From Xico

A Melancholy Trip to Barranca Grande

 

Sometimes on holidays or special days, often, actually, Jim and I go on excursions instead of going out to eat or buying each other gifts.  We were, this Valentine's Day, in need of an excursion. They've become altogether too few and far between.   So we got into the RAV 4 which is now seventeen years old and headed out with three of the dogs:Jocko the Afghano, Happy, the Mexican Brown Dog and Little Guy the salsiccia.  We didn't quite know where we were headed at first, but by the time we got to the Crucero, the crossroads of the highway between Coatepec and Xico and the road that goes from our Colonia in one direction toTeocelo in the other we had settled on Barranca Grande which is down an escarpment about halfway between Teocelo and Cozautlan.  Our whole area is lush with plant life pouring down steep slopes into narrow valleys and along rivers. Small (for the most part) towns climb hillsides, hug escarpments, roll over hillsides and nestle in basins.  

This trip we followed the road to from Teocelo to Cosautlán to the Barranca Grande turn-off.  The people of the area demonstrated to have it properly paved, but it still is only partly completed with sectionns (smallish) being fine, others still filled with deep potholes and still others in a rough state of incompletion so the trip which is about eighteen miles from our house takes over an hour.

 

On the map below, you can see our colonia as a weird red squiqqle above San Marcos de León.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The road from Teocelo (A) to Cosautlan (B) as you can see is extremely (to put it mildly) twisting.  

The road to Barranca Grande splits off probably half way from Teocelo to Cosautlan.  It hugs the side of a precipice and is marked with sharper, steeper turns than the road it leaves.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the left, a view across the barranca from the top of the road next to the bus stop.  On the right,  capilla which stands at a sharp curve's bend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a cross on a rock on another curve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

El Río Pescados which flows through Barranca Grande seen on the right at a bit of a distance.  This is a view of the river from the road down the escarpment.

On 9 September 2008 heavy rains caused a devastating rock and mud slide that severely damaged a large part of Barranca Grande in the state of Veracruz.  Two people, including a three year old child, were killed and three were wounded. Below you can see the church, now abandoned and a school damaged by rocks and also abandoned. Five and a half years later, the town is still desolate since the government's aid entailed relocating the inhabitants to a nearby location they say is not susceptible to slides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This house on the left is literally the only bright spot we saw.  Most of the houses are small and unpainted

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what's left of the village's health services.  It's a sign urging men to use condoms not just to prevent unwanted pregnancies but to protect women's health. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 You can just about see Jim on the other side of this foot bridge which crosses the river at the north end of the town.  It connects with a trail in one direction and a pantheon or cemetery in another.  After Jim explored  a bit, we drove a bit further along the road which ended a bit further on the river and turned back.  On our way back we came across a large crowd of people coming over the bridge following a celebration in the pantheon.  A pickup and a station wagon were waiting to take some of them home.  They were going to Barranca Nueva, the place higher up the escarpment where the government had resettled some of the victims of the landslide.

The government wanted to relocate everyone to Barranca Nueva in the community of Xixitla.  It transferred 732 people, providing 203 houses for them.  149 people remained in Barranca Grande in 42 homes.  There are currently no services in Barranca Grande and the town no longer exists in the minds and maps of officialdom.  

The houses provided in Barranca Nueva are made of pressed cardboard, and indeed this type of construction has been used elsewhere with some success.  But here people have not been happy. The cardboard gets mushy and soft in the often humid weather. Many of the  people have worked with brick and mortar and are reconstructing their houses out of this sturdier material.  In addition, large families were squeezed into tiny rooms.  Fifteen of the relocated families ironically and unfortunately find themselves in possible danger from slides from a nearby quarry.  

I don't know the status of the promised school, health clinic and Opportunidades (Progreso)buildings, but as of 2012 they didn't exist. There were some mobile classrooms.

The reason the people of Barranca Grande were encouraged to resettle seems at least as much because the previous governor contracted with the giant Brazilian dam-building company Odebrecht to build dams for electricity to be sold away from the area, including one which would flood Barranca Grande out of existence.  One of the dams was to be in Jalcomulco, but as of today, the protests there led to it (hopefully) being cancelled with the company having to restore the areas it had damaged.  This whole project is a probably destructive tangle which I may write about in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More miniscule adventures

A couple of days ago we did NOT have a great deal of fun driving around Xalapa.  Xalapa has a LOT of traffic and it is often bumper-to-bumper on narrow streets which don't always go in straight lines, especially at certain hours.  Some of the hours include from 2 to 4 in the afternoon.  This is the still-frequently-taken lunchtime when I think people do their errands (Workers work at least eight hours a day, sometimes more. Often I don't mind the traffic because it gives me a chance to see the huge variety of tiendas and workshops that line the way. Anyway, we went in to try to buy a generic version of a medication I take and to go to Costco to see about hearing aids.  Costco is probably one of the best places to buy hearing aids.

