The slightly deranged look in Christine’s eyes is most likely the fear that a firecracker would explode on our heads

It’s not proper IPA spelling, but hopefully Christine the linguistics Masters degree holder will forgive me. It’s been quite awhile since the last post, and instead of addressing things consecutively as I usually do, I’ll handle the food of the Oaxacan region first.

On New Year’s Eve, Christine and I went out from Casa Giron to see the festivities on the Zocalo, the main square in the city. We stopped to watch a fast speaking clown called “el Tonto” (the Fool) who had drawn a crowd at its edge, but of course as soon as he spotted two foreigners in the crowd, he just had to pull us into his act, and literally into the center of his act to speak in rapid fire Spanish while blowing up balloon animals for us. Christine told me later that it was mostly dick jokes regarding Mexicans and Americans, so I guess I didn’t miss out on too much. We were stuck with the balloon animals for the rest of the long night; we ended up giving them away to some begging children on the edge of the square (along with a peso or two as well). The rest of Tonto’s act was something that drew some wry amusement from the Americans in the audience – Tonto pulled two little boys and a girl out of the crowd and (apparently, according to Christine) was going to have them reenact “the classic love tragedy.” One of the boys was given a poncho, the other a sombrero, and the girl a dainty red lace umbrella. And then both of the boys were given cap guns and Christine said, “oh geez, this would never fly in the USA.” Tonto told the children exactly what to do – the girl was to deliver a passionate speech regarding “I love both of you, how could I ever choose!” and then the two boys were to circle each other menacingly, threatening each other with child-level threats (“your hat is dumb!” “you look stupid!”) and then open fire on each other with the cap guns. One boy was “killed” immediately (although he had difficulty remembering to stay dead, much to Tonto’s derision) and then the girl threw herself down at his side, shouting that it was actually he that she had loved the most. Then she grabbed the gun, shot the other boy, and then shot herself, and all three lay on the ground twitching theatrically.

“Kids, resolve your problems by shooting each other the way you see them do it in old movies!”

The crowd of children, parents, and young people in our age group just ate it up. Tonto’s off-color jokes probably helped too. Christine and I enjoyed it as much as two non-native speakers could, but of course our perspectives were colored by the fact that if any children’s clown tried this in the USA, screaming parents would be hurling themselves at him, shielding their own children’s eyes, and he’d probably be imprisoned for willful endangerment of children’s minds or some other similar charge. Continue reading this post…

We ate our way around some of Oaxaca’s plentiful taquerias and food stands. Second breakfast (after the omlettes served by Concepcion) was at Oaxaca’s number one rated restaurant, a bakery conveniently located only a couple blocks from Casa Giron. The owners were both there, two young Mexican men who spoke perfect English and made us some great sandwiches on ciabatta and focattia and served them with a mug of homemade kombucha.

Coin Candles just don’t have the same effect for me.

The large and impressive Temple of Santo Domingo was nearby, so we stopped there. In my opinion, the edifice and its insides were much more impressive than the Cathedral we had seen the day before, and it appeared to be a hangout spot for both vendors hawking goods and university students who were handing out free maps of Oaxaca to anyone who looked slightly foreign. As it was a Catholic church (and really, they all probably are in Mexico) there were several of those “pay a bit, light a candle” stations, except with a modern twist – you could drop in either 2, 5, or 10 pesos into a slot on the front of a box, and then one of about 40 electric candles on the top would light up and flicker dimly. Christine and I agreed it was a rather tacky replacement.

We were walking back down one of the main streets when I saw a sign that called out to me – tacos for 5 pesos each, or about 33 USA cents. Both of us were a bit taken aback by the thumping club music emanating from the establishment, and the emptiness of the place, but it seemed to be a dance hall that didn’t really do much business until the late hours, so we tried the cheapest tacos we’d ever seen….they were about as spicy as the “Porky” tacos in the airport, which I’m starting to realize now is probably a bad thing, but the taste was also BBQ chicken, so it was at least recognizable. At some point I tried to ask in Spanish “what bird meat is this” but Christine told me I said instead, “which airplane meat this?”

