From Xico

Soldiers and Poets

An English professor, Elizabeth D. Samet, writes in today’s Sunday Times Magazine about teaching poetry to West Point Cadets. Among the poems are Shakespeare's sonnets 30 and 73, wisps of which probably drift around the recesses of most of our minds from high school or college.

Download shakespeares_sonnets_30_and_73.doc

They also read poems of war by people such as Thomas Hardy and Donald Hall and the Chinese poet Li Po.

Download hardy_hall_poems.doc

The students, as Samet shows us, take these poems to heart, responding with openness and depth. They will be military leaders I suspect with insight as well as courage.

A Book Fair

These PCs didn't evoke life, color, feelings for me. Outside my window life throbs and swooshes and streaks and tumbles and screeches and bellows and hums and sings. Wood smoke carries roasting meat smells, sometimes the river sends up the scent of its human contents. On the other hand, when I look at my laptop, I am reminded of office cubbies and water coolers and deadlines and drab colors and bland people acting important. Well, they are I guess, but the language of the modern world of commerce and government and aid organizations is stripped not to basics, but to beige and gray and put on paper without curves or flourishes or anything that might give a hint of real life.

But having my hard disk crash and take everything with it has been what shall I say, a learning experience. Kind of like a miniature version of having my house burn down. Everything I would try to grab from my burning house: letters, poems, photos, bits of thought, is gone. I am sad.

Yes, I did backup stuff, save some of it, but I saved the oficially important things, not the really important things. I have learned.

I still have the last 173 pictures I took. I hadn't downloaded them at the time of the crash. One of the events recorded is the Universidad Verucruzana annual feria del libro universitario. All kinds of books get to be called university books, so it's a lot of fun to go to. This year as last it was held in the Museo de Transporte, a stark aluminum and glass structure clearly meant to look like something that might get you somewhere Here is a photo down one of the main halls off the entry:

And in the feria decorators played to the strengths of Airport Basic:

In the booths lined up so austerely were some surprises. Here you see the Embassy of Argentina has wares on display. If you look carefully, you can see that its picture was taken through a booth that advertised the world's smallest books.

Across from the Argentine display was a little booth sponsored by the Cuban Embassy. Che Guevara smiled gorgeously out of movie star posters and there were the The Revolution is a Wonderful Thing books, but there was poetry and best of all there were all kinds of music CDs. I hope we get back to buy some. Scattered on a small felt-covered counter were some really great schlocky souvenirs a la Miami 1955, key chains and the like. I thought of buying some and sending them as Christmas presents, but then I thought if customs found them I might get our kids, the gift recipients, onto strange lists of undesirable people. So I thought maybe, just bring a couple with me next time I went home. But no....I left them.

There were thousands and thousands of books and I managed to get away with only buying three! I was so impressed with myself. But then we have some good bookstores here, so it's just easy virtue.

And to officially open the bookfair an excellent and very stylish Latin jazz combo:

Wonderful!

More horrors from our government

I tried to attach the permalink for the article below here, but I can't seem to get it to function. Possibly a glitch in my old computer here. But you don't really need to read more than this little blurb to be aware yet again of the utter meanness of our government. It has to be stopped. We can't wait eighteen months. What on earth do Pelosi and Reid think they are doing?

Washington
U.S. Rule Limits Emergency Care for Immigrants
By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: September 22, 2007
The federal government has told New York State that chemotherapy, which had been covered for illegal immigrants under a Medicaid provision, does not qualify for coverage.

Computer crash update -- and bridge update, too

Thank you all for your comments, observations and advice on and off the blog on computers. I have ordered a Dell Inspiron 1520 online, but here in Mexico. It seems it won't be much more (if at all) expensive than getting it in the US becasue it has a 2000 peso discount at the moment and because it is configured slightly differently so I don't have to pay for certain features included in the US. We've had Dells in the past and as I said, I am now using an eight year old Dell Inspiron and have been generally happy with them. Service seemed to decline at one point, but I think it has improved per some of your reports. I did look at HPs at Costco, including a recommended version, and wasn't terribly excited. Well, I don't exactly get excited about laptops any more in any case, but they just didn't have any zing, and the keyboard wasn't great. But thanks, John, anyway, for mentioning your HP of six weeks' age.

The bridge is in a state that suggests it may be about to be repaired: there's a big backhoe and gravel and ropes and cables and stuff spread around. Seems, however, that this means repair and not replacement with a wider bridge. But who knows? Meanwhile from our point of view, the detour is definitely adequate and hasn't hampered us. I think bigger and bigger vehicles are edging along the slim, very basic one lane bridge on the detour so we're all praying (I'm not religious but it seems important here) that it holds up. I have pictures, but this old lady of a PC is a bit awkward for using to put on the blog.