So ANYWAY, of course we hit the 2-4 traffic, and it was cold and rainy and dreary.  On sunny days, Xalapa looks bright and busy and colorful.  This day, though, the sky was a dirty gray which seemed to drip onto everything and everyone.   

About medications here in our corner of Mexico:  There are lots of generics available and reputable places tend to have good generics, but some people (like me) may not respond well to generics available here so they end up paying non-generic prices.  Our wonderful doctor had found (he and we thought) a generic put out by the very company that makes the non-generic drug.  Unfortunately, according to the Pfizer salesman it required a prescription although the brand-name doesn´t and other generics don´t.  (Here a little explanation:  most drugs here don't require prescriptions.  The ones that always do are antibiotics, benzodiazapines like Xanax, and opioid pain medications like oxycodin. Antibiotics and narcotics, in other words.  There may be other classifications, but I haven't come across them.)  So anyway we went to one end of town to get the prescription which was limited to only twenty tabs for some reason, and then drove to the other end to find the pharmacy.  Need I tell you, they said they didn´t have it at either of the two stores.  These were discount pharmacies, ones who specialize in generics, with a long counter and shelves piled high with boxes of medicine.  Here most medications are packaged one pill to a bubble on a card of maybe ten, not in bottles.  Even prescription meds come this way so you often have to buy a bit more or a bit less than you want.  So we drove (sort of) a right angle to get to Costco.where I had to make an appointment for the hearing aid evaluation.  Groan.  I went to Xalapa with my friend Diane a couple of weeks ago by bus.  It is much, much pleasanter to go by bus, and we would have if we hadn't had to lurch such large distances in a relatively short time in the cold and rain. 

I now have the hearing aids.  They are the Kirkland brand and they are excellent.  The young technician was proficient and friendly and we got 19.22 on the dollar which was good for us but bad for Mexico (I think, but am not sure.)  The first shock I had happened when she opened the door to the littl soundproof room where hearing aid stuff is done.  With a whoosh, I was greeted by all kinds of sounds I guess I haven't heard in years.  Costco is NOISY!  Anyway, if you folks are finding yourself cupping your hand behind your ear to hear, leaning forward, maybe enjoying how soft everything sounds, maybe, just maybe a hearing aid evaluation at Costco would help.  Hearing aids have come a long way.

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The day before yesterday we took our dogs for a walk and went a bit further. It was not raining or misting, but it was chilly.  We usually let the two smaller dogs run free, which they do with glee.  Little Guy, the dachsund, can run as fast as Happy and as she is the alpha dog, she insists on being first. She is very cute as dachsunds are.  She is tiny, with floppy ears and limpid, doe-like eyes. She has learned to make wheedling sounds, soft beseeching sounds, coy sounds even. Often we are at her mercy. 

BUT in her own world which she enters as soon as she is off the leash, she is a hunter. In response to some smells she´ll roll in phantom remains, in response to others, she´ll dig frantically.  In response to fowl and other low-resting birds, she´ll catch them.  She takes off so fast she can´t be caught.  She doesn't  even acknowledge that anyone is shrieking at her to STOP while pounding after her.  And it seems she inevitably catches her prey.  We have been putting her on the leash long before we see a chicken, but the other day, she caught one yet again.  It was dead before she even turned around with it hanging limply from her mouth.  

Unfortunately, this chicken turned out to belong to friends of ours who refused to take any payment.  There I was, holding it by its legs, there my friend was saying, no, no, you don't have to pay while she looked mournfully at the bird.  Another friend made the suggestion that we buy her another live one.  I think we're going to try to do it.

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Last post I wrote about the miraculous healing of the dent in our front fender. So then we went to meet our ahijado to take the car to the man who was going to paint it.  We only remembered half the message: to meet him.  We didn´t remember the other half: to meet him at the painter's workshop.  So we went to his house.  I´m glad we did, though, because in spite of feeling a bit foolish when Doña J asked why we were there, we got to see the baby sheep Don A had bought.  The guy who works for Don A was grazing them on a rope outside their chicken pen and I have a picture for you.

I think the big one may be the mama.   But none of them are big.  I  have to confess I thought they were goats at first.  You'd think I'd know what goats looked like by now!

Not Just about Jews in Mexico. Also about Samuel von Basch, the Emperor Maximilian, Mexico during Maximilian's Short-Lived Empire, Jews in Austria in the Nineteenth Century, etc. etc.

