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September 25, 2006

Strangeness on a Train

Train travel used to be the norm for long-distance trips in the United States. Although the hulking metal monsters that glide along the rails have been replaced here by ones that manipulate lift and drag to fly through the air, some still meander over the countryside at their leisurely pace, allowing passengers a close look at the magnificent landscape that, in spite of my loathing for the systems of the United States, still captivates my heart and leaves me in awe.

Unfortunately, what should be a relaxing two and a half hour wandering along the coast of southern California as I make my way from San Diego to Los Angeles is not.

I wonder when exactly Americans started to swap pleasure for productivity, permitting it to creep even into moments like this, when the excuse to hang up the phone and put the papers in the briefcase for a couple of hours was made irresistible by the alluring vistas passing just outside the window. Was it ushered in by the country having to be ever-vigilant against the insidious evils of communism? Did it give way by the financial frenzy of the 80s when time was money and everyone was clamoring to get as much of it as they could? Was it the slow realization that the systems were going to collapse and that dogs would have to eat dogs if they wanted to survive?

Along the road to a life made easier by machines and technology, when did the tide roll back and give way to an existence lousy with wireless telephone headsets and Meals-in-Minutes®? Did leisure lose its value, or did it just acquire too great an opportunity cost?

On my train today, a lawyer and his team are seated two rows ahead of me. He has been talking loudly to himself (or so his microsopic headset makes it seem) since we pulled out from the station in San Diego an hour and a half ago. In reality, he is coordinating a meeting with another lawyer, who has a court appearance at 3 pm and needs to do some work in advance of his reunion with the lawyer on the train. A matter-of-fact female associate of the lawyer suggests that the lawyer at the other end of the line have their company's limo pick him up, either downtown or in the valley, take him to their office, where they will make a room available to him so that he can complete what must be done before the meeting he has with them.

During all of that, the gentleman in the seat in front of me got up and looked about for another open seat, but returned dejected. A couple of minutes later, he asked if the lawyer wouldn't be so kind as to speak a little more quietly. In doing so, his accent gave away that he is British. Have they somehow escaped this obsession with working at any given opportunity?

A few stops later, another lawyer gets on and sits behind me. I now have lawyer stereo. The new lawyer is rattling off instructions to her assistant, ticking off points of their agenda by saying, "NEXT!" after completing each individual matter.

"...and remember that I have to get photocopies of each individual report, and then those have to be sent over to Morrison as soon as possible, okay? NEXT!"

A brief respite will follow, for which I am truly grateful. Again I can hear the soothing click-clack of the swaying train for a few brief moments before...

"I don't know why she thinks that. I have been very clear about that numerous times. Okay, well what you are going to do is to call Henry, of course, but you're also going to call Robert and have him remind Henry too. This is very important and he can't forget. He has to remember it and he has to call them as soon as possible. Then you tell Earl to send copies of those to Monogram...there's a fax, if he doesn't have his own fax, there's a fax I bought for the company and it should stay there at the office. I think he took it home, but he's not supposed to. Tell him it belongs to the company and he has to bring it back. Jack is his cousin...call Jack and have him get on Earl because they're family. I bought it for the company. He's not supposed to take that home. NEXT!"

In contrast, the older couple from the Netherlands sitting behind me, who ordered red wine as their complimentary beverage that comes with business class on Amtrak, are delighful, despite the fact that their volume has grown in proportion to the amount of wine they've consumed. They must have traveled from Florida to Las Vegas at some point, because they keep mentioning the two in succession. Since I don't know Dutch, I don't really piece together anything else they say, but whenever they say "Florida" or "Las Vegas," it sticks out like shards of glass.

For you, Jonathan, that would be "sherds."

Posted by crispy at 11:10 AM | Comments (6)

September 24, 2006

Back In the U.S.S.A.

I thought you might be interested in some initial thoughts and details.

First the details on the trip from the Tijuana Airport to San Diego:

Taxi from the airport to the San Ysidro border: $180 MXN.

Four-Day pass for San Diego Trolley, taken from San Ysidro to San Diego: $15 USD.

Trip time on trolley: About 30 minutes.

I hit town and went to Dara (402 Broadway, #180, San Diego, CA), a great Thai place. I had Pad See Ew with mock duck (seitan) and the huge fried tofu appetizer, accompanied by a thai iced tea. With tax and tip, it was $25 USD.

