From Xico

Feliz Navidad Part 1

People do have Christmas trees here in our neighborhood. Not everyone does, but even here in our Colonia you can peek in some of the windows and see brightly decorated trees.And lots and lots of people have strings of lights. The streets looks lovely. Not extravagant like San Antonio, but that is a good thing: the lights s sparkle: they don't make the houses look like they're about to catch on fire. They pick up the colors of the walls and surround La Virgén with joy and reverence. They tumble over bumpy walls and woodpiles. It doesn’t seem like our neighbors have taken on US culture, rather that they’ve made Christmas lights their own.

Our tree, fast fading now at the close of the old year, is stuck in a paint bucket filled with dirt which is how people seem to anchor their fresh trees. Jero, our housekeeper/friend has a big branch from a tree on the hillside near us strung with lights. Under it, her large array of shepherds and their animals, collected over many years.

We went to a tree farm to cut our tree down. The tree farm is part of the reforestation efforts of the state ov Veracru: to develop harvestable products without destroying the forest. I don't have pictures to show you of our trip because it was just too dark by the time we got there to get any, so you can just use your imaginations.

There are a number of slick looking banners hanging over the road betwen Xico and Coátepec advertising the farm as being eleven kilometers from Xico. Eleven relative kilometers. People minimize distances on signs pretty regularly and we knew it, so we weren't going into this blind. But the signs were so very professional, so big, we couldn’t envision that this place was not only off in the remote mountains but was itself hardly distinct from the surrounding woods. We didn't recognize the names of the bridge and road until we got to them: this was the way to Guillermo's and Jero's family places.

In fact, past Jero’s and Guillermo's family places, so it was a couple of hours getting there.

Grrrrr.

Already the light was failing when we came upon the tree farm tucked into a fold in the hillside. Mist was swirling in. A pretty, simple chalet and a couple of small outbuildings, empty-seeming, sat near the road.There were no lights: there was no electricity. We neither saw nor heard a soul. A metal gate with a handmade sign announcing we'd arrived stood open, so we walked through it and along a little path and found a picnic table under a palapa with a portable radio sitting on it playing classical music. Haunted. Whisps of all the people over the hundreds of years who’ve made their way through that silent, fog-filled forest seem to drift by.

We called out a few times, and soon a lean, flannel-shirted man emerged from the woods, machete at his side. At home, friendly, perfectly ordinary. He went into the larger building to retrieve a saw. He would take us to see the trees: Two kinds, short-needled for 300 pesos, long.needled for 200 pesos, no matter what size. Densely planted, they climbed up the sides of a bowl rimmed with giant firs and oaks, part of the original forest. Rita (who had come with us) ran free while we went through the ritual, the same here as ever, of finding the tree that called out to us: a shortish, fat, round, long needled one. We saw it right away but wandered further just to make sure. So we brought the tree home down all the curves and bumps and jolts, along with a free gift of a bottle of home-made mora, blackberry liqueur, and a garish pink and black flyer explaining how our purchase helped reforestation efforts.

Jero was eager to decorate it, so she did a lot of it. I was melancholy because I couldn't find the stars that our daughters had made a million years ago: I was sure I'd brought them. Finally, we found them in a box stuck on the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet. More about Christmas soon. It has really been quite a different experience.

Field of Dreams?

Up the street from our house you come to the campo de futbol o beisbal, depending on the season. Now it is beisbol. This has to be one of the most beautiful places to play baseball in the world. THese pictures were taken the Sunday before La Fiesta de la Virgén. Two teams from Xalapa were playing -- there are leagues here. They were very good.

Some of all the pictures in my posts are Jim's -- the best ones.

Now where were we....

December 12 is the Feast Day of La Virgén de Guadalupe all over México. She is also the patron of our Colonia which is why it is an especially big deal here. Now if I mention Catholic, Virgenes of the mother of God sort and Mexico, you might imagine something exceedingly solemn and reverent. A visit to the Latin American collection in the San Antonio Art Museum, for instance, would lead you to the conclusion that this is a heavy-duty seriously religious, seriously serious place, especially where the Church is concerned.