I have this pattern I now recognize to my chagrin.  A topic grabs my attention, preferably one about Mexico, even better one about our area, and I mean just to read a bit about it, talk to a few people about it, maybe look around and look at pictures and tell you about it.  But in the end I follow threads -- glittering threads which I can't let go of and which lead me to this nexus and that, to that thread and yet another.  And I spend hours and hours on these journeys, and the information from them> only a bit of it makes it into blog posts.

I guess I have to say "so be it." Or maybe "So what."  

The last topic, and the one at least theoretically lighting my way, was/is Jews in Mexico, particularly the Yiddish poet Yitzhkok (Isaac) Berliner whom I discovered in an article in Tablet Magazine.  I wrote several posts about him.  Richard Grabman picked up on him and wrote a good, concise biography.  I'm not so good at concise.  Anyway, through Berliner I discovered the Diario Judio de México (who knew?) which had a series of portraits of Jews who were either Mexican, immigrants to Mexico, or involved in some significant way in the life of Mexico as residents, at least for awhile. I read a number of the portraits, and for some reason I don't understand, fixed on Samuel von Basch, Maximilian's personal physician in 1866 and 1867, the year in which he was executed.  

But to understand this sliver of time, I found I wanted to know how von Basch's Jewish family got to Austria, how he became a doctor, what he was like.  Vienna is the city which embraced him, medicine is the field in which he excelled.  And of course how did he get to Mexico? First to Puebla where he was a physician to the French troops billeted there, and then to emerge to become not only the personal physician but a close confidante of Emperor Maximilian first in Mexico City (with an important short side trip to Cuernavaca) and finally in Querétero where the Emperor met his end?  

While I suspect his time in Mexico was the most intense of his life, von Basch returned to Austria and became an extraordinary physician and researcher considered now the father of the blood pressure measurer (sphygmomanometer is its proper name) and of circulatory system medicine.  Doing these things is what he spent most of his life at.

I am, of course most captivated by the Mexican period.  I hope I can put down my reading long enough to share some stuff with you before I find myself rushing down another path.

Leaving Quito, Ecuador

We have just returned home from a week's very interesting vacation in and around Quito, Ecuador. This trip was our first vacation together in many years.  Last time we traveled together we went to Boston to see an eye specialist because of Jim's glaucoma.  THAT was definitely not a vacation.  

On our trip home, we we found heightened bag checking in both Quito and Mexico City.  In Quito, Jim was called downstairs somewhere to have his bag searched while we were waiting at the gate.  (Actually, it turned out to be my bag, but no matter)  According to Jim, the inspectors went through the giant bag of the woman ahead of him with meticulous care.  By the time they got to Jim, it was almost flight time and they were far more cursory.  Nonetheless, he had to go through the whatever you call it that you have to walk through for security yet again.

In Mexico City, it took a very long time for the baggage to make it onto the carousel which it did in fits and starts. While we waited, we watched as inspectors, often with the assistance of the owners, unloaded luggage carts brimming with suitcases and carryons.  The  inspectors went through all this stuff with the proverbial fine-tooth comb.  One woman had packed all her belongings  into an awful lot of plastic bags. Inspectors opened each one.  I was impressed with how polite and amenable everyone was. Passengers helping with difficult knots, lifting clothes out of their piles, and so on.  I wondered how the same scene would play in New York.  But there was still more.  In Mexico's airports, you push a bright red button after your bags have gone through the X-ray machines.  If it turns on green, you are actually free to go.  If it turns red, you have to go to a customs inspector to get your stuff combed through.  I wondered if the people whose bags had already been picked apart had to face this additional obstacle.

The day before we left Quito, October 6, a newspaper headline announced that the President Rafael Correa was supporting the release from prison of a couple of thousand drug mules.  A new law now treats them "more as vulnerable people exploited by cartels" than as hardened criminals. 

Apparently this was also seen as a slap in the face of the US umm war against drugs (We're not supposed to call it a war on drugs anymore).  More important than any gesture against th US I think is that the government, which describes mules as mostly poor and uneducated, often women who are single mothers or sex workers or drug addicts, is acting compassionately.  A side note to all of this is that a number of the mules are from Spain, people who could not get jobs in the terrible climate of Spanish unemployment.

And in the interest of fairness, I would like to note that in the US, Eric Holder, departing Attorney General, also has condemned the brutality of aspects of the what shall I say, the government's effort to remove temptation from people who can't do it themselves.

Living in Mexico, it is hard to ignore drug crime-related issues, but I was completely oblivious to the presence in Ecuador of any problem.  In El Centro Histórico, police in lime green vests were quite numerous, probably so obvious in order to reassure tourists.  The warnings about crime centered on what you might expect in any dense city, namely pickpocketing and purse snatching, among other things.  One peculiar (and a bit scary) activity was spraying something in the face of potential marks so they'd pass out and the thief could take everything.  Taxi cabs had been scenes of crime, so now you can tell when you are getting a legal taxi.  It will have big black numbers on doors, special plates, and, inside, tiny cameras.  In any event, we never felt in any particular danger.

