week 4 - Querétero and friends

Nataly eating dinner with friends from camp

        We spent last Domingo in Querétero, a medium sized city about an hour from San Miguel. We had an easy time taking the bus, which surprised me. The city buses are nearly impossible to figure out the route, the times, and where the stops are. The inter city buses have a terminal and lots of people selling tickets and very frequent service (like 3 times an hour) and they're cheap too. On the bus I had a good talk with a very kind man who lived a good part of his life in the US and was now back in Mexico working at a bilingual school. We talked a lot about the issues of language acquisition and the variation in quality that he's seen in schools. As he put it "the US is missing out on an opportunity to raise bilingual children". In Mexico bilingual schools are extremely common. There's a least 6 that I've looked at here in San Miguel, in a town the size of Santa Cruz, which has only part of 1 school that is bilingual. The man Jaime helped us figure out where to go in Querétero and even gave us his phone number in case we ran into any trouble (we did not).

        I really liked Querétero. It is easier to walk around in than in San Miguel, because the sidewalks are bigger (wide enough for 2) with much flatter, regular stone construction, rather than rough cobbles. There are many, many squares, fountains, monuments, churches. The architecture is similar (in this downtown area) to that of San Miguel.

       But the best part was learning about all the interesting history that has taken place there. For example, in 1531 the spanish were able to conquer the local inhabitants, in part due to a miraculous image of St James that appeared in the sky during a major battle, and was taken as a sign that the conquerers where blessed. Querétero, like San Miguel, grew wealthy due to its proximity to the silver mines, which the Spanish used to fund all their explorations and expansions. In 1810 a movement amongst the elite was growing to gain independence from Spain. One night a wealthy woman in Q named Josefa Ortiz learned their plot had been discovered. She was under house arrest, but found a way to have a servant alert the leaders that their plot had been discovered. The next day the soon to be hero Miguel Hidalgo seized the fleeting moment and began the revolution ahead of schedule with the famous rallying cry "Viva Mexico" in the nearby town of Dolores.  

Josefa Ortez

       We went to a wonderful old building that originally built as a monastery in the 1700's. Now it is an art museum. We all really loved the art of Pablo Castillo of Argentina. He makes large animal sculptures out of recycled metal and plastic. We had fun with Nataly trying to figure out what the different parts were in their former life. 

This fish is about 4 feet long!

Another artist also caught our eye who makes compelling shadow box constructions. 

We ate at a beautiful little restaurant that specializes in Oaxacan dishes. Michael and I split a tlayuda, a crunchy tortilla base as big a a large pizza with mole sauce and Oaxacan queso, which turns out to be very similar to string cheese.  A very interesting day.

      Now our friends JoAnn and Sophia are visiting and we're sure enjoying their company. Nataly and Sophia go to spanish day camp and us grown-ups attend classes for a couple hours too. Today the adults got to go to a hand blown glass fabrica (factory). The glass dishware we saw was being packed into boxes labelled Crate and Barrel and Pier 1. I've seen "artists" make glass objects in their studios in the US, but this factory setting was quite different and much less romantic. It was pretty basic and lacking in safety measures probably required in the US, but it didn't seem inhumane, just dark and rudimentary. Actually, we did see one thing that was somewhat disturbing. People were squatting in amongst big piles of broken glass (bottles and jars etc) sorting things out by color, with their bare hands! The guide said that after a while you build up callouses enough that you never get cut. Yeah, but how do you get to that stage?! Apparently they get most or all of their glass from the local restaurants in town and recycle it into beautiful Mexican style glass. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures.

We had our first night out on the town, thanks to our new babysitter Dani. JoAnn, Michael and I went to salsa night at the Hotel Guadalupe. We were feeling a bit out of place at first as this place was quite swanky and so was the attire of the people there. After a bit a couple got up and thanked everyone for coming to their wedding! Oh, is this a private party? This was our second wedding crashing. On the bright side, most of the wedding party didn't really know how to dance salsa, so Michael and I weren't too out of place. JoAnn showed us a few things and we enjoyed the live music and gave it our best. Tomorrow we have another salsa lessons with our friends, so hopefully we'll start getting the hang of it soon. No pictures of this either :>  We already feel a bit like we do in Santa Cruz, where you're always running into people you know. At the salsa night we saw several friends from circus camp and several of the young teachers from there also.

Circus camp and cucarachas

I do circus camp and its very fun. There's a hoop, a trapeze, and fabrics and another name is silks. My favorite one is the hoop.  Three of the moves I really know are star, bird's nest, and layback. Here are some pictures I want to show you about circus camp.  My teacher's names are Mushy (Mush), Cecilia (Ceci), and Maya and Edwin. They all the speak spanish but Maya and Mushy are fluent in english too. I learned how to say - un otro alado (the other side) when we are warming up.

We find lots of worms and cockroaches (cucaracha in spanish) in my room sometimes. You know what cockroaches are: basically big huge ladybugs, so there's no need to be scared. The first time I saw one I said, "Mommy come see. I see a HUGE beetle". They lay on their back when they are dead.

