Taxco - city of a million church pictures

So, after a number of days of unpacking the house, our friends C&J along with our Canadian neighbors invited us to go to Taxco with them.

Taxco is the silver capital of Mexico. When Cortés came to Mexico, he found the governor here sending the tribute to Montezuma in the form of big honkin' silver bricks. Cortés said, I want a piece of this action, and made Taxco the center of his silver mining operations. The church of St Prisca sits all pink and pretty in the square, and I took about a million photos of it as everywhere we went, people kept pointing out new and exciting vantage points.

Inside, the church was filled will many intricately carved altars.

Everybody needs a giant Jesus statue standing over your city.

After coming out of the church, C turns to me and says, "Did you just take a picture of that man's pants?!" Uh, yeah.

I love this shot. I had been trying to get a picture of Hat Man, but he always wanted to sell me a hat if I came anywhere near making eye-contact with him. Here, C distracted him by trying on a mask while J and Baby A look on laughing.

Nevara tried on a different mask.

So, this guy was hand-shaving the ice for snow-cones. Raul was all set to get one when C announced that anyone who ate a snowcone would not be allowed to ride in his car for fear of digestive explosions. Exposure to contaminated water occurs most frequently here when someone forgets that ice is like water only frozen.

Yes, I'm going to hell. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to photograph a funeral. Actually, there were two, and the second one was even better with pall-bearers and everything, but I didn't want to push my luck. I really dug the mariachi bands wearing their photographic pants.

Barranca Lobosa

So the girls started school on a Monday. Their school requires that they ride the bus each way for security and traffic reasons. But we were still living in our temporary housing across town from where the bus was planning to pick them up at our permanent house in Barranca Lobosa. So, the weekend before school started, though our belongings had not yet arrived, we borrowed a van from the embassy, loaded up all of our stuff (suitcases, airfreight, etc), and moved ourselves across town. Here's the girls standing on our stairs the first morning of school.
The dog was pleased to have a bit of back yard to dig in.

So, our house is built on the side of a steep ravine (barranco). Our front gate is at street level, but our house is one story down from that. So our poor movers had to unload everything in our carport, bring it down the stairs, through the courtyard, into the house, up the stairs, down a long hall, to finally get to our bedroom which is across the wall from the carport where they started.

This is our bedroom furniture. And that is our bedroom on the other side of that far wall. As they frequently say here in Mexico (translated for your convenience), "You can't get there from here."

August Food Update

Papaya is nasty. Okay, not really nasty. The seeds looks like some sort of insect egg, slimy and with the faint look of something growing inside. The fruit tastes kind of like cantaloupe and guayaba's love child. Guayaba, I have found, is guava. It is tasty, much like fruit punch, but it has about a million seeds, rendering it inedible.
Zorra had her tradition Key Lime Pie for her birthday. What we Americans call the "key lime" is the Mexican lime which is sometimes the only lime you can find here. You also can't find lime juice in a bottle, so we had to squeeze out all of these tiny little limes by hand, with no juicer because our stuff hadn't arrived yet. But it was scrummy just the same.

Less than 45 minutes from our house is the Mexican city of Toluca, hometown of Mexican Chorizo. Mexican chorizo is nothing like the kind you find in Spain. In Europe, the chorizo is a dried sausage, much like a very fatty pepperoni or salami. Around these parts it is a raw linked sausage that needs to be cooked, either in the casing or crumbled up. It comes in two types: red and green. Green gets its color from parsley, cilantro, spinach, and at Walmart, vast amounts of food coloring. It tasted nice and herby, and made our tacos (upon which we sprinkled it) look radioactive.

Finally, I fry up plaintains at least once a week, but, horror of all horrors, my daughters will not eat them. In fact, the very smell of plaintains frying in butter makes them gag. Zorra would rather be sent crying to her room than take even one bite. It's not my poor cooking to blame. Imagine banana custard surrounded by a slightly crispy caramel coating. And buttery. Nevara says that they are too sweet. This child has never met "too sweet" before. I think something is wrong with my kids. But more for me and Raul.

Endnotes from Chapultepec

Yeah, I have no idea who these people are. But they danced with crazy kit on and had a fellow manning the ritual smoke. Which smelled very similar to some stuff they were smoking at a Phish concert I went to once. I'm just sayin'.

Voladores de Papantla

When we were walking back to J's car after our long day at Chapultepec Park, we heard the eerie fluting of the Papantla Flyers and came to sit down as they were setting up to fly. 5 men climb to the top and spin the platform, wrapping their ropes around the pole 13 times. 4 of the men "fly" down while one man stands at the top playing the flute. This pre-Hispanic ritual was thought to be a call for rain; the men representing the 5 elements, the four flyers' 13 turns representing the 52 weeks of the year. Their costumes are said to make them look like birds to get the gods' attention.

The pinwheel dealer wasn't part of the show, but I found him entertaining.

Nevara took some video, but so far, I haven't been able to get it to open correctly. If I get it fixed, I'll load it here. The whole performance was cool and peaceful, but not nearly as thrilling as say sword swallowing or snake charming.

Mariposas

The zoo here in Mexico City is free. Except that you're not allowed to take any bags inside, so everyone has to pay the 8 pesos ($.70) to rent a locker to put your bag in. And then special exhibits cost an entry fee of a few dollars. We paid to see the butterfly house which was totally worth the 3 dollars per person charge.

The zoo is laid out a lot like IKEA in that it has an entrance where you follow little arrows around the park and then you exit in a separate place. Of course, your bag is at the entrance, so you have to walk all the way around to get back to the beginning. The pedestrian road is lined with vendors hawking their wares. One fellow called out, "You will die if you do not buy some water!" We kept noticing many parents had their children tethered to them by the belt, as if on a leash. Before I had children of my own, this seemed like a cruel thing, but having lost my kids in many a crowd despite all due diligence, I have since decided this is a wise and loving contraption. A few of the vendors were actually selling these kiddy-leashes for all of 10 pesos -- about 90 cents. A good deal all around.

Now if only they made something to rein in Nevara's two-fisted treat habit.

Grasshopper Hill

One lovely Saturday, our friend J and her adorable daughter came and took us to Chapultepec Park to visit Chapultepec Castle, saving us from our eternal car-less-ness. Chapulines are of course grasshoppers here in Mexico, chapultepec in Nahuatl means "Grasshopper Hill." The park is the Mexico City equivalent of Central Park - a huge park right smack in the center of the city. Near the middle of the park is the huge hill on which sits the Castle.
This lovely carriage could have solved a lot of our car problems.

The most famous use of the castle was the very short period when it was an imperial palace. The French (along with the English and the Spanish) took advantage of the United State's civil war and marched on Mexico to collect some defaulted debts. Napoleon III took the oportunity to set up an Emperor in Mexico with the approval of the Mexican conservative elite, and placed Maximilian and Carlotta on the throne. The Mexican liberals refused to acknowledge Max's right to rule, and the populous, led by President Benito Juárez, fought continuously. Strangely, Max turned out to be a fairly progressive ruler who insituted many liberal policies like abolishing child labor, extending voting rights, ending serfdom, and a universal health program (Okay, I made that last part up) which should have appeased the people, but they couldn't stomach a monachy. Max lived at the castle from 1864 until 1867, when he was captured by Juárez's forces and executed. Their apartments were pretty swanky, having a lovely European charm.

J & Baby A

Zorra and Nevara went lizard hunting on the grounds.