Well, it is, but it's not just that. La Fiesta de la Virgén is also like the 4th of July only much much noisier. The only time I remember being so up close and personal with violent noise was on New Years' Eve in Rome many years ago when we took to hiding under our covers as Romans filled the night air with the sounds of gunshots, gunpowder bombs and old furniture crashing to the ground.

A week or so before the actual Fiesta, people started putting together two arcos, one for La Capilla Azul, one for the main capilla in the Colonia. Local guys worked on them up the street from us in a cul-de-sac.

The arcos are all different from one community to another, but they all incorporate this strange plant: itlooks kind of like a fingernail on the end of some kind of prickly succulent: Arcos in some communities are pretty much covered with these things. We are still not sure what they are. THe arcos were put up on Saturday, December 9th. You can see the one in front of the Capilla Azul and the one over the main chapel. The Capilla Azul is only open for the fiesta of La Virgén, the big capilla is actually the community's church. When we took these pictues, the Capilla Azul was still being readied for the arrival of La Virgén on the night of the eleventh. Here you can see how the job was going. In the foreground you see the chair in which the Virgen will be carried.

In honor of La Virgén´s fiesta, there's a good ole fashioned carny complete with rides and including a bull riding contest: a bigger bull for the men, a smaller one for boys. Yes, this fenced area was to be the bullring. The bullring is in an open area that you can see from the photo from the steps of the capilla. We can only show you these pictures from the setting-up. We can't show you any from the actual festival night because I at least was too scared to go out. See www.vivaveracruz.com/blog to understand why. NEXT year Jim and I will have to brave the fireworks to join the fun.

The whole weekend preceding the Fiesta was filled with activities. There were tons of church services with baptisms and first communions and so on. Jero's daughter was among those celebrating their first communion. You can see the back of her head in the left line of communicants -- the shortest person with her hair up and a little crown.

Jero and Ave had a party to celebrate Jaquelyn's first communion as many other proud parents did for their children. It was a lovely party and Jero cooked a really delicious meal. At parties in our Colonia, people come and go and have a really good time. They last for hours so we could arrive four hours late and still enjoy everything. Here, the food is not served buffet-style, but individual plates are prepared in the kitchen and brought out. Jero and her two older daughters must have worked like slaves to prepare the feast we had. Jaquelyn had changed from her white communion dress into a lovely pink one for the party.

Runners in many communities (everyone celebrates this most important Día de Fiesta even if La Virgén is not the patron saint of the community) go to Mexico City to have torches lit at the Shrine of La Virgén which they bring back to their home towns relay-style a la Olympic torch the evening before or day of the Fiesta. But, contrary to gloomy images of Mexican catholicism that a lot of people in the States have, this is not such a serious undertaking. From our colonia, a bus full not of quietly reverent young men dreaming of being priests, but of partying guys departs. Very sadly, this year, on the trip home, the bus had an accident in the fog leaving several injured, I think two seriously.

Nonetheless, the show must go on and did.
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Now we are into Las Posadas season -- more on this in another post.

Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy this picture of a kind of giant caterpillar we sometimes see. It can be as long as sixteen inches but it moves slowly and does not bite.

Radio Teocelo

Jim and Mindy are our friends from Teocelo. As far as anyone knows, they are the only Gringos in Teocelo. In spite of speaking not too much Spanish, they find they can cope quite well because people are so willing to be helpful.

Anyway, below is the URL to their blog which is full of interesting stuff. Find the post on Radio Teocelo. Jim and Mindy had previously directed us to Radio Teocelo, a very local AM station, and we have enjoyed listening to it. Very local, with weddings and funerals and birthdays and local musicians as well as a whole lot of other stuff. Anyway, today if you go to Jim and Mindy's blog, you will find a very interesting and moving story about Radio Teocelo. Check it out at

http://www.blog.solarhaven.org/

Fancy Xalapa

This past Tuesday night, Pronatura Veracruz, the wonderful environmental organization for which I volunteer, (www.pronaturaveracruz.org -- check out the website)held a benefit opening of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It was held in one of the Xalapa multiplexes, the one in the subdivision called Las Animas. They closed off one of the many theaters so that after the movie was shown, we could all have drinks and snacks.

