What I See in México

Hello everyone! This post is pretty interactive, and will take a while to fully appreciate, so if you can set aside some time to look at everything, I would appreciate it. One of the most difficult things to maintain is a sense of wonder, and just to make sure that these places don't become too normal for me, I want to share them with you folk, who will definitely appreciate them.

Ver mapa más grande

This is my city! Click here!

Heroica Puebla de Zaragoza is the main city; I live where it says Cholula de Rivadavia. The two volcanoes to the west are Popocatepetl and Iztaccíhuatl, and the one to the east is La Malinche, which we (almost) climbed a couple months ago.

Ver mapa más grande

Here is the first house I lived in: Click here

It was located roughly in a municipality called San Antonio Cacalotepec, the latter part meaning (in Nahuatl) "Hill of the Ravens". I'll give an explanation of the Mexican city/town naming system on my blog in a bit.

If you'll zoom out a bit, take a look at the intersection of 24 de Febrero and 24 de Febrero. The little street only has a name for the sake of having one in Google Maps, there's no sign or anything. To go anywhere, I walked from the house to that intersection, then, following the yellow 24 de Febrero, to the highway Federal Puebla-Atlixco to take a bus to the NE, and from there to more places. A great way to learn!

Ver mapa más grande

Here is the house I live in now, it's the one above the wondeful name of my street. Put your fingers on the name John F. Kennedy, and move them to the NW until you touch a house. That's mine! If you'll zoom out, you can see the street I walk to get to La Recta (here they call it Ruta Quetzalcoatl, which is OK too), which is where the buses pass.

I don't know where my third house will be, but now is the fun part! I hope you all have Flash Player installed, and that you know how to use Google Street View, because this is the more interesting part. These are some of my favorite places in México.

Ver mapa más grande

Here is El Centro of Puebla, centered around a zócalo, or center square, a fixture in every Mexican city, and any one with Spanish influence. The first thing you see is the Cathedral of Puebla, which is a really intimidating and powerful building that has a great sense of serenity in the middle of the city. Here are some looks at the inside, intricately decorated and amazing to stand in.

A little bit to the left, and you'll see the zócalo, a really neat park with huge trees and a beautiful fountain in the middle of it. Even further to the left and you'll see the portales, which can be found in pretty much any city in México. in there are some really neat restaurants and shops. I encourage you to "walk around" with the Street View camera to get a picture of how neat it is around el Centro.

Ver mapa más grande 

Here is El Parián, a really cool market downtown, where handmade pottery, clothing, tourist stuff, candy, furniture, etc., is sold. The SV function doesn't really do it justice, so i would recommend zooming out, grabbing the little orange man again, and then placing him on some of the blue dots that appear. They represent photographs of the inside of the market, really amazing.

Ver mapa más grande

This is the zócalo of San Pedro Cholula, a place where I go to relax and write, about a 20 minute bike ride from my house. As you can see, the main plaza, with the Mexican flag and portales, is accompanied by a nice shady park with huge trees. There a huge markets, or tianguis, which, apart from having a great Wikipedia article, are put up on the weekends, where anything you could ever want is sold. Check out the other side as well. As before, it's definitely worth it to zoom out and put the little man on the blue dots.

I hope you enjoy these photos, and trust me, some of mine will but uploaded soon! I hope you're all enjoying yourselves, and I send you all much love from México.

"You can't have two sets of manners!"

    One of the quotes that has confused me as long as I have lived, until very recently.

My grandmother, Jane Brown, has always told us in that grandmotherly way, that having two sets of manners is impossible. Of course, as with most quotes and advice from grandparents, they sort of sit around in your brain, not making much sense, until the time when they would have come in handy to have thought of has passed. I'm still in awe of the wisdom of this one.

We always understood it in the strictly manners sense; that you should eat pizza with your friends without plates at 4 in the morning the same way you should eat Christmas dinner with the entire family with the good china. Obviously, that didn't make much sense, prompting us to say "well, I have lots of sets of manners, what is that about?" The idea of coming home at night to make Ramen noodles then eat them on porcelain with the good silver and napkins doesn't fit.

I think that I have found a new, better meaning for this quote. Manners should be interpreted as the way you act, the things you talk about, the way you address people, but most importantly, your morals, beliefs and ideas. Obviously one will address a grandparent differently than a friend's little brother, but the sentiment should be the same; saying hello in a friendly way.

 More importantly, do your morals and ideas change depending on who you are talking to? Do you change your opinion slightly in order to facilitate the conversation? Are you easily convinced and influenced? if so, you're using two sets of manners.