As for initial thoughts:

Posted by crispy at 11:32 AM | Comments (4)

September 19, 2006

Time to Renew

The story in the news today about Maher Arar, a Canadian falsely accused of being associated with al-Qaida who was "detained" at JFK Airport as he was returning to Canada after a vacation and sent by US officials to a Syrian prison where he was tortured, has me a little worried about my upcoming visit to the United States. But I have to leave the country to renew my travel visa here in Mexico, and with airfare being around $75 USD to fly from here to Tijuana, the price is right for a visit to southern California. Luckily I don't have to fly into a US airport.

I will be leaving Shawn behind, with two weeks worth of lunches prepared, parceled and frozen in the freezer, as his job permits him only certain vacation times. Although we used to travel separately quite often, over the past year or so, all our trips have been taken together. I suspect that it will seem a little strange at first to be going solo, but I am meeting up with friends in California.

While there, I will be doing a little shopping to buy things that we just can't get down here. Among them are the vaunted Tide-To-Go Markers®, Q-Tips® with paper "sticks" (down here, they only have them with flimsy plastic), and bulk ibuprofen.

While I'm there, I suspect I'll have some time to blog, but since this is a blog about Mexico, it won't be about what I'm doing in the states. I'll try to keep it on track, possibly with some observations about differences between the two countries that I didn't notice until after living in Mexico for eight months. Maybe I'll compare California's Mexican food to Guadalajara's. That could be some exciting research.

Posted by crispy at 08:25 AM | Comments (3)

September 16, 2006

Wacky Mexican Television Revisited


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Playing Jenga® on Muévete

This is a Saturday morning show called Muévete. It's for kids, mostly.

It reminds me of the children's programming in Brazil as represented on The Simpsons. They have scantily-clad hosts that bounce around, banda ensembles, and perky songs about not smoking cigarettes complete with a dance line, again, scantily-clad.


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Playing Jenga® on Muévete

The audience seems like a big party, with everyone dancing around and singing. They hold up big signs that talk about how they love the hosts of the show and young girls (scantily-clad) blow kisses to the camera.. At one point, they bring out a special guest, usually someone slightly famous from Mexican TV, and...what else? They play Jenga®!


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Playing Jenga® on Muévete

The band plays this trippy abstract "tension" jam, like when the protagonist is walking through a dark house and you know the murderer is waiting for him in there somewhere. But because the Jenga® game can go on and on and on, it's like the house is the château de Versailles and the inevitable victim is practicing walking meditation.


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Playing Jenga® on Muévete

Given that it's a couple of people playing Jenga® for half an hour on tv, it cracks us up that they run a title at the bottom of the screen that reads: ¡El momento más tenso de televisión!

Posted by crispy at 11:05 AM | Comments (3)

September 15, 2006

Washer & Dryer

Up until recently, I've been completely satisfied with doing our laundry at the laundromat, or as they're called down here, lavandaría automática. However, with Shawn having to wear a specific uniform provided by his school, and as they only delivered on three of the seven uniform shirts he ordered, that means washing a lot more frequently and with smaller loads. The inconvenience factor convinced us that we needed to get a washer and dryer, and I'm waiting at the house for the delivery guys to bring them.

The lavandería is fun for me actually. The guy that owns it is very nice and very smart, and we often get into interesting discussions, or (to borrow from Oscar Wilde) at least they're interesting to me. I am sure that he often struggles to understand the nonsense I'm babbling, but I am very grateful for the practice with discussion about something other than where a certain restaurant is, or the number of bottles of water I want on any given week.

Yet while going there is relaxing and the Spanish practice is helpful, it's still inconvenient. They are open from 8 am to 2 pm, then they close from 2 pm to 4 pm, then they open again from 4 pm to 7 pm. Because I'm not usually up that early, I tend to go in the afternoon, but because it takes over an hour to wash and dry the laundry, you have to figure in that you need to get there by 5:30 pm. Having only an hour and a half window for arrival is often inconvenient for me, and it would be nice to be able to do laundry at night, or at 2:30 pm if I wanted to.

We bought the items at a place called Ekar de Gas, and they included installation as well as delivery. But the process is not necessarily simple. First, I have to call a certain number after 9:15 am to find out the time at which I am to expect the arrival of the delivery men with the washer and dryer. Then I have to call the service technicians to set up a time that they can hook up the equipment. You might think that would be simple, and that I could do it myself, but no. It's a gas dryer, and in Mexico, propane gas is used instead of natural gas. The burner in the dryer is made for natural gas because it's made in the United States. For this reason, the installers have to change out a certain part of the burner so that it can efficiently burn propane.

I don't have the machine yet, but the installers have told us that we need to give them the serial number of the stove so that they get the right converter. So after the machines are delivered and placed upstairs in our little roof enclosure, I have to look up the serial number and call them to tell them what it is. Then they're going to come on Monday to hook it all up.

