Through the Looking Glass

Two Things

I was reminded of two things over the last two weeks, as Patricio and I road-tripped through three American states and six Mexican ones. We went to buy a car for me: a very gently used Toyota Matrix at an even more generous father-to-daughter discount. After a year and a half of internal struggle where environmental ethics battled with a need for personal freedom and safer mobility, Patricio and I took a flight up north to drive back with a car that would call the Mexican roads its new playground.

I remembered all the times driving south on Interstate 25, after shopping trips to Colorado with mom and dad when we'd pass caravans of used cars--some hitched one behind the other--destined for El Paso and the country across the border. Legalizing American cars in Mexico, until recently, was much more inexpensive than buying the same thing within Mexico itself. I wondered at the hoops these traveling car dealers must have had to jump through to make the process work. And wondered even more if it was really worth it.

Now I understand that it was, and often still is. There is a widespread fascination in Mexico with owning American cars, not only for the caché that might come with it, but a more pressing delight in getting a set of wheels for a price more commensurate with the low salaries most people have to settle for. Exactly why we drove south ourselves.

And as we drove, passing through the long, dry, menacingly beautiful state of San Luís Potosí, I remembered the trips my family would take to Kansas, visiting my grandparents on their farm. With wheat fields flanking the road on either side, both growing toward harvest or fallow with wild grass, the stalks and leaves always seemed to bow and wave toward the car. I let myself anthropomorphise, imagining that the wheat was welcoming us there, to a place that wasn't home, but still a place where we belonged.

as humanish beings, like desert Ents who, if one was patient enough to watch, might begin to move around wherever they pleased. As if frozen in some sort of exultant dance, their outstretched arms seemed to welcome us back. The Joshua tree had become the new wheat. Though highway-side plants contain levels of lead that only the constant traffic could contribute, I still stifled the chiding voice of "yet another car destined for a city with far too many." I reminded myself that freedom can be a welcome thing, too.

In San Luís, it was hard not to see the Joshua Trees near the highway

In the Mix

Syncretism seems to be Mexico's story. Tomorrow and Thursday, the country celebrates Día de los Muertos, a perfect example of the meld between Christian and indigenous holidays. And driving up and back from Cahuacán on Sunday, a little more melding was seen. Small groups of children stood at bends in the road with jack-o-lantern carved green pumpkins in their hands, small candles inside shedding light on the road. They were pidiendo calaverita, literally asking for the little skull, shouting at passing cars to see if a few coins might be handed their way. Some say the tradition dates back a long time, with children asking for money to buy sugar skulls for their family ofrenda, or in most cases, to eat.

But Patricio doesn't buy into that much. Perhaps it has been a long-time tradition in other places, but he didn't see it happen until well into junior high. And now, with many kids dressing up in costume, toting the plastic orange pumpkins for candy or loose change, it's clear that Halloween now plays a large part in this time of year. Some feel it's a slow tragedy. Perhaps any syncretism is. But Día de los Muertos is still celebrated in the home, a mix of one tradition imposed on another long ago.

It's happening, and it's inexorable. And I admit the commercialism is, indeed, a little gross. But the best part of syncretism, as far as I can tell, is the chance to twist the best of both things when bringing the two slowly together. What American kid wouldn't love to start trick-or-treating on, say, October 27th? A whole lot of young ones do here. Extending on into November 1st and 2nd, it's a week-long event full of dreams.

It's Mexico's story, continued.

white fish, or thoughts on the adjective

last friday, i tagged along with patricio to work in the morning, our plan being to later catch an x-men matinee. we headed into downtown tlalnepantla, parking the jetta in an un-metered street and ambling our way to his client's office. we were early, and hungry, and patricio was in the mood for fried fish; we changed our course and made a beeline toward the market.

smaller than the market here in san pedro, it still boasts a wealth of fruits and meats, herbs and treats, and i would soon be agreeing with my husband about a certain stand's battered and deep fried strips of sierra. sliced open to make room for lime juice and valentina salsa, the tender, white fish quickly disappeared from the plate, appearing immediately in my personal list of favorite fattening foods.

before and after the fish fest, winding our way past tortillerías, butcher blocks and produce boxes, vendors asked me as we passed, "¿que le doy, güerita?"

