Better Tarde Than Nunca

*sorry about the lack of updates lately. internet has been scarce.*

When we last left off you were experimenting with household chemical products and Calen and I were at a bus station/car wash just inside the border of Guatemala fending off prehistoric arachnids with cloth and oil torches while trying to urinate in medeival torture chamber baños. It was very Indiana Jonesesque.

After the battle was over and we had escaped the wrath of Kali-ma (while Mexico is largely Jewish, Guatemala is primarily Hindu) there was nothing to do but wait. With a 9 hour bus ride on the horizon, and Calen's talents for evacuating the contents of his stomach during those sorts of trips, we decided to eat. Only Calen, in anticipation of the bus ride had taken half of a Dramamine. He took only half because last time he took all of one, it was as if he had been put under general anesthesia. So half. But 3 minutes after he took it, and just as we decided to procure sustenance and beverages, he began to feel groggy again. I never recalled a side effect of Dramamine being "dead to this worldification." Perplexed, I examined the individual pills very closely. And right there in plain English, was a little imprint of the words "recuerdame ahorita" which, translated from the Spanish means "forget-me-now." Naturally, I took 6 and then headed up the hill to find some food.

I arrived at a small establishment with about 7 tables and a bar. 4 of the tables were occupied by 4 people each. And the people appeared to have been occupied by at least 10 Coronas each. Only Corona. The waitresses/cerveza wenches did not appear to be in the habit of clearing empties. Or maybe it is customary in Guatemala to have an objective count of how many beers one has consumed so they know what to tell the police when no one pulls them over anyway.

Needless to say, being sober, multicolored, and not Hindu, I stood out in this place. I received some sideways looks, but nothing to alert my spider sense. That could have been because my spider sense had been depleted by our battles with the tarantulasaurs, though. I tried to place an order, but the dB level of the (somehow) internet jukebox made this an other than smooth operation. Eventually, through our combined efforts, the CW and I agreed that I would have whatever she had said that I pretended to hear. About this time, I noticed the only large guy in the bar moving in my direction. He got way too close to me and i braced myself for impact. He said a bit drunkenly "Como estás, how are you feeling?" Still braced for impact, I answered "I'm fine, how are you." Then we had a nice conversation about how he lived for 22 years in Union city, his father still lives in LA and, in his words that I "had picked a wonderful time to be in a wonderful country." Then we shook hands and parted as friends. The end.

I went back to the bus station with the food that turned out to bethe standard fare of steak, tortillas, beans, and rice and Calen had fully embraced his coma. The bus arrived. We departed. I made sure they would wake us up at our stop. Then i went to sleep. About 4 hours into our 3 hour journey, I woke up. Assuming, as was often the case, that the bus was just running a bit behind, i waited until the 5th hour to go and ask the driver when we would be arriving. A bit irritated, he told me he had decided that we didnt speak enough Spanish to get off the bus at Los Encuentros because it was too dangerous. I told him that the 12 year old at the bus office had assured us it was safe. I told him this in perfect Spanish. But he said he was taking us to Guatemala City where they recently passed a law that only one person can ride on a motorbike at a time in order to curtail the frequent occurence of the passenger on the bike shooting bus drivers and then robbing everyone on the bus. He said he did this, so that we would be safe. I thanked him for his concern, in perfect Spanish, and then went back to my seat to take a nighttime siesta which I think they generally refer to as just sleeping.

In Guatemala City we had to buy another bus ticket to get back to Los Encuentros. We were only robbed 14 times while in line at the bus station, which from what I've heard about the Guat, means we had a relatively uneventful visit. We got on the bus back to the place we were to have already been, and made the trip.

Arriving in Los Encuentros, we could see several hotels within 100 meters of the official bus drop off point which just so happened to be in the middle of the highway. Since it was day time and we had no need of lodging, we turned 180 degrees to behold the chicken bus terminal, which was also in the middle of the highway. The story of the chicken bus has been well accounted, but its worth telling again for those who may be unaware.

In the US there is a saying, youth is wasted on the young. I think this is a pretty clear reference to the idea that, as you grow wise enough to appreciate life, your physical body loses its capacity to endure certain parts of it. This is not the case for the Guatemalan chicken bus. The chicken buses are all old school buses from the US, presumably. But when they arrive in Guatemala, the rough equivalent of retiring, they are souped up, emblazoned with flames, shark teeth, and other less than subtle paint jobs, covered with stickers, and given a new driver who has no liability to protect the passengers of the bus like they do in the litigious United States. The buses, having reached old age, are then packed sardine can full, three to a seat with people standing in the aisles, and all the various accoutrement of the Guatemalan public transport patron strapped in various places on the vehicle. This accoutrements can be anything from live chickens, hence the name, to very not alive bundles of sticks. The new driver then takes winding turns and sharp corners through the mountains at breakneck speeds. All the while the passengers, chickens, and sticks are being loaded onto the bus on the fly. The non-people passengers are loaded by a person that I've dubbed monódebus, which when translated from my made up Spanish means "bus monkey." He is called this because while the driver tries to kill us, he is busily climbing all over the bus, often on the exterior, shifting loads, collecting money, and flinging dung at other drivers that fail to observe the unwritten rule of the Guatemalan roads called "The Municipal Code of Get the Fuck Out of My Way." I didnt censor the F word because they dont. So buses have a useful, active role in the sunsets of their lives. This is in stark contrast to the states, where anyone over 35 are generally sedentary, useless, and obsolete drains on society. I know that useless and obselete are basically redundant, but i thought it should be mentioned twice. All they do is sit around talking about the weather and yelling at the kids to get off their lawn. In the modern age however, everything is digital. So even though theyre too old to understand how to work email, they usually have pretty decent wi-fi networks set up in their homes. But they lack the useful sense to secure them with any sort of encryption. Or if they do, the password is usually something easy to remember like "1234" or "sporadicadultonseturinaryincontinence." This is a boon for us whippersnappers as the modern equivalent of treading on an old person's lawn is using their bandwidth. We call it drive-by-wi-fi and virtually all of these blog posts are brought to you by such activity as we cant afford the 12.5 cents per hour it costs to use the internet because we spent too much money on banana crepes and tuna salad croissants. Digression over.

Returning to story. We arrived at Lago Atitlan unscathed, jumped on another chicken bus, literally, as it was moving. That ride was a lot shorter with a lot less poo flung. Then we took a boat across the lake to a place called San Marcos.

San Marcos is a small lakeside village with no ATM and a bit of a forest canopy covering everything. There arent really roads and the main form of travel from place to place was foot. The street dogs were noticeably well fed, and bonus lizards ran rampant through the footpaths. It was paradise. But like all paradises, there was little to do and after a couple of days our addiction to stress won us over and we decided to hit the old dusty trail. The old dusty trail, as it turned out, was Laguna Atitlan. It was far less dusty and more algae-y. But after a 5 minute ride across the lake we were in a village called San Pedro which featured establishments that played good copies of bootleg films, restaraunts that had inventive and delicious sopa d'jour (there's that spanish-french fusion again), and bars where one could play chess to the tune of ear-blasting techno music. We planned on staying a night and then taking the shuttle to Antigua, which despite being in practically the same place as San Marcos, cost half as much. We planned on staying a night. Then we stayed for 10 days. There was a BBQ and we had semi reliable internet access. What do you want?

San Pedro had its fair share of interesting happenings, but the most peculiar was when we saw/nearly stepped on and killed a San Pedro Bonus Street Crab. Street dogs roam the calles of the world in abundance. There's a person selling bread every 50 paces in every city outside of the modern western world. But never have I seen a huge crab stalking the streets of a village located several hundred meters up a rather steep rocky outcropping from the nearest body of water. And we almost hadnt seen it. Because while the crab stalked the streets, a kitten stalked the crab. Having had little time to develop its hunting instincts, the kitten was failing miserably at staying under cover of darkness, even though it was the middle of the night. And our attention was on it, rather than the road we were walking down when we nearly stepped on the wayward crustacean. I let out a shriek like a burly, bearded, flannel wearing lumberjack, despite what may have been reported by the neighbors the following day about hearing a 9 year old girl screaming in the middle of the night. The crab sidled its way to a shadow, the cat doublebacked presumably to outsmart the crab, and we never saw either of them again. However, for the next few days the nightmare lived on in my mind and i have since embraced an irrational fear of coming face to face with another Bonus Street Crab. And if you think I'm being ridiculous, consider the context. It would be like if you went to take a shower and a murderous, sociopathic, arrogant jaguar jumped out of your shampoo bottle. It just didn't make any sense.

We passed the time in San Pedro studying spanish, playing rave chess, and eating way too well for a small village in central America. And then the worst happened. People have been warning us about swine flu and killer drug cartels and pickpockets and hippies and all the other evil things that we might encounter on our trip. We didnt get hit by malaria or a hurricane or even a mild tropical storm. What befell us was something that no one had bothered to warn us about. And really, it is the only true threat to any American traveling abroad. Kiwis. Thats right, we came into contact with a brood of average Household Bonus Street Kiwis. The kind that make all their statements in the form of questions of uncertainty. The kind that say "ay" with a frequency that would make the Household Bonus Street Canadian pull out his hair. The kind that say "water" without an "r" at the end but "wikipedia" with one. The kind that have a fanatic obsession with travel pillows purchased in Italian airports. I would have rather met a crocodile in a bathtub.

If we survive our time with these monkeys descended from a bunch of monkeys descended from a bunch of criminals eating kangaroos and wallabies, I'll write about Antigua, roasting marshmallows over lava, Kiwi contributions to the planet, and a special new type of dog we encountered.

All of this and more IF we're alive and if we can find a dark shadowy place to hide in the middle of an open network wi-fi cloud.

Too Much to Title or Colten and Calen Ride A Bus.

Its been a long time, so settle in because we have a lot to cover. Maybe grab a drink. Send the kids to the neighbors (demographic studies has shown that my readership is largely composed of suburban middle aged married couples with 2.3 children, "social" drinking habits, and no clue when I make a reference to Arrested Development, even when i point it it out). There's almost too much to cover, so i may need to break this up into two or three installments just so you can digest it all. Most middle aged married people have weakened the lining of their stomachs and intestines as a result of their (excessive) social drinking, thus difficulty digesting.