But, we did wonder if all the excessive searching, especially on the Mexican end, was due to the release of the mules. And we wondered if the US was pressuring Mexico to watch flights from South America with special attention.  The US does not walk softly; it stomps around in big boots.  And it seems to consider much of Latin America drug territory even though it may be softening its rhetoric.  A fuller description of the situation can be found here.  It is worth following the link for an understanding of President Correa's personal interest in drug crime.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Sigmund Freud

For a long time I have wondered (as have far greater minds than mine) if it is at all possible to figure out the underlying factors that drive people to hold onto seriously destructive beliefs in the face of all reason. In our black-and-white culture, we tend to paint people who don't agree with us all one color. It's hard to be subtle.  As I have watched the ripping apart of Gaza, I have seen no evidence  of the policy to spare civilians Benjamin Netanyahu claims exists. Instead, it appears that the Israel Defense Forces he commands are bent on absolute destruction.  I wonder how  Netanyahu who I am sure sees himself doing good could appear to have twisted himself into someone so  evil.  Who is this man who stirs the pot of hatred in his country so successfully? And why does he do it? Why does he feel righteous (not to say self-righteous) following his policy of enormous overkill in Gaza? Is it possible to figure out how we justify horrible actions to ourselves, all of us?  And why, with all our knowledge, haven't we come to terms with our own proclivity for violence in response to perceived attacks, for hatred of people we don't know.  Why haven't we developed a way to soften this hatred.

I happened upon a review by Vivian Gornick of a book called "Becoming Freud" by Adam Phillips.  I bought the book for my Kindle, and I will refer to it throughout this piece.  I am not a "Freudian", whatever that means, but I think he opened up ways to look at people from unexpected angles. Freud's discoveries give us an opportunity to take a different approach to Netanyahu.

In her review, Gornick says:

"It was through attention to the unconscious that he [Freud] made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it." 

Somewhere I saw an illlustration of the human psyche in which our consciousness, our supposedly sensible, aware part, was riding a giant bull or some similar animal, barely under control.  The bull was our  unconscious, unruly portion of ourselves, much bigger and stronger.

There is no definitive explanation of the conscious and the unconscious, nothing even close as far as I'm concerned.  But we tend to recognize that we have been exposed to so much, have woven so much out of what we´ve been exposed to, that we can't possibly be conscious of it all, pull it into our decision-making or our creative efforts, even when it would be useful to do so.  And if Freud is right, we don't even want to know all the unconscious stuff we harbor: it would go against who we think we are and what we want to be.  We tend, all of us, to justify our own hideous actions to ourselves and others. Very few of us happily accept ourselves as evil creatures who enjoy doing evil things.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Nathan Mileikowsky (1879-1935), Benjamin Netanyahu's grandfather, shared pretty large pieces of cultural heritage (so did my dad's parents for that matter). But they responed to their heritage in very different ways.  Netanyahu's father and grandfather became revisionist Zionists who were deeply committed to getting as much of the British Mandate of Palestine as they possibly could to turn into the country Israel.  Their efforts were bloody.  Freud's background was not so political. 

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Adam Phillips says,"The Jews of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century lived mostly in small communities as minority groups in what were often tolerant but hostile cultures.They were hemmed in by restrictions and prejudices, but were not perceived as a threat to the states in which they lived....They had access only to the resources of their tightly knit communities, and they lived, like all immigrants with, and under, a great deal of suspicion.  The continuity of their lives resided in their family traditions, which were religious in origin, their inherited ways of life in a diaspora that had become their culture....The consolations of locality were always provisional....

"....The stories of the poorer Jews in central Europe in the ineteenth century tend to be generic...due to the lack and limits of ...documentation.  (Freud's parents and grandparents would mpt jave beem omterested om tjeor ñoves tje wau [Sigmund Freud] taught us to be.  For these people, success was survival....[T]here fate was to be always potentially nomadic because they had no political or civic status, living always on sufferance in foreign states.

Orthodox judaism itself was declining in the nineteenth century "...due to the pressures of modernization.  The haskalah--the Jewish Enlightenment...--was eroding the old scholarly-rabbinical tradition in favour of a more rational, skeptical humanism, radically suspicious of dogma and traditional forms of authority and encouraging more politically active forms of assimilation."

This was a period in which "European boundaries were shifting in Europe and the status of Jews was unclear. Whether or not they were a race or a people...they were resident aliens wherever they lived...As both the enemies and inventors of Christianity the Jews were doubly disadvantaged...they were by definition a dissenting group....

