Weekending

NB: I wrote this post a little while ago but wanted to dig up photos and edit out some of the long-windedness before I published. Well, one out of two ain’t bad! However, the weekend in question is actually a couple of weekends ago now.

I’m aware that my blog hasn’t been up to much in the way of insights into, or even descriptions of, my life in Mexico. Mostly, I think, because there is so much that for me is odd, funny, exciting, interesting, wonderful, and more odd, that new things are always happening that seem worth writing about, and I never catch up with myself. Or, alternatively, because I am lame.

So, in the manner of a primary school Monday morning, I am going to write about what I did last weekend. Only I don’t have any wax crayons to draw a picture.

On Friday, I worked until late, and it rained, and I was tired and ill. So instead of going to watch a colleague doing pre-Hispanic dances in his pueblo, I went home and quietly enjoyed being by myself. Then I hung out for a bit with some friends (other youthful types on campus) who were also tired and lacklustre and every word anyone said irritated me entirely irrationally.

And so I went home and screwed up my energy and courage and called a taxi and went out to dance in a very insalubrious club – a big box full of heat and smoke and bodies and beats. I can pretty much guarantee I was the only white girl in the place, and the only person lip-synching along to ‘Saturday Night’ by the Underdog Project (which I love, shamefacedly and sentimentally, and was the best tune of the night amongst a parade of dull, indistinguishable electronica). It was all endless identical beats and hot, sweating skin, like a club anywhere… until, this being Mexico, and always surprising, always odd, out comes the mariachi band sometime in the wee hours, complete with shiny-buttoned uniforms and shiny trumpets, and everyone is suddenly dancing to popular norteño tunes, closely-coupled. It’s difficult to express what a weird contrast these two styles are, but to give you an idea here is one of the most popular norteños (and one of my favourites – the chorus means more or less “I love you the way you are”):


I got inevitably a bit perved on by random drunk guys. I greeted and smiled awkwardly at my friend’s friends, and even more awkwardly at his theatre professor. We held hands, me and a beautiful boy in the dark, as he drew me out of the way of people pushing past, or led me onto the dance floor, and I didn’t know if it meant anything. But it made me happy.


On Saturday, I felt like I nearly died getting up in the morning to buy vegetables from Jesus (tee hee). I got ready to face the world v e r y s l o w l y indeed. When I finally got my act together I went to collect my test results from the clinic (nothing terrible, I just had a weird stomach thing that took a long time to shift. You have no dignity left when you have had to be in the same room as a woman labelling your poo samples. Haha, MS Word doesn’t have the word poo in its dictionary, but it does have pueblo. Now that is a bizarre level of prudery. Anyway…) and then pootled on up to the nearest of the many pueblos around here named San Miguel, all of which were having big St Michael’s day fiestas, just because it seemed like a shame not to go and have a look.

The streets leading up to the church were full of stalls selling festive things: special biscuits and sweet breads, nuts and candies and candied nuts, toys and cowboy hats. In the main square, entered through floral archways, a mariachi band played on one stage, while the next band’s instruments were set up ready on another. On the other side of the church, dormant fairground rides waited to let their buzz and lights and noise loose on the evening. In the garden of the church, biers decorated with flowers were on display, waiting to carry each of the churches saints through the town. The garden was the perfect habitat for them, brightly painted and brilliant with flowers. The front of the church itself was entirely decorated with a figure of San Miguel, surrounded by fish and starfish and dolphins and mermaids (I’m not entirely sure why), all made up of flowers. The inside of the church took your breath away even more; it was literally full of flowers, thousands and thousands of lilies covering each pillar and surrounding each saint’s niche, filling the air with their scent as people waited patiently in line to light candles and offer a few coins and their prayers to San Miguel.

And, the best of all these things, the entire town was swathed in bunting in all the colours of the rainbow, which I honestly think is one of the loveliest things I have ever seen.

A saint's bier (if bier is the right word? Litter maybe?):

Looking up at the front of the church:

Inside the church:

Another saint-carrier, in the shape of a swan, with bizarre blonde mermaids on the church wall behind:

Fairground rides:

Flags:

As pretty as San Miguel gets:

More pictures of the flags, taken on a sunnier day, from inside someone else's car while driving through:

On the combi on the way back into town I gazed out of the window at cactuses and agaves and bright yellow ‘Mexican sunflowers’ – huge yellow daisies really – and tangles of smaller daisies in pink and white all growing in scrubby nowhere land beyond the roadside. I thought about how I barely notice huge cactuses and agaves anymore, and how strange it is that for a British person – and for me when I arrived – they are strange and exotic and enormously striking. It’s rather melancholy that sometime – soon, really – they won’t be ordinary things outside the bus window for me either. It’s odd to think of them not being part of the general background. I wonder if they will always be something I don’t really notice anymore, something part of my personal internal landscape of the ordinary, or if in a few years time they’ll once again be something to stare at and exclaim over.