First and foremost, an issue of conservation. Anyone who owns a TV and uses it as a viable substitute for their brain is very aware that the hottest new trend a human being and a few other members of the primate family can embrace is an attitude of concern for the state of the planet. Naturally, ive embraced such an attitude with a fervor that would make global warming piss its proverbial pants, if it actually existed. But it doesnt, so its on to the next pressing issue:

The notable absence of the Common Bonus Lizard in the Chiapaneco highlands.

For those of you who arent virtuosos di fassion (i dont know what that word means) like yours truly, a Bonus Lizard is a reptilian organism on the order diapsida that exists in a given setting as an amplifier. While this zoologically correct description may seem vague and allude my normal readership, i am willing to provide an example for clarification because after 4 scotches and a box of ding dongs that was supposed to be for school snacks, powers of clarity are probably not in long supply.

Say for instance you are walking down the street wearing orthopedic shoes with posturpedic sole inserts (no, those dont exist to my knowledge) enjoying a Gob or a Bluth Chocolate Banana, your disability claim just got approved, and the your lawyer from Bob Loblaw & Assoc. says you've got a case (thats a twofer, maybe even a threefer depending on how you look at it). Your day couldnt possibly get any better. But just then, on the fence to your right, a lizard scurries up and over the wall making your day exponentially brighter. This was a lizard of the Bonus variety. Another, rarer specimen of Bonus Lizard does exist. Its known in the academic community as lizardinum oneupsmanshipicus This is the Bonus Lizard that lives in the cages of other animals at the zoo. It merits the classification because sometimes youll be watching a zoo animal show you its hindquarters as if in contempt of your very existence, and then bam, a lizard runs across the concrete pond area meant to simulate the conditions of a polar bear in its natural arctic environment, barring the 94 degree ambient temperature. You came for the view of the polar bear's sphincter, but you were blessed with the additional lizard. Bonus. Get it? I realize taxonomy is a heady subject. But scientists work very hard to classify the organisms that make up this great big doomed ball called Planet World. The least you could do is try to understand how the upliftingly surprising appearance of a reptile is grounds for classification. If nothing else, youll sound smarter than all your friends at the next BBQ where everyone pretends to care about the performance of other people's 7 year olds in soccer last Saturday.

So with that little bit of completely concise and relevant background information, we must inform you with much alarm, that we didnt see a single Common Bonus Lizard in San Cristóbal. It seems that the lizard population at elevations exceeding 6500 ft during winter climates is receding dramatically. This is a cause that every person (and some other members of the primate family, even Republicans) can take up. Together we can restore the Bonus Lizard numbers in chilly mountain climates to their once legendary proportions. Its clear that someone must be held responsible for the lizards decline. And while preliminary research yielded no culpable party. The answer it turned out, would come to strike us like a bolt of Belgian lightning.

A Belgian girl, the sister of the one who got scabies from the Virgin Mary told us a story. She said they were hiking the jungles in Guatemala, which are rife with snakes, deadly jungle turkeys, wayward bochos, and jaguars. They were sleeping in a tent and she said she had her "face pressed up against the plasteek like thees, when the jaguar came and sniffed my face and he took with his tail and whipped it in my face." If you're wondering what "like thees" means, imagine if you stuffed your head into a rubber glove. There would be a vague, but recognizable outline of a human face. This is the official sleeping custom of the country that lent America cultural treasures like Jean Claude Van Damme and Stella Artois. She would later go on to describe the attitude of the jaguar towards her and the way he whipped his tail as "arrogant."

Right then we knew that the jaguars had been resposnsible for the decreasing figures in Bonus Lizard concentration, even though the jaguars were in the jungle and we were in the mountains. The logic is sound, but it would be a waste of my time to explain the intricately connected web that is life on Earth because, lets face it, after 4 glasses of scotch, 2 margaritas, and a little taste of Windex just to see if you felt anything, youre just wondering when the next bathroom break in this post is going to arrive. Just trust me on this one, I took part of a zoology class at community college once.

So there you have it. Arrogant Guatemalan Jaguars are decimating the Chiapaneco Highlands Bonus Lizard population. The data clearly shows this to be true. Connect the following dots:

1. Arizona state has one of the largest Bonus Lizard populations on the continent.

B. Jaguars have recently extended their range to include places as far north and west as the Yard House on 93rd ave. and Glendale.

C. The same thing happened with the buffalo because the Native Americans figured out about buffalo meat taco tuesdays and fiesta sauced them nearly to extinction.

14th. In a survey recently conducted by the restaurant conglomerate Brinker international, the emerging dine out market of Married Arrogant Suburban Jaguars with 2.3 Cubs and a "social" drinking habit prefers far and away the idea of Bonus Lizard Viernes to Chicken Fajita Fridays (The mexicans pronounce their v's like b's if that helps to grasp the alliteration).

Being a pair of doers, and not so much talkers, and even less of a couple of thinkers, Calen and i laid out a plan of action to bring this issue to the awareness of the only people who ever get anything accomplished in the world, possibly the universe. We had to get the attention of the inhabitants of a little piece of heaven on earth we like to call Hollywood. We trekked out to the jungle in hot pursuit of a guilty jaguar (they're all guilty) so that we could make a PSA poster announcing the birth of a gooey, slimy new eco-cause from the overworked maw of a vagina that labors to make sure new fashionable causes are born. And geographically, Hollywood, being the anus in this metaphor, is always the first to hear about and righteously adopt the fashionable causes.

The premise was simple, we would find a jaguar, then i would put it in an armbar or a triangle or something else that would finally get me on The Ultimate Fighter, or at the very least on The Real World 47. Calen would snap a tasteful photo. We would probably conveet it to sepia to make it even more tastefullier. And then wed be the toast of the town. And i think somewhere in there we would keep the Chiapneco Highland Bonus Lizard from going the way of the unfortunately named Taco Meat Buffalo.

We found a jaguar, with the expected ease of two men who possess our vast experience of the jungle and nature as a whole. Then i put that lizard eating son of a bitch in a 4 finger taint lock. Calen went to snap a photo. Unfortunately, the memory in his camera happened to be full at that very moment due to the fact that he has on his camera a running narrative of photos chronicling everything that has happened since Christmas of '07. Included in this essential collection are 50 or more photos of Sam holding Molly like a baby, each on a seperate ocassion. So the meaty part of the plan failed to come to fruition. And finding another jaguar and doing more jiu jitsu seemed like a total hassle. So we just went and got a couple falafel sandwiches.

Realizing that if the lizards really wanted to live, they would have written a letter to Oprah or Early September Santa Claus or something, we abandoned our cause. Besides, the falafel was really filling and it was siesta time.

After our naps and a series of other. inconsequential days of waiting, we decided to shuffle off that mortal coil (mortal coil is a Mayan word for Mexico and head into Guatemala for purposes other than wrestling large animals and awareness raising. The bus ride was only three hours, but terrifying as always with a subtle odor of something you know you dont want to be smelling but cant quite pinpoint exactly why.

The mexican/guatemalan border isnt as heavily fortified as the US/Mexican border. Once you arrive its up to you to figure out the system. The street is open and there are nondescript buildings on both sides of the street and both sides of the border. Once a pedestrian notices you and is kind enough to point you in the direction of the place where people are supposed to go when youre not from there, its a rather painless process. A quick conversation with an official, no searches of any kind, body cavity or otherwise, and youre on your way. Hop in a Nissan Sentra taxi with anywhere from 13 to 35 other people and their luggage, take a quick ride up a mountain to a place called la Mesilla and repeat the "find the right building" process to officially enter Guatemala.

When we found the right building it was inhabited by 5 portly gentlemen who were dressed like they worked at the Mexican Joann Fabrics, that is to say, same as anyone. They were watching Keanu Reeves beat the shit out of The Game with a phonebook on the televisor. And they didnt seem to have the least bit of interest in us until that part was over. And once it was they stamped our passports and asked us for some money, which we were short a bit. But it didnt seem to bother them much as im sure it was just used, upon our departure from the building, to buy popcorn for the rest of their movie.

Stepping out of the immigration "office" we entered into a no holds barred, anything goes, pandemonia of buying and selling called la mesilla. We found the chinchilla body armor we had been looking for, as well as officially licensed soccer jerseys for dogs, and a tesla coil that they had been using somehow to impart extra spicyness to their habañero salsa. Leave it to the Guatmalans/Mexicans to combine theoretical physics and salsa production. All that crap was heavy though, so we traded it for 16 street tacos and a wooden necklace of beads with a giant letter "T" on the bottom of it.

Night had descended upon us and our only goal in la Mesilla had been to find the bus office and get on the overnight to a place called Los Encuentros en route to Laguna Atitlan. The street upon which La Mesilla had encysted itself was unequivocally steep and each person we asked about the location of the bus office pointed us in the opposite direction that we were headed. So it was up the hill, down the hill, uphill, downhill, with full packs, 16 street tacos, and that alphabet necklace, for like an hour. In the end we discovered that every person we had asked had been telling the truth. We had been walking up and down the street in front of the bus office because the bus office was essentially a closet with a 1/4 of a desk in it. Upon closer inspection, said desk was manned by a 12 year old boy and the closet also held all the normal things you would find in a closet like coats, brooms, a '53 panhead motor, and a family of gerbils.

Getting the bus ticket was relatively easy. I then asked him if it was safe for us to get off the bus at Los Encuentros at 3 AM and if there were hotels nearby where we would be able to get a room. He actually managed to give me a rhetorical answer. Now im still not totally sure what a rhetorical answer even is, i just knew that i had received one. And it was in the affirmative.

So we hiked it up the ridiculous hill until we came to the obvious place for buses to disembark, a car wash. Theyve implemented a similar diversification technique as the bikefish guy in San Cristóbal and so at the car wash you can get your whip detailed, catch a long haul night bus, pee in a bathroom with a ceiling that rests comfortably at a height of 5 ft. at the apex, or get eaten by a giant spider. And with that we'll leave off until next time so you can go use your luxurious adult human sized bathroom and ease the demand on your bladder. Oh, and the Windex under the sink in the bathroom is the same as the Windex in the kitchen, so leave it alone.