Although Freud ended up with an education in Enlightenment values, there had been "Generations of politically marginalized Jews in his family, people for whom political participation was unthinkable."

Freud and other Jews of his generation believed they had found a culture in which they had "a place and a voice" in Vienna.  

Phillips goes on, " The allure of a taken for granted liberalism, however wishful it seems ...[in]hindsight...must have seemed irresistible to the Viennese Jews of Freud's generation...[which] wanted to free themselves from...a 'history of the Jewish people...long limited to a religious narrative of persecutions and martyrdoms. Esther Benbassa writes this 'story of suffering stood in for History in the proper sense of the term' as a way of preserving the fragile unity of the community in diaspora.'  

This "story of suffering" still is dominant in the lives of Jews, secular or religious, who  participate in Jewish culture.  For some (many?) it merges with the notion of Jewish specialness, of Jews as "chosen people."  Before the end of World War II, these beliefs offered, sometimes, means to survive and to maintain some integrity in their identities. Of course the genocide they suffered under Hitler gave it new life.  Today, I think, especially in light of the great social and economic changes wrought in the second half of the twentieth century,Jewish communities themselves have changed. For some Jews, the mythology of their past has become malignant.

Netanyahu, the Zionist, is one of these Jews I think.  Freud was not.  Freud's father had renounced orthodox Judaism.  He was apparently a failing wool merchant and because of this, the family moved first to Leipzig and then to Vienna, at the time a particularly vibrant and liberal city.  The family stayed there.  Many, many Jews who couldn't sustain themselves in "local shtetl communities" were migrating to eastern and central European cities.

Jews wanted their kids to gain respectability by hopefully taking up a profession, "preferably medicine or the law."  Freud was consciously drawn to Enlightenment values,  and himself said his father "allowed me to grow up in complete ignorance of eveything that concerned Judaism".  Yet Freud's endeavors seem shadowed by his family's Jewish immigrant past.

 

 

 

Related articles

Jews and the 'mad science' of psychoanalysis

Dogs and other stuff

Although the house and our lives seemed strangely muted after Jocko's death, we had started to like the idea of having only three dogs, none of whom was big.  Jocko wasn't loud or destructive.  He was loving and well-behaved, very appealing, endearing.  Throughout his life with us, he never quite seemed to be a real dog: more some kind of creature maybe from another planet or dreamed up in someone's imagination. He did learn some dog skills from our other three. He mastered the art of begging: He'd sit quietly, ears forward, eyes huge and liquid.  Irresistible.  He learned to bark when the other dogs did, his voice low and husky.  Boy, do we miss him! But we had, we thought, actually decided three was better than four. Anyway there was no substitute for Jocko.

Then last Monday morning the phone rang.

 I´m sure you've guessed.  A friend had rescued a dog who'd been wandering, lost, up and down the road to Xico.  He and his wife couldn't keep him. He was looking for someone who could, as well as trying to find out if anyone had lost this muy amable creature.  Well.  With Jim's prompting, not so subtle, either, I said we couldn't.  And I asked what kind of dog he was.  A slightly dark-haired golden retriever type, incredibly affectionate, he said.  I asked our friend to call us back to let us know if he'd had any luck.  When I hung up, Jim, much to my surprise, said well maybe we could think about it.  But we can't take him unless we meet him first and like him.  I said something inane like well, change keeps our minds working better. What's life without a little chaos?

So we brought this lovely beast home.  He's a stocky dog, heavy and strong but not particularly tall. And indeed, incredibly affectionate and loveable.  And after a couple of noisy days when Daisy and Happy loudly voiced their objections to him every time he got close to Jim and me, things seem to have settled down. I don't quite know why, but we named him Hank.  I think we should spell it Jank as this is Mexico.  H(J)ank is strictly a Spanish language dog, but he has a big vocabulary and was obviously taught well.   As you can imagine, he loves walks. Below are some pictures from today's walk.       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hank in front, Rita and Happy in back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Ole Rita Bita

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daisy jumping off a rock.  She makes us nervous when she does this.  Dachsunds are notorious for having back problems.  We hope all her exercise keeps her back strong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim and Hank in the river near the new bridge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daisy and Hank walking back to the car.

We took Hank and Daisy, too, to see the new veterinarians, husband and wife, in Xico last week, a checkúp for Hank and a parasite check for Daisy.  They are an interesting couple, from DF, spent five years studying in Spain. I guess you could say they practice integrated pet management, making use of medical treatments when necessary and supporting them with natural stuff, some of which they make themselves.  A bird cage hangs outside the office door with a sign saying that a free bird lives in it.  And guess what, it is indeed an open cage and the bird lives in it and comes and goes at will. 

