Expediciones Culturales!

This post will be pretty light weight, with mostly photos.

In my infinite restlessness, I've been organizing a bunch of day trips and stuff like that to various strange and obscure places in México, called "Expediciones Culturales!" (with a mandatory exclamation point). Basically, I put the call out to travel to a place for the day, we meet up in a place, and then take the bus to a previously unknown place! The first one was to the Pyramid of Cholula, and the most recent one was to TONANTZINTLA, a small pueblo on the outskirts of Puebla.

It's known for it's church...

The church is pretty much unique in México, because it is one of the very few NOT designed by Spanish artisans. The Spanish conquistadores, for some reason that I'm not sure of, put the indios of this pueblo in charge of building this church.

So, instead of building the traditional heaven over the altar scheme, the indios were told to build what THEY thought heaven/paradise was like. It turned out like this. We were not allowed to take photos inside, so I'll have to use some others:

If you notice, it's not all about angels and stuff like that, even though it looks like it at first glance. Instead of angels and God, the indios put little children, according to their belief that the afterworld consisted of being reborn as a little kid; life's most innocent age.

This was about half of the group.

Later we headed over to San Francisco Acatepec, another pueblo pretty close to Tonantzintla. I don't have so much history about this one, but the architecture speaks for itself...

          Beautiful inside, beautiful outside.

We were lucky enough to happen upon a wedding, complete with mariachis, bolo ties, and wedding cake. Really an amazing treat.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!!!

What the deal is.

Hello everyone, I hope you're all just dandy.

I'd just like to give a little update to what I've been doing lately, and some of the changes in my life obviously. Maintaining a blog is tough to do, because you have to go out and do things and make things happen in order to have good material, that is to say, that I can't actively update this thang while exploring cool places or meeting new people, you, the readers, have to hear it through me.
Admittedly, this is a hard task and , also admittedly, I haven't been doing it very well! Oh well.

At the beginning of the month, I went to a party for my friend's birthday, Camille from France. I arrived in bus after meeting up with my friend Lucy, and from Angelópolis, a mall, we took a bus the the Pyramid of Cholula, which is ridiculous to be saying like it was a normal thing, but that's the way things are, honestly. Don't worry, guys, I still appreciate and love looking at it.

So, we arrived at the party, and I will never get over how beautiful Mexican streets are. Picture a Wilson Farms or 711 or something like that. It has a big sign, fluoresent lights, trademarks, stuff like that. In México, with the exception of OXXO stores and other ones like it, the convinience stores family-owned, relatively unconnected affairs, with awesome names like Miscelania Juquilita or Abarrotes Cristo.

 Miscelania translates pretty well, but abarrotes doesn't. If you'll look at the definition, it comes from the word "to pack", which I take to mean that they are considered the things that one packs. Abarrotes are gum, pop, chips, cigarrettes, but other more local things like tamarind candy, chicharrón (pork skin), and all my favorite brands of Mexican beer (Click here for a bunch of examples).

So, to get back to my original point, these abarrote stores are magnificently decorated, with hand-painted signs, usually dedicated to some saint, person, or idea. So fun to explore in these little places, in a lot of them, if you move too much, you'll knock some stuff over! Imagine the little old ladies who sell newspapers in NYC, the ones that you can barely see, and you get the idea. So much more personal, and a lot more efficient in terms of space!



I'm a sucker for these family businesses, quite honestly.




I recently chatted with the guy who runs one near my house, a store with pretty much anything you could imagine (except deodorant, apparently), but the size of an American living room.



Another interesting thing about these stores is that seemingly without problem, it's common to see 2 or 3 open and running on the same block.

Sorry that this isn't my picture, but it gives you the idea:

Credit to pbase.com

So, just sharing some thoughts on the things that I hope will always stay interesting and weird! Come to México, it is a beautiful and interesting country, full of the type of things that you always thought would be stereotypical, but end up being perfectly in place when you find them.

Much love to all!

New photos!

Easily accessible through these links:

Fun stuff I've been up to

More fun stuff

The rest of the Independence Route

Check them out folks!

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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.