At that point, I started wondering what the taco quality gamut might run. If five pesos was the lowest, then what about ten pesos? fifteen? We were doing so much walking around the city (about seven miles by the end of the day, I estimated later on) that I was bound to be constantly hungry. After reserving our spots for a two-day overnight bike ‘n hike, we came across a little taco cart called El Flamazo which had amazing smells coming off from it. I couldn’t resist taking a seat at the cart and ordering a “plata” of five tacos for 38 pesos. What meats do you have, I asked, and the three young men running the cart told me that my choices were tasejo, tripe, and cabeza; head meat. Christine was looking at me nervously, and I knew why; it was a street cart in Mexico, which meant that the water quality was going to be suspect. Everything was cooked but the cilantro, but the smells were so wonderful I threw caution to the wind and ordered two tasejo (which is just ‘regular’ muscle meat,) two tripe (stomach/intestines) and a single head meat taco…which I guess I’m assuming is cheek meat? I suppose it could come from any part of a cow’s head that has meat on it. They came to me smothered in fried onions and cilantro, with (of course) two lime slices on the side. They were absolutely amazing and I made numerous attempts to tell the high-school age workers that in my broken, mangled Spanish.

One of Christine’s photos where I’m wildly and exuberantly gesticulating about the food

Next to us, a somewhat-off looking guy was arguing with one of the employees about how much money he should pay. It seemed that he was short 10 pesos, or about 60 cents. My meal was going to be 38, so I paid with a 50 peso bill and told the employees I would pay for the guy’s last ten, too. They refused and made the guy pay anyway, so I tossed them the 10 as a tip (the man begged the remaining two pesos off me, which I gave him, to the eye rolls of everyone else at the cart. What can I say? I was filled with delicious taco and probably would have kept giving small change to people all night if pressed). The young man reached under his cart and pulled out a t-shirt bearing the logo for El Flamazo and gave it to me, saying “for you.” I told him I would wear it proudly, and asked if they had other carts around the city, or if this one moved. I was told that there were 3 other carts, run by other brothers in the family. Now, my Spanish isn’t so good, and they might have been kidding us, but when I asked how many other brothers they had, they said “there are twelve of us, three each with a cart.” Maybe they meant “hermanos” in the metaphorical sense – aren’t we all brothers on this taco-cart of a planet? – but maybe they actually meant 12 biological brothers running delicious taco carts in Oaxaca.

Cheers to El Flamazo!

I don’t know, but I got a sweet shirt out of it, which I’ll be wearing today when we go to Monte Alban, the archeological site a few kilometers to the southwest of the city.

Two trips to the Spanish-speaking world in one year! When Christine suggested it a couple months ago as our post-Christmas vacation, she said she could always use the language practice, and I agreed on the account that I could always eat more cheap tacos (I’m not kidding, that probably was my first thought).

After spending a lovely Christmas with my family in Brodhead (during which my uncle got engaged) and then later in the day, with Christine and her extended family (during which my cousin got engaged, or at least I received an SMS with that information), we were ready to take our red-eye bus ride from Madison to O’Hare for our 7:15am flight.

We flew to Mexico City for a brief layover in the airport, the highlights of which were, for me, eating a “tres tacos platter” from an airport restaurant (I thought $10 was a pretty good price) but which Christine told me (after taking a single careful bite) that they were actually horrible and they just used a lot of hot sauce to cover up the taste. I guess that explains why they were called “Porky tacos” on the restaurant’s sign (not kidding) but at least the airport’s rat problem mysteriously stopped. Christine and I then briefly napped on the extremely worn and comfortable couches in the airport’s “eagle museum,” which had hundreds of large portraits and photos of the nation’s “royal eagle” that adorns the Mexican flag.

The 40 minute flight to Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-hahk-ah, resulting in my usual attempts at alliteration in the title) was over in a flash. In a sad memory to how things used to be in the United States, when we stepped out of the plane onto the tiny airport’s tarmac, families were right there at the fence to greet their loved ones. Ah, for the old days.

Our first homestay for the next three nights, Casa Giron, was only 15km away from the airport but due to 4pm traffic, took us an hour to reach. As is to be expected in these old cities, the roads were cobblestone and extremely narrow, leading to traffic jams every few feet. At least Oaxaca didn’t have the horrific haze of smog visible from the air that Mexico City had wreathed about it; we were happy we didn’t have to leave the airport back there!