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We have been having daily rain.  Rainy season isn't supposed to start till June.  It's hard to complain, though, because instead of the usual dust and heat of May, things are gloriously lush already.

Today is Mother's Day in Mexico.  My friend Doña Gloria brought me flowers and a delicious and very fattening cake for the occasion. A lovely surprise!  Graciela and Claudia came and wished me Happy Mother's Day last night.  We had just come back from our walk. We mentioned to her that the road up to Xico was packed with traffic.   Doña Gloria said people were going to the Pantheon, the Xico cemetery, to put flowers on graves of mothers who'd died.

We went to the city of Veracruz twice last week, the first time so Jim could have a cataract removed and the next day to have the results checked on. Veracruz is indeed a hot place, but it is seductive, too, with brilliantly colored flowers and strange plants.  It's dreary going into Veracruz, though, with what seem like miles and miles of dreary small stores selling car parts and junk and beauty shop supplies and so on tumbled together on barren blocks.  There are housing developments, rows of tiny attached units.  And then there are the rich who smile out of the pages of glossy society magazines and sit in the doctor's waiting room in expensive jeans and very high heels.

The setting for Jim's surgery was a blank new building in Boca del Rio, a place I can't quite figure out.  The tiny city is stark and modern, with fancy hotels and restaurants and a world trade center in the midst of unfinished streets and buildings.  It is contiguous with the city of Veracruz, sitting more or less south and east of it, and bounded on its east side by the Gulf.  An anonymous building with only a number on it housed the doctor's surgery suite.  It seems that Boca del Rio is actually the municipality of which Veracruz is a part, not the other way around.

The doctor's office is in a small cylindrical medical office building in a neighborhood of doctors and clinics and very pleasant houses.  The air is heavy and fragrant.  We found a cafe which we've been to twice.  They have, by the way, excellent coffee in Veracruz. People talk with each other in much louder voices than they do in the Greater Xico Metroplex.  Voluble.  They do inthe doctor's waiting room and the bus station and on the street, too.

Well, I'm ending this right here.  Somehow time flew. It's way past my bedtime.

A Somewhat Random Collection of Odds and Ends Including Emergency Info

First of all, if you have an emergency in the Xico-Xalapa area, you should call 066 for assistance.  They will help 24 hours a day.  The second item in the left sidebar of this blog will provide you with more emergency information.

When it rains here these days, sometimes it rains as if The Flood were coming and we should all start building our arks.  Green drips from trees and giant leaves and small ones, too.  It has been a bit hard gardening because the rain washes seeds away, but still we have an abundance of what has not been washed away.  We have cilantro and small wild tomatoes and tomatillos and beans and greens and I think giant Italian squah and very hot red peppers and bamboo which we didn't plant but which decided to come up in two beds.  We'll have to move it.

Here is a video on youtube of us driving through the rain near here.

It seems Guillermo our gardener has a relative who worked for our friend who died.  So we talked a bit about that and then I told Guillemo I discovered we, too, could be buried in the Xico Panteón and Guillermo said then we really would be from Xico, or at least OF Xico.  And then he said, but best to enjoy today and not think too much about dying.

Except a friend dying is a good and poignant reminder to me not to dwell too much in the news I can do nothing about.  So I have been stopping myself from following wandering thoughts of Syria and so forth and wrapping my spirit (so to speak) in our countryside which is munificent and filled with friends and I also downloaded Seamus Heaney's book of poetry, "North", which is available on Kindle, as are some others. Earthy and vivid and melancholy, perhaps, too. Serious, northern imagery, but not at all ponderous.  I'd heard his name, but had not read his poetry.  Actually the only poetry I've read recently is that sent by a good friend, and whenever I read what she sends, I tell myself I should read more.  

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Seamus Heaney's death is a huge loss to the world of poetry

Bus Trip to Mexico City, Second Segment -- a Little Bit of Mexican geography plus Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl

A few geographical notes.

Mexico is considered part of North America because it lies on the North American Plate, NOT for cultural reasons.  Some of Baja California also lies on the Cocos Plate and the Pacific Plate, but by far the largest portion is on the North American Plate. It is the rubbing together of these plates, as well as its related volcanic activity, which makes the country particularly earthquake-prone. 

Although Mexico City is in a valley, when we go there from our house, we go up even after we go down a bit.  We are never as low, on the whole trip, as we are at home.  Xalapa has an altitude of roughly 4000 feet, although it varies from place to place. Our house in Col. Ursulo Galván, about eleven miles more or less south from Xalapa, is at 3800+ feet.  The top of the Colonia is also about 4000 feet. Our area of Veracruz is on the eastern, down side of the Sierra Madre Oriental, on its corner with what is called the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, or the Sierra Nevada (Nevada means snowy--these mountains are or were snow-capped either all year or part of the year).  We are in the faldas, or skirts, of Cofre de Perote, to our west, which, along with Pico de Orizaba, makes the corner of the two mountain ranges.  The trees in these mountains are mostly oak and pine having, surprisingly for people expecting something more tropical. They have an appearance not unlike the mountains of the US west. to me they look somewhat Oregonian.