Again, thanks all! More blog posts with pictures soon if I get back a functioning Acer, later if I have to wait for the Dell. I sure hope its the former because this machine won't do it for indexing and I have one coming at the end of the week. I can't quite see Jim happy with me hogging his 10 hours or whatever a day.

computer advice sought following groan hard drive crash

i'm writing this post on my maybe eight-year-old Dell inspiron laptop. as you can see, the left hand shift key doesn't work. also, if i barely graze the 44444 key, it repeats. plus very quickly for mysterious reasons i go to 100% on CPU usage and have to reboot to get it down. however, it more or less works. Which is a good thing.

the hard drive on my Acer crashed and has to be replaced. here are some things i've discovered as a result:

-- that my warrantee will cover the cost of the new hard drive but the new hard drive can't be warranteed as it is for a mexican machine and is being put in an American machine.

-- that while it is much cheaper to buy computers in the us and bring them here, you wreck your warrantee once you have mexican stuff put in an american machine, or so they tell me.

--that Acers have bad repair records. There's an Acer listed on one of the top whatever laptop lists currently on pc world.

since i use my computer to work for money, i need a reliable one, keeping the Acer for back-up. So i am seeking advice.

my son recommends macs, but i would have to buy and install windows and its enabling program to run the software i use on a mac so im not at this point convinced any advantages of mac would outweigh the extra cost, etc.

however, i would like to know if any of you have particular recommendations. i am inclining towards either an hp or a gateway. it has to be a laptop, and not the most expensive version.

i would also like to know what you have found with windows vista and if you have found there are truly advantages of one version over another. im not a gamer but i do like to watch movies, etc.

i don't want to give up ease of use, durability, etc. for price but don't want to spend a mint, either.

any input would be most welcome.

Buenas Noticias on Bridge Story and a Bit about the Border Fence

Jim and I lived in San Antonio, Texas for almost eight and a half years. Moving to Mexico didn't have anything to do with not liking South Central Texas, because we both were very happy there. This is sometimes hard for east and west coastal types to understand, and I suspect that no matter what we would show them to dispel their beliefs about Texas, in no small part colored by the fact that it's where GWB comes from, we wouldn't succeed in overcoming them. I wasn't nuts about the suburbanness of our neighborhood which was nonetheless within city limits and the endless, cancerous growth around north and west San Antonio of giant box-store strip malls and freeways and McMansion-type gated communities and ticky tacky subdivisions. This was enough to make me want to move where I didn't have to see them, but that didn't mean leaving Texas was necessary. If Mexico weren't such a draw as a perhaps last adventure for two aging former Peace Corps Volunteers and if it weren't so damned hot for so long where we lived, I think we would have happily settled in a smaller town outside of San Antonio or on the West Side of the city itself and watched the rest of our lives spin out right there.

All of which leads me to point you to an article in this current issue of The Texas Observer, one of my all-time favorite magazines. Called Habitat for Inanity it has to do with The Valley's response to the insanity of building a wall to keep out illegal immigrantsem. It does South Texans proud and will give you a glimpse of the fact that many Texans don't fit stereotypes. I'd like to add that hostility to the federal government, a former Conservative trademark, sure doesn't make you right wing here and in this case! (The Valley refers to the lower Rio Grande Valley. It isn't much of a valley if you come from places with meaningful hills, but that's what it's called.)

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And now a news update on the Broken Bridge story.

People around here are resourceful. First of all, they've developed a nice two-way system which wends its way through the Colonia above Las Puentas making the journey at the most ten minutes longer than it was the old way. They did this by filling in some holes with gravel and by changing the shape of the exit from the road into Las Puentas so it isn't so sharp. You can see the original version of it on the first post on the fallen bridge.

However, buses still can't go this way and neither can trucks larger than large pick-up types. So they are also fixing the road that bypasses bridges altogether and goes into Coátepec. This is the road Jim and I tried to come home on and found had turned into swamp and stream. Now this isn't turning into some four-lane highway. Basically, if I'm not mistaken, it means a large Cat is coming through and evening it out and widening it here and there. Here is a picture of a stretch of road the Cat's been through:

If this isn't the best photo you've ever seen, it's because it's a very gray, rainy day and because, even more important, I was being dragged around by the three dogs whom I had decided needed a walk very badly due to their um exuberant behavior, something they are very good at when they've been confined too long in the house.

ANYWAY, as you can see, the improvements to the road from Ursulo Galván to Coátepec won't have much to do with reducing mud and holes. But it'll work.

Here are some more photos from this walk, not good ones, but I hope interesting.

This is a wall next to a not-rich house, as you can see. What appeals to me here and what is very common is to turn all kinds of containers into planters and hang them on walls everywhere. If you look carefully, you can even see a horizontal soda bottle. The rain has hammered some of the flowers around pretty badly, but they will perk up when it dries up a bit.