After checking into the homestay and meeting our hostess, Concepcion and her son Juan Carlos, we got dinner at a little tacqueria named La Lolita. Afterward, we visited the main Cathedral at the Zolaco (the center of town) and watched the post-Christmas, pre-New Years festivities – Peruvian flute bands (Christine says that she’s never been to a place in Central America that didn’t have them tootling away madly wherever people that could tip them are found), children playing with massive cylindrical balloons, and more somberly, a tent-city in the middle of the square with hundreds of tents, with signs and pictures up regarding the 43 young students slain in last month’s cartel-related tragedy. They were literally butchered, put in garbage bags, and set on fire. The president and local politicians are being decried as corrupt, and Christine was a little nervous to be walking through the tent city. “I wonder why they haven’t been tear gassed in the middle of the night and had their tents bulldozed,” she mused.

Everywhere, sets of things numbering 43 (photos, cut-outs of doves, peace signs) were hung

Center dome of the zocalo, covered in signs

We walked back to the homestay, and got a couple beers at an eccentric bar that looked hip (although Christine and I have never been good judges on what is “hip” in any country, really). Inside, there were hundreds of hand-drawn pictures all over the walls; from what Christine could tell they had all been done by the same woman who was thanking/blessing every saint there was for things that had gone well for her in her day to day life.

Christine translates some of the many blessings the artist has received

Today so far, we’ve had a tasty (included) breakfast cooked for us by Concepcion; omlettes spiced with verde tomato salsa with frijoles and coffee. Then it’s off to wander the town!

Seems like only yesterday I was writing about being in this show, Two Diabetics, but the video’s finally up on Youtube! And embedded below, for your convenience.

Stereotypical tropical beach sundown time!

Our last flight home, from Houston back to Milwaukee (we didn’t leave the airport this time, with only an hour layover) has about an hour left in it, and so I’ll try to briefly summarize some of the interesting facets of Roatan, Honduras – probably one of *the* most heavily touristed areas we’ve ever visited together.

First and foremost, either the government of Honduras or the local leaders of Roatan need to figure out whether or not they’re officially backing the Honduran lempira, or the US dollar, and stick with it. It was rather crazy to see that the majority of hotels, restaurants, and other random businesses we frequented not only often accepted USD primarily, but then also would randomly put the prices for other things down in lempira instead. Some hotels would list their prices in USD, for example, then have the drinks in their bar in lempira – and vice versa at other places. The exit tax we paid to leave the country, for another matter, was even charged in USD, not lempiras – but yet, all the credit card machines in the country will *always* do the transaction in lempira, regardless of whether the price was given in USD or Lemps. By the way – the government of Honduras doesn’t seem to see fit to have an easily-findable, up to date list of what the exit tax is – well, as of June 1st, 2014, everywhere else on the internet is wrong – it’s precisely $39.72 for foreigners (to leave by air; from Roatan). Thankfully some elderly British gentleman in the line behind gave me the last 200 lempiras I needed (about $5) otherwise I would have needed to get out the plastic – and all of the fees that would have entailed. Continue reading this post…

It’s going to be hard leaving the tranquil jungle of La Fortuna, our hotel on Lake Atitlan, behind tomorrow. We really lucked out with Christine finding them on Trip Advisor and them having a few rooms available at low season prices. I’m sitting on the porch of one of their bungalows right now, looking into a small cluster of coffee bushes and beyond that, the under-construction new “Big Bungalow” and then finally, the lapping waters of the lake itself. We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning back south for a night in Antigua, one of the most touristy sections of the country.

To be honest, at first I didn’t think I’d be able to write any more for the duration of this trip – moments after I completed the previous blog entry, my computer went dead and I was unable to power it back on – it merely would throw up an error message that said it couldn’t find any boot devices and then demand to be restarted. I grudgingly admitted defeat that evening, as we left around 10am from our hotel in Guatemala City, Dos Lunas, and I didn’t have time to work on it. We had an entire full-sized van to ourselves – our driver, Reyneido, estimated that it would take us about 3 hours to arrive at Panajachel, the “gateway village” to the rest of the lake. I asked him why it would take so long when Google Maps estimated two hours, and he said something about robberies and rapings and various other bad stuff if you don’t use the most well-travelled, well-guarded routes. Looking out the windows, I saw that every barrio/neighborhood had barbed wire, sometimes electrified around the entrances, and at the outside of every bank stood one or two men with shotguns – gas stations too (at the prices they were charging; $5 a gallon, I’d want to rob one too). Christine reminded me that this wasn’t the safest of countries to be in. Three hours seemed fine to me!