"what can i offer you, little whitey?" is more or less how it translates, but the literal change of words leaves a lot of subtle, important meaning behind.

having grown up in a country where few are named by their appearance, where the cultural baggage is often packed with political correctness, it took me awhile to realize that being called güera (pronounced kind of like "weh-dah") wasn't necessarily a bad thing. it isn't a synonym of the often pejorative "gringa," but an adjective to describe a person with light-colored hair, skin or eyes.

and physical characteristics are prime material--and perfectly acceptable, at that--for addressing a person or forming nicknames here. my brothers-in-law, alberto and daniel, are chino and chaparrito (curly and little shorty, respectively), and chaparrito's wife is la flaca, because she's always been skinny. our friends pedro and laura call each other gordo and gorda (fatty) as their terms of endearment, and most people i know have a negro in the family, the uncle or brother or cousin with the darkest shade of skin. one of patricio's old buddies is canelo for his cinnamon-colored complexion, and his dad, indalecio, is well-known as güerito for his genetically fair and ruddy tones.

many folks even name their businesses with their own appearance-based monikers, as the fondas and taco joints with a sign reading "el güero" are impossible to count.

but that word, güero, sometimes goes beyond just a description of a person's fairer hair, skin or eyes. when parking his car with an attendant or walking down market aisles, patricio also hears himself being called güerito, too, just like every potential customer that passes by--dark, light, and every measure of melanin in between.

it's well-established business practice to be friendly to the consumer, but what does it mean when that friendliness has taken the form of calling everyone white? in this new country of mine where many of the most wealthy and famous are also fair-complected, it's easy to draw some quick conclusions.

but i know i'm looking at the situation through lenses not made in mexico, and i'm learning that a friendly word can be, in spite of its origin or seeming cultural connotations, simply that--friendly.

like the simple friendliness that, beyond doubt, helped make our fish taste so good last friday.

pesos and sense

i paid the phone and water bills today, twenty-four hours before the deadline--a monthly errand that translates into something often easier said than done. sometimes the forces work against early payments, mainly that the mail still arrives on a predictably erratic schedule. in spite of our efforts to help the postal service distinguish between our house number 73 and the house number 73 three houses down, the mailman doesn't seem too conscientious about separating the two homes' arriving envelopes. so our neighbors continue to toss our mail into our yard a few weeks later. and i've discovered that if ever a drought threatens to descend upon the valley here, we wouldn't have much need for rain dances, just a bit of mail. every time envelopes addressed to us are scattered across the yard, the rains never fail to fall before we get out or get home to find them there. to date, each letter, postcard, or delivery notice we've received has been warped and stained, with shades of water-run ink, but miraculously legible.

the phone bill, too, has arrived a number of times on the day payment is due. but this month, though warped and crispy, we picked up envelopes from the phone company and the water plant more than a few days early. i smiled, knowing that this time i would avoid the lines and the hour-long waits.

those wayward bills make me think of good timing, but this month they also reminded me that i still do a lot of translating. 

learning a new language for most people means learning to translate words and phrases and expression from the unfamiliar into the familiar, making comprehension slow and sometimes frustrating. but after time, those same new words or ways of communicating no longer depend on a translation for meaning to happen; their meaning begins to lie in the combination of letters themselves. like our rain-soaked but readable mail, it's something of a miracle.

for the most part, i'm there. though i still often find myself translating an english thought into spanish, following a conversation or reading a novel no longer obligate me to process so much. i simply understand. and i think that's amazing.

but the world of prices and costs in this new economy still have me translating them every time. i addition to being physically warped, the numbers listed on our bills also seem conceptually warped, as well. i can't yet look at our phone/internet invoice of $758.00 pesos and comprehend immediately how much that really means--i have to translate it into my own monetary language of the us dollar. lucky for me and my mental math block, it simply means moving the decimal point one space to the left.

i'm fascinated with this need to translate, to find meaning in these numbers, to compare them with a system of place value that i understand better. i'd wager that monetary value is as much a part of a country's language as its nouns, adjectives and verbs. economics is a mysterious field for me, especially since value seems so arbitrary, but one set of those arbitrary value indicators makes more sense to me because i've grown up with it and its relative stability.

