Claire and Marie-Helene Do Querétaro

With this post, I am trying something a little different. I have uploaded a number of photographs illustrating the goings-on described here on the Flickr website, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomwheaton/sets/72157594191228436/ Please visit the site to see the photos. It is easier and faster to upload them to Flickr than to spend the day or two to load them on the blog. Let me know if this is OK or just a pain in the neck.

On June 11, we headed to México City to meet Christiane’s buddies, Claire and Marie-Helene at the airport. As usual, we did not no know which door they would come out of. Gate 1 is usually for arrivals from Latin America, and Gates 2 and 3 are from other places, mostly the US. They even have television monitors indicating through which gate a certain flight’s passenger will be leaving customs. But they forget to tell the passengers, who can leave through any gate they want. Again, I waited between Gates 1 and 2, and Christiane waited at Gate 3 where they were supposed to be. They came out of Gate 2, of course. Fortunately, the entire concourse is not too large, and we located everyone.

Next stop was the money exchange offices to exchange some dollars for pesos. There must be a couple dozen, all with varying buy and sell rates, and long lines of people. This took over 20 minutes since passports are required and the people in the offices have to count the money (several times, it seems) and check to make sure nothing is counterfeit. As they were doing this, I went to an ATM (better rate than the exchange offices) and got some money out of our Bank of America account in less than a minute (no passports, no hassles). And so it goes.

We spent the next three days in México City. It was the first time that Christiane and I had seen it (expect to drive by on our to other places) in 30 plus years. It is now twice as large as it was then. Then, it had around 8-9 million people, now it is well over 20 million. We stayed at a hotel a couple of blocks from the Zocalo (main square) and since México had just played in its first World Cup match that day (and won), the place was pretty busy with large TV projection screens showing reruns. After a quick walk around, we went to the roof top restaurant for dinner on the southwest corner of the Zocalo where we could only afford a coffee years ago. Memories came flooding back to the accompaniment of indigenous music and the hubbub of the crowds down below. One of my main memories was teaching English to one of the higher ups in the city government in a building across the street at 8AM, two or three times a week.

Claire and Marie-Helene were afraid the food would be too spicey, and it was a little, but by the end of their trip they had gotten used to it, mostly.

Our hotel rooms were on the top floor of our hotel and had rooftop terraces with flowers and furniture, all for under $40 a night. We could just make out the dome of the cathedral on the Zocalo, which is under repair, as the cathedral is slowing sinking into the old lake bed. The main part of the cathedral is not open to the public yet.

We decided to take a tour bus trip around the city the next day. For around $10 you can take a double decker bus, and get off and on at stops around the city for a day. This sounded perfect. I really did not want a guided tour, and this would allow us to get around quickly and easily and with as much independence as we wanted. Or so we thought. It started at nine in the morning. The weather was sunny and cool, perfect weather for a tour. We headed to Avenida de la Reforma (main street in town), tree-lined, very wide and with most of the major monuments México City is known for. We got about two blocks down the road, and traffic came to a halt. Police were diverting all traffic onto side streets. For the next 5 to 6 hours, the center of México City was closed down due to a political demonstration and teachers’ (I believe) strike. We were shunted onto a parallel street and spent the next hour going a few blocks, ending up at Chapultepec Park, where we rode around while the driver figured out what to do. He finally dropped us off at the nearest subway station, and we got back downtown on our own. The small print on the tickets said that there were to be no refunds due to demonstrations, etc.!

Over the next couple of days we saw the Shrine of Guadalupe (patron saint of México) which is also sinking, even though it is on what was the edge of the lake; the National Museum of Anthropology (was the best museum in the world for my money); Coyoacan where Cortes and Frida Kahlo lived (at different times, of course); the heart of downtown; and the Templo Mayor where the Aztecs had their twin temples to Tlaloc, the rain god and Huitzilopochtle, Hummingbird on the Left, the god who needed all those beating hearts, and the Templo’s new museum (more focused, but probably better than the National Museum in terms of interpretation).

Marie-Helene’s hip replacement surgery was giving her trouble with all the stairs for the subway and walking around town, so we decided to head to Querétaro. Claire and Marie-Helene did not quite believe me when I kept commenting on how green everything was, but it really was, compared to a couple of months ago.

The next two weeks went by quickly. Marie-Helene stayed at our place, and Claire stayed at Shelley’s B&B down the street. Before we knew it, they knew most our neighbors, Mike M. with the Peace Corps, Carl and Francis, Shelley, the French girls in the next apartment, Julian and Pauline at the end of the patio, the waiter across the street at Hotel de la Merced, and half the street vendors in town.

We visited Bernal, which is becoming a must-do for our visitors. It has a great view of La Peña de Bernal (stone monolith that towers over the town), is cute like San Miguel but without the gringos, and has a wide selection of handicrafts, shops and restaurants. We go there early before many of the shops were open, and parked in the street which you cannot normally do. When we got back to the car three hours later it was hemmed in by a sidewalk café and a peddler’s wares.

Later that afternoon, we headed up the road to Cadereyta where Bob and Maria had told us about a cactus experiment station, Quinta Wagner. The tour was fascinating as there are over 4,200 species of cactus and succulents there. Some of them live for several hundred years and cannot even begin to procreate until they are 150 years old. At the end we all got a free cactus, and headed next door to their restaurant for lunch and the tail end of a World Cup match, France against someone else. We ran into some friends from Querétaro, Elvira and Ramon and their daughter, small world.