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program...

In an effort to tastefully cover a large eyesore of a water heater in a medical consult room, we ended up having to make a trip to the Mexican Joann Fabrics with the offensively early christmas display. The situation in the medical room was much like what one might see on the once too hot to touch television program Trading Spaces. For the sake of helping you to imagine the setting, i was like Ty Pennington, the ruggedly handsome, hip, semihomosexual (but still straight), skilled carpenter. Calen was that bitchy chick from the show no one could get along with (pick one). And we had to somehow tie together an untreated concrete floor, a raw tin roof with visible wooden cross beams, a dangling electrical system, a bamboo partition wall, and a 1000 gallon industrial water heater. But we're that carpenter and that bitchy chick and nothing was gonna stop us from succeeding.

Naturally fabric (along with blood, sweat, and the manly kind of tears that burn babies' skin if they touch them) was a big part of the solution, hence the visit to the fabric store. Every fiber or my body was screaming boycott. Viva la revolucion. But we didnt have a whole lot of alternatives and we were under a very strict, self imposed deadline to make it as much like the show as possible. Thats actually where we'll leave off for the redecoration, save to say that it was a monster success, so much so that we're in talks with a major network about doing a new show called El Extreme Pueblo Makeover. That entire story, based loosely on the truth, was nothing more than a setup to tell the tale of the fabric store.

The buearacracy and process of making a purchase at this store is something that would make the commanding officers at a World War II Siberian gulag envious. I walked into the store and sorted through the hundreds, no, billions of rolls of fabric in there. Once i sorted through all the reflective Virgin Mary and sequined Mr. Banana Grabber fabric and found a nice subdued, neutral earth tone perfect for disguising monstrous appliances i was faced with the task of finding someone who worked there. Make no mistake, in the end it turned out that they had a massive staff, they were just all dressed as customers. Then there was the Spanish thing. Since my main area of experience in the language is medically related, it was exciting trying to figure out if they had eyelets to facilitate the suspension of the piece of fabric i intended to purchase, from a curtain rod. We sorted that out. No, was the answer. And the nice muchacho cut the fabric for me, then spent 12 minutes trying to figure out which price matched the fabric he had just cut, failing to notice, even after it was pointed out to him 3 times by yours truly, that the price was actually on a large sign attached to the exact roll he had cut from. He had pulled from his back pocket a small crinkled master list, in which he clearly placed a lot of trust, that i can only assume he received directly from the hands of Sra. Joann herself. Once he found the price on the list, he cross referenced it with the massive in your face price printed on the sign and all was well in the universe. He then went over to a little machine tucked in a far corner of the store and, while referencing his master list, printed out a little piece of paper with a bar code on it. This he handed to me and then escorted me to a booth in the center of the store where he left my piece of fabric, and me, without further explanation. I followed him for a moment like a small, lost puppy before i realized that he had lost interest in me. Needing nothing else from the store, i went to the booth in the middle where my desired item had been requisitioned. I asked the lady, who didn't acknowledge me if i could pay for the fabric. Wordlessly, she pointed to a different booth in another part of the store with more employees dressed like humans. There was a glass wall dividing me from the employees inside the booth, making them a little easier to identify. But the glass was only about 4 and a half feet high. So when i approached the lady at the counter and she asked me for my ticket, i naturally went to hand it to her over the glass. I had forgotten that people in this part of Mexico rarely reach a height of 6 ft. But i was promptly reminded when she pointed to the bottom of the glass where there was an opening in the window that i was supposed to slip my ticket through. I obediently completed the transaction using the opening in the fabric store cashier area sneeze guard and was handed a different piece of paper. Left to figure out for myself what to do, my street smarts kicked in (thanks, Compton) and i made my way back to the POW booth in the center of the store where I traded my new piece of paper for my fabric and a different piece of paper. Now if all that seems a reasonable way to prevent theft to you, i will now reveal a pertinent detail. The store is small. Standing in any given place in the store, you can see every bit of the rest of the store, making this whole process unnecessary.

As I was leaving I saw a matching shower curtain that I just had to impulse buy as it would work great to cover up what was essentially a brick cave in the consult room. And it was only $3 US keeping us well under our budget so we still had money left over for designer paint and a handmade salvaged barnwood armoire that would be perfect to hide all that unsightly medical equipment, like an MRI machine. This shower curtain already had a barcode and a price on it so I was certain it would be a much simpler process to purchase it. I even had exact change. But like a bunny rabbit near the highway with an unfortunate affinity for headlights, my certainty was mashed to chunky pulp, guts splattered across the thoroughfare. And the Mack truck to my certainty was the same helpful gentleman who had so helpfully helped me before. As I went to pay for my purchase at the sneeze guard, he snatched the item out of my hands and withdrew to his magical paper printer in the corner of the store. Rinse, lather, repeat. Get it? Cause its a shower curtain. Jokes are funnier if you have to explain them and simultaneously have the opportunity to insult your audience.

Later that night, we discovered what must be San Cristóbal's hardest worked city position. The graffiti removal guy. He was circling the blocks covering up the unsanctioned paint, much of which lacked the artistic merit that I usually reference in an attempt to debate that its better than the advertising or the crumbling city scape that was there before. But he was doing something interesting that I didnt quite expect from a government employee. He was thinking for himself. He was being selective about what he covered. Anything that referred to the October 2nd massacre, or freeing of political prisoners, he simply left alone. He was a think-for-yourselfer in a world of do-what-you're-tolders. It wasnt solely covering graffiti that he saw as the purpose of his job, it was the elimination of extraneous messages, subject to his ideals. Political messages and rememberances remain. There's also a piece of graffiti near our hostel that says "puto hippie." He didn't get around to covering that one either. So i can only assume he agrees. I trust his judgement. He's an inspirational fellow.

Shortly thereafter we found ourselves in a classy Mexican food restaraunt called El Subway. No, wait. It was just called Subway. It was this fantastic little submarine sandwich shop. From what we've been told they actually have them in the states. I will say this. It was the cleanest Subway I've ever been affiliated with. No sarcasm at all. The employees, who clearly worked there, were polite, well kempt, and more aware of cross contamination control than some doctors I've encountered. While in the El Subway ordering, this kid began harassing us to buy his crap. This is a pretty standard event when 3w-ing (walking while white) the streets of México. And even though we weren't buying his criendship bracelets and gum, he put on his best pathetic face and asked for some food. So we got him half of a sandwich. Just then, as if by some sort of ESP his friend (perhaps partner in crime would be more accurate) showed up. So I told him he had to split the sandwich with his friend. They started angling for soda and some chips, so we got that, too. But we drew the line at 64 oz pepsicylinder novelty cup. As the fine employees at Subway were preparing food for the four of us, those snot faced bastards told me that they would let me take a picture of them for 10 pesos each. Compassion overwhelmed me as I thought about how difficult these kids lives must be and so I responded in Spanish, " You're both too ugly to be in a picture, just be happy with the meatball sandwich." Right about then, the food was ready and I had the guy cut it in half to ensure that the both the kids got an equal share of the sandwich as I remember a fear of unequal portions causing me a lot of anguish as a child. As i carried the tray over one kid picked up the bag of chips, Sabores de Soledad, I believe they were called, and the other grabbed both their sandwiches and took off running out the door and down the street. By the time hs friend and I got out of the restaraunt to make chase he had teleported to the corner and was hiding behind a pillar. His friend caught up with him and I watched to make sure he got his half of the sandwich. Then I prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe (we are in México) to give him an inconvenient, but not severe, case of scabies which she instead gave to a Belgian girl staying at our hostel. Even though the curse was a bit off target, I still marveled at the Holy Virgin Mother's swift response to my request.

Satire Free Sunday: Brought to You by Monday

On Friday we were told to meet at a certain place "a las siete maňana." So we dragged our sleep 'til 9 or 10 asses out of bed at 530 am in order to shower and eat breakfast and walk to the rendezvous point by 7. Yes, that's a french word in an english speakers blog about travels through a spanish speaking nation. Ill allow your mind to finish boggling........ ok. Let's continue. Where normally we would sleep until 650 or so and then rush to show up less than 15 minutes late, this day we made sure we had all the time in the world because the overall purpose of the day was important to us. We were to meet with th zapatistas and see if there was anything we could contribute to one or a few of their many communities. The zapatistas (this will be an oversimplified explanation) are a group of indigenous Mayans living in southern Mexico. They have been marginalized in the same way that all indigenous people have been marginalized by explorers and conquistadors since the beginning of time. But this was happening still in modern times with the modern government. In an effort to preserve their culture and gain basic human rights, they organized, and began a movement, calling themselves the zapatistas after emiliano zapata. The list of notable moments in the zapatista history is too numerous to list. But the one that probably received the most coverage was the uprising in 1993 where they militarily gained control of 4 or 6 cities in southern Mexico. I read a little anecdote somewhere about an uprising that occured before the one in 1993 and it said something to the effect of the first zapatista operation was run entirely by women, it was entirely successful, and there were no casualties on either side. This is one of the major tenets of the zapatistas, women may fight in the resistance in whatever capacity they desire. They also choose who they marry and how many children they will have and raise. This is in contrast to times past where the strength of the indigenous women was underplayed.