which makes me think that it would be extremely difficult for people in their own country to live through an economic change or crisis that would turn their monetary understanding into a foreign language over night. patricio remembers the years when almost everyone he knew was a millionaire here, knowing that the peso was worth much less, but a little unsure about that really meant. across the atlantic, i imagine that converting to the euro had a similar effect. the equivalent to aggie or pollock jokes here in mexico take aim at the spanish, and one of those jokes attributed a sharp rise in spanish automobile accidents to the drivers' attempts at converting pesetas to euros, concentrating so hard on the math that they forgot about the road. i laugh because it's kind of absurd, but also because i know how it feels.

coke is still it

almost everyone has memories that i might say are common everywhere--memories of playing, of crying, of feeling under the weather, of feeling love or feeling loved, memories of things that are seemingly universal, whether they happen in the mongolian steppe or in a suburb of massachusetts. and there's one thing i'll bet millions, maybe billions of people in every conceivable corner of the world have memories of that isn't a natural biological or social occurrence, yet certainly plays off of both--a result of some incredible marketing and the human affinity for something sweet.

who of you don't have memories involving coca-cola?

it's ubiquitous, and it's only been on sale for 120 years; that first syrup-based drink was sold in jacob's pharmacy in atlanta, georgia today, may 8, 1886. be it coca-colonization or the product's natural progression (i tend to believe in the former), it's since risen to such an iconic status that it can easily be taken for granted.

my most vivid coke memory happened one afternoon, at least fifteen years ago, when mom and i were spending some time with grammy, my spunky, nonagenarian great-grandmother. i don't remember the sequence of events leading up to it, but what i do remember is that mom filled a dixie cup with coke and offered it to grammy, who curled her slim fingers around it and commented on the years it had been since she'd last taken a sip. she tipped the cup to her lips, and not two seconds after swallowing, the look on her face was that of a child who'd just put back a glass of lemonade without the sugar. it was hilarious. even grammy had a good laugh as her taste buds recovered from their carbonated trauma.

ever since i realized that coke left my teeth covered in that unmistakable sugary mossiness, i converted to the diet variety. and though we only have it here in the house every once in awhile, i'm pretty much, for better or worse, a coca-cola loyalist.

so is the rest of the country, it seems. some statistics point to mexico and iceland having the highest per capita coke consumption in the world. i don't know about iceland, but here it isn't difficult at all to believe. rare is the store, party or venue without coke, and the ones that do exist have likely just ran out of it. the soft drink has been bottled and sold in mexico since 1927, and as far as i can tell, it now forms a part of the common culinary scene just as much as charro beans or carnitas. and certainly, it's the only country with a president who was once dubbed "the coca-cola kid"; president vicente fox was head of coca-cola's mexico division, eventually appointed to supervise all of coca-cola's latin american operations. 

there are even claims that mexican coke is, indeed, the real thing.  since it's asserted that bottling plants in mexico still use cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup in their list of ingredients, the taste is better and likely closer to the original. mexican coke has even carved out a strong little niche within the united states, for it's taste, for it's glass bottles, and likely for the nostalgia those two things can produce.

beyond simply satisfying a customer's tastes, wants or needs, i'd wager that it's a sentimental attachment, both individual and cultural, that enables a product to achieve any level of lasting popularity. sentimental attachment (along with, perhaps, sugar addiction) is something the coca-cola company has managed to create on a scale no one would have believed when sold for five cents a glass in 1886. grammy's reaction to it and my memory of that instant may very well sum up the relationship the world has with coke: a bitterish initial shock at the thought of such heavy global sugar consumption, business monopoly, possible unethical working conditions or the almost frightening success of marketing machinations. but then, the punch somehow wears off, and one is left enjoying it's sweetness in spite of it all.

thus spoke the diet coke enthusiast living in mexicocacola.

***

here are some interesting information snacks from wikipedia:

1. kosher coke, bottled by a few companies in the u.s. for the passover season is also made with sugar, rather than corn syrup, due to the special dietary restrictions for observant jews (ashkenazi jews are prohibited from consuming corn during this period) during the holiday. this variant can be found in some areas of the u.s. around the month of april.

