Vas a Queretaro?

Sol: Everything in Queretaro is orange and yellow and the shines hot hot hot. The city is familiar, but not too much so because my memory continually plays tricks on me. It´s both nice and funny to see random folks I met over 2 years ago, who must wonder at my continual passings-through. I hang out at the university regularly and still tell people that No, I don´t study here- but I did 2 years ago. They don`t mind. I don't feel much time has passed really, things move slowly here. And I enjoy this immensely. Solo quiero irme despacio, with one foot falling at a time, being carried forward only by natural momentum and falling contentedly where it may. I am happy doing just one thing a day and letting the rest of my day's time fall around it. Like when we walked to the arcos, Queretaro's ancient aqueduct, that was a day for me, from there I could stare at them for hours, happy as a cat on a warm, stone wall. Me dice un hombre pasando por donde me quedo sentado que tengo ojos de gato, igual que el.

Las mananitas: I was lucky to pass my birthday in Mexico. A delicious, round, walnut-and cherry-covered cake and mango flan. My Mexican mother, Marcela, and her daughter, Gaby, singing me the Mexican birthday song, while dad snaps pictures with a disposible camera. I blow out one big, red candle and cut the cake. Later, friends bring wine and tequila, which puts me to sleep nicely. I am really getting used to, and enjoying, going to bed at a decent hour, must be them birthdays and how they keep on comin´.

Palabras: My Spanish rises and falls, I forget simple words and remember silly ones. My best purchase so far has been a Spanish dictionary, designed for middle-school students but good enough for me. I can´t contribute this entirely to my dictionary, but this morning I wrote a letter in Spanish. I gave it to a friend for corrections and the most correcting he did was taking out a few commas and suggesting a different word in one place. Well, that felt good. Now to work on speaking.

Luciernaga, luces mas contenta: Last weekend we went out to the country with the family of a friend's. There they have a tiny garden that is somehow filled with every type of fruit and all kinds of flowers and vegetables as well. We wandered through, fighting millions of relentless mosquitoes, tasting apples here and pomegranates there and the smallest baby tomatoes and the biggest, juiciest blackberries. We try to play poker but move quickly to black jack. Pancho's dad likes to insist that he won. We move to another cement square nearby, for pulque and elotes. The pulque is sour and delicious, the elotes are blackened by fire on the outside and blanketed with limon and chile on the inside. Elotes and pulque are good precursors to jumping on a small, black horse named El Cantante. We ride around for a little while, my horse sings for his yegua but can never seem to catch up. Although it gets chilly at night, the wind in the back of the pick up truck during the ride back feels good.