Now, after a series of evolutions, the zapatista movement has shown that it has the ability to adapt and change, unlike most institutions that have existed for any number of years. There hasn't been any military offensives since the early 90's because the zapatista army is answerable to the people, not politicians or corporate interest. The people decided that the cost of war was too high for both sides of the struggle, and the army obeys. Still. Its a novel concept. The zapatistas are struggling for autonomy along with access to basic rights. Even though the government model that they have evolved has shown signs of efficacy, it is still in its relative infancy. But there are some very clear differences between what the zapatistas represent from what a national government represents. Rarely failing to be direct the zapatistas call their system of government "good government" to differentiate from all the other forms of government available in the area. The implication is obvious. It is a democracy by consensus rather than by majority rules. Compromises are made until there is total agreement. It seems impractical at first thought. And its true that it often takes forever to get anything done. But it takes awhile for a baby to learn to talk as well. And just because something is difficult and cumbersome doesn't mean it should be abandoned. I predict that once the zapatistas don't have to worry about basic survival, once their fundamental needs are met, they will be able to focus on streamlining the system that they've developed. The first computer took up 8 city blocks. And the telephone that I type on right this moment is exponentially more powerful than that. If the metaphor isn't obvious, WHEN the zapatistas have the opportunity to focus on thriving rather than surviving, they will be the example that sets into motion the end of any government that isn't "good." The positions in government are rotated rapidly so as to create a situation where its not the personality that's important, but the responsibilities of the position instead. There is a bottom up philosophy of mandate rather than top down as well. If its a testament to the progress made and the adherence to their values, many of the zapatista community resources throughout chiapas, clinics, education centers, etc. are being used by non-zapatistas. And they are welcomed. The reverse is not always the case.

My little anecdotes about the zapatistas are certainly incomplete, and probably inaccurate. But just do a bit of research. Wikipedia has a good introduction. They are a poetic bunch and steer clear of the sterile and refined messages of faceless institution. A google search and a bit of patient reading and I have no doubt in my mind, that you too will be inspired by their struggle and even moreso by the out of the box thinking that they have actually put into practice, regardless of whether or not you agree with all of it. But with that little bit of explanation...

We got to the rendezvous at 645 in the freezing morning and waited and waited and waited. Around 715 we began to wonder if they meant 700 pm, as we were told we would be going to a fiesta which is spanish for like a chips factory or something. Sitting there, we looked at each other and said "who fiestas at 7 in the morning, of course it was at night." How could we have been so stupid. Even though we were still pretty sure it was 7 in the morning. Just then a barefoot man with a smashed, very bloody head and a finger that had been stabbed came walking down the street. Judging by the clotting he had been walking the streets for a few hours We tried to help him as best we could but he was mentally ill, although polite, and he went on his way after assuring us he was close to home. Ill spare the suspense, because we just saw him a few hours ago in a completely different part of town. He very excitedly remembered us, showed me how his finger was healing. His head wound was actually far less severe than the bleeding conveyed. Heads bleed readily. He seemed no worse for wear and now had boots and a 49ers jacket. We felt better, you know... cause its all about us. Travel back in time to when we first saw our bloody buddy, and we walked home. After a couple hours of trying to see if Casa del Bagel was open (it wasn't, it never is) we got back to the hostel and got a phone call. We were to meet at the center of town in half an hour. It was supposed to be 7 in the morning, but there had been some problem that prevented them from meeting us. So we left for the center of town.

We met our guide, for lack of a better word, hopped in a taxi and were on our way to fiesta. We drove for about 40 minutes through the windiest, greenest, steepest hills you can imagine and arrived at a place in the Chiapan highlands that was nothing less than surreal. The breeze blew thousands of cornstalks planted patchwork almost vertically on the sides of steep green hills that layered themselves into the distance infinitely. We walked down a dirt road on the spine of one of the hills between rows of corn that towered over us and made a sound like the ocean as the wind passed through. As we moved past the corn, the hills and valleys opened before us in all directions and up at the top of the mountain there was a small church. The only way up was to scramble up the dirt, grass, and rocks, some arranged loosely into steps to ease the way. When we got to the top, there was a church service going on and the indigenous people were all dressed in some kind of very colorful traditional dress. Much of what went on was lost on me, as the language they spoke was Mayan and not Spanish. But the church lies on a border between the federal lands and the autonomous zone of the zapatistas. So it is a safe meeting place for the two groups. At the end of the ceremony, two keys were presented to two people who I can only assume were community leaders. And then everyone drank coke and fanta that was brought and served by state police officers. I'm not exactly sure, but I think they had recently reached some kind of an accord, and this was the celebration.

When the service was over the indigenous men walked down the path and were confronted by a large group of men that had been amassing on the path during the service. The entire thing seemed to have some kind of uneasy air about it, and around this time, it became obvious that it wasn't just our imagination. The struggle was real and it was constant. After a tense negotiation between two mobs that seemed to last forever, everyone just started smiling. They shook hands and went on their way peacefully. I still don't know what happened. I'm just glad that the alternative didn't.

We were brought to a van with a decal identifying it as a zapatista autonomous zone vehicle and driven again through the hills. We came to a city called san andres where it seemed that everyone who had been at the church was waiting. Without a lot of explanation we were brought into a warehouse where there was a table, perhaps 60 seats long, each with a bowl of meat and vegetable soup and again a bottle of coke and fanta. We sat down with everyone else and we ate. Their wasn't much talking while eating but after the meal was finished some basic conversation was exchanged in spanish. And then we all left so the next crop of 150 people could come in and eat. This city was the home of the zapatista good government presidency for the highlands zone. After a bit of waiting we were told we would meet with the "consejo' and speak to them about what we wanted to do. I didn't really know what to expect. But I did know that my grasp on the spanish language was tenuous at best, and my mayan is about as good as my klingon. I've never seen an episode of star trek.

We were brought into a room and told to sit down on a wooden bench in the middle of it. Already seated in the room when we entered were 10 our 12 or the zapatista good government council members. They were in a semicircle around us. The walls were bare except for the one in front of us which had plastered all over it images of revolutionaries throughout history. And I guess the best words to describe the initial feeling are nerve wracking. We were unprepared. They explained to us that they would tell us about their situation and then we would get a chance to explain what we were doing there. I would have a difficult time expressing that in english, let alone in spanish. So we listened. They told us that even though today was a fiesta, they live in constant sadness. They didn't actually have the money to celebrate. But the act of celebrating was imperative. So they did it anyway knowing they would have to struggle to recover later. The collapsing economy has hit them even harder because they were struggling even when times were good. They spoke of how they lacked access to even the necessities. The word tristeza (sadness) was repeated over and over. In the end they had conveyed, not so much through their words, but through their state of being that the challenges they faced were greater than anything I could wrap my head around. What was I to say to that? English or spanish, what could we do to alleviate any of their suffering. Nothing. But I stuttered in spanish something about trying to help in whatever capacity we could and trying to explain, inadequately, that we owed them for the inspiration they had given us. I told them we wanted to learn first hand about their struggle rather than reading watered down reports on a computer screen. I don't think it was enough, especially not with my spanish.

But the imprint left in our brains is something that we will carry with us. Even though we may not be in a position to do much now, that first computer took up 8 city blocks. The man who connected us with the zapatistas, came to our rescue in the end and summed up what were capable of doing, as we had been helping out at his women and childrens center for most of the week. His name is Sabas and he deserves something nice for sticking his neck out on our behalf. A piñata or something, I don't know. His organization is called SYJAC, which is a mayan acronym. Just search for it with san cristobal or chiapas if you want to see more about what they do. The council that we spoke with was only the first step. They have to check with community representatives to see if there is anything useful we might be able to do. So we are waiting in San Cristóbal for word. Even if this is as far as we get, we will take more away from this experience than we even have the capacity to contribute. And even if there's nothing we can do right at the moment a time will come, seeds have been planted...

And again, please excuse any inaccuracy or failure to convey on my part and find out for yourself what the existence of the zapatistas imply.

Christianity vs. Judaism? Who Cares, We All Hate Yappy Dogs

Not to be outdone by their capitalist Megalasaur neighbors to the north, Mexico has adopted the practice of starting the christmas season about the same time as easter. Even here, where not indulging a life of consumerism is less a choice and more... well... the only way to survive, the Mexican Joann Fabrics has already set up a series of window displays depicting the various important events that make up the Christmas tradition. There are little dioramas of Mexican Santas (just kidding, everyone knows Santa is some kind of nordic-martian cross breed) delivering pizzas to all the townspeople and one where Rudolph frees everyone from the crippling oppression of poverty, as long as they promise to buy lots of gifts. But my favorite one is where Mrs. Claus leads people of all ages, races, and creeds in an armed resistance against the secret hand that controls the world, so that everyone can benefit from the holiday savings at Wal-Mart and get lots of stuff for their friends and family and that one guy at the oficina who is kind of weird but buying him a 6 dollar pen and pencil organizer might just spare you from being on his people to kill list. That's right, all these quaint little scenes are already depicted right there in the window of your friendly, local, neghborhood Mexican Joann's Fabrics, ahorita, in October... INSTEAD OF AFTER THANKSGIVING LIKE IT SAYS IN THE GOD ***** BIBLE!!!!!! For those of you who are concerned, those stars are just used to cover up the word bless because the word bless in all capitals is a secret code word for a far right christian conservative plot to take over the planet and make the Christmas season start the day before MLK day and I didn't want any googling to inadvertently include my page in a search for more information about that campaign. Don't worry about my piety. Besides, count the stars. 5 not 4. I would never say god damn bible.

Know what's worse, it's not even just corporate Mexico joining in the charade. We saw a chihuahua, inside a house, a domestic animal, dressed in a little elf suit. If the chihuahua had been a tough ass street dog, maybe the elf suit would have been passable. Like maybe that's all it could find to stay warm. Although even then the logic starts to break down because most kids have barely just said good bye to their slip 'n slides or their los slip 'y slides as the case may be. The search for warm clothes has not yet become so desperate as to merit the use of an elf suit in early october. So **** that little chihuahua and **** the person who dressed him without respect for the law laid out in the Holy Bible. I realize that Mexico is a largely Jewish population, but that's no reason to use your dog's attire as an affront to the some couple hundred Christians in the world.