2. contrary to popular belief, the coca leaf extract cocaine was never added to coca-cola, per se. because cocaine is naturally present in untreated coca leaves, small amounts of cocaine were also present in the beverage. today's coca-cola uses "spent" coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage. since this process cannot extract the cocaine alkaloids at a molecular level, the drink still contains trace amounts of the stimulant. the united states dea oversees the importation of coca for coca-cola, and the subsequent sale of the extracted cocaine to the drug industry, where it is used in the creation of many of the common drugs whose names end in "-aine" (such as procaine).

may-be day

labor: physical or mental exertion, especially when difficult or exhausting; work.*

labor day still brings to mind the last day before the new school year begins; a september holiday, a monday of celebrating hard work by providing the chance not to do it, a day when the only thing i can think about is the work tuesday will entail.

every bit of that has changed. returning to the library or the classroom isn't on my calendar this year, and that same calendar shows a holiday that falls in may. today i'm not mentally rehearsing my own work. instead, for the first time, i'm thinking about work that my husband's paisanos are doing, both here in mexico and across the northern border.

mexico celebrates labor day today, the day of the international solidarity of workers. patricio's not working. neither are uncle jorge and aunt sara. we're headed up to their ranch soon for an afternoon of doing nothing but sit, visit, and eat many a taco of carne asada. smaller towns play host to parades. cities like the capital will surely see all stripes of union protests.

i haven't heard the news, but i'm curious to know if the boycott is underway in the u.s. today, too. i'm curious to know if thousands of people are absent from work. and i'm curious to know if it serves its purpose.

because i'm a bit cynical about the idea of labor day. while patricio and i sleep in and drink breakfast coffee at noon, thousands of people here in mexico have been hard at work since much earlier hours. while we spend the day doing everything but working hard, we still silently expect others to report to their posts, to keep our lives easy and predictable. we want to fill the jetta tank with gas, keep the radio on while we do it, and pick up an extra kilo of steak for the party up the hill.

it often seems like those who really labor--that difficult, exhausting physical or mental exertion--are those who continue doing just that, straight through the holiday. whether in their usual posts or on the streets en masse, they're either doubting or still hoping that that their work will be recognized. i don't knock a day off; a break from the routine can be very, very healthy. but it also seems to me that a day off is appropriate recognition for those who labor under favorable conditions. the year may be filled with busy and stressful work schedules, but also with commensurate salaries, medical insurance plans and a 401k. a day off for those working without such benefits is a day to worry about lost income, or a day to march, mentally occupied, in an attempt to garner better conditions.

maybe cynicism isn't the right term. i'm also harboring hopes that someday labor day will be a holiday celebrated, either in may or september, as a day of progress made--a day in which more people can really enjoy a day off, or at the very least, feel fairly recompensed for the work they're doing. labor day changed for me this year. maybe i'm not alone?

*the american heritage dictionary

the eggs' happy ending

today, i baked.

it was a big deal for four reasons, one of which you likely know already. on the off chance that you don't, i'll illustrate: i believe i turned on the oven in rachel's and my new york apartment once for every year we lived there, and on one of those occasions it was to stick onion slices on a cookie tray, making the place smell like i'd actually cooked something.

i once had a recipe for banana bread memorized, but that didn't last much longer than a summer's time span. i adore baked desserts, and i especially adore them when they result from someone else's mixing and measuring. working in a school where the chocolate chip cookies--served sometimes at lunch and at all manner of faculty meetings--tasted like something for which santa claus would consider having another christmas in july, the only reason i might have had to bake was to get gratuitously, incredibly fat. taking into account my new york vanity, that just wouldn't do. so i didn't bake.

in new york, we had a gas oven. we have one here, too. but as i lit the oven's pilot light, it occurred to me that our tank of gas was probably running really low. stepping into the patio and gave it a light push, my suspicions were confirmed; we'll probably be flagging down the gas truck in the morning for a thirty kilo replacement. the decision came down to brownies or a hot shower later. i already had the eggs and oil lined up on the counter. the shower, this time, would simply have to wait.

