of the worst places you've ever visited?

What's the deal with Dia de los Muertos down there in Mexico?

How's spanish school these days? Have you started any technical grammatical analysis yet?

Now, in order, the answers:

Aguascalientes - a city about 2 hours from Zacatecas - was ok, I guess. We went for the Festival de Calveras, or Festival of Skulls, an annual shindig to celebrate Dios de los Muertos. We had checked out the schedule beforehand and seen that there was going to be an Israel pavilion and some bands from Israel playing, so we decided to go. We stayed at a crappy, but clean hotel on a street that's just begging to have more happening but there just isn't enough...people, bars, restaurants...I don't know.

Anyway, Aguas is totally flat and pretty uninteresting. There's a very few cool things to see - the Palacio del Gobierno is a beautiful building with a ton of murals painted all over the inside, there's a big cathedral which looks like...a big cathedral, and the Sanborns has a nice awning, which may or may not be of Art Deco design.

Yeah, that's about it.

For shopping, there's a lot of stores to check out. It seems, however, that most of the stores carry the kind of crap that you see occasionally and wonder, "where the hell did they get that thing?" It turns out that Aguascalientes is just the place to go shopping for that crap. The shiny, the strange, the miniature, the fake-looking, the that-reminds-me-of-something-else. In short, the knick-knack, the tchochke, the chingadera.

They have it all.

As for the festival, well, it was ok. There weren't any stands set up selling stuff like at the big fair here in Zacateas, which was just fine. The Israel pavilion consisted of a bunch of pictures (clearly skewed Christian for the audience), some bottles of wine (to show up the crappy Mexican wines?) and some heavily pop-rock influenced klezmer band. They didn't even have any felafel or anything. Lame.

Highlights of Aguascalientes: Trees, fresh ground coffee from beans grown in the south of Mexico, a bakery that sells only whole-wheat products where they had a close approximation to the bread that my mom makes and I sorely miss, and the fact that it's only two hours to get home.

Wow. I hope I don't have to go back.

Dia de los Muertos is a holiday on November 2, preceded by All-Saints Day and Halloween. It's one of the indigenous holidays that was mixed up with Christianity when the Spanish conquered the area. They figured that if they could blend some indigenous stuff with Christian stuff, the natives would be a lot more amenable to converting. It seems to have worked.

They celebrate by having lots of skulls and skeletons around, eating sweet bread and candy and visiting the graves of loved ones. They go to the graves to clean them, adorn them flowers, and basically hang out with the souls of those who have passed on. One of the ideas is that death isn't the end, but rather passing on into another stage of existence. The go to put food, drink, flowers, play music, etc so that the souls come back to visit and are stoked to see their favourite stuff waiting for them. I think it's a nice thing to see whole families doing all this work around the graves, adults and kids alike. It seems like it fosters a good relationship with the idea of death - that's it's not necessarily something to be scared of, but just another part of the big picture.

Good stuff.

Spanish school is good, and yes, we have started in on some technical grammatical analysis in fact. Kind of weird/creepy that you knew to ask that, as we just started today, but whatever....

I'll have to get back to you on what it entails - I'll keep you posted.

weekend weekend

what a weekend of cultural experience.

I bumped into our friend Shirani and he said that he was going to a concert of this band, Infected Mushroom. Turns out, they're Israeli, so we obviously had to go. I mean, the Jewish population of Zacatecas would be at least double what it normally is on any given weekend, and we had to be there.

The show was called for 8pm, but with some openers, so we figured if we got there at 10pm, the main act would be coming on. Showing up at the Dome (or whatever the concert venue is called), we see a really long line wrapping around the parking lot. There must be some mistake...it's close to 10:30 and all these people haven't gotten in yet??

We get in line and we don't move more than 20 feet in about 20 minutes. After a quick reconnaissance mission, we realize that there's literally one guy at the entrance who's patting everyone down. This was inefficient, slow, and we should have known.

Finally getting inside, there's a decent crowd of people milling around. There was a VIP section right in front of the stage, fenced off and filled with tables, chairs and couches. I think this was not a good idea for a show at which people are meant to dance, but ok. There was a DJ going through his set - decent, but definitely not great. It really seems that it's just too easy to be a mediocre DJ. I mean, beats dropping, crowd energy wasted...just not that great.

Weird thing #1: On the big projector screen on stage, behind the DJ was playing massive advertisements the whole time. Why not have trippy video instead?

After the first few DJs, and close to midnight, we finally asked someone working there when the main act would come out. Oh, after 7 DJs, he said. Probably close to 1:30.

Oh.

At that, I went to the bathroom - again. The beer was running through me at lightning speed and with each trip to the urinal costing 3 pesos, I ended up spending almost as much on that as I did on Coronas. The wall towards the back of the venue that everyone else seemed to be using looked pretty nice by the end.

