A cold and colorful place (Ocampo and Angangueo, Mexico)

Well, I am already behind in my weekly Mexico updates! Not too much of a shocker. And this one will be a shortie -- I started a longer post in a document on my computer, Toby, but he had a bout of grouchiness (my ability to break computers just by touching them has not diminished) and I couldn´t finish it.

Now I am writing on a nameless computer in Ocampo, where I arrived a week and a day ago to a parade with music and colorful banners -- not welcoming me, but celebrating Mexico´s 199th year of independence. It was lovely. I got to see most of the town´s adult residents lining the streets, proudly sprinkling confetti on the heads of most of the town´s schoolchildren, who were marching in step, looking proud or confused. Since that auspicious beginning to my stay here, so much has happened that I can hardly keep it straight in my head. Here is a list:

- I decided to move in with Adriana, an English teacher at a nearby school, instead of spending three months in a dark hotel room. Excellent decision. Adriana is wonderful, and we have spent the past few days cleaning and organizing the house (she more than I, since she moved to the house about a week before I arrived). Among our successes are: a garbage-free yard and river (at least the part of the river that we can see), a mostly functional kitchen full of food, a fixed ladder, and a compost bin with some fruit peels in it, which we plan to use on what will soon be our splendid garden.

- I met Adriana´s friend Edwin, who is the leader-type of a group of about ten young men (sometimes a few more, sometimes a few fewer) (a few fewer?), with whom I have gone to a dance, played soccer (´played´ is perhaps misleading -- I jogged around and dodged the ball), and hung out on several nights in Edwin´s room and in Adriana´s house. The young men -- Isaac Fernando, Javier, Gabriel, Eduardo, Chafai, Brian Alexis, Ricardo, Fierros, Freddy, and others -- are friendly and funny, and I´m glad to have been adopted by the group, even if I am still quiet and awkward around them.

- I met, went on walks with and/or had meals with several other people (a woman named Carla, her father Don Manuel, and her mother Dona Remedios; a girl named Anaisa who works at a taco stand; a man named Jacob who works at a telephone store; a woman named Angelica who is the director of a kindergarten) in Ocampo.

- I saw 1200-to-800-year-old pyramids with Adriana in Zirahuato de los Bernal. !!! We then went to Zitacuaro, the nearest city, to go grocery shopping and drink fruit nectars.

- Now that I´ve mentioned fruit nectars, I should also say that I´ve eaten: tacos with beef and pork and nopales, mole, rice, Michoacan mushrooms, chicken, enchiladas, pumpkin seeds, atole (a hot soupy sweet corn beverage), pan vaso (bread dipped in chili sauce, fried, and stuffed with your choice of meat), a lot of tropical fruits, and . . . well, chocolate, of course, but that´s not nearly as exciting. I´ve only gotten sick to my stomach once. Made of steel (I am). Adriana is going to show me how to cook other delicious things, among them tamales. The thought makes me salivate.

- Learned the Mexican names for many words! I hadn´t realized how different the vocabulary was.

That´s it for the list, I think. Now I should describe the places! I`ve spent the most time in Ocampo, which is flat and surrounded by tall forested hills (where the butterflies gather starting in November). It is a tiny town, with one main plaza, one main street and not too many others, and a river. There are always people in the streets, and there are always food vendors selling tacos, so some parts of town smell delicious. There are several wood processing shops, which turn wood (legally or illegally logged) into crates and sticks for mops and other such things. There are a lot of arcade game rooms. There are a lot of homeless dogs. There are corn fields and farm animals at the outer edges of town and beyond. There is a lot of rain, and there is visible breath in the mornings (it is cold! and humid) (the first few days I felt like I was in the rainy period of ´100 Years of Solitude´). There is a big market on Saturdays.

That description doesn´t do the town justice, and I think that I achieved my goal of sounding like a third-grader who doesn´t want to put much effort into her English homework. Yes!! I´m actually living much closer to Angangueo now, which is quite different from Ocampo. It, too, has one main plaza, but this plaza has two churches and they are taller and grander than the one in Ocampo. Angangueo is much more colorful and much more vertical than Ocampo, since it is located higher up in the hills; walking around is good exercise (for legs and eyes). In general, it seems better cared for than Ocampo, and has more hotels and nice-looking food businesses (the ones in Ocampo are nice, but not nice-looking) -- it is the more touristy of the two monarch butterfly reserve gateway towns. I have yet to meet people in Angangueo. Next week I will wander around looking friendly and eager to make the acquaintance of anyone who is nearby (but only if that person looks at least half as eager as me -- I don´t want to scare anyone).