Another day we headed to San Miguel to show them how the other half lives. As the “girls” went off shopping, I figured I would buy a paper and have some coffee while waiting. Much to my surprise the newspaper guy wanted two pesos more for the paper than the advertised price or the price I normally pay. He became rather vocal about it and attracted the attention of the folks in the cafes. It was like he took an immediate dislike to me simply because I am a gringo. This does not happen in Querétaro. We had lunch in a nice little café (full of Gringos) up the street, and headed out of town to Dolores Hidalgo where Father Hidalgo gave the grito, cry of independence, in 1810. We stopped at some of the talavera (often called faience in the US) ceramic shops and bought some trinkets to take back to the states. People were delightful, and actually seemed to want our money, but there were no gringos.

One Thursday after we visited Santa Rosa church we stuck around for the year end dance program of a youth folk dance group. They had dances from all over México, and were really good. The audience was mostly parents, which is too bad, because they deserved more recognition.

On the first Saturday, we took everyone to see the house we are trying to buy. This was the first chance for our architect, Miguel C., to see it and give us his opinion on what it would cost to fix it up. The house is 150-200 years old, and has never been really modernized. We met Jaime, the agent who found us the apartment we are living in, and the owner, Alberto G., at the house. Miguel’s first words when we went inside were, “me gusta”, actually more like “meeee guuuusta!” “I like it”. It definitely has possibilities, but will need a lot of work, too. The patio is paved with 6 inch thick cantera (the rose colored stone, quarried in the nearby hills). The floors are “Mexican” tile and can be ground flat again and sealed. The ceilings are about 16 feet high with the original vigas, or beams, exposed. Those in the living room are carved with two parallel groves along their length. The kitchen has an old, perhaps the original, stove and dry sink with no running water or drains. The stove is a large concrete/stone counter more recently covered in dark red tiles. Along the front of the counter were two holes, since filled in, where the cooking fires were stoked. There were two large round holes, also filled in, on the top of the counter to place cooking pots and let the smoke out. There is no chimney, the smoke just went out the window. If we can ever convince the owner to sell we will keep the set-up as close as possible to its original condition with the addition of water, electricity and drains, and some kind of cupboards.

The week after we visited the house, the owner raised the price, so we are now trying to negotiate it back to his original price. He claims that a Mexican friend from Atlanta (of all places!) just happened to drop by and offered him $7,000 US more than what he was asking. I didn’t just drop off a turnip truck, but there may not be much we can do about it. His “friend” will be getting back to him on July 10, so we are just going to wait and see what happens.

The last week, we did a little local sightseeing. We visited the location of the old Querétaro airport on the top of a hill overlooking the city. We then had brunch (great being retired) at the Holiday Inn which has a great view of the entire city. We also visited Apaseo, the town where we bought our furniture. Claire bought an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Fortunately she does not have an apartment here or we would have undoubtedly been loaded down with furniture too.

On the last evening, we headed to the Casa de Faldon cultural center to listen to a friend (Ramon, whom we had met the previous weekend in Cadereyta) play the guitar. We took along Mike M. Christiane and I thought Ramon would be accompanying some singers or poetry readings, but things turned out a little differently. We arrived on time, like the gringos we are, and had some great Oaxaca tamales as we waited for things to start. Marie-Helene’s tamale did not agree with her, but the rest of us were all right. The evening began with people from the audience, who all seemed to know each other, getting up and singing, playing the piano, or whatever. The music was, in a word, awful. But they got a rousing reception and calls for encores. Mike and I looked at each other like what the heck have we gotten into. He swears that the 80 year old lady playing the piano was wearing gloves. But they were really, really into it, and the audience was appreciative
.

We felt that we could not leave because Ramon had not played, and I was beginning to wonder what he would be like. After about an hour of this, Ramon got up on stage. He set up a tambourine stand, and put on a harmonica brace around his neck, and sat down with his guitar. We waited in breathless anticipation. We need not have worried. He sang a bunch of songs from funny ones about driving in México City to a call and response type song from Yucatan, that had us laughing even though we kept missing the punchlines. In the latter, he was helped, extemporaneously, by a 98 year old audience member who just wandered up on the stage. Ramon pointed us out and sang a song just for us, so of course we could not leave until the end. Everything was in tune and really very good. Ramon is an engineer who always wanted to be on stage, I suspect.

It was like a bunch of vaudevillians getting together and remembering the old days. When Ramon finished, the older fellow, who had been sitting at the table right in front of me, took over with his ventriloquism act. His great grandson had brought in a suitcase earlier in the evening, and I wondered what was in it, a dummy of course. His jokes were all off-color and he had every one in stitches. We were also treated to 1930’s style dramatic poetry readings by an 88 year old poetess and actress (she might have been a vaudevillian too). They were followed by a guitar player who was celebrating his birthday and who played 1960s style songs in English and French just for us. His wife also sang. And by about halfway through it dawned on me what this was all about.

It is a real community of people who love each other and encouraged each other, and just liked being together to have a good time. The old folks were helped by the younger ones, everyone got encores (otra! otra!), rum and coke was being passed around surreptiously, there were inside jokes, and we were accepted, even if we were the only gringos there (again). This happens the last Saturday of every month, and you can tell that the old folks really look forward to it. We plan on making this one of our regular monthly events, thanks to Ramon and Elvira.

Sunday morning, the “girls” left. Claire had one more suitcase than she started with, and it was heavier than lead. We dropped them off at the bus station, and they arrived back in Altanta, safe and sound, except for the left-over effects of the tamales.