Speaking of dogs, what description of a place would be complete without an over generalized description of the dog dynamic. So here's the deal with San Cristobal. Its backwards. All the big dogs are nice, cuddly, even if mangy, loveable, usually homeless bastards. While all the small dogs are just bastards. The perfect illustration of this was when we were walking down Calle de Diego Dujelay today, you know, right after Avenida de Cristobal Colon and just befor Maria de Flores, and we saw a big dog laying in the shade minding its own business. We admired its cuteness and then as if on cue a stupid pekinese or some other equally ridiculous breed of dog came hauling its yappy little ass up to the screen door to bark its annoying little head off at us. It showed classic signs of a Napoleon complex except Napoleon was an outspoken frenchmen, not a mexican. This caused us a bit of dishistorganization, not to mention a faire amount of ethnoconfusion. Calen was out of grenades. So we threw the yogurt we had just bought at it. Incedentally, if you ever find yourself in this part of town, check out Lacteos Maya for all your fresh dairy needs. I realize that's a pretty weak illustration, so for lack of a story about getting bitten by tiny little bastard dogs, you'll just have to take my word for it. Big dogs here awesome. Little dogs here suck. I used to watch a lot of Dog Whisperer. I can sense their intentions. So the take home lesson is they'll eat your lungs out of your thoracic cavity given the chance, and they dress in seasonally inappropriate clothing. Stick with rottweilers.

We saw another peculiar sight that sort of concerns rottweilers in a way. Long known for their reliable appearance of intimidation and guarddogsmanship, rottweilers and the traditional guard dog breeds are being phased out in San Cris in favor of an unlikely candidate, the common horse. Thus, their legacy is at stake. I tried to wrap my head around this when we saw a horse that was very clearly guarding a brickyard. But I have yet to figure it out. If I'm not mistaken, caring for a horse is probably on the order of 100 times more expensive than caring for a dog. So the economics of it baffle me. But if there's one things the mexican people are known for, aside from their staunch Judaic tradition, its accounting. So I can only assume that the horse provided some benefit in the area of guarddogsmanship that made them choose to employ the horse over a canine. In a country where a large percentage of people subsist on less than a $1000 per month, a human being with an automatic firearm would probably be cheaper. But again, I have to concede that I'm not an expert at guarding brick yards. So they clearly know something that I don't. Maybe their guard dog started alienating the neighboring businesses like when he walked across the street to buy a taco and told told the taco man "You should call this one a Gob, guy." More than likely though. their guard dog showed up to work in a turkey costume for the whole month of february and a banana suit for Rammadan. Then I could see trying my luck with a horse, or like an alpaca or something. An alpaca with an automatic weapon. Hence the market for chinchilla body armor, which we never found.

Just down the street from the guard horse is a shining example of ingenuity and a triumph of the human spirit. It is a shining example of entreprenuership and diversification so entreprenuershipped and diversified that it would make Jay-Z, Richard Branson, and all the Rockefellers crap their collective pants. It is the San Cris Goldfish and Goldfish Supply/ Wayward Bicycle Parts Sales and Repair Shop. The genius of this store isn't in the juxtaposition of live aquatic animals with random inorganic bicycle parts. It's in the actual store setup. Walking down the street in one direction, one can only see the bike shop half of the store despite the lack of any sort of dviding wall between the two sections. Walking down the street in the other direction, one can only see the part of the store that specializes in goldfish. It actually took a couple days of us walking by the store to realize that they were one in the same and, for lack of a stronger word, genius. Not only that but a quick glance inside and its obvious that the owner of the goldbikefish emporium has positioned himself in the market for a world takeover. On the bike half, despite the myriad piles of parts, there isn't a single complete or even half complete bicycle anywhere to be found. There's a complete bicycle distributed somewhere among the piles, but its up to you, the consumer to assemble it. By utilizing this method of merchandising the business owner ensures that the units per transaction will be ridiculously high, so that quarterly reports to the board of trustees always show favorably for his sales team, indicating his success and prowess as a manager. On the goldfish side, there wasn't a plastic bag to be found anywhere. At first, what seems like a mundane detail about the shop turns out to be the business equivalent of winning a game of chess by kicking your opponent in the groin thereby winning the game due to injury. How are chess, nut kicking, and fish sales related, you ask? Here's how. By not having any plastic bags with which to transport fish, the owner ensures an aquarium sale. You come in for the 5 peso orange floppy swimmy thing and you leave with a 2000 peso complete self sustaining ecosystem complete with marina blue anti algae rock fill, plastic, green, mario bros. water level plants, and miniature, bubble blowing scuba diver, sized appropriately to make the fish feel like a giant thus avoiding the napoleon complex that plagues most of the small animals in the southern part of Mexico. He knows you don't come to the goldfish store to have a look around. They only sell goldfish and goldfish accessories. And he knows you know. So if you're there, you're buying. And you're also buying something to get that fish home alive. Again, sales look good to the board. The company gets the nod to go international. And next thing you know they're putting santa hats on the bubble blowing scuba divers in August because their market research has shown that manipulating the psychology of the consumer public increases profits. Idiots. Everyone involved.

You know who would have seen right through all this manipulative corporate bullshiznonkey? Erik Erikson. He broke down the entire psychology of human development into little digestible pieces, that even us, the everyday normal Christmas fanatic could understand. And so he's our next nomination for the scientist crotchal street name dealie. We'll try to get this one called Eriksons First Two Stages of Human Development Street. Integrity vs. Despair indeed.

Cross Cultural Similarities and Contrasts: An Academic Treatise on Sociology or Calen Throws a Hand Grenade

The similarities between Mexico and the US are becoming more and more apparent day by day. Sure there are differences. But I would like to think think that when I leave this world I will be seen as a unifier and not a divider, even if its a lie. I won't care. Ill be dead and waiting for someone to get a street named after my ballskies.

In one instance of cross cultural homogeneity, it seems that mexican youth have taken to a timeless tradition of american youth, albeit with a little mexican twist that just so happens to make it safer for all those concerned. When I was but a wee lad, 15 perhaps, and all my friends were turning 16 and getting their driver's licenses issued, if not reluctantly, by the state of California. We discovered that we had a distinct advantage over pedestrians and other public thorughfare users not encased in automobiles. That advantage was our superior velocity. I was a timid adolescent. But I couldn't help but snicker as my friends screamed valuable information to runners like that they weren't going to burn enough calories at that pace. They would frequently question the sexuality of the runner if he was male, a cross dresser, or a pre or post-op tranny. If the runner was a female they would scream awkward, crackle voiced cat calls and then giggle, ironically, like schoolgirls. And if projectile resources allowed, they always jumped at the opportunity to hurl In & Out Burger at the hapless jogger. Some of them did dress rather ridiculously and maybe deserved at least a small percentage of the ridicule. Luckily for all of the intended targets none of my friends were very smart, as evidenced by their choice of afternoon entertainment, and as such, in every single instance, they failed to account for any of Newton's well proven laws of motion (Newton is also the scientist' testicles after whom a street was named in Mexico City and began a nationwide frenzy in the US to get a street named after a scientists balls. Yet another shared characteristic betweenn the two nations) and so no one was ever hurt except perhaps an ego or two. A few runners were struck by a wayward sauteed onion (my friends often preferred animal style preparation) but no one ever suffered a compound tibia fracture or a coma inducing head injury as the sauteeing rendered the onions 70% softer than a raw ones.

The Mexican teenager's version of the American Hurl Insults and Food Out Your Window Game is the Mexican Drive by the Gringos and Yell How Are You Out the Window Game. Calen and I were the victims of one such session of the favored Mexican pastime. And in the end were left with little more than feelings of confusion and uncertainty. Because there is one little detail in the Mexican version of the game that is contrary to a successful American Burgering. Often times, as was the case in this instance, pedestrian foot traffic in Mexico is substantially faster than automobile traffic. So they drove by and screamed a common American pleasantry, in our own language, because a secondary goal of the Mexican version of the game is to practice one's English. And then, because they were travelling at a speed well below 5 mph, we caught up with them at the corner 10 m ahead (being a cultured world traveller I can switch between standard and metric units of measurement with ease) where we witnessed them laughing at their own clever little act of youthful mischeif making as if they had just made a pun in a second language. We didn't know what if we were supposed to retaliate or what the next step was in this saucy little dance, so we just did what came naturally. We screamed back, "bien, y Uds. ¿como estan?" Then Calen threw a live grenade in the car and I stabbed two kids in the face and kicked a puppy on the corner just for good (metric) measure.

Now normally, this would seem like a gruesome act of violence. But it was actually a gruesomely noble act of crime fighting. And since the grenade was manufactured by Halliburton, we were also spreading peace, freedom, and democracy. Three of the kids in the bocho (this is what they call volkswagen beetles, but we've appropriated the term and are going to try to use it to replace douche bag in the States. As in look at this f***ing bocho and his stupid shirt. Tell your friends) were drug kingpins trafficking in cocaine, heroin, and tampered dramamine and the other was the daughter of the guy who invented food poisoning. Which brings us to the scoreboard.

Drug Cartels and Food Poisoning: 2

Calen and Colten: 116, 429

Another similarity can be found in the gleaming eyes and innocent hearts of the children of our neighboring countries. Children who have been brainwashed into a standardized fashion of thinking that only alightly allows for expression of differences in cultural heritage. At the free Mexican zoo with three Mexican McDonald's (if you're not yet picking out the pattern, everything in Mexico is the same as in the US just with the word Mexican in front of it. This can also be flip flopped, indicating the same relationship by adding the word American in front of a word) we heard the gleeful, high pitched cries of children screaming out, "Martine, Martine!" Assuming that Martine must be some sort of sensational figure, perhaps the real singer of the fictional band Tacomatadietas in which Calen sings backup vocals and plays guitar, we rushed to catch a glimpse. When we got there we were greeted only by the striped asses of zebras as they enjoyed their evening meals. Still not sure why the children were screaming Martine, we looked at the sign on the zebra enclosure to discover that there was no reference to a Martine. It was at this point during the confusion that Calen began to remove the pin from a live grenade he had in his pocket specificallyt to rectify moments of confusion. It was then that he remembered that in the cartoon films Madagascar and the aptly titled sequel Madagascar 2, there was a zebra named Marty and that Martine was the Spanish translation for the name Marty. He re-pinned the grenade and we moved on to the giraffe enclosure where all the children were screamingl "Hi Ross from Friends." Oh that's one other thing, all the children would, in vain, attempt to get the animals attention by yelling hola at them. It turns out that its not only naive American children who think that animals presumably brought from the depths of the forests of exotic and far away places speak speak their language. I thought it was only Americans who assumed everyone spoke English. But apparently Spanish speaking children are the Mexican American kids at the zoo... only they're at the Mexican zoo. But the Mexican McDonalds still has a Mc Flurry. Some things spell delicious in any language.