´This one will be a shortie.´ I am so funny! I will write another update within the next, oh, ten days -- one better organized and more informative -- and send best wishes to you, kind reader.

A chapter ending (A Corunha, Spain)

Oh, shameful neglect of blog! But I plan to write weekly (that's not too ambitious, right?) updates when I am in Mexico -- I leave tomorrow morning! In fact, this post is largely an attempt to put off packing, not because I have to rack my brains deciding what to bring with and what to leave behind (I am bringing everything with, of course), but because zipping up my suitcase tonight will be an awful lot like closing a chapter in the Book of Watson Adventure, and I am in a state of disbelief. Leaving Spain already? Quoi?!

The past few weeks have gone by incredibly quickly, and I've met more wonderful people than I can mention and describe. In Santander I spent every night with a group made up of Germans (there are a lot of these in Spain), American (just one), Cuban (also), Argentinian (also also), and Spaniards; we walked around, drank chocolate and ate churros, and admired the light of the moon on the water. No joke. It was really pretty. In Madrid I stayed with Rosa, who was the friend of a friend of my mother's and is now my friend (a shorter and nicer title), and with whom I felt completely at home and happy. She introduced me to her friends -- more feelings of comfort and happiness -- and pointed out every cute thing that her two young cats did. During the days I explored the city (enormous! grand! overwhelming!), went on a day trip to Toledo (narrow-laned, beautiful and touristy), and spent an afternoon with Alberto, my Foz friend. This past weekend I've been back in La Corunha with Sylvia, Juan and not-so-little Giulia, who has grown a lot since I met her three months ago! Her favorite word is "agua". You say, "Hooola, Giulia" and she responds, "Aguaguaguagua. Agua. Aguagua." (There are infinite variations of this exchange.) I wonder what she thinks she's saying.

All of these people have been incredibly good to me and admirable. I love admiring people! And I've been sad to say goodbye to them.

The topic of time has come up on many occasions during my travels. Almost everyone I meet is willing to talk with me about it, so I have learned oodles from people. I have also noticed that artists are obsessed with time -- many museums that I've visited have exhibits with creative titles like "Representations of Time" and equally creative artwork (that I often fail to get, like a painting of a cute little dog face that was supposed to make me consider the meaning of "instant" and "present"; it made me consider the weirdness of dog breeding). Historical museums, too, are filled with interesting time-related things; I like to see how different ones set up exhibits that span many centuries. I hope to write about these things in my journal when I am less computer-averse, and I'll post something more concrete in this blog (as well as a summary of my fishing knowledge!).

I'm not sure what my internet situation will be like in Ocampo, Mexico -- I'm not even sure what my living situation will be like! -- so I'll publicly apologize to anyone who tries to get in touch with me but doesn't hear back for a while: I'm sorry.

Now I'm going to go back to packing, and at some point I will zip up my suitcase (my personal soundtrack will be playing dramatic orchestral music, lots of violins). Ciao now, Spain! Hooola, Mexico!

I hope that you are doing wonderfully.

A collection of very old art (Santander and Puente Viesgo, Spain)

A one-paragraph update, because I am getting behind in my blog duties (but am also increasingly computer-averse)! Yesterday I went to a town called Puente Viesgo, where I saw, for the first time in my life, prehistoric cave paintings. The experience ranks high in my List of Mind-Boggling Historical Experiences. Over the past many millions of years, dozens of caves have been carved by water into the rock of Monte Castillo, the big hill by the town, and in the past century, people have found cave paintings in five of them. Two of these -- la Cueva de las Monedas and la Cueva del Castillo -- are open to the public. La Cueva del Castillo is the main attraction for paintings. Excavations in the opening of the cave have revealed twenty-six layers of human-produced materials, ranging in age from 150,000 years to about five centuries. This cave has been a home for a long time! The paintings themselves, deeper inside the cave, date from about 12,000ish years ago, and are of bison, deer, horses, hands, and symbols that haven't yet been deciphered. What I found most fascinating was that the painters used the contours of the rocks as part of their art. They didn't say, "Oh look, a flat wall -- I will draw a horse there!" They said (something like), "Hmm . . . those cracks look like a horse's hind legs . . . and look how the rock protrudes here, that could be the horse's head . . . I will draw the horse's torso and front legs." They saw the pictures before they drew them! My favorite one of all involved shadows. The guide pointed out a painting that looked pretty odd to us -- a large pair of legs with no body attached. She asked us, "Why would they do that?" We failed the pop quiz -- nobody knew. Then she put the lamp in a certain position behind a rock formation -- and suddenly there was an upright bison body to go with the legs! The people had seen the shape of the bison in the shadow and added legs to turn it into a shaman. That's the theory, at least. WOWEE!!! I almost bounced up and down (might have actually). I think it's so exciting that we can see the same thing in a shadow that people saw ten thousand years ago. The other cave was more geologically impressive -- stalactites and stalagmites and curtains and organs and falls and other beautiful formations galore. Our planet is so great!

