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.
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