The other thing that they have here is neighbors who play their music too loud at inappropriate times. While in the US its usually suburban middle class white kids playing their rap music out of their trunks in their driveway at 2 AM. In Mexico it's a 12 piece band wearing cowboy hats with a full brass section playing rodeo music in El Plaza de Santa Domingo right smack in the middle of siesta time. Its all these tiny differences that serve to illustrate just how much were all the same.

And that explains why, deep down, we all want the same things. Like a roadway named after a certain piece of male crotchal anatomy perhaps belonging to scientific thinker of sorts. A name like Real do Galileos Massive Heavenly Bodies. The guy was burnt at the stake for telling us something we all eventually decided to agree with anyway. Its not like he tried to sell us a bunch of recalled and defective cornballers just because we have lower safety standards. He was trying to help reveal the order of the universe. Think of this as reparations.

ABC: Always Be Closing

After Calen took the dramamine laced with heroin and our 12 hour bus ride, we arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas which is a city with features as poetic as it's name. Our first stop, well, our second stop after we brushed our teeth in the bathroom at the bus terminal (the Brothers Dr. Mann would be so proud) was the internet cafe where the propietor had seen fit to decorate his establishment with novelty posters of homer simpson portrayed as different famous and historical figures including Hitler. I have no idea.

Without a plan, we got lucky and after walking 12 blocks stumbled into a pretty awesome hostel with a view and caretakers who were the very first spanish speakers I have met on this trip who took to heart my little spiel about how I'm just learning and if you slow down I can understand perfectly. We've actually had conversations. Its been nice.

I think Calen and I both agree that this is our favorite place. The weather is amazing and the pace of life is right in the middle of a bustling metropolis like mexico city and nothingness beachtopless like mazunte (I forgot to mention that there was a nude beach next to the one we were at, which didn't matter, because no one was there). There is also a distinct lack of impending threats to one's safety in San Cris. Drivers, even taxis, slow down to let you cross the street. The sidewalks are more or less well maintained. And like most landlocked, mountain towns, there aren't any sharks here either. Something about the elevation throws off their equilibrium. In fact, the most threatening thing in San Cris is the risk that the temperature might drop a few extra degrees and you might have to put on a long sleeve shirt. I guess the cold could constrict your blood vessels, increasing your blood pressure, causing an anhuerysm. Its rough. But its also a low risk scenario, so its endurable. In light of all these new developments, I'm decreasing the terror alert level of this trip to mauve.

After our siestas, a custom which we have embraced whole heartedly, we went out to find some food and instead we found gelato. As far as Mexican versions of things found in the US, like pizza and tacos, the gelato was a red on the terror alert meter. For those of you having trouble understanding the meter, that's the point. That's alwas been the point. Meters don't mean shit. Not even when they're emblazoned with a homeland security logo. After our naps and gelato (we're roughing it) we did what anyone raised in California would do, we hired a set of personal shoppers. Two cute little girls with the salesmanship and determination of those guys from Boiler Room (and maybe the same tanning bed because they had a brownish hue to their skin indicative of either a dedication to ultraviolet or genetics.) tried to make us buy some of their crap. About 20 minutes earlier, Calen had been outlining our goals for the evening and they were to eat and get one of those sweet Mexican sweatshirt jacket dealies. The two little girls came into the restaraunt where we had finally found food and tried to give us the hard sell. After finding out they were called panchos, we told them exactly how calen wanted one to look. They left and returned in 5 minutes with 3 that fit the description. There was even one with a zipper and two pockets. We called it the Shakur. Calen tried them on and they had nailed his size with nothing more than a look, so we had to buy one. It was about 8 bucks. We pretended to be outraged, so they didn't know we were pushovers. We didn't want to leave with a dozen panchos and 46 friendhsip bracelets as I'm sure we would have had they had their way. After dinner, 2 blocks outside of the restaraunt, we found another woman who sold one to me, without negotiation for 5 bucks, again nailing the size. I guess 3 dollars is the going rate for personal service and dinnertime delivery in this part of Mexico. We weren't mad at it. Food and panchos. Check and check.

There was one other kid who came in the restaraunt to sell wooden toys. We didn't buy any because they had no artistic merit of any kind. And I have standards that even 10 year olds must adhere to. But he did earn himself a peso and two avocados. Not for salesmanship. Not for tenacity. He earned his money for being dumb. In retrospect, it probably wasn't his fault. But facts are facts even if they're a bit sad. And even if I recount them like a tactless jerk. I asked him his age. He said 10. I asked him if he was in school and he said yes. I asked him if he knew multiplication and he said yes. I asked him what 10 times 10 was and he said 1000. When I told him know (because that's how he would have wanted me to spell it), it was 100 he argued with me and said that 100 is the answer to 10 plus 10. Eventually he came around to my way way of thinking when I threatened to call the Hot Cops if he didn't. I then asked him what the capital of the state of chiapas was. He answered mexico. I didn't bother to correct him. I just moved on to the next question which was what is the capital of mexico. He answered north. After the conversation came to a close, I realized that he might have been 0 for 6 including being incorrect about his own age and school attendance. His commitment to wrong answers inspired me, thus the peso and avocados. I hope that my satire, distasteful as it may be, brings attention to a broader issue. School might be an important part of helping these kids to grow up and live lives beyond goals of mere subsistence. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I would have been as likely to give that kid a peso if he got even one question right. I've got a lot of thinking to do about my role in this situation. Great.

It looks like the Zapatista thing is going to work out after all, thanks to the efforts of a teacher I had in high school. It turns out some of them really do care and are even willing to put their neck on the line and help out a student 10 years later. It has really changed my perspective on things because I always thought teachers just got into the business for the money.

You know what some teachers teach? Science. And some of that science was developed by scientists. And some of those scientists were men. And you know what that means. Its time to play get a street named like how they do in Mexico City. Our suggestion for congress or whoever picks the names of streets today is Deductive Universal Forms of Plato Boulevard. It may seem egotistical to refer to a set of testicles as "Universal Forms." But let's allow the guy a bit of honor.

Nothing, Ninjas, and No Sharks

The scores are the same as they were before. So no need to recap. Just scroll down if youre really that much of a fanatic about it.

At the moment Calen is passed out on the floor of the bus station. I think whatever we bought at the farmacia out of a dramamine box was actually GHB. It might be a translation error, but to know for sure, im going to have to find a colloquial spanish-english dictionary and see if Dramamine is what they call roofies. Regardless, Calen is dead to the world right now. Maybe its malaria. I dont know. Whatever the case, I sort of envy him right now. If he can keep up this act, he may very well sleep through the entire 12 hour bus ride were about to take.

Every 40 passenger bus weve taken in Mexico has had 6 people on it. Us, the driver, maybe a chicken or goat, and a couple other people. But tonight, when the option was an 11 hour trip on the early bus we wanted to take, or a 12 hour trip on the late bus we didnt, the early one was completely full and the late one had only two seats left on different hemispheres of the bus. In Mexico they divide buses using hemispheres. They´re a cartography loving people. I dont know if this is my american entitlement speaking, but i think they should either kick some people off so we can sit together or send an extra bus so we can sit together or send us in a taxi for a comparable price so we can sit together. And it should probably be a taxi with a bathroom because i plan on taking plenty of pressurized beverages on this trip as well.

The place we are leaving is mazunte, which, in a rare occurence given the tendency of human beings to embellish and romanticize, actually lived up to the hype of a beach paradise as it was described. Only its the low season so there was no one there except us, a guy who was probably a bus driver, a chicken or a goat, and a couple other people. At no point could one look out on the expansive beach and be unable to count the amount of people on their fingers.

We stayed in a place called La Atarraya which was a fine establishment run by the Mexican Jason Ross, only his name was Cesar and he didnt have any 18-year-old-impulsive-decisions tattooed on his arms. Since we were the only ones there, we opted for the camping package which meant we slept on hammocks on this huge 2nd story, open air terrace covered by palm leaves and literally (not figuratively) looking out on to the surf which was about 30 yards away. The lower floor of the place is actually just sand. Its sort of like a gateway to the beach. We arrived on the day of a full moon which meant a couple things. High tide. Huge waves. And a night on the beach which was lit up so bright by the moonlight that you could walk around with eyes squinted like my mom when she´s drunk and still safely arrive at the destination of your choosing. I woke up in the middle of the night and walked down to the beach and there is really only one way to explain the experience, dreamlike. Everything was coated in a soft blue light, which was a sharp contrast to the blinding light of a beach day.

We became well acquainted with the beach. The sand was fine and soft. The kind of fine, soft sand we discovered, experientially, that can remain in any nook and cranny of your nether regions that it chooses (it chose all of them) without detection for 2 days. This was ninja sand. It went where it wanted, when it wanted without so much as making a noise or setting off an alarm. We only learned this lesson because we employed the same approach to hygeine as we did when we were 12. Swimming counts as bathing. What we started to notice is that even though we spent copious amounts of time in the water (yes, calen swam in the ocean, repeatedly) we still developed a stench that rivalled the smell of the mexican street seafood with which we had become so familiar. So eventually we showered, and found the ninja sand. We killed them all with our peppermint samurai soap. Their tiger style was no match for our d'wa-gone style.