So the bus from Xalapa climbs through the Sierra Madre Oriental and then on to the Altiplano de Mexico, or the high plains or plateau of Mexico which extends from the southern US border to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt.  In the southern area, its altitude averages about 6600 feet above sea level.  It is quite uneven because Mexico City itself is in a valley of the altiplano (called the Valle de México) and is 7350 feet above sea level.  In the bus we go down into Mexico City from the altiplano.  The site of Mexico City was originally a lake.  The Aztecs built on an island in the lake, but the Spanish filled it in. The people of the area farmed on man-made islands in the lake. Interestingly, Tlaxcala (see previous post) was one of the regions in which people lived who came to actively oppose the Spanish during the Conquest.

Well.  I could go on, but this post is supposed to be about what we saw on our bus trip.

Anyway, after Malinchin, the next spectacular sight is of Popocatepetl(17,800 feet) and Iztaccihuatl (17,160 feet), the second and third highest mountains in Mexico after Pico de Oriaba.  You see Iztaccihuatl first on the bus trip.  It is not an active volcano.  The name means white woman because it is snow covered, and its four peaks are said to look like a reclining woman. I think it looks as much like the profile of a face as of a body, but no matter.

The picture below (stolen from Wikipedia) is pretty much how it appeared to us.

You drive a bit further before Popocatepetl appears a bit to its south.  The two are separated by the Paseo de Cortés and are linked by a Nahuatl legend of thwarted love between a princess and a warrior, Iztaccihuatl being the princess, Popo, the warrior.  Popo was not the name of the warrior, however, at least I don't think it was.  Popocatepetl means smoke-covered mountain.  In the 1990s the glaciers on Popocatepetl shrank noticeably, apparently partly because of warmer temperaturs, but also because of increasing volcanic activity.

Popocatepetl is the more famous probably because it is still an active volcano (and is easier, at least for me, to say).  In fact, it was more than normally active on the 22 of May when we went past it for a visit to Jim's opthalmologist.  I wrote about that here.  The government has a series of warning notices about the severity of volcanic activity which seems a bit like the US's warning system for terrorism danger, but where the volcano is concerned, it is more useful and accurate.  The three stages are green, normal; yellow, alert; and red, alarm.  It has been on yellow for awhile now, though since our last trip, things have quieted down and it is has been at a low yellow.

It looked pretty much like this last Wednesday when we drove past, except it also had a very, very thin stream of steam coming out to the left.

This image is from the CENAPRED website.  CENAPRED is the Centro Nacional de Prevencion de Desastres.  It has an excellent page on Popocatepetl and information on a lot of other stuff as well.

Today, after a relatively quiet few weeks, there has been an uptake in volcanic earthquake activity with a cluster of seven of about 2.4 on the Richter scale occuring this morning. I found this information on the site called Volcano Discovery  which says it may (or may not be) an indication of an uptick in activity. This as well as the CENAPRED site offer all kinds of up-to-the-minute information on volcanoes, the former world-wide, the latter Mexican.  

Back on the bus, Popo and Izti (their nicknames) fade into the horizon behind us, and soon we find ourselves slipping down the broad, curving highway to Mexico City.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mexico City Bus Trip Yet Again: First segment

If she had to take the eight or nine hour round trip bus ride to Mexico City yet again, a sane person, like Jim, would say, "The best part is when it's over."  But I continue to find it captivating.  I am stepping into another existence.  Some of the strange appeal is the sensation of being in yet not in the landscape. All the outside sounds are mute on the bus.  Instead there are the movies: usually silly comedies or cartoons or infomercials or strange documentaries. You can turn the sound over your seat off so that a blur of Spanish from a bit of distance sinks into a monotonous hum, a kind of white noise. The bus starts out on route 140 going through the clutter of Xalapa highway life, and then it seems as if the bus magically lifts itself onto the new cuota, or toll highway, an impossibly smooth ribbon of road gliding up along sweeping curves that pass through densely green evergreen forests crowding steep hillsides.  

You can mark the trip's segments by the tollbooths: there are five of them. After the first one, the land flattens and becomes distinctly dryer.  You go through true badlands, Joshua trees growing out of broken-up lava flows that have not yet turned to soil.  The trees have been badly burned on one side of the road.  Last time we passed by, their blackened arms and trunks, had twisted grotesquely, their spiky leaves sad scorched crowns topping them.  Jim thought they were all dead.  I noticed some green shoots and thought maybe a few had survived.