That's it for this update because it is breakfast time. In nine days I will be in Mexico -- holy shamoley.

An exultation (Picos de Europa and Oviedo, Spain)

I think that I must be the most fortunate person in the world. My legs, on the other hand, consider it a great misfortune that they were paired up with me, and went on strike yesterday to protest the abuses to which they were subjected during the weekend excursion to the Picos de Europa. They haven't lifted the strike yet, so I cringe every time I go down stairs -- but all I want to do is go back to the mountains and abuse them all over again.

I arrived to Oviedo on Friday evening and was met at the station by Chus, my CouchSurfing host, who also studied physics (but is now an independent graphic designer) and with whom I have another 79348579345 things in common. Any attempt to describe him and his hospitality will end in gushiness; suffice it to say that I am glad to have a new Friend. He had organized our weekend excursion into the Picos de Europa, a vast mountain range about two hours from Oviedo, and that night we won the gold medal in Last-Minute Preparation -- when I confessed that I didn't have hiking boots ("but my sandals should be all right, no?"), Chus said, "Impossible!" and we drove to a delightful outdoorsy store at a suburban strip mall (Spain has these, too) to buy a pair. Castor and Pollux, my new spiffy boots (and trusty steeds), would end up saving my life, or at least my ankles, many times during the next few days. We also bought food for our hikes; in retrospect, two loaves of bread, five packages of sandwich cheese and meat, and 725 grams of chocolate (my idea) was overdoing it a little, but better that than (e.g. and oh horror!!) a chocolate craving left unsated. We had a late dinner at home and conked out after looking at an Ansel Adams book -- photographs of big wild spaces! We would be in one soon!

The next morning, we picked up Alina, a German student who is spending eight months in Spain and who came adventuring with us, at the bus station, and we all set off for the mountains. Alina, too, is gush-worthy, and almost the same person as me because 1. she spent a year in Minnesota, 2. she speaks Spanish, German and English, and 3. she will be doing her master's at Boston University either next year or the following one (in International Relations, though, not Science Journalism). Twins! Upon reaching the mountains, Alina, Chus and I left the car near a lake and hiked up to the refugio, where we would spend the night. Alina and I were delighted at every turn -- mountain walls of gray stone with purple flowers! cows with gently tinkling bells munching on the grass! some pretty trees! -- and Chus, who had visited these mountains many times before, said, "You'll see what the places we hike to are like!" Also auspicious was the almost sudden disappearance of gray clouds and fog that had hung over us until we stopped for lunch and Chus said, "We just have to hope that the clouds clear up." Lo and behold! They did.

Not everywhere, though. After dropping off two of our backpacks at the refugio and filling the third with water bottles, we hiked to a nearby mirador (passing the occasional cave in a wall or in the ground) and sat on a ridge that overlooked a valley, presumably forested but so completely filled with clouds that we couldn't see the trees! All around us, we could see mountain tops and ridges in the hot sun, and to our left was a steep mountain wall, wet from the water that seeps out of the rock, but below there was a cloud sea. At one of the edges of the cloud sea, I watched the fog spill over a low mountain ridge into another valley -- it is absurd what beautiful things this planet is capable of creating. Way to go, Planet. We reluctantly hiked back to the refugio and arrived just in time for our eight o'clock dinner, which was exquisite and especially impressive because the three people who run the refugio have to bring up all of the supplies on horseback. That night, after a peach-rainbow sunset over another cloud sea, the fog around us cleared up and we saw the stars. Ugh. We are part of such a big universe.