The waves in Mazunte made me realize something and added a bit more cohesion to my otherwise disjointed existence. There are some things in life that you never really understand why they seem so important to you until that fateful day when the answer is revealed. I had a strange obsession when I was but a lad of 17 with learning how to do a yoga asana which, by its anglicized name, is called the scorpion pose. Maybe it was the cool name, or maybe it was the acrobatics of the pose. Whatever the case, i practiced until i could do it, never seeing a practical reason for all the effort. And without any (Gob´s) segue (that counts as the Arrested Development reference for this post), as i mentioned before, high tide meant big waves. Huge, crashing, deafening waves. Waves that make you appreciate the power of nature. Waves that pucker your ninja sand hiding spots. Waves that appeal to the reckless stupidity of people like ourselves. We reasoned that since we grew up in California, and California touches the ocean, that we must be an ocean people. So we surfed with the only thing available to surf. Our bodies. And in one of those classic misjudgements of ocean people that grew up in a landlocked valley of the state of ocean people, i got caught (it feels even dumber to admit that it was intentional, so I´ll pretend like I was an innocent victim of the cruel Poisedon) in a wave that slammed down with a special kind of torque that made my heels touch my cervical vertebrae, even though i specifically asked it not to. I got out of the water wondering what a fractured vertebrae felt like. But after about an hour all i had was a slightly sore back which was 100% after another hour, and a profound sense of gratitude for community colleges everywhere that make yoga classes fulfill a degree requirement. Sierra College, you saved my life. And thats not even the first time. You wouldnt believe how often calculating instantaneous rates of change or identifying a gerund has saved me from an untimely death.

So the beach was absolutely amazing. It was like living in Lost without all thje creepy people who, for no reason, are always lying to each other. But it turns out that doing nothing isnt really something im good at. I enjoyed myself immensely, but after two days and a combined total of about 8 hours in the sun and saltwater, and the vast majority of the other 24 or so in a hammock, it was time to move on. I do believe that it would be the perfect place for a large group of friends and family during the low season though. Or maybe if I could stay and paint for a month. Something other than nothing. Houses with kitchens and relatively modern ammenities can be rented on the beach for $300 per month and the cost of travel is negligible assuming you dont mind gambling your life on the bus ride. The food on the beach is amazing and cheap and fresh. There aren´t sharks, jellyfish, carpet fish or anything else that can kill you aside from the waves. They have fishermen that are more than happy to take people out to fish, sea turtles (get it?), dolphins, monsters of the deep, etc. There are internet cafes for checking email and porn. Somebody set that up. Aunt Karen, Im looking at you. You like email and porn in a secluded beach setting more than anyone.

So here we are now in the bus terminal with peeling faces, a few mosquito bites, serious fatigue, and against all odds, uninjured, waiting to take the later, longer bus ride to San Cristobal where our goal is to hook up with the Zapatistas. This is a task that is proving to be more difficult and less likely to occur the closer we get to the actual place. But its the meat of the trip, and so it merits a bit of struggle. Besides, what kind of goal would it be if there was a brochure or something? The things in this life worth doing usually involve a nonexistent, uncharted, or overgrown path. Things like meeting up with a group of well organized, indigenous rebels with a world view that inspires to the ends of the earth. Things like getting a street named after a scientist's balls.

How about Stephen J. Gould's Sesamoid Groin Processes Road? Speaking of sesamoid processes, the zoo in Mexico City had a giant panda in an enclosure that seemed to intentionally obscure our view. I think it was animatronic and theyre trying to pull the wool... no wait... panda fur over our eyes. But i digress. Dont be surprised if i suggest more streets with Gould. I like him. He deserves this. Read Ontogeny, Ontogeny and Phylogeny and there will be no end to the amount of letters you'll be motivated to write to Obama to make this happen for Mr. Gould, God rest his soul.

The Royal We

We had a new contestant enter the game and so the time to remember the fallen is over... after one day. So here are the new scores:

Drug cartels and food poisoning: 2
Calen and Colten: 17

Even though food poisoning and cartels technically constitutes the formation of a new team, we will allow them the points won by swine flu due to the fact that they are at a heavy disadvantage in the overall standings. Were not about to give up our hard earned points, so its only fair to make a concession for them.

All those scoring politics aside, it isnt often that one gets to truly enjoy the unparalleled bliss of simply being alive. It is something that often goes unnoticed. However, its much easier to be aware of it when contrasted against the very real and (for 9 hours at least) omnipresent specter of meeting one's doom just after careening off of a go-kart-track-curvy, vertically banked mountain road while sitting inside a bus that has no business going that speed or taking turns that a rabbit would have a hard time managing. The funniest thing was that on the back of the bus was a little decal that read "velocidad controlado." Im not sure what they set their speed control thingy at, but - think it was the same setting as whatever they use for NASCAR. In the end, we arrived at our destination safely. So thanks to whoever was driving and thanks to whatever god to which someone sacrificed a pot bellied pig on behalf of our safety during this trip.

There was one other little hiccup on the voyage that, in hindsight seemed foreshadowed. But i didnt heed the warning as my intuition, nay, common sense had been debilitated by what westerners know as "churro drunk." We needed water for the long bus ride as i think bus toilet water falls under the category of water you arent supposed to drink in mexico. So we went to the store and i just grabbed the two biggest bottles of water i could find. 2 liters each, if youre dying to know the total. Thats 4 liters total if you went to american public school. Booyah, take that you failing American social infrastructure. When we got to the bus station Calen popped one open, accompanied by an unfamiliar hissing noise in the context of bottled water. He then discovered, much to his consternation that the water i had selected, strictly for the sake of gluttony, was carbonated. He then went on and on and on about how gross it was and how he was going to beat my ass (a common occurrence on this trip that has yet to come to fruition) and told me to try it. I did. I took a long, long drink and even pretended to be refreshed, even though it was just for pretend. He looked at me like i was crazy and questioned my sincerity. I stuck with my story. He insisted we throw it out, but i insisted to the contrary. In the end, we all boarded the bus, the carbonated water being included in that particular use of the pronoun, and sat in the very back seats in front of the bathroom.

We all, still including the water, fell asleep to the sweet sound of a spanish cartoon retelling the story of Noah's Ark. This film was selected by the bus company, presumably so that all the children on the bus could learn what a wrathful and destructive deity the catholic god is. At a certain point in the night, i awoke to discover three things. Calen had moved to a different row of seats. I looked out the window and saw that the bus was about three inches from the side of a cliff with no guardrail while pulling a 7 G turn (this only concerned me because in an effort to travel light, we had selected not to pack our G suits). And, possibly worst of all, my socks were very wet.

At first i thought i had cut my leg while somnamburesheathing a samurai sword (the sword of destiny) that Ive been carrying around mexico ever since our trip to the chinese holistic medicine store and as a result, i was bleeding into my sock. But even in my sleepy haze my deductive reasoning kicked in and i knew that was impossible because both my socks were wet and i had traded the sword just hours before to a kid in oaxaca for his last 16 churros. This left only one other option. The bus toilet had broken and water and whatever else there is in bus toilets was leaking out of the bathroom. I panicked and leaned forward to begin my analysis of the situation where i was promptly squirted in the face with water and whatever is in bus toilets. The squirt in the face sobered me out of my sleep and my churro intoxication and i discovered the source of the water was not a bus toilet but one of the carbonated 2 liter bottles of water. Im not sure whose to blame, but i knew i had to act fast. So i found the hole, covered it, took it to the bathroom and put it in the sink. I went back to my seat, pleased with my handling of the situation. Moments later i realized it would be a much more efficient solution to go and just empty the bottle completely rather than letting pressurized mineral water spray all over the bathroom as we all (still including the water) rode the tilt-a-whirl down the mexican federal highway. So i went and did that and then returned to my seat even more pleased with myself.

Then my socks continued to get wet. If you private school kids remember, there were 2 bottles. Whatever had attacked and punctured the first one, proceeded to attack and puncture the second. Knowing exactly how to resolve the situation, i remained calm... and proceeded to resolve the situation. There was a lot of proceeding going on including when the bus driver proceeded to take the bus onto an olympic slalom course, with moguls. I guess it was a shortcut or a gas saver or something. But his proceeding proceeded to cause me to proceed to be thrown out of the bathroom slamming the door into the knees of the guy sleeping next to it. He didnt kick my ass. In fact he was very understanding. And when morning came i learned something new. Just before i got off the bus, I learned that i knew how to say, "Sorry about slamming the door into your knees last night." in Spanish. I did not know that about myself.

Also, Mexican teenagers have taken to the habit of mistaking Calen for a rockstar of some kind. They dont ever know what band hes from, they just know there is a band and hes part of it. We (no longer including the bottled waters) decided that since they all seemed so sure, theres no reason to dash their hopes and dreams of having their photo taken with an american rockstar. So when they ask, we answer, "hes in a band called tacomatadietas." Thats the name of a taco shop we saw in mexico city and it means diet killer taco.

Oh yeah. And Calen threw up.

I checked and the Einstein's Quantum Energy Balls is failing to make headway in the ligislative processes necessary to get a street named. So here's a new suggestion. Lets try Anton von Leeuwenhoek's Microscopic Coccidia Boulevard. Come on people. If a small group of mexican anarchists can vandalize an entire major city, we can get a street named after a scientist's balls.

Mexico city is spelled r-e-d-e-m-p-t-i-o-n

Current standings:

Swine flu and drug cartels: 1
Calen and Colten: 14

If you take a look at the scores, it is alarming to see that the opposing team has scored a point. A couple days ago, Calen began to have a sore throat, a clear indication of an H1N1 attack, which required urgent treatment with the Mexican equivalent of Airborne. It worked. This means that we have effectively cured swine flu. The implications for the world at large are profound. No longer do we have to cower in the deepest corner of our homes in fear of fever and other flu-like symptoms. Never again will children have to don their self contained personal quarantine iso-health disease resistante bio-suits just to go out to the cul-de-sac for a game of freeze tag. Everyone can start eating bacon again. Pot bellied pigs can go back to being the lovable and cherished family pets that they once were, rather than being offerings for the daily ritual sacrifices weve been making to the gods of maladies that resemble the flu exactly, but kill way, way, way less people worldwide. You're welcome earth. We'll be here all week. I will continue to include swine flu on the scoreboard in all future posts in order to honor the fallen. Even if the fallen was a highly inconvenient peehole.

Anyway, we're on a bus to Oaxaca right now en route to some beach paradise as described by our gracious hosts, and we can safely sum up our experience of Mexico City without the fear of having to eat our words later when we are attacked by a band of robbers disguised as mariachis or something. The official statement:

Mexico City was a safe and beautiful place with a full gamut of activities for all types of travelers.