our oven is also a bit bullheaded, if you'll permit me the anthropomorphism. i can calculate fahrenheit to celsius down to the last little degree, but the oven always has its own agenda: hot. a thermometer is perpetually perched on the rack inside, but baking requires constantly monitoring its tiny needle, alternately opening the oven door and turning down the temperature to keep it at a steady 350.

so there they are, the first three reasons. i'll let you judge their capacity to daunt. the fourth, though, would give pause to all but the most oven-loving folk i know.

bakeries.

they're everywhere, lined with one after another leavened delight. and those muffins and danishes and donuts and twists are unbelievably cheap. just up the hill from our house, we have two perfect examples offering big, delicious bites for about thirty cents apiece. it's enough to make any amateur baker throw in the oven mitt and head out the door. arriving back home in ten minutes with a bag full of assorted carbohydrate delights is no small temptation for a lazy baker with little gas and an oven given over to hot flashes.

the good news, for me, is that i'm not alone in this; very few people bake at home here. i know this because finding measuring cups and spoons in a store can often become a shopping odyssey. muffin tins? only in specialty shops, along with the rare and coveted chips of chocolate. it ocurred to me a possible reason why  the santa claus thing didn't catch on too quickly: no one wanted to make cookies for his chimney shimmying, midnight trip.

i have yet to meet a friend who uses the oven for something other than storing pots and pans, or to ripen a hard avocado. why bake when the corner bakery can do it for you?

still, i've yet to see a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie among the bakeries' daily offerings, so i decided to try my hand at both. and they slid out of the oven so mouth-wateringly good that if we don't start giving them away, both patricio and i will run the risk of becoming gratuitously, incredibly fat. i suppose it's a good thing i have a number of reasons not to bake. but tonight, we're going to indulge like santa claus on his sleigh-ride of christmas eve.

 

across the spectrum

it happens that color makes me grateful. grateful for the mottled color of lobsters clicking across the kitchen floor in wyoming, dark marvels shipped live from maine to my parents when i was small. grateful for the color of fields in kansas, unripened wheat that was so tall it could swallow me up in its sea of deep, emerald green. grateful for the explosive color of bougainvillea, paper-thin leaves of fuchsia that will soon be cascades of color by the side of our front door. the way the world paints itself is, i think, a constant work of wonder.

and the ingenious people who decided to replicate those colors win another huge measure of my gratitude. paint--or any color we can apply to some surface--is, beyond doubt, one of my favorite, favorite things. and those who know how to use it well complete my gratitude triad. paint makes prague the most beautiful city that i've ever seen. it makes our walls feel warm and calm and welcoming. with it, artists can transform a canvas into a another world. and it goes from can to brush to wall to make all kinds of sundry signs here.

shop names, merchandise, slogans and logos are often painted onto the buildings' facades, in bold signature colors and with impeccable shapes and lines. a new locale down the street today was getting its own color makeover, sponsored by corona, carried out by a team of dexterous, teenage, rotulistas.

after outlining their work in the lightest of light yellow chalk, they began filling in each letter with quick, confident strokes. the accuracy of their brushwork seemed infallible, as if their inherited fine motor skills were compounded by a kindergarten teacher who demanded that they color within the lines. i was mesmerized, and i offer you a similar experience here.

rotulistas--sign writers and hand letterers--are contracted to paint much more than storefronts, too. remember all that colorful campaign propaganda? it was the handy-work of rotulistas. those same walls and road banks have since been transformed into concert promotions, painted by the same group of painters who work for a company named after its owner, a man known simply by his first name, chuk. using chalk lines to keep their work straight, the rest is filled in with what seems to me considerable skill. it brings to mind the idea of pop art with its countless, identical, city-wide repetitions.

it's a manipulation of paint, of color, that even now seems new to me. sometimes it feels like too much. it can easily feel too busy. but it's creative and vibrant, and it's extremely different. for that, i'm definitely grateful.

hop on the bus, gus...tavo

i live in a city of drivers. everyone i know spends time behind the wheel, the dashboard, or the seat in front of them. the subway's efficient and extensive, but definitely not designed for twenty million people spread out over 570 square miles of metropolitan area. it's a kingdom of axles and gasoline. it's the urban planner's challenge of the century.