The idea is that while many things change in terms of environment, what is the thing that you always take with you while traveling?

  Your brain, your ideas, your beliefs.

So, instead of taking it as an effort to always be proper or improper, because the situation will always change in terms of etiquette, take it as a point that we should be a little bit less flexible. The other people usually don't know much better than you what to do, so if you can be the one that is fixed in your morals, ideas and beliefs, they will be drawn to you. Be the one who doesn't have two sets of manners; the one who can adapt to the situation; not as the situation is, if not to how your experiences, manners, beliefs, etc, apply to the situation! 

If your morals are flexible to the situation, who are you?

Happy birthday Jamie!

"Butt luck will drive ya butt batty"

Gotta love confused foreigners.

This confused French dude was lucky enough to have ATCQ telling him what the deal was, I'm still figuring it out more or less solo.

Some beautiful photos from a friend

My new friend Ed Simmen recently sent me some excellent photos, taken really early in the morning by his friend.

The volcano that you see is Iztaccihuatl (The Sleeping Woman), and the moon right next to it is really powerful.

I'm sure that Niagara Falls or even Lake Erie could inspire awe, but for me, these volcanoes looming over my existence here has given me a more acute sense of the power of the Earth; the reason that the volcanoes have legends associated with them.

The legend in it's most basic form:
Iztaccíhuatl was an Aztec princess, and Popocatépetl an Aztec warrior who fought for her father. Izta (her unofficial nickname according to me) fell in love with Popo (the actual nickname), but Popo was sent by Izta's father to fight in Oaxaca before they could get married. When he was about to leave, Popo promised Izta that they would get married, hoping to return alive from battle.

While she patiently but anxiously awaited her lover's return, Izta received the news that Popo had died in the war, and in her unbearable grief, she committed suicide and laid down for her final rest.  

When Popo returned in triumph, expecting to see his future wife, the discovery of her death prompted him to wait there and watch her, paralyzed with grief. After a while, he became rock, and now remains there, beside his would-be wife, watching her.

Of course there are tons of versions, but this one is the most popular. Other ones say that Popo is waiting for her to wake up, others that he committed suicide too, others that he is angry, and for that reason a volcano, and there are others that are completely different. Foor a really good breakdown, check this page out, it's got a nice explanation, and some good external links.




This is yet another example of context being changed; the power of perspective. I was always the one relatively unimpressed by Niagara Falls, that "it's just a bunch of water going over a cliff", until my dad started telling me all the legends and history associated with them. Even so, a person seeing them for the first time will undoubtedly be more amazed than I.

However, driving through the insanely curvy highways between México City and Puebla upon my arrival, I was utterly in shock. I had never been in mountains before, and the power of rock sticking up so far from the Earth, shaping the lives of all the people that had lived there since ancient times really moved me.

It's the exact same situation with the water/river/falls of Niagara Falls, but because it was a different sort of marvel in a different context, I was exponentially more impressed.

My family explained the legend to me, but I was probably asleep, and didn't really remember it, but the power of the nature really stuck with me.

GET OUT AND CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE!

Much love y'all, keep the peace.

YouTube Culture

All righty, as we all know, there are some cultural prerequisites if you want to be a competent teenager in the world today, and one of those prerequisites is having viewed a large amount of stuff on YouTube. Obviously, as even those from previous generations have experienced, the uncomfortable sensation of not getting a cultural reference or quote is not fun. However, the cultural pool has A. been expanded and B. become a lot less highbrow.

For those interested in catching up on American YouTube culture, i would recommend www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com, a primer on all that crazy stuff floating around the web.

In Mexico, there exists a YouTube culture too, as I was pleased to find out! Here are some basics


Here we have "La caida de Edgar", or basically, Edgar Falls. i saw this quite awhile ago, but the experience has been vastly enriched by the ability to understand the various swear words that he yells.

The important ones:
Pendejo: Dumbass, idiot, useless (It comes from the Latin word for "butthole hair")
Gato: Cat, literally, but in this sense it's more like gay
Naco: Low-class, uneducated, rude, ill-mannered, poor

This video is also funny because of the absurdly thick Norteño accents, think of how we Yankees view Texas accents.
_____________________________________________

Here is another great one



"Me amarraron como puerco", or "They Tied Me Up Like a Pig"

This guy was stopped on the street for some reason or another, and subsequently questioned by TV cameras before the cops. I don't question it, because he undoubtedly tells them things he wouldn't have told the police, and in better style too, according to me

The punchline is usually yelling La Canaca! which the man claims is an important social club to which either he or his father belongs, no one is sure. The other great line is "Soy el hijo del papa",  or "I'm the son of the father". It doesn't make any more sense in Spanish.