I got that off a travel brochure I saw on the sidewalk outside Chapultepec park. But the statement stands up to the grueling, rigorous, gauntlet of truth to which i subject everything i read. So I decided to appropriate it. The empirical evidence just keeps stacking up that Mexico City is a pretty awesome place. I mean even the tourism industry has figured it out. And they are usually pretty reluctant to make broad sweeping statements about places and things and stuff.

We did, finally (maybe) almost get robbed. But in hindsight, im pretty sure the guy that was paying a little too much attention to us, looking at us weird, and acting generally shifty, was only doing so because we were doing the same to him and he probably thought we were going to rob him. Classic misunderstanding. We had gotten off the metro in a part of town usually not reserved for lobster faced gringos (we forgot to wear sunscreen for 1 f***ing day) after being directed to take a certain set of stairs by an all too eager to help subway passanger, from whom we had requested no help. So naturally, my paranoiadar went off and we took a different exit. But there was a man who seemed to be following us. We tried to lose him by slowing down... a lot. He kept pace with us stopping to look at ridiculous items being sold on the street. I knew it was suspicious because i have never seen a local stop to look at a stuffed monkey holding a taco in one hand and praying the rosary with the other. We slowed a lot. And he suddenly became a much more involved shopper. So we did what we learned from video games and movies and ducked into a shoe store. When he walked past, we stepped out right behind him. Now he tried to slow down and get us out from behind him. We didnt bother with the show of shopping and chose instead to slow down blatantly. He crossed to the other alley in the market but still seemed to keeping pace because everytime there was an opening between the tents in the market he would be looking over at us. In the end he turned around. He didnt rob us and we didnt rob him, which is exactly what ive been trying to say the whole time. No one gets robbed. In fact everyone with whom we spoke about the subject of personal crime in Mexico City knew someone who had been a vitim, but not one of them have been a victim themselves. Im beginning to suspect that crime in Mexico City is an urban legend like the loch ness monster in Scotland or the stripper who is just doing it to pay her way through medical school.

In other unconnected news, if you do ever come down here there are a few things worth knowing. The first and most important is that red lights are just a suggestion, and since the police dont generally enforce any traffic controls, suggestion might be too strong of a word. And if you're squeamish, and you ride the subway, and you see a man wearing a shirt with no sleeves get on who doesnt seem to be selling anything like all the other people who get on the subway with sacks of something, and he does, in fact, have a sack of something, and he sets that sack of something on the ground and opens it flat to reveal that the sack of something is actually a sack of broken glass and if the train is coming to a stop for passengers to get on and off... if all these things come to pass, especially the part about being squeamish, look away, because he is about to jump in the air and slam into that pile of broken gass shoulder first, with full commitment. If youre not squeamish, keep looking. It might be the only time you get to see something like that outside of a circus sideshow.

Also, i have successfully acheived the only goal i had regarding my study of the Spanish language. I have mentioned to several people that if i could acheive a moment of genuine humor, not one where people are laughing at me because what im saying is nonsensical madness, but actual cleverness, then i would feel as though i arrived. Yesterday, i made a pun. I belive my exact words as i held up a large handful of Mexican coins were "Mucho peso." Get it? No? Then learn Spanish. You live right next to Mexico. Anyway, it was linguistic premature ejaculation. Sure, i can make jokes now. But i cant get a gatorade from the 7 eleven (that's here, tambien) without needing the clerk to repeat basic phrases for me to fully comprehend what is being said to me. Its way too early for me to have acheived "success." So like with the trying to get robbed thing, I need to reevaluate and come up with a new measure of success.

How about Einstein's Quantum Energy Balls Avenue? Call your congressman. Together, we can acheive anything.

Isaac Newton's Testicles

Disclaimer: this entry was written in pieces, sporadically, on a cellphone, and then converted into a format usable by the computer, and then loosely edited during a heated game of Spongebob Monopoly. And photos... forget about it right now. But I'll add them in later. Mostly I'm just posting these things as proof of life. So don't get on my ass about the grammar, spelling, or general lack of continuity. You try doing this shit while keeping a vigilant eye on your monopoly money while struggling to understand the rapid fire Spanish being spoken by three people who are all very capable of speaking English to make sure they aren't conspiring to distract you and steal the title deed to Tentacle Acres. End Disclaimer

Here are the scores as they stand now.

Swine flu and drug cartels: 0

Calen and Colten: 3

We have been in Mexico city for well over 24 hours now and the most dangerous thing we've encountered has to be the uneven sidewalks that so diligently try to reintroduce us to our often forgotten friends, Gravity and Twisted Ankles.  Every hora (hour) que pasa (that passes) sin (without) any of the excitement we were promised by the media, friends, family, friends of friends, homeland security, and random people on the street with strong opinions, we slip deeper into a state of boredom and despondency.  It's not so much that we want to be the victims of a random act of violencia.  It's the anticipation.  So like any bored tourists, we decided to take matters into our hands.  We spent most of today trying actively to entice the criminal elements of this fine city to take notice of us.  The plan was to spend the day walking around looking very conspicuously like lost tourists.  We did so by putting on our matching t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase "USA A-OK!!!," donning neon flavored fanny packs (yes, flavored), and reading all of our maps upside down while maintaining dumbfounded blank faces (it wasn't hard) and just generally trying to appear unfocused and vulnerable.  Fool proof, right?  Wrong.  We didn't even get so much as a sideways look.  The policia wouldn't even rob us.  And if you cant get taken advantage of by the police in Mexico City, then it's time to reevaluate your tactics.

We knew we had no choice but to crank it up to 11.  We went to the place where during the day, there are bootleg markets.  But we went at night when all that is left on the streets are the people who run the bootleg markets.   At night, the markets are closed and we figured without a clearly defined sense of purpose, the "fell off a truck" sales team would be happy to make our acquaintance.  So we removed our shirts and pants and tied them around our eyes, effectively rendering us blind and unable to serve as reliable witnesses against any would be criminals.  We then took all the money out of our pockets and stuffed it in the waistband of our underwear, being careful to ensure that the money was still visible from a distance and easily recognizable as large denomination pesos.  We then proceeded to perform the chicken dance, which we later found out was a much more inflammatory gesture than we had previously known.  Still, nothing.  I'm not sure if we overdid it or what.  The weirdest thing is that I think we ended up with more money in our underwear than when we started.  I guess it all worked out for the best though, because a cursory glance at a Mexican legal guide listed stuffing ones underwear with money and performing a dance in a venue not zoned for such actividad (activity) as an actionable offense punishable by several consecutive life sentences in prison or a fine of 120 pesos (currently about 10 dollars American).

Aside from behemoth failure at becoming just another statistic and perhaps a cautionary tale for future visitors to Mexico City, there were some highlights of the day.  We visited the Museo Nacional de Antropologia where we saw, among other things, this giant dong.

Don’t try and use your imagination.  It is exactly what it looks like.  It said so on the information card, and I’m pretty sure they proofread those things.  The museum, apart from its phallic wonders, or perhaps because of them, is quite impressive both in scale, and the detail of the exhibits.  There were burial exhibits everywhere.  We never knew there were so many different ways to stuff a recently deceased body into a hole and then leave it there forever. But leave it to the Prehispanic Mesoamerican indigenous cultures to find about a trillion different ways.

 

We rode the metro to the Zócalo which was the town center of old timey Mexico City if I'm not mistaken, which I probably am.  This was on the way to the bootleg market in Tepito and merited a look around.  I don’t think I've ever been in a cathedral that big before.  Oh yeah, there was a cathedral, and we went to it, and it was big, just to clarify the lack of transition.   It was, how do you say, very Catholic, with all kinds of beautiful and dramatic imagery, insanely detailed architecture, and you guessed it, high, arching, cathedral ceilings. 

After awhile it became exhausting seeing all the paintings and statues of people who were clearly better than us, morally, and just in general.  If any of them were alive today they would probably be better than us at video games, too.  We Brothers Smith like to maintain this deep seated delusion that we're ok people in the moral sense.  And depictions of pure, suffering, holy saints don’t do much but create feelings of inadequacy deep within our souls.  So we left the church to see if we could find some stolen computers or chihuahua fights or something.

We could tell that Tepito would have been awesome, had we arrived 4 hours earlier.  I guess the Mexican bootleg market keeps bank hours. Since one of our major concerns is maintaining a light load for travel, we resisted the temptation to impulse buy some authentic Kasio watches or bedazzled and officially licensed Ed Hearty shirts.  The bootleg leather motorcycle jackets seemed nice though, and I want to say that if your’e ever in Mexico City and you are in the market for a leather jacket that might, but probably won’t, prevent your skin from being ripped from your body in a 30 mph fall from a motorcycle, and you want to look good doing it, without the hefty price tag of tried and tested jackets, Tepito is the place to go.

On a more serious note, we learned from our new friends here about a march happening on Friday to commemorate a rather gruesome event in Mexico's history.  In 1968, the year Mexico City hosted the olympic games, there was a massacre of 40,000 (a four with 4 zeroes, this according to the account we received, although disputed) students and other unfortunate souls who happened to be in the area.  This was done in an effort to create a peaceful ambiance for the upcoming games because the government and students were at odds over certain oppression that most governments attempt to impose at some point during their existence.   The massacre was successfully covered up, somehow, someway.  And the profound pain of an entire nation was swept under the rug for the sake of what amounts to marketability.  This is only a very precursory description of the events, based on my very inadequate understanding.  But it merits further examination.  And even though it may seem like something that could “never happen to me” it’s a good illustration of why a government should be afraid of its people and not the other way around.   A government is an institution, inherently heartless ruling over millions of people each of whom possess both hearts and minds capable of profound feeling.  The relationship doesn’t add up.  Governments also tend to arise by way of violence and maintain power in the same fashion.  There doesn’t have to be a massacre or bloodshed for violence to occur either.

Tune in next time where I will discuss the very imperative issue of getting a street named after the balls of famous scientists like they do here in Ciudad de Mexico.