Briefly, I enjoyed the movie. There was so much photography of Al Gore's person in it that I might have thought he was running for president again, except there was nothing glamorous: you could even see that he bites his nails. It seems to me that we should all be worrying a whole lot more about global warming and the general effects of a profligate economy and lifestyle than we should be about terrorism -- although, wait a minute, in a way, the two bear a bit or relationship to each other. Anyway, I read that the producers or some group wanted to donate thousands of copies of the film free to US high schools -- but that the major US high school science teachers organization turned them down because they didn't want to offend the corporate sponsors of high school science projects. Anyone know anything about this? Sounds like satire and reality have become the same thing.

So back to the opening night. One of my wonderful friends commented that at times perhaps there was a bit of culture shock for us living here. At the beginning, there was some jangling. However, I thought I would show you a bit of suburban-style Xalapa (there's a lot more to Xalapa, by the way, so those of you who panic at the thought that the world is being Americanized can sigh with relief) so you could see that there is a bit of medication for withdrawal symptoms.

Although I can't say I ever missed what you'll see in the following pictures.

Las Animas is a fraccionamiento outside the main east-west highway which goes to Mexico City. It is relatively new and relatively well-off. The town "center" is an indoor mall which contains an Office Max, several banks, Radio Shack, clothing stores, and a bunch of other places which will seem familiar to you in the STates. It has the largest of the Chedraui supermarkets. Chedraui is the main chain of supermarkets in this part of Mexico and the Chedraui family is very, very rich. They also own the elegant new shopping mall called something like Espiritu de las Américas here in Xalapa. I'll send you some pictures of that, too, one day soon.

Anyway, Jim and I were invited to this benefit premiere because I'm a volunteer. I challenge you to see any difference between this view of the inside of a multiplex (remember, it has been partitioned off for the benefit -- without partitioning it would stretch out) and one in the states except for the language.
This was a benefit, so those accustomed to be benefactors were in attendance as well: A

And there were a few eccentric Americans:
Away from the crowd the service tables were set up. Here you can see a few of the many white-jacketed servers and the big Pronatura banner. We were offered chicken salad on rolls, tuna salad on croissants, ham and cheese roll-ups and some kind of veggie roll-up along with pastries and wine and various fruit drinks. Roll-ups are big in this segment of Xalapa right now.

We get the same movies in Xalapa that you get in the states, sometimes a bit later, as in the case of An Inconvenient Truth, sometimes a bit earlier, sometimes at the same time:
At the end of the movie, a very elegant man whose name I missed, though I suspect he was the Executive Director of Pronatura Veracruz (I just work in the office, guys) gave a wonderful, impassioned speech about the magnificent treasure that the state of Veracruz is, how rapidly it is being destroyed, how there are many among us who KNOW what to do, how we must do it. He was loudly applauded and cheered by the well-heeled crowd. I was quite moved. There are quite a number of people here who are sensitive to the environment as a place of beauty and natural wealth and as something which could die, which we will of course die with. Something I hear in this area is the word patrimony. Now it might not sound pc to say patrimony instead of something gender-neutral, but it conveys the deep sense of connection to place many people here seem to have. This is complicated in Mexico where so many are so poor -- the issue, for instance, of deforestation: up in the mountains among the terribly poor, it goes on apace because the population has grown so rapidly and people need to cook and keep warm. What to do? Solar stoves, you say. But there isn't enough solar in cloud forests for the stoves.

But there I go again.