Awesome Idea #1: We wrote a note in hebrew and gave it to the security guy by the stage entrance to pass along to the band. We told him that we know them from Israel and wanted him to pass the note on to their manager or something. In the note, we wrote that we told the security people that we know them. We said we're the only Jews in Zacatecas, and because of that, they should call us and do some partying. Awesome Idea, no phone call. Oh well.

So finally this Israeli band comes on, and they're decent, at least. Not sure if they were worth waiting 3 hours to see, but good enough to get some dancing done. It was cool, for sure, to hear some hebrew being sung right here in good ol'Zacatecas.

New York, New York

That's right folks, we were in the Big Apple for about a week - sorry we didn't have the chance to hang out. If you saw the post below, you'd know why.

It was definitely interesting going back there, even though it'd only been about 3 months since we left.

There were a bunch of things that stuck out in my mind as part of the culture-shocking. Here's two of them:

First, there is nothing like drinking water straight from the tap. Down here, we use purified water (delivered weekly in big jugs) for absolutely everything from drinking to tooth-brushing to cooking. It's just such a luxury to walk over to the sink and fill up a glass of water (or put my mouth under the tap, as I'm wont to do). I really didn't miss the feeling of "damn...no more water and there's no where to buy any now, so I won't be drinking anything until morning..." or kicking myself for rinsing my toothbrush off in the sink, rather than with the bottled water. I mean, I did have typhoid and all, and they did tell me that even just that little bit of water from the sink could have caused it...

Second (and this is an interesting one) is the total lack of diversity in Zacatecas, if not all of Mexico.

I mean, you walk around New York City and you see someone from literally everywhere. Every color, every accent, every everything (not to mention all their food too...mmm). Here, we are the diversity. Everyone is Mexican and us gringos provide all the "different" there is to see. Of course, I am discounting to some degree the huge variety of different peoples in Mexico - there's a lot of indigenous people here - but it just seems like we're the ones who look different.

Other things: english, while strange to hear in Zacatecas and definitely worth turning around to see who's talking, is common in many neighborhoods in NYC. It's rarely worth turning around.

Celebrities in New York I saw: Mario Batali with his trademark orange crocs and Chelsea Clinton, whom we sat next to at a restaurant.

Bagels, pizza, coffee, vegetables, etc. Yes. Yes. Yes.

We walked through the farmer's market in Union Square the other day and one thought kept coming to me. If there's no typhoid in any of the produce, where does the excitement come from?? I mean, without that risk every time you take a bite, is eating even fun? I hope I'm not ruined forever on food that doesn't carry at least a small chance of getting me violently ill.

a week

so here's what's up -

Last week, we were trucking along here in Zacatecas and got some sad news that M's grandmother would likely not live much longer. While not sick, per say, she was about 100 years old and just not able to keep going. I will say that I have only met two people of that age that were as with it (or more so) than people half that age - strangely enough they were both M and my grandmothers. Reading the NY Times everyday, watching TV, movies, sports, keeping up on current affairs...wow

We decided to fly home (?) to New York to see her and be with the family. Luckily we were there for about 5 days before she gave out and were able to spend some time with her. It was just amazing how

aware she was of everything and everyone around her. She knew perfectly well that we came from Mexico to see her (she asked if were learning spanish and offered to teach us hungarian) and couldn't have been happier.

She also knew exactly what was happening with her and seemed very well prepared. This was a first experience for me in that there didn't seem to be a tragedy in death - for some reason it just didn't seem like the same sadness you would expect. The sadness was there, of course, because a wonderful woman wouldn't be with us anymore; because her family would miss her terribly; because she had a particular way of being that is rare to see - especially in a woman who lived through so much and who lost so much. She just seemed to have an incredible sense of clarity and dignity about the process.

It was truly an inspiring thing to see. She will be missed.

Today

We went for a walk today, to a part of Zacatecas that we'd never seen. Called La Encantada, there's a small man-made pond, trees, a jogging path, zoo, bbq picnic areas, concert stage, geodesic domes, ducks, and...lots lots more. It was so great to hang out on a grass lawn under a bunch of trees.

The zoo is kind of depressing, however. There's a lot of animals in small cages who would definitely be much happier elsewhere - much like zoos many places, I imagine.

We also found a sports center that has an awesome pool. We want to think we're going to join. Go team.

Tomorrow, the plan is to climb one of our local mountains. Root for us, and assuming all goes well, we'll speak then.

Love,

Z

And now, for something completely different

Different because, for the first time, we were told someone would show up to do something and IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Now, we have Internet. Got my wireless set up and, baby, we are online.

Things are coming together...though why havin Internet signifies that in my mind, I don't know. I'm sure it's a sign of something unhealthy.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone