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.

Monterrey

North: Monterrey, in my mind, is like almost any other large, sprawling, impersonal city. At the same time, we met amazing people there who truly made our stay worth it. Our host, Irais, offered us a lovely sunlit living room floor to sleep on. Sebastian made us pasta and supplied us with endless amounts of Swiss chocolate. We might have done better to just stay home and cook because in the city we wandered indecisively up and down the same streets, finding mostly fast food, shoe stores and internet cafes that were without internet. Yet, we were greatly rewarded on our first day though when our wandering brought us to a magnificent Frida Kahlo exhibit, only 30 pesos for students, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO). I on-and-off hitched onto a tour and learned more about her work and life, so much tragedy and beauty that at the end of her life, according to our guide, Frida said "Vivi, y vivi intensamente. Ame, y ame intensamente. Pero, espero no regresar." I really enjoyed reading some of her letters, too. In one, she tells her doctor her opinion of "Gringolandia" after she'd spent some time in New York. She said the thing that truly bothered her about "gringos" was their hypocrisy, their endless ambition and blood thirsty desire to be "somebody." She said, "I don't want to be anybody" Me either, Frida. A tremendous tormenta delayed our departure from Monterrey, but as with most fast and heavy rains, no harm was done.

la fuerza de gravedad

Distance: Watching the earth roll out from under the tracks of a train or the wheels of a bus, travelling at the speed of gravity, is a good way to learn distance. Airplanes, phone calls and emails can make distance seem obsolete, but as we travelled for an entire day just through Texas, the land stretched out like a drying hide, I could appreciate travel and communication in new ways. Even after arriving to Mexico, I feel much further from Michigan than I have before. 35 hours by Amtrak to San Antonio.

San Antonio: It shocked me in a way to come across the Alamo while meandering through the downtown of the city of San Antonio. In my mind, the Alamo was always crumbling and dusty, sitting out in the desert, surrounded only by even more dusty land. But, no. Instead it sits pretty, surrounded by green gardens, well-lit at night, and directly across from Ripley´s Believe it or Not, a Haegen-Daaz ice cream shop, and a robotic Davy Crockett amusement ride. And instead of desert, office buildings, busy streets and department stores surround this building that sticks mythologically in the American psyche, when in real life, to me, it amounts to a Disney World attraction, in both its false construction and its atmosphere. We found the River Walk to be a lovlier part of San Antonio and we walked it both at night, tranquil and quiet, and in the morning, greener and tourist-ridden. In the morning we took our breakfast tacos (something all the Texans in New York told me they missed most about Texas) and tequila down to the river and made a nice breakfast out of it before hopping on a greyhound, headed across the border.

La Frontera: Crossing into Mexico by land was considerably less a hassle than what I remember from the airport. The bus stops, U.S. citizens get off the bus, run large parcels through the scanner and pay 23 dollars for the visas (and an automatic 6 months, no less) and back on the bus. Making things even easier, the Greyhound tooks us right to Nuevo Laredo´s main bus terminal and within 7 minutes we were on another bus bound for Monterrey. Things move swiftly moving south.