it's also a fantastic place to learn to drive; mastering the techniques of moving through traffic can prepare a person for urban navigation the world over. granted, a graduate of mexico city's streets runs the risk of being overly aggressive, but that's easy to cure. it's the confidence that really counts.

given the sometimes anarchic nature of traffic circulation here, i'm often amazed at the comparatively low number of accidents that occur. nine times out of ten, it seems that construction is the cause of bumper to bumper turtle-paced traffic, rather than a car crash. most drivers seem reckless, and some really are, but those people at the helm are paying attention in way that lends a whole new nuance to the term "defensive driving." i'm still just an apprentice. patricio is a master. and so are those women who spoon-curl their eyelashes while passing microbuses en route to work.

a microbus is, simultaneously, one of the alternatives to driving oneself around in the daily chaos and one of the chaos's  primary instigators. kind of like fruit flies, when one comes, it's followed by a bazillion others. making stops and picking up passengers at the wave of a hand or a word to the driver, the microbus is often the bane of every other driver's street-savy existence. not only does it occupy the right-hand lane with it's starts and stops, it often bears into left lane territory, cutting across traffic in it's tank-like impunity. it appears to be against a micro driver's moral code to use the directional blinker; sticking an arm out the window is the signal that suffices. most often, though, it's the menacing nose of the bus veering left that lets the rest know they're about to get cut off. if traffic's light and speed bumps are few, they'll gun it, pedal to the metal, turning their route into a roller coaster ride. ask my dad--heading home from lunch up the hill, he was hooting with delighted terror, mashing his foot into the floorboard, telepathically telling the driver to remember those things called the breaks. passing one under normal circumstances is frequently enough for a little adrenaline rush. relegating them to the rear-view mirror while primping oneself must be akin to best of extreme sports.

patricio's never put a spoon to his eye while guiding his car through the madness--he gained traffic mastery by becoming a bus driver himself. instead of a micro, he was captain of a combi, or a volkswagen van that also enjoys status in the ranks of public transportation. taking fewer passengers but moving them around more quickly in his bullet-sized bus, patricio worked his route for a couple of years, elevating his driving skills to that of official road warrior. the police may know the mind of a criminal, but patricio knows the mind of a bus driver. a big advantage, if you'll excuse the pun.

thankfully, not everyone in this metropolis owns a car. and those who do, if it's not up to emissions standards, have to keep the car parked at least one day a week. these folks, of course, number in the millions, and this is where bus drivers step up to the challenge. with the exception of the metrobus in mexico city proper, camiones (buses), micros (pronounced "mee-crows"), and combis are privately owned and operated. still, they're registered with the city or suburban municipalities, following different routes, with their destinations listed in florescent pinks, greens and yellows on windshield-posted placards. on occasion, destinations written with shoe polish help fill in the blanks in a pinch. this individual ownership is bad news for traffic and the environment, good news in the sphere of employment. and though the lack of emissions regulation enforcement for buses is appalling, the personalization potential for most vehicles is too much fun to ignore.

in addition to the bright-colored cards, many bus drivers have a cacharpo, a buddy hanging out the door to yell out destinations at various stops. they'll also often shout that the bus has seats available--even if it doesn't--or hold out their hand, with the number of fingers up indicating the number of available seats inside.

camión and micro drivers with more spare change and the desire to spend it on their business will trick out the interior with everything from leather stick shift sheaths to velvet pompoms fringing the dash. they'll install curtains in the windows and small shrines, complete with flowers, crosses, guadalupes and rosaries in the center of the windshield. blasting their signature tunes or radio station over the speaker system, some will also invest in different horn sounds, like the semi-truck style pulled with a rope, the cat-call whistle (i got one of those today), or my personal favorite--the tarzan yodel. in spite of the meticulous decor, most micros manage to look on the outside like they've been resurrected from death-by-a-beating, their seat cushions in shreds, enough legroom for a people measuring four foot eleven. if the drivers are, indeed, road warriors, their buses are big, rectangular battle scars.