Anyway, after the show and reception, Jim an I wandered over to Chedraui to pick up a few things -- I keep trying to find whole nutmeg. It doesn't seem to exist here, though a myriad of spices I never heard of before do. It wasn't in this giant Chedraui, either. I think you can tell it is a quote full-service supermarket unquote. I took one picture there, but could take no more. A store employee very politely told me I couldn't take pictures inside the store. You can't take pictures inside of US supermarkets, either. Why not, I wonder. Here is the one picture I took:

To conclued, I show you a house in Las Animas decorated for Christmas. It belongs to our friends Janet, on the left, and her husband. David, on the right, is from Madison, Wisconsin and is here with his wife who is doing consulting with the state dept of education. They live in Coátepec. Las Animas has actually a lot of charm. Many varied row houses, lots of different urban types live in it. Also some palacios of the very rich.

The other side of the mountain

A few of you have actually been to Cascada Texolo (and to Coátepc and Xico for that matter). You went via the main road to Xico. On Sunday, we took another road. You all will want to come back to see it from this angle!

Going into Teocelo one day, we had noticed a little sign pointing to the falls. Now Teocelo is on the other side of the river gorge the falls tumble into. Also on the other side of the mountain from Col. Ursulo Galván (hence the extremely witty title of this post.) Here is a GoogleEarth map showing I hope clearly enough how everything is laid out. Remember, you can click on the thumbnail to get a bigger version.
On this tiny map, you can see the longish white blob towards the center left which is Xico, the mountain we see from our house just to the right of it, our little Colonia Ursulo Galván just to the right of the peak,and Coátepec behind us and Xalapa behind Coátepec. I don't know if you can pick out the umbers in front of and slightly to the left of the peak, but if you can, that is the longitude and latitude of Santa Rosa, the tiny town where the path up to the Mirador (view point) of the falls starts. Its altitude is about 5300 feet.
Here is a link to the map formatted into a Word file. It may be better for seeing.Download googleearthmap.doc

Now the road to the falls on the Xico side is definitely not hidden away (at least not by Veracruz state standards). As you get closer to the falls, you come upon souvenir boothes and little restaurants. There's a pretty big parking lot, several buildings for miscellaneous, usually tourist-related stuff. And you have to pay. Not a lot, but something. Anyway, the falls are spectacular from that side, too, and touristy or not, it's really fun to make the trip and cross the bridge over the falls and look down the canyon and if you are feeling up to it, go down the steps to the bottom of the falls. I haven't done that.

But going through Teocelo is better, and not just because it's free.

We started late in the afternoon -- getting towards five or so. We took the sharp turn at the sign in the road at the near end of Teocelo. The road forked and it seemed clear we should take the paved branch. But after awhile, it just disappeared into nothing. Time to ask how to get where we wanted to go. We should have, it turns out, taken the dirt road at the fork. Didn't look promising. We were told we had to go through a little town we'd never heard of called Santa Rosa. We passed a small, grim collection of shanty-type housing clinging to the steep side of a hill and then entered a dense forest of coffee and banana. A young woman dressed as if for work in a shop surprisingly came walking in a business-like way towards us as if she were walking down the sidewalk, not through the woods. Could there be a town up ahead? I'll save you the nail-biting suspense. Soon enough, we came to Santa Rosa. It isn't exactly a a pretty town, but it is a nice, compact, real town. I suspect it was better off at one point. It has an air of being from a diffeent time. But itis busy with people: kids playing, men talking, stores open and bustly, and it still produced coffee.

Here are some pictures of Santa Rosa.

We drove through town and pulled up at the far end near the little church to ask how to get to the falls. The men thought we were lost -- what with Jim the Güero and our Texas plates, this happens often. They wanted to direct us back through Teocelo, back down and up the gorge to the main Coátepec-Xico road so we could go the tourist way. "But can't get we get tothe falls this way," I insisted. "Yes, one man said, but the road is in terrible condition from all the rain and it would take at least an hour and a half. Why not go back? It's really easier." But I pressed, "Isn't there a mirador?" Ah! Enlightenment. He was clearly skeptical this old lady could hike up to it, but he showed us the way.

Santa Rosa hopes to develop its side of the falls as a bit of a tourist attraction, too, though the hike part is unlikely to draw the out-of-shape. (In spite of his glance and comment, I am in better shape than I've been in for years, at least for hiking.) We followed a narrow, zig-zag concrete path up through the coffee and bananas. This picture shows its start.