There isn´t always an unhappy ending. This trip, Jim and I saw that many had survived, that strong green shoots had pushed through the tops of most of the plants.

You can also see the snow-capped peak of Pico de Orizaba off to the south during this segment of the trip. Pyramid-shaped, snow-covered, it seems small.

Closer to us and a little further on,  the mountain the Spaniards named Malinche or Malintzin rises into view.  She was named after Cortés´s Mexican translator and consort who came from the current state of Tabasco which Veracruz neighbors on the north.  Indigenous people, the Tlaxcaltecs called (and still call) the mountaain Matlalcuéyet. According to a good article in Wikipedia, she is a "a goddess of rain and song."  It is located mostly in the state of Tlaxcala and a bit in the state of Puebla. Its brown and rocky mass takes a long time to pass.I think we come at it from the northeast, the road from xalapa veering southwest at the edge of Tlaxcala, or maybe a little further east.  When the rains come, the slopes will turn greener, I think.  Tlaxcala is the smallest state in Mexico and is surrounded on north, east and south by Puebla and on the West by the state of Mexico. Somewhere it is also edge by a tiny bit of Hidalgo.

The new cuota crosses Tlaxcala, bypassing to the north (I'm pretty sure) the city of Puebla that the old route traversed.  On our first trip to Mexico perhaps 26 or 27 years ago, there was very little fancy road once we left Mexico City. The bus bumped its way into the downtown Puebla bus station and then made its way on small roads, old ones, sometimes not paved, to Xalapa.  More recently, the bus bypassed downtown Puebla but went past the Puebla airport which we don't do now.  If I sound confused,it is because I am.  New cuotas are everywhere and are now linking with each other. At one place, you have to cross over the unfinished road to get on another. Thus I am not really sure of how it all fits together.

The scenery changes before Tlaxcala.  You see irrigated fields now starting to show their crops, more and more buildings, more traffic.  In Tlaxcala, the bus goes through what I think are the edges of the town of Huamantla and, later, the capital city also called Tlaxcala.  Although the smallest state, it is rich in history, both mesoamerican and post-Cortés and is a relatively prosperous state.  We had a friend who did his year of community service in Tlaxcala after finishing med school.  Much more recently, one of the physical therapists who treated me after I had injured my shoulder was from Tlaxcala. When she told me where she was from, I said, "Oh, that's the smallest state in Mexico."  It was not a tactful thing to have said, and from then on she was somewhat chilly towards me.

If you are interested in learning more about Tlaxcala, here and here are a couple of sites in English.  This is the google.com.mx site for pictures.  I'd start with it.  Now that Jim's trips west to see the ophthalmologist are less frequent, we really would like to explore this area to DF's east.

 

A hike on Cofre de Perote at around 11000 feet

Mountain climbers mostly like to get to the top of mountains, but this is hardly necessary to do in order to envelope yourself in the majestic and sometimes strange landscapes of Mexico. I myself will probably--no, certainly--will never hike to the top of Pico de Orizaba.  I have hiked to the top of Cofre de Perote where you find a tiny village of workers and a small forest of antennae.  There are any number of at-least-as-interesting things below.

Having never been to the top of Pico de Orizaba (Citlatépetl in Nahuatl), I can't swear the same is true, but I do know that trips lower down are filled with their own beauty.  Several months ago, we drove to Nuevo Potrero,about 32 miles south-southwest of where we live, on the eastern flank of the mountain to walk just a little way up to the peak five miles away.

Here is a map of the area from Coscomatepec where you leave the road for Pico showing Potrero Nuevo. Remember, you can click on it to make it bigger.  

We did not spend much time in Potrero Nuevo, but you can find some stuff about it by googling Potrero Nuevo, Vereracruz, including some nice YouTube videos. It is, I believe, the highest town in the State of Veracruz at 10,637 feet.  We parked at the edge of town near the church which is either under construction or being rehabbed and set out with our dogs.  Below are some photos from our hike.  It is arduous, not only because it is a sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy steep trail, but even more because of the altitude.

You can just see the summit through the clouds here.

The road up from Potrero Nuevo

Jim and Jocko.  Jocko's mountain heritage shows when we go hiking at high altitudes.  He loves it.

We passed a man going down with his burro dragging some wood.  This wasn´t a recreational trip for him or his beast.

Jocko posing on the trail.

The trail goes into a leafless forest.

A view across the top of Mexico, more or less.

Just some more of the trailwith mist drifting through.

Jim has some pics of the little town which I will post perhaps someday.  I am hesitant because there are about ten thousand things I mean to post.