as a general rule, though, micro drivers seem to spend the most time putting their individual mark on their ride by plastering telling white words across the shaded part of their windshields. it's a way for passengers to get to know the conductor, but it's also a statement about the driver's personality, who he loves and, very commonly, his taste in music. it's nice to recognize "che," "denisse," and "paula" rolling up the street in all its gothic-lettered glory. "snoop doggy," "cypress hill," and "depeche mode" are also familiar theme-mobiles, along with the inventive type to the left who keeps his vent tipped up,revealing his version of a british union jack. i hold a particular fondness for the guy who declares in permanent print, across the back window, that "all woman are crazy."

they all pass by in a constant parade down the avenue parallel to our quiet street, at least five every sixty seconds. click here to watch it happen. they're headed to points along the edge of mexico city proper, the metro stations of toreo, popotla, rosario, politécnico, tacuba, and chapultepec looming large in the corners of their windshields. they're loud, they're stinky, and they often drive us crazy. but they drive us where we need to go. they're oh, so quintessentially, mexico city.

a tale of metal and plastic

last tuesday, patricio and i used our gift registry balance to buy some knives. we'd been slicing and dicing everything from eye-stinging onions to rib-eye steaks with a single, serrated knife for the past three months. when patricio began pulling out his heavy-duty hunting knife to help make the salad, we decided it was time to expand our kitchen repertoire of cutlery.

our sleek new set hadn't been de-boxed for more than five minutes before patricio gave them a quick wash and set to work on slicing up meat for tacos. it didn't take long, though, to realize that instead of effortlessly turning steak into strips, he was hacking away at that meat on the counter. he looked up with an expression that spoke for itself, mixing "har har har!" and "for the love of sweet Jesus" into one hilarious grimace. upon further experimentation on that hapless steak, it became clear that all the straight-edged knives needed more sharpening than the accompanying steel rod could do for us. it was time to recruit a professional. in the meantime, the hunting knife has made a number of encore performances.

patricio mentioned last night that he planned on taking the knives with him to work today so he could have them sharpened in tlalnepantla. i spent a good hour listening to the knife-sharpener's pan flute sending its ocarina-clear notes trilling through the neighborhood, thinking i wouldn't need to flag him down for his services. later, putting water on to boil, my eyes rested on the black block of knives, every single one tucked snugly into place. i wondered if patricio had forgotten about his plan, but it soon dawned on me that today he couldn't drive the car. with the jetta still in the shop, we've been hopping behind the wheel of his parents' ford; it's certainly worked in our favor that they're in houston until april. the point is, that it's probably not a very smart idea to carry three big knives around all day on public transportation, dull or otherwise. patricio doesn't look menacing, but pointy metal sure does.

i decided to take them up to the market, having seen a knife sharpener there in front of the church a number of times. today apparently , was his day off, so i ended up carrying those knives around in their zara bag disguise while i took a long stroll through the market aisles. it's always a monumental temptation to buy up kilo upon kilo of fresh, leafy, smooth or crunchy vegetables, but with my already half-occupied paper bag, i wasn't very well-outfitted for the task.

i suddenly wished i had a bolsa de mandado, or market bag. sometimes made of thick, woven plastic, the most commonly used kind, though, are the soft but durable ones that also double as mobile advertising. left and right, slow-moving matrons, boys sent out for after-school errands, and sharp-eyed wives all passed by with their bolsas in tow. with names of local butchers, tortillerias and other small businesses printed on the side, the bags were overflowing with cilantro, celery, mangoes and limes, and sometimes the occasional chicken. i love these vinyl cornucopias.

i also love that they are an alternative to the plastic supermarket bags. not only are they more environmentally conservative, they're also a source of color and charm. the latter observation screams out "100% gringa," but i don't mind. the former isn't to say, either, that the way of life in general here is particularly concerned about conservation; the river hugging the edge of our neighborhood looks like coffee that shrek exfoliated in. small contributions are still valuable in the long run, though, so i appreciate the bolsa culture for that.

why don't i have one, then? i could easily buy a woven one, which i'll probably do sooner or later; they're even sold in the market itself. it's doubtful i'll be getting one of the billboard bags, though. they're usually given to customers who buy a good deal of the business's product, and with just patricio and i in the house to feed, i don't see myself buying tall stacks of tortillas or sausage enough for seven.

so i left the market with still-dull knives and without a bag full of jicama and fish, but full of good vibes, and free to smile inside about this place where i live.