Ah, Tepoztlàn

Tepoztlàn is a bit like the Vermont of Mexico. It´s surrounded by majestic mountains and Tarot card readers. It´s the ice cream capital of Mexico, and has a really great food and crafts market. I like Vermont, and I like Tepoztlàn .
Tepoztlàn is also small,enjoyably walkable. All the roads are cobbled, and they are really bumpy and not very car friendly, but pretty foot friendly. Also it´s consistently mildly warm and sunny. There`s lot`s of quirky architecture that I like to peer at as I walk around.
I have been taking more Spanish classes at the Spanish Cat in the mornings. There is one other person in my class, a woman from Denmark. The classes are great, y he pensado en español. I teach a five year old English, which is actually also another chance to practice my Spanish. I also go to ceramics classes. They are in some kind of artist housing co-op. Lot´s of sassy, friendly people attend. I`m about an hour south of Mexico City, so at some point I´ll take the bus in and visit lots of museums. That´s all for now, time for dinner!

The piñata I made for New Years

















The Scorpion in my sink

So I headed up to San Miguel, all excited for a mecca of art. Unfortunately, in this situation "artistic" just meant "rich". It´s a bit like what I imagine a country club to be like. So I looped on back to Tepoztlan. I had made a handy giant list of cheap apartments, casitas, and bungalows. After five nights of sleeping in various hotels, I decided that I was done with that and would just find an apartment that day. I stashed my bag at the bus station, and started calling the places on my list. I was a bit confused about the pay phones. When you dial, they make either a long beep, and short beep, or an esoteric message. So I went to a coffee place to check their bulletin board for new postings, and ask how the phones work. After that I had much better success on reaching people. I contacted one close by who said I could go look at the place right then. I went down to look at it. It was a pretty cute little teeny houselit. I told him I´d think about it, and called and visited a couple other places. I went down to Quinta Piedra to visit Jack and see if he knew of any leads, and visit Anne. The little casita was the best option, so I calld back and said I´d take it. The same guy met me there, gave me keys, and I paid him. I was sitting in my new living room, talking to Anne, about an hour later, when someone peered through my door. Assuming he was the resident of the casita next door, I said "Hi! I´m your new neighbor!"
He looked puzzled. "Who rented this place to you?" He asked.
"Um..Fernando?" I said. He now looked furious.
"He has no right to rent this place! He´s not the owner!"
"Oh, who´s the owner?" I asked.
"I am." He said "And I have someone coming for it tomorrow!"

So I went over to his casita so we could call Fernando. I gave him the number, and he yelled at him a bit and then hung up. I asked if I could call him also, and he said sure. Fernando said he was coming right over. I relayed the message to the owner, and he said I would have to speak to him from the other side of the gate, as he hates Fernando. I was beginning to get worried about the money I had paid for the place, as well as where I would stay that night. Fernando arrived with someone else, and the other person talked to the owner while I talked to Fernando outside on the issue of giving my money back. He did give it back to me, and Anne and I said we were leaving. We went around the corner, being bemused for a few minutes until Fernando and the other guy left. I headed back to the bungalow, and the owner asked if I had anywhere to stay that night. When I told him no, he said I could stay there. He said I was very nice and admired my Paulo Coehlo book on the table. He said "Well I have someone looking at the place tomorrow. You´ll have to take out all your things then. But you can put them in my place and maybe..."

I slept fretfully, and packed my bag in the morning. I brought it over, and spoke with the owner, who is an artist, for a bit. He told me that if the other person didn´t rent it, he would rent it to me. I spent the morning frantically calling and finding other places, a couple of which were viable, but much more expensive. I went back in the afternoon (getting lost on my way), and was tentatively excited to see that he had put my backpack in the vacant casita. He told me that the other guy was trying living somewhere else, so he would rent it to me! He had put in a pot and a pan and a plate and made the bed. The attached picture is of the little living and dining rooms. The neighborhood is also quite nice, in all my walking I discovered lot of little tiendas and fruit vendors, as well as many doors pronouncing art classes within. After a couple days of not calling anyone or walking anywhere, I´ll go check those out.

The Christmas update

We are spending our Christmas at Jardin del Unicornio'La Quinta Piedra, where we have been working. It`s a pretty great project; a series of mansions that were abandoned in 1994, and are being turned into a farm and alternative school. We take care of the bunnies, plant neem trees, and shovel dirt out of the tennis court for an event on New Years. It`s hot here, and even I am getting slightly tan. We`re in Tepoztlàn, in Morelos, about an hour south of Mexico city. We`re a bit of a ways off from the town, which my Lonely Planet warned me that it had a New Age onslaught after rerported UFO sightings. While it is slightly on the wacky side, it`s pretty beautiful, and even has an organic market.
We leave here in early January, at which point Madeline is going to language school in Oaxaca, Anne`s going back to language school in San Cristobal, and I`m going to metal art scool in San Miguel.
For Christmas, we caught a duck from the pond (almost dry now as it`s the dry season) and slaughtered it. Since Christmas Eve is the bigger event than Christmas, we had a nice feast last night, with roast chicken, bread and bread pudding, a nice rice stuffing, and cheese. Today we`re having the duck with sauteed onions and mushrooms from the farm and carrot cake.
Computer time is precious here, and everyone else is waiting to use it, so that`s it for now. The mansions are quite interesting and best described through photos, which I`ll put up soon.

When we arrived in San Cristobal, we had taken an overnight bus from Campeche. We checked into a hostal, ravenous, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. They said breakfast was at eight, and we walked off, bewildered, because our watches said it was eight. After a couple more incidents, we figured we must have gone through a time zone in the night, and dutifully set our watches. It wasn´t until a couple bouts of confusion coordinating with people in the U.S that we realized we had in fact not gone through a time zone, we just went through daylight savings time, as had the US!
I say this because it has come to my attention that yesterday was not Thanksgiving, as we had all believed. I hope that we´ve at least understood the results of the presidential election coreectly.

holiday update

Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., but there´s plenty of celebration here, as it´s the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and Anne´s birthday. Tonight I am going to attempt to make her a cake out of a stack of fried tortillas, carmelized sugar, and sweetened condensed milk. Yesterday, when I left the grocery store, there was a giant parade of children dancing and doing acrobatics for the day of the Mexican Revolution. I put down my groceries and watched for a bit.

We wil be heading to Veracruz on November 25, to work with Finca Tres Mundos for about ten days. That farm does cob building and makes yogurt, marmalade, and chocolate. Should be another huge adventure.