Posted by crispy at 09:16 AM | Comments (3)

September 11, 2006

Café de Olla

There are so many gastronomic delights in Mexico that I'd never heard about until I moved here. One of my favorites is café de olla, a spiced coffee made in big terra cotta pots.

Supposedly, the stuff started out on ranches and in small towns in central Mexico, but its popularity has spread throughout the country. You can get it at traditional Mexican food restaurants where it is made the old-fashioned way, but it's so popular that someone has come up with a packaged mixture that you can put into your coffeemaker and brew it like regular drip coffee.

I am sure that even considering making it that way would bring down generations of shame on ones household though, because the pot used to make it is reportedly the one element that must not be omitted. After all, it is named "café de olla," and the "olla" is the pot.

All the ingredients are combined in the pot and simmered, and there are a couple that are interesting Mexican things that you might not know about.

One is piloncillo, unrefined cane sugar that comes in cones. In fact, the name means "little pylon." In India it's jaggery, and in Colombia, it is known as panela.

[This was confusing to me because in Mexico, panela is a type of cheese, but in Colombia they have a drink called agua de panela. I thought this sounded less than delicious, thinking that it was "cheese water," but really this just means hot water with piloncillo dissolved in it. The kicker though is that in Colombia, people melt a chunk of cheese in their agua de panela, so when it comes down to it, a Mexican thinking "they're drinking cheese water!" would be right.]

Another ingredient in some café de olla recipes that is perhaps foreign to those readers that live outside the sphere of Mexican influence is Mexican tablet chocolate. In Mexico, this means Ibarra chocolate de mesa, or "table chocolate." In English, it's called tablet chocolate because it comes in round tablets that you can break into smaller pieces. It consists of sugar, cacao nibs, cinnamon and lecithin and it is most often used to make hot chocolate by melting it in milk.

There is a competing product on the market, but in my opinion, anyone that uses that instead of 100% mexicano Ibarra table chocolate is a traitor and should be drawn and quartered. I might be a bit biased though, because Ibarra is made right here in Guadalajara. I guess there's also Chocolate Moctezuma, made in Michoacán, and that's also acceptable. But that other Swiss crap...I wouldn't use it to clean my toilet.

In addition to these ingredients, various spices are added. Cinnamon is universal, but the other spices vary. Some recipes call for anise, others orange zest. Cloves seem to be a popular addition too.

Below are some recipes for café de olla if you want to try making it at home. Note that most of these recipes do not even mention the use of a clay pot, but as I mentioned before, you're supposed to use one or it's not real café de olla.

Posted by crispy at 01:39 AM | Comments (5)

September 10, 2006

Independence Day

Although in the United States, 5 de mayo is more celebrated among Mexican-Americans than 16 de septiembre, it is the latter which is Independence Day for Mexico and is the one that gets celebrated.

The facts behind it are this.

In 1810, the same year that King George III was found to be insane and Frédéric Chopin was born, a priest named Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla Mandarte Villaseñor y Lomelí (but called Don Miguel Hidalgo for short) lived in the town of Dolores, near Guanajuato. Shortly before dawn on the morning of 16 September, he rang the bell of the church, calling both indigenous and mestizos to mass. When they arrived, he made a passionate argument for a revolt against the Spanish who had been exploiting Mexicans for more than 200 years. This call to arrest or force from Mexico all Spaniards became known as the Grito de Dolores ("Shout from Dolores"), which ended with "Mexicanos, ¡viva México!"

Hidalgo raised an army that was very successful at first in ousting the Spanish, and they even got to the edge of Mexico City within a year. However, he retreated for reasons that still today are unknown, and was eventually captured by the Spanish and executed. For several years, his severed head hung in a cage from the granary in Guanajuato, put there by the Spanish as a warning to others who might get uppity.

For those that are interested in history, it should be noted that the situation was much more complex than stated above, involving criollos, gachupines, Ferdinand VII and Napoleon. If you want to read about such nuances, see this article at MEXonline.com.

In practice, the celebration is one of the major celebrations in Mexico where people party down for the whole week before the actual holiday. This past Saturday, one week before the 16th, fireworks (and I mean serious fireworks, not just bottle rockets and firecrackers) were going off all over town, all night long. People have started selling homemade flags on the streets from little carts; Shawn bartered a vendor down from $300 MXN to $200 MXN to buy me one that's probably about 5' x 3' and on a nifty stick that has been whittled to have a point on the end that you can stick into something so it will stand up. I was delighted with it. It's tied to the stick with three cloth strips, one red, one white and one green.