In town I ran errands, and went to buy a gift for a friend’s birthday in one of the town’s two glass factories, by far my favourite of the two – a dusty, higgledy-piggledy Aladdin’s cave of glass. Going there is always a tremendous pleasure for me. It is fascinating and beautiful and strangely peaceful, like a half-forgotten church, and absolutely deserves its own entry, but for now here is a picture I took that I like very much:

In the evening I made strawberry fool and dug out my black lace tights and went off to a party, a sort-of-goodbye party for my boss, who I wish wasn’t leaving, but that’s another story. And I’m sure that it was an excellent party, only a motley group of us were leaving early. And this was the big event of the night: we had tickets for a hot salsa concert – Grupo Niche, a genuine big-name, one of the world’s best known salsa groups, all the way from Colombia; La Sonora Dinamita, a Colombian cumbia group; and Maelo Ruiz, a pretty big cheese in Salsa from Puerto Rico – all performing only a few miles away.

Well, I don’t know what I was expecting from the venue, but it wasn’t an enormous aircraft hanger set in a vast expanse of concrete, open to the night air. And our seats in the ‘VIP area’? Stools at rickety wooden tables, on rickety wooden balconies on either side of the hangar (though I was glad to have them rather than be trying to stick to my friends in the thousands-strong crowd below). It soon became clear that we needn’t have left early, as the crowd gradually gradually grew and the evening didn’t really start for a few hours. We danced a bit, and then danced some more to the salsa playing over the speakers; the first support band were terrible, but the second I liked, with their crazy pelvic thrusts and ridiculous dancing and energetic merengue.

This being Mexico, and always surprising, always odd, the main acts were preceded by a blast of electronica as a number of neon-clad figures ran onto the stage, now lit with UV, to treat us to some bizarre high-octane dance routines before disappearing like an acid-fuelled dream. And then, finally, after endless fiddling with the mikes and the amps and all that jazz, with the crowd getting more and more impatient, whistling angrily, Grupo Niche appeared. And the sad thing is the sad quality was truly terrible. So I can say I’ve seen the famous Grupo Niche live, but I’m not sure I can say I’ve heard them.

The Niche bus arrives - through the crowd!:

The famous Group Niche:

I found it really surreal that the crowd of thousands were almost all dancing during the recorded salsa before and between the bands, but hardly anyone danced while they were playing (though our group did). I mean, how cool is it to say that you’ve danced to Grupo Niche? I’m not sure if it was out of respect for the music, or disgust at the sound quality, but the way I see it salsa is for dancing to – especially if you can’t hear the fine details all too well!

Half our group left during a hiatus halfway through Grupo Niche (including the other non-Latinos, and while I dislike stereotypes I do think it tends to be more of a Western trait to be disappointed when things aren’t how you imagined them, and unable just to enjoy things as they are). After that things did actually get better. They lowered the volume, which diminished the feedback, and we danced anyway, including a conga line around our table. And I danced a lot with a certain person – a different boy, but equally confusing and unreadable.

Then a lot more restless waiting, and Sonora Dinamita finally came on. For me they instantly lit up the stage. They were vibrant, sexy, exciting, full of energy – you just had to get up and dance. I absolutely loved them, but I only got to dance a couple of songs. My companions wanted to head off and so we left – me dancing all the way to the carpark and wishing I could stay. (When I say carpark, I mean patch of weedy wasteground half-full of rusting trucks. What else?) We hadn’t even heard the final act – and it was gone 3am. And then, dark, empty roads; remembering I hadn’t eaten properly all day and that might be contributing to my spinning head; tired, perhaps intimate conversation in Spanish; food; and sleep.


On Sunday I didn’t even remember I’d planned to do some work as I sleepwalked my way into the day, and made another strawberry fool for another party – this time a tea party to say goodbye to a good friend and colleague. A very different kind of party: all international staff, tea and cake, adult conversation. I found myself rather incapable of normal sociable behaviour, wrapped in a tired bubble of my own abstraction, so I ate heaps of delicious goodies and sat on the grass watching the kids playing the goat, which was a pleasure. The feeling of warm concrete under bare feet made me happy, and later on so did the stars. We talked into the evening, and then some of us relocated and talked some more, and I was there but also not really there at all.