Pyramids, food, and the circus.

Anne here -

Michael and I went to an interesting talk at the Biblioteca about the pyramid that’s nearby. It’s called Canada de la Virgen and we plan to visit it soon. I was hoping there was some fascinating reason for its name, but no, it just takes its name from a nearby river. Like at many pyramids skeletal remains were found. But the mystery here is that the bones buried in the temple atop the pyramid belonged to a person who lived 500 years before the founding of this pyramid in the 5^th century A.D. This person’s skeleton was looked after and kept intact for 500 years. That’s amazing. It’s like 10 generations caring for this person’s remains.

We are realizing how important familiar food is to our sense of comfort. San Miguel does have quite a bit of international food in the restaurants, but the grocery stores stock very limited items. We miss Trader Joe’s almost as much as our friends and family.  Strangely we can’t get pre- made pico de gallo salsa. So we finally learned to make our own, which was easy enough.  We have splurged and bought cheddar cheese, which we nicknamed queso de oro for its astronomical price. There is no whole grain bread and sandwich bread is a rarity. The pre packaged stuff here is really unhealthy. For example we had to hunt high and low for a peanut butter that doesn’t have sugar in it.  We’re thinking we need to start cooking more from scratch. We have been soaking our beans and cooking them because every single can we can find has chiles on the ingredients list, which Nataly won’t tolerate.

          On the plus side – a kind of natural yogurt that tastes like the tart frozen yogurt. Around the corner from our house is a garage selling delicious homemade paletas de crema (ice cream pops) out of their freezer in lots of interesting flavors (pine nut). 2 different tortillarias within 5 minutes walk, popping out tender, fresh, hot corn tortillas from machines so interesting to watch. I learned that the government controls the cost of tortillas, so that this basic food source stays affordable to the people (about the equivalent of 3 pennies apiece). Also, I’m loving a food I’d forgotten about – jicama. The way they do it here is slice it up into long sticks with plenty of lime juice and then you dip the slices in a spice rub of chile/lime. Es muy rico!!

I was brave one night and went to the biblioteca to check out the ‘conversation entre amigos’. There were about 12 of us, half Spanish speaking and half English speaking. It was actually great and the people were very friendly. There were all different levels but we practiced back and forth in the 2 languages. Besides clerks in tiendas these were the first real local people that I really talked with. The Mexican elections were the day we arrived in San Miguel so we talked a lot about them. No one at this meetup liked the new mayor of San Miguel. He owns a nightclub and is very pro business. As well the people were hinting that he has unsavory connections (narco?) When I told people I was from California several people had their stereotypes at the ready. Was I a hippie? Does everyone use drugs there? Meeting local people from all walks of life was a great experience and I’m trying to persuade Michael to give it a try.

Nataly’s on her second week of circus camp (cirque de soleil style). It’s been an amazing experience for her, but I’ll let her talk more about that. Three of us mommys decided it looked too fun to pass up, so today we had our own class. I sit here feeling sore and physically exhausted, but happy. It was so cool. We did the hoops, silks, and the trapeze. On the silks I went upside down and felt like a gymnast again. The hoop was even more fun, but the trapeze requires superhuman strength. Both Nataly and I plan to take more aerial classes here during the fall.  Ceci told me they will do an aerial nutcracker in Dec. How awesome is that!

Here’s a couple of  pictures to show off some of the art and beauty around every corner in this city.

Nataly’s entry - First couple days in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

 Today is July 5, 2012 and I want to tell you about some of the pictures I took. Today I made a flower and a butterfly made out of tissue paper. It was fun to make and easy.

  I made it in summer camp. Today was my first day of summer camp in San Miguel. We made a clown also out of tissue paper. I’m learning spanish there. An example is – “a la izquierda” means to the left.

Another interesting thing is that every night there is a man who comes to the corner outside our house. He sells corn, and a boy, probably his son, walks along with him. At first we thought he was looking for a dog or a child because he was calling something. But it turned out he was calling elote” (corn) in spanish. Today my mom went out and asked he was selling. She said “Que vende?” and we bought some corn and he put on mayonnaise and some sprinkled cheese with some sort of seasoning that’s the color red (hot sauce). My Dad and mom tried it and said it was good.

Here it rains every afternoon. And sometimes we get drenched. But we dry out in about 5 minutes. It rains in the middle of our house cause we have a garden in the middle of our house that connects everything. There’s a fountain that lights up.

July 9,
Yesterday we went to a festival at a place called El Charco de Ingenio. Its a arboretum.  The festival was about giving thanks to the garden.  There were big people there, about an inch (just kidding!). They were made out of cloth and huge paper machie masks. People were inside them. And one of the man's arms fell off and it was funny!  They were really rocking out. The music was trumpets, shakers, and drums. At first it was very loud. 

There was a different group of dancers.  The dancers were wearing feather costumes. On their legs they were wearing shakers.  In the middle were 2 big men who were playing drums.