Don’t mess with Guatemalan gasoline.

Around three hours later and a van-transfer later, we were unceremoniously dumped near the dock in Panajachel, where we were immediately swarmed by private boat drivers who quickly told us that there was no public-fare boat to La Fortuna, an eco-lodge that is pretty much completely cut off from the rest of the world by land. Christine, of course, spoke rapid Spanish to the men down on the dock itself, and of course we found a public boat right away, for a tenth of what the drivers up near the drop-off point were shouting at us.

I’ll let the photos I took of the La Fortuna lodges speak for themselves. It’s one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been, and the fact that it’s so quiet, tranquil, and cut off from the world (yet still with wireless internet!) makes it heaven on earth for me. Kat and Steve, the owners, have three dogs and of course Christine was ready to pet and play with them as much as possible. I couldn’t believe that Steve and a few of his Mayan-Guatemalan employees were able to make 2 mile long trail through the jungle behind the bungalows just with machetes, flat rocks, and wooden stakes driven into the dirt. I was told this place used to be an old coffee finca (farm/plantation) and that they still make about a thousand pounds a year of the stuff and serve it to their guests. It’s quite tasty; I’m drinking a cup of it with panela brown sugar right now.

Photos on Google+ (upload speeds from here to my website are pretty weak, so this is easier)

Yesterday, we climbed the trail behind the lodge up the side of the mountain at 5 in the morning to see sunrise on the lake with the volcano, Toliman, looming across the lake from us. Kat and Steve’s employees, cute and shy young Mayan women from the villages around the lake, served us breakfast at the bungalow when we returned – although it’s hard to hear them quietly say “Hola? Hola?” outside the door sometimes! We Americans are more used to the brusque “housekeeping!!” when we travel, I guess – there’s no missing that. No “do not disturb” tags for the doors yet; La Fortuna has only been around for a year and a half so I’m sure they’re still ironing out the last bits, even as they construct a massive bungalow right on the lakefront that will eventually contain a lounge, office, game room, and a communal place to eat that isn’t your bungalow.

We spent the rest of the day visiting a few of the numerous small villages that ring the lake – first back to Panajachel to use their most-numerous ATM’s (thanks, Charles Schwab bank account, for reimbursing me for all international ATM usage fees – otherwise I’d be in the hole an extra $20 due to withdrawal fees by now!) and then to San Pedro, the most touristy village, across the lake, for 25 quetzels (the local currency) per person. We met a couple of Americans on the boat ride over who were trying to learn spanish on the cheap at some of the numerous language schools (usually charging $130-160 per week for lessons) in the village. There was an animal rescue shelter with a friendly Canadian who implored me to send any veterinarians I knew to the area, as she could really use the help (we both gave her money instead), and we ate lunch at a place named “Smokey Joe’s BBQ” that seemed to be filled with nothing but tattooed young Americans and Europeans. Smokey Joe and his wife were a raucous middle aged southern USA couple who hollered out people’s names and slid over plastic trays covered in burgers and the “backpackers special” – a burger filled with three or four kinds of smoked meats.

After lunch, it started to rain and we caught a cheap tuk-tuk (looking identical to the ones in India) to the next town over, San Juan, with an affable young driver. Christine pointed out to me that all of the Mayan-Guatemalans we’d met so far were rather quiet, subdued people who had a very relaxed air to them – even the children, when playing, just seemed to smile and shout in a quiet way. We bought some textiles in San Juan, but it was much less touristy than San Pedro and perhaps due to that, and the rain, almost everything was closed. Although we’d been told to haggle everything here, the elderly woman in the shop wasn’t willing to budge much, even for a bulk purchase of four or five items – just because they were quiet didn’t mean they weren’t resilient!

Continue reading this post…