Shawn also scored us an invitation to the party being given by our downstairs neighbors next Friday night thought being the charming social butterfly that he is. I don't know what is typical at such events, but I'm going to be researching to find out if we should bring something in particular, if there are any customary rituals or if you're supposed to wear anything specific. It will be the first party that we've been to in our apartment building, so I want to be sure that we make a good impression.

Posted by crispy at 10:33 PM | Comments (3)

September 08, 2006

Yay, Torture!

Although there is a lot that goes on that I'd like to post here to make sure people reading this blog know it's going on, I usually don't. This is a blog about Mexico and our Mexico experience, and I try to keep it focused on that positive stuff.

However, this story caught my eye and made me think, "man, I'm sure glad I'm out of the United States." It's from an article in the New York Times, but you can read about it all over the place. I'm sure most people in the United States are not, though.

Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush's Support
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 8, 2006

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

That the executive branch wants to give themselves more flexibility in violating human rights does not surprise me. What really gets me down is the continuing chorus of Americans that keep spouting meaningless jingoistic clichés and vague doublespeak to convince themselves and other Americans that our long-valued concept of due process is simply outdated and worthless.

John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration's early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.

“When you're fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven't faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.”

In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.

Heh. "Meddling."

Do none of the rest of you find that creepy?

Posted by crispy at 11:15 PM | Comments (4)

September 06, 2006

The Mariachi Gala

Monday night we went to see the Mariachi Gala, the formal performances of the Mariachi Festival, where they have three mariachi groups, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, and a guest performer. The event stretches from 8 pm to around midnight. The mariachi groups performing for us were Mariachi de América, Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano, and the group widely regarded as the best mariachi group in the world, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. The invited artist was Eugenia León.

It was the first time we've ever been to the Teatro Degollado, and that alone was fantastic. It was first opened in 1866, and is in great shape having been well-maintained and regularly renovated. The entryway to the theater has a beautiful chandelier, and for these events, atendees are greeted by an stunning array of lovely young ladies in very formal evening gowns who have been selected as queens of the festival or representatives of the corporate sponsors. For example, Miss Zeta Gas was in attendance, handing out little pocket shoe polishers.

We took our seats and marveled for a while at the artwork on the ceiling and what was surely hundreds of dollars worth of flowers ringing the stage before the show started, but it didn't take long before the emcee took the stage and brought on the orchestra, which played one song solo before being joined by each mariachi group in turn. Those combinations played for about an hour and a half. There was an intermission, then León sang with Mariachi los Camperos. She sang nine songs, and then was presented with a plaque (by the aforementioned festival queens). She left and each mariachi group played solo for a while, then they all got together and played a couple of songs. It was kind of like what I would imagine a show called Monsters of Mariachi to be like.

The atmosphere was of Mexican high-class to the hilt. While some people came in relatively casual dress, many were decked out in incredibly sharp suits and gowns. Yet demonstrating the relationship Mexicans have with mariachi music and musicians, people would call out to the performers on stage with comments, despite the high tone of the event. Mariachi is an integral part of la vida mexicana, perhaps not obviously on a daily basis for some, but every Mexican has grown up with it. Even if one thinks it is corny or old-fashioned, he still inevitably knows all the words to certain songs. Most people know many mariachi standards by heart.

Such was the case with Amor eterno, a sweet slow number which stood out as my favorite part of the performance at the gala. It was the most popular hit by a Spanish singer named Rocío Dúrcal, often called "the most Mexican of Spaniards" by Mexicans because she recorded a lot of Mexican standards throughout her career. Earlier this year, Dúral finally lost a long battle with various forms of cancer, and while this year's festival is dedicated to women, it is especially dedicated in memory of her.

At the gala, during the part of the program where Mariachi de América played with the orchestra, one of their members came out from backstage into the audience and sang the song under a follow spot. Then, after the chorus, he pointed the microphone at the audience and stopped singing. The musicians played along but only the audience in the theater sang, until at last the singer came back in for a last go at the chorus before turning the singing back over to the crowd for the "la la" part that ends the song, which they all knew to fade out slowly, as is done in the popular Juan Gabriel version of the song. It was breathtaking.

I was so unhinged by it that I cried, and I wasn't even drunk. That would be perhaps my biggest criticism of the gala, which I can't make with much seriousness: you can't sit around drinking tequila while they play. Usually, in the events where you have mariachi, you also have considerable drinking going on. It seems odd without it. Joseph suggested that next year I take a hidden flask of something so I can sip on it throughout the show, but I think I'll just have to get it out of my system before the week of the festival next year by going out to places that have the two together. It will be like a warm up to the big event.

Posted by crispy at 05:32 AM | Comments (3)