The next day was our Big Adventure (the one for which my legs still haven't forgiven me) -- a full-day hike to the top of the highest mountain in the part of the Picos we were in, complete with crawls up steep slopes of sharp, football-sized rocks, slips down snowy valleys, and scales up walls that were significantly more vertical than horizontal and significantly higher up than Safe Falling Altitude -- but we didn't fall. Castor and Pollux, and Alina's also-brand-new-but-six-times-as-expensive hiking boots, saw to that. I'm passionately in love with the Picos de Europa, which I feel incapable of describing. Such a big part of being in the mountains, and particularly these mountains, so big and harsh and dry (I kept thinking of Mars and the Moon on steroids), is emotionally responding to their presence. I can't write about what I saw because it wouldn't explain what I experienced. So: go to the mountains! Have a mountain experience! It will be super. (And even more super if you have companions like Chus and Alina.)

We made it back to the car at ten at night, now a company of four, because Javier, Alina's CouchSurfing host from Gijon, surprised us at the refugio! On the way home, Chus introduced me to Bruce Springfield, who is now on my List of Artists to Discover and Admire, and, after showering, we went to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. The next day was decadently relaxing. We slept in and spent the afternoon strolling through the old part of Oviedo, sitting at a bar and a sidreria (a place to drink sidra, or cider), eating gelato and fine chocolates, and sitting again at a park . . . "watching life pass by," as Chus told me Arturo Perez Reverte puts it. Watching life pass by is delightful. The park was full of elderly people who walked slowly and sat together or alone on benches, and parents with children, some of whom were entertaining themselves by chasing and popping the giant bubbles a man was making with a sticks-and-string contraption. We were surrounded by big trees, which were around before we were born and will, I hope, still be around after we're dead, and I'm sure that the park will be full of the exact same people doing the exact same things then (there's no "then" word for the future!).

In the evening, Chus and I cooked mofongo (plantain balls with garlic and pork) and fried okra, my attempt at an introduction to Puerto Rican and Southern U.S. cuisine, and Javier and Alina joined us for a lovely and long dinner. I have learned so much from so many people in the past week! Chus, Javier and Alina all indulged me by starting conversations about time, but these always morphed into conversations about life philosophies, ways of living, trends in society, goals for the future -- and I am forming a clearer and clearer picture of how I'd like to lead my life. Two concrete examples:

1. Alina told me that she had recently become interested in Zen and Buddhism, and that, several months ago, she had started meditating and making an effort to be present in the moment (a mentality that both Chus and Cristiano also shared with me). If she is doing the dishes, she is DOING THE DISHES. If she is walking in a park, she is WALKING IN THE PARK. It doesn't make sense to be stressed about what awaits her at home while she's walking in the park, because she can't do anything about it in the moment -- instead, she should enjoy the park. Since she started focusing on this way of living, she is happier. Moments are fuller, and sweet ones are less bitter; before, she wanted to hold everything close, and the knowledge that good things would disappear was painful, but now she is trying to accept that all things come and go, and they are no less wonderful for going. It was helpful to hear Alina (and Cristiano) talk about this, because I have struggled with it, too, and especially during this trip. It has been very difficult for me at times to be fully in the present when so much of what has shaped me, my family and friends and familiar environments, are far away. I miss them, I think about them, I fantasize -- and my mind ends up being somewhere different from my body, clinging to what is not there. Part of the reason that the mountain excursion was so glorious is that this didn't happen -- it was so easy to be exactly there, in the mountains with Chus and Alina, and not somewhere else in my head. I have to keep working on this!

2. Javier talked, among many other things, about his dissatisfaction with this society's consumerist ways. We're so used to consuming that it's what we do with our free time (think going shopping), and we value things that cost money more than things that don't (in his opinion, people don't go to the mountains because they're free; if they were fenced off and a 30-Euro entrance fee were charged, crowds would flock to the gates). We've become slaves of industry giants, who survive because we fall into a consumption-need cycle -- the more we consume, the more we need. Javier is currently working on freeing himself from this cycle -- a long, multi-step process -- by needing less. Last year, he looked around and said, "I have enough stuff! I'm not going to buy anything this year." He gave his fancy motorcycle to a friend, and is trying not to buy clothes, furniture, music -- material clutter. I admire this greatly! And I, too, am going to try to need as little as possible by consuming less. Also, when I do consume, I want to consume better. If I can choose between an imported apple at a grocery store and a locally-grown apple, I'll pick the latter, so that my consumption habits better reflect my philosophies and ethics. I think that this is much easier in theory than in practice, but it is also how I am (indirectly) relating to many parts of the world -- and that is pretty important! A life-long Thing to Work On. Those are the best.

Now I'm in Llanes, where I'm spending just a day, and tomorrow evening I go to Santander. So much so fast! I can almost feel myself growing up.