The Return Pt. 3: el DF y Texcoco

It was early evening when I got to el DF and getting dark by the time I had pulled my bags up and down the stairs of several metro stops and was looking for my friend’s apartment. I was exhausted. I had met this gal through the Mexico City couchsurfing community and found her again. I’m glad I did because she is such an interesting and sweet person to be around. She quit school when she was 14 and traveled all around the world, working on and off, and is now working for a couchsurfer that contracted her, while she saves up money for her personal dream: a traveling culture bus.

So the real reason I’d even stopped by Mexico City on my way down was to see the wonderful banjo player and our friend Andru Bemis play. It was just too lucky to be passing through at the same time he’d be playing so of course I had to stop. Unfortunately a friend who lives just outside of Mexico City changed his mind about coming with me and the friend I was staying with was too tired and broke to want to go. I was a bit disappointed but we decided to just play cards and go to sleep. As we’re getting close to the end of the game (thank God because I’m losing horribly), another couchsurfer calls. My friend thought she was getting in the following day and now has to go meet her to give her the apartment keys. Turns out this woman’s hostal is only about 4 blocks from where Andru is playing. So, we decide to walk over and perhaps just go for a little bit, until we find out that the cover is 150 pesos. Eh. I decide to just go in and say hi to Andru but he insists we come in and we do, thanks to his utter generosity. We end up staying the entire show even to the very end where Andru got up on a table, stomping his feet, even getting guys in suits who had just finished their extravagant dinners and several bottles of wine to bark and howl like dogs along to the music. I’d never seen Andru play in a crowd like this but as always people shouted and clapped and wanted to hear more.

The next morning I went to visit my friend in Texcoco, an hour outside of the city, where he goes to an agricultural/forestry-based university. He studies tropical forest systems but is currently finishing his thesis on organic agriculture in Mexico, so of course we hit it off immediately when we first met in Chiapas a few months ago. Some friends of his had told him that it was going to be the free pulque day of the Pulque Feria, taking place in an even smaller village 15 minutes from Texcoco. Along the way we meet several people who tell us that this is false information but the sun is shining so nicely and the breeze blowing so sweetly that we decide to go anyway. It doesn’t take long to get there and find the pulque, a sort of sour fermented cactus drink that goes down easy and then gives you a good smack when you’re not looking. First we are buying pulque in a little stone courtyard from a fierce woman who serves pulque and insults with equal efficiency. I start out with mamey-flavored, which is very sweet and a bright sweet potato color. Later I drink a cup of guanabana-flavored and later we all move on to the good and simple “natural.” We also move on to some straw bales down the road under a tree where a man serves us pulque messily by dipping a big ladel down into a large metal vat.

We are me, my friend, a friend he knows from school, and a friend of his friend’s (who I later find out is named “Funny” and this gives me great amusement especially after a few liters of pulque). Our conversations range from school to homosexuality in Mexico to politics to whether Lala actually does rent their entire fleet of trucks. Our pulque server can’t help but listen as we’re sitting only a couple of feet from him and he occasionally smiles saying to us once “Well you certainly have interesting conversations.” The day starts to fade and so do our individual grasps on reality. Pulque can be quite strong, though it seems like it’s only a slimy juice. At some point we realize that the court yard pulque must have run out because young kids are coming to our (“our” because we had been there first and had nearly exclusive access to this pulque for several hours) pulque stand.

Some cowboys stumble up and say hello, one repeatedly refers to me as “clear eyes” and he later tries to give his white sombrero to my friend’s friend. He says he can give away the hat but not the band tied around it because that’s from his girl and he loves her so much she’s really the sweetest girl and he loves her so much so he can’t give away the band but he really wants to give the hat way because you’re good people and it’s a good hat but he can’t give away the band because he really loves that girl. At one point he is standing directly in front of me, shouting, God I wish I could remember what he was saying, only I don’t think I was even listening because all I remember now was thinking was, “Is this God? the devil? What is happening here?” It seemed he was accusing me of something, maybe of being clear-eyed and sitting on a straw bale somewhere in the center of Mexico, who knows.

Sometime after the sun sets we get back on a bus for Texcoco. Then there is confusion and we are jumping off the bus on a very dark stretch of road, somewhere outside of the village where there are only high weeds and fenced pastures. We start walking back and only after we are walking for several minutes do I find out why: Dario lost his backpack. Well, we somehow find our way back to our pulque stand but never find his backpack. It’s around this time that I realize it’s 9pm and that I’m not going to attempt the Mexico City metro system in this state. So I just crash at the house where my friend lives, a house for students but most are out of town right now, and I want to go right to sleep but not before, of course, we attempt to drum on a water jug. My friend’s roommates come home and find us silly and drumming and loud and for them it is just a quiet Thursday night to come home and study. Oh, dear.

The next day we get a cheap breakfast of eggs a la Mexicana, perfect for a morning following a day of pulque, though I eat so slowly that my friend eventually asks if I can just eat the bread while we walk. We take a walk around the university and he explains to me how it functions. Basically it started as a university for the poorest of the poorest students in Mexico, to offer them a place with free (or heavily discounted) tuition, but not only that, it also gives the very poorest of its students free clothing and shoes and haircuts, nearly any basic necessity. There are also dorms on the campus (very rare for a Mexican university) and cafeterias where students can eat for free. Though my friend is skeptical as to how much longer this will last due to the push for privatization and social cutbacks taking place all over in Mexico, in which the higher education system is getting hit with enormous and detrimental changes. He said it is already affecting the scholarships that he receives and that his university is one of the only of its kind so it’s especially terrible. But for me, I just keep thinking about the fact that they give out clothes and shoes. “What kind of shoes” Are they good clothes” I ask. For me, coming from the most anti-communist, individualistic place on earth where the only footwear associated with one’s economic state is “boot straps” all I can imagine is a large warehouse of uncomfortable black shoes that all look the same and if they don’t have your size you just have to make do. He admits that most students don’t actually wear the clothes that they are given, except for to work, but that the shoes are pretty decent. And no, they’re not all black.

In the afternoon we crash a luncheon hosted by my friend’s department. We aren’t fully “crashing” it; we signed up the day before, but it’s mostly a function for faculty and overly ambitious students so we just show up, eat, and leave. Turns out that most, if not all, of the professors also live on the campus and the luncheon is held in the backyard on of these houses, which is actually pretty nice. I can’t imagine what kind of houses they would have to offer to Western’s professors to get them to live on campus.

In the evening we head for el DF as I’m aiming to catch a bus for Oaxaca in the night. I bought my ticket for midnight which would put me in at dawn in the city of Oaxaca. Then, we decide we have just enough time to go and crash another party in a suburb of Mexico City. It’s the birthday party for a gal that my friend met in one of his classes. He barely knows her but hey, in Mexico everyone’s welcome at a party. Again we show up, have a couple of drinks, eat, make small talk, and then ease out of the party and head back for my things. We have to rush a bit and take a taxi to the bus station but I make it to my bus just in time.