And here is what you find at the top.(All of the rest of the pictures, by the way, are courtesy of Jim.)

This view looks down and across the falls. Those of you who've been to the other side should recognize it.

It turns out you can walk down the side of the escarpment and meet up with the path that leaves from the other side. This is a spectacular hike, but unfortunately it was getting too dark for many pictures. However, here is one taken about half-way down.

In this photo, you are looking down from a bridge at the river narrowed, then swirling into the falls, and then finally tumbling down. Tricky to figure out.

A beautiful flower:

Some leafcutter ants (everything is from this same hike, by the way) (and more on leaf cutter ants and other ants in later posts.)

And finally, back at the top, we see the other side of the mountain from the one visible from our house.

and on into Coátepec

Today, class, the subject addresses the Saturday Market and downtown Coátepec. Coátepec is maybe four miles north of us on the way to Xalapa. It is a colonial town and was just granted the "honor" of designating itself a "Magical Pueblo." This opens up tourist funds from the Federal government, a pretty good thing. But Coátepec is hardly a tourist destination a la Cancún or Branson, MO. It is a place where people live and work at a number of things, especially coffee production. It is definitely a very pretty town with all kinds of old colonial buildings and streets which now can be better rehabbed.

We go to Coátepec fairly often. We shop at the main Mercado for all kinds of fresh produce, chicken, tortillas, piñatas, etc. We can also by clothing, radios, oilcloth, plants, bells and a host of other stuff. I guess outside of the shops here in Ursulo Galván, it is where we get most of our stuff. I am going to go get stuff for a new creche there in the next couple of days.

On Saturdays, however, there is the Saturday Market. This is in the courtyard of the Coátepec Cultural Center. This is how it looks from the street:

At this market, local producers sell organic fruits and veggies, jams, honey, cheese and butter and yoghurt and meat as well as really heavy and delicious breads, whole wheat cookies that taste great but go down like steel wool, crafty stuff, some delicious home-made liquors, etc.

When there is some sort of event in the Casa de Cultura, the Saturday Market is held in the courtyard of the Government Palace across the park. Here is a picture of the government palace which lies at the other end of the park from the main church of Coátepec. The church is across the street from the Casa de Cultura, to give you some idea of the lay of the land.

This is the main church. The church and the Palacio del Gobierno have recently been painted on the outside and look very handsome.

The lion sits peacefully outside the church and frequently finds himself covered with children.

The park itself is usually full of people, especially afternoons and evenings. These pictures were taken fairly early in the morning when vendors were just getting set up.
Shoe shine stands.

Bouquets of balloons -- two of many.

This two-story gazebo in the center of the park has a place for bands upstairs and an outdoor cafe downstairs.

Now, let's go back to the Palacio del Gobierno to see it set up for the Saturday Market. It is not as pretty in the Palacio's courtyard and often the market is slower to get started since you don't know it's going to be there till you go to the Casa de Cultura first. Hopefully, a friendly policeman or other will know where it went and will direct you.

Mother and daughter, dueñas of Flor de Mayo, a panaderia down the street, also sell their wares at the Saturday Market. There is also a son and a father. The father is from Spain, but I don't know if mother and daughter are. The bread is, as an old boss of mine used to say, to die for. The apple strudels are wonderful, the muffins are like balls of lead. I don't know how people who can make some stuff so well can do so badly with the muffins. Anyway, they used to sell out of the kitchen which is outside and in back of hte store: a large whitewashed room with two huge wood-stoked ovens. Now they have a small store in front where they sell pots of herbs, a delicious mole and of all things where they also make duplicate keys for you.

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This is Paco, here with his daughter. He sells stuff from a number of small organic producers: dairy products, meat and chicken, thick corn tortillas, mushrooms, and gelatinas.

This is the tiny, adorable, outgoing and charming woman who sells pan dulces and galletas which are made from whole grain and which are good for scouring out your insides, but which also taste fabulous. She would like to get married to someone who would want to live with her in the country and who would respect her business acumen. If you're interested, let me know!