Ursulo Galván now has its very own brand-new farmacía. I haven't been inside, but it is very pretty on the outside and seems to sell all kinds of knick-knacks as well as medicine.

This is the AA meeting just up the street from us. It is called The Path of Light. It's crooked and the sign is cut off because the dogs saw some other dogs and got excited at just the wrong moment.

The four of us got home in one piece, more or less. Then they took naps like good dogs.

Signs

Let's, see this must be Day 6 of the two months we are told it will take to fix The Bridge. Work is going on to improve the alternate route. It will still have a single lane bridge, but then that's pretty much what the broken bridge was. Hopefully a wider and smoother road on the detour will improve speed, though it won't improve access for trucks and buses. While they work on it, we find ourselves with a detour on the detour. Gossip is swirling: Did Governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán offer to have the military install a temporary two lane military-style bridge? Did the Xico city government tell the state government it didn't want the military to put up a temporary bridge even though it would prevent who knows how much money from being lost? Is the city government right that the state government would abandon Xico and leave it with a really ugly army bridge forever if it were permitted to install it? I don't know about all this stuff. I know Xico would like a proper two-lane bridge to replace the crumbly only one-and-maybe-a-half-if-we're-generous-lane bridge, and I sure hope we get it. Should any of this developing story as they say on CNN and Fox provide exciting reading, I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, yesterday it took almost two hours to get into La Orduña for my Tai Chi class. People have been really patient. Sometimes drivers can act like they come from the East Coast when there's a tie-up, honking and yelling with the best of them, but on line to cross yesterday, all was peaceful, if a little exasperated. It seemed clearly a good idea to get some chores done and stock up on stuff so I picked up two outdated New Yorkers at the Post Office and bought some good coffee beans. I went without much optimism to the supposed bread store that makes the best bread possibly between here and St. Louis (if the St. Louis Bread Company is still in operation.) Without optimism because this store has eccentric hours, to say the least, and only has reliable hours as a vendor at the Saturday Market which I hadn't gone to because of the bridge closing. So I was surprised and happy to find that the bread people actually had their store sort of open, meaning there was a hurriedlly hand-printed sign on the door saying if you want bread, please ring the bell. So I rang the bell and in the midst of a lot of tiny dog barking, the dueña came and took me out back to the baking area which is in a shed. She wasn't cooking this day but had some leftover from yesterday. She gave them to me at day-old bread prices and put some pastries in with the order gratis. She also had some bags of granola that Ruth, the workaholic baker who goes herself to get organic flour in Puebla had given her to sell. I am missing my mango yoghurt and the goat cheese and the butter from Paco.

I didn't get a photo of the baker's hand-made sign, but here are some signs in our neighborhood.

More or less from left to right and top to bottom:

This sign advertises ice cream for sale plus hair cuts, washing and styling. And the next is the house the sign is on. This is down the street from us.

We have several AA meetings in our neighborhood. This one is called more or less "Dreams made real," or "hope made reality."

There are lots of round billboards -- canvas tied to circular metal frames. This one advertises a new subdivision at an old hacienda nearby.

"Protección Civil" is the State agency of I guess what we would emergency services or something. I like that the logo is a heart.

And a bumper sticker on the back of a large SUV waiting to cross the bridge on the detour. This one says NO to nuclear testing and is sponsored as you can see by Greenpeace.

The last two are painted on the wall going down the main street to the broken bridge. They are completely hand-painted: no stencils, nothing. They are ads for upcoming performances by musical groups. This is the standard way of putting out the word.

The air was chilly this morning, and dawn gave way to a perfectly blue, cloudless sky.

Detour

Now that we can't take our regular route because the bridge broke (see yesterday's post), we have to take this alternate route. Here are some pictures we took while walking on the road.

We took the stairway from the main road to the alternate route. This stairway is for pedestrians. Cars have to start several kilometers further back towards Coátepec to get on the alternate route. This shot looks back towards the main road where buses were turning to go ba k to Coátepec. As I mentioned yesterday, they've worked out a system so that buses which used to go through now stop on the Coátepec side of the bridge and discharge their passengers who walk down to the bridge, cross it and walk up the other side to get the buses going to Xico, Teocelo, etc.

This house looks pretty ordinary on the front side.

But it's pretty fancy in back. It has a glassed-in multistory overhang looking out to swimming pool, tennis curts, manicured lawn, etc.

The gorgeous orange blossoms on this tree are actually fungi that appear during the rainy season.

Pickups wending their way along the road.

Lots of trucks have names. Boing isn't a common one. More often it's something like "Regalo de Dios", gift from God.

Here is the very, very small bridge that we now have to cross. As you can see, it is not designed for buses and trucks.