Enjoy the cross cultural understanding!

Quotes that made me question my uniqueness in the world

Today as I was walking down my street, an old man in a Texas Rangers cap said "buenas tardes" from his window, an act of sheer courtesy towards an American-looking male in México, or any male in México, that took me by surprise. I turned around to look for where the sound had come from, and I was asked where I was from after about a minute of casual conversation.    
When my acquaintance recived the answer of "Los Estados Unidos", he immediately looked excited, something that also struck me as unusual, until he responded by saying that he was from Galveston, Texas.
It always gives me pleasure to encounter my paisanos around here, and this guy really, as is said in Spanish, "fell on me well". I asked what his profession was, and is turned out to be a literature professor at the UDLA, a university right near my house. Immediately excited by this development, I quickly replied that I too was fascinated by literature, and that I was thrille to have stumbled across a fellow enthusiast. He told me to wait there and that he would come down to say hello.

When we met at the gate of his fraccionamiento (think a gated community, but much more common in México, and less snobby), he shook my hand and introduced himself as Ed Simmen, and offered me two books, along with his card, to borrow. Random encounters define my life.

Anyway, when I got home, I started reading the book that HE had edited called Gringos in Mexico, a collection of short stories written by American authors who's time in México inspired their subsequent works, such as Stephen Crane, John Graves, and William Cullen Bryant, among others. I had never felt more understood in my entire life. Every single one of the authors, through interview or text, put to words what I have, up until this point, been unable to.

Here are some of my favorites:

"I went to México not to seek romance or to immerse myself in learning about the country, but, mainly because it was unconnected with things and people I knew and seemed a likely place wherein to start getting my head straightened out"

"México, for deep and ancient reasons, is an especially, emphatically foreign country, one that has always rebuffed easy familiarity from outsiders except of a surface sort"

"You can't possibly write about a country that you come into as a foreigner except in a very humble way. As a foreigner, you can't possibly try to point out the specialities or peculiarites of México"

"I was temporarily demolished by amoebae, and more or less hypotized and frightened by the splendid barbarousness of the country"

"I told them frequently, for a while at the beginning anyway, how things ought to be.What they must have thought, that assured, sophisticated Mexican family, of my sophomoric observations! I blush now, remembering; but the basic values, we all found - the Biblical, human values of decency and love and behavior - are no different in Mexico City than those in Wellsville, New York"

I'm way too excited to start this book.

Pirami-Day!

Hello everyone! I hope you're doing well and enjoying your situations.

Right near my house, there is a structure that should be more famous than it is, because it is not only the largest pyramid the world, but the largest monument as well. The Great Pyramid of Cholula! Dimensions are approximately 450 x 450 meters of the square base with a height of 66 meters, rather large. In terms of the volume, it is even more impressive, measured at 4.45 million cubic meters, around 2.5 the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

Aside from it's impressive dimensions, the history of the structure is worth reading as well. Started in the 2nd century BC, the construction continued until around 1200 AD, being added to every time that a new leader came into power. The structure of the pyramid was made so that each new layer covered the old one completely, imagine those Russian dolls that hide each other.

So, for reasons unknown, the Cholultecas abandoned the site around 1300. As we all know, those crazy Spaniards started arriving around 1600, and on their way to Tenochtitlan, they stopped in the nearby city of Tlaxcala to recruit natives that wanted to help them in their conquest. The Tlaxcaltecas and Cholultecas were enemies, and also two of the few states not controlled by the Aztecs. So, seeing that they had a huge ally in Cortés, asked him to do them a favor by demolishing Cholula, and in return they would join him. Something like that. Cortes arrived in Cholula and engaged them in the infamous Matanza de Cholula. The pyramid (although still believed to be a hill) was used during this time for keeping hostages.

After most of the dust had settled and after many historical events that I am neither aware of or capable of telling, the Spanish started building the beautiful church, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Our Lady of Remedies) around 1574. The Spanish had a tradition of sort of "blocking" Mesoamerican monuments and sacred sites with churches, erasure in a spiritual and physical form.

So, the entire idea of this post was to let you guys know the cool stuff that happens. About 15 people came to the event, just to see each other, explore the wonders that sometimes turn into normal, and spend time together. We walked up the pyramid to the church, wandered around and marveled, explored, took in the magnificent view from the top (I hope someday to accompany this with pictures), and in general, enjoyed ourselves. Hope you like it!