A coffee processing plant on our side of the little tiny bridge. The road from here on to our Colonia has blacktop, though as it gets closer to the Colonia, it is badly damaged. We hope that maybe this current onslaught of traffic will lead to some repairs.

How our side of the road normally looked before the bridge collapse meant it became the main route to Xico and beyond.

It's raining all the time unfortunately

Hurricane Dean came and went, but Tropical Depression 17 (or whatever its number is) came and stayed, and so did the rain. Today it is raining yet again, whether from Tropical Depression 17 or from general unsettledness or another burgeoning storm, I'm not sure. Down at lower altitudes, difficulties are piling up especially from flooding. Jim left late last night for Mexico City and then the Bay Area to visit his kids, and it is a good thing he didn't go via Veracruz because of washed-out roads slowing the trip markedly. Flooding made it impossible a little further north to go from Tuxpan to Poza Rica on main roads.

And here in our corner of Veracruz, a big hunk of the primary bridge which connects us to Coátepec, Xalapa and much of Mexico fell into the river below. THis bridge is critical for something like 75000 people. We learned of the collapse shortly after it happened. We were on our way home Wednesday night from a birthday party in Coátepec, when we were stopped at the turn onto the main Coátepec-Xico highway. To our left, a pile of cars and buses, to our right, well, nothing but darkness. The policeman told us we could go ahead if we wanted, but we'd just have to come back: the bridge was gone. Which was quite shocking, given the bridge's importance. I mean, it is hard to imagine that this bridge wouldn't be taken particularly good care of since it is a lifeline. It hardly looks like anything important: it's a one lane bridge and lines of traffic have to wait for the other side to clear. People have done this patiently for years and years.

Jim and I decided to head in the direction of home instead of staying overnight in Coátepec. There are two alternate routes, one is comprised of a network of totally unkempt barely visible one-lane dirt roads which, in good weather takes an hour to make a journey of ten minutes on the main road, the other, also mainly a one-lane road is much closer. It involves crossing the narrowest imaginable one lane bridge, but it is quite fine for our Toyota Rav 4 and other regular-size cars and small trucks if there's no traffic. Not buses, though, or trucks of any heft.

Very quickly we found that this second, better alternative was blocked. In fact, traffic was piled up long before we got to it. Being intrepid (or foolish), we decided to try for the first one. We turned back and went the short distance to the entrance. And then we drove for ever along roads that had turned into swamps until we finally could go no further -- and at a place where the trees cleared and we could see the lights of San Marcos, we had to turn around. We tried a couple of other branches, but they were even more impassable. Not even mud, they had become free-flowing streams in places.

So we joined the line of unmoving traffic, both of us stubborn and determined to spend the night at home. Buses were discharging their passengers behind us, and hundreds and hundreds of people trooped past us to walk home over the footbridge which, since it is separate from the car bridge, is still open. We considered this but couldn't figure out where to leave the car. Jim did reconnaissance and came back maybe twenty minutes later and said the alternate route was still closed.

But then we realized buses were backing in the left hand lane and that the cars in front of us were actually moving. The alternate route had opened! The buses apparently had blocked the tiny bridge by driving the mile to it and then discovering they couldn't make it across. All those buses had to back up slowly, slowly, to the main road before anyone could pass. Slowly, slowly we made it home. And now we're kind of stuck ... not really stuck, but we have to think about whether we really need to go to Coátepec. There is a wait at the tiny bridge on the alternate route of up to an hour in either direction while one stream of cars lets another pass since the road to the main highway is not only just one lane, but it is a dirt road, and muddy and slick, washerboard in places, large rocks sticking up in others, and holes everywhere.. Last night we waited almost an hour on the way to the Xalapa bus station.

Yesterday morning we walked to San Marcos to see the bridge. Here are some pictures.
This is sort of a close-up of the broken place.

This is looking across the bridge from the San Marcos (our) side.

This is from the Las PUentas side looking towards San Marcos. The bridge, incidentally, is the border between Las Puentas which is in el Municipio de Coátepec and San Marcos which is in el Municipio de Xico. Colonia Ursulo Galvan where we live is west and north a little less than a mile from this bridge.

This is looking downstream from the bridge.

This is looking upstream. As you can see, the river is still high.

The bridge was built in 1832 and is considered historic by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia. Obviously, it was not originally intended for cars. Structural weaknesses have been obvious for awhile, but it was the very heavy and enduring rains that did it in the night before last.

Yesterday the governor of Veracruz visited and vowed to replace it with a proper two-lane bridge and to improve the road in general. Meanwhile we have been told it will take one to two months to make anything crossable there. Obviously this is going to cause all kinds of problems for the people on our side: not just getting to work and back, but transporting goods to the thousands of people who live where we do and further.