They're getting bigger...

Jenne's prediction was, of course, absolutely correct: we have about a million pictures of the cats now. And I finally got around to organizing them! I'll put up a Mexico album soon as well, but for now, you've got the cats!!

http://picasaweb.google.com/DyaniJohns/Cats

In other news, I quit my job! Hooray! I will now be even more sedentary, but I won't have to deal with my dumb boss's ambiguous emails and irritating policies any more. Woo! I'm planning to read all of the books on my shelves, get in shape for biking and do yoga and pilates on a regular basis. We'll see how that goes!

Official Names

We finally thought of a middle name for Milton, so now we have their official names:

Sir Darwin Sniffles Blake
Lord Milton Showboat Wallace

We want to get them sepia toned portraits in fancy picture frames with their names inscribed on little gold plates.... It would be ideal if they could be wearing spectacles, or possibly a monocle for Lord Milton...

Photos

Mexico 1 and 2:

http://skidmore.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2033576&l=595f5&id=12203734

http://skidmore.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2033578&l=234a6&id=12203734

Kittens:

http://skidmore.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2033583&l=abef1&id=12203734

Kittens!!

I'm home now, so this will be my last post for this blog, unless I change the name.... The trip back was fine, but I missed my connection in LA and had to wait about 4 hours for the next flight. I was no big surprise that I missed the connection--I only had an hour to go through customs, get my bag, walk--or rather run--from terminal 3 to terminal 7 (at the opposite end of the airport, of course), go back through security and then find my gate... Not a chance. I wish that I had just decided that it wasn't possible, and not tried to make it because then I wouldn't have gotten so flustered and upset over missing it after literally sprinting the mile between terminals and arriving all sweaty... but oh well! When I re-booked I went to Starbucks and got a nice big cup of peppermint tea, and just sat to calm down for a while.

Conor had told me on the phone that there was a big surprise waiting for me at home, and though I had tried and tried to think of what it might be, I didn't have any inkling until we got to the door. Conor said, "Ok, you go in first, but be careful opening the door." At that point, I gasped, and when I opened the door, there were two adorable kittens waiting for me!!! We had talked about how great it would be to have pets (dogs or cats), but felt like we probably shouldn't get them because we're going to move again at the end of the year. We had seen the SPCA tent set up at the farmers market a week or two before going to Mexico, and the kittens were just so cute! So what a wonderful thing to come home to!! We haven't decided totally on names yet, but Conor was thinking of naming them Darwin and Wallace, which I like (especially for the cat we want to name Darwin), but can't help feeling is just to science-nerdy... SO then we decided that they should both have long official names, and that they can both have science-y names if they both get to have literature-nerd names too! So, what we have right now is Sir Darwin Sniffles Blake for the gray one and Sir Milton Wallace for the creamsicle colored one (we haven't come up with a good middle name for Milton Wallace yet--Sniffles is because Darwin sniffles a lot. He was the runt, and so he's got a lot more funny traits right now than Milton. I'm sure that eventually we'll think of something good as a middle name for Milton!). Here are some photos:


I'm going to put more pictures of my trip up soon, in flicker or on facebook, so I'll post a link when I've got it all set up!

Thoughts on Mormonism

Last night at cena my host father, Sergio, asked me if I had a religion. It’s a bit of a loaded question in this country… But I told him the truth (that I don’t have one…) and he didn’t seem to mind. I told him also that my parents were a little like Buddhists (I don’t quite have the words to explain the ashram in Spanish…) and he thought that was funny. Then he launched in to a story about how when he was young, his grandmother wanted him to be a Catholic priest. He attended the seminary for 13 (I think) years, and then, when he was 18 he decided to become a Mormon. He said that some of the priests were good men, but that a lot of them were “un poco más mal”—what I gather to be his way of saying that they were corrupt, and he said that he had a lot of doubts that the Catholic faith couldn’t answer for him. He was attracted to what life outside of the church could offer him, and so he decided to take another path.

The he told me all about how much work it is to be a Mormon—it sounded to me (though I didn’t catch everything) like he was an administrator in the church in some way, and possibly a missionary of some kind. He’s traveled extensively to all parts of Mexico, and has been to the US on church business something like 11 times. These trips have been over long weekends, and he said that at the peak he was doing this twice a month. He would go and have meetings—I suppose with other church administrators in other places—but also he said that he was involved in helping families in three ways: spiritually, mentally and physically. I assume that means that he helped them to understand how to apply the Mormon faith to their everyday lives. He said that it’s been a hard life—no alcohol, no caffeine etc, and other things, but it seems that he’s come through wonderfully. He said that it was always most important to him that relations within his family were good, because otherwise, how could he go and speak to other families and give them advice on how to live their lives? As far as I can tell, seeing only brief interactions with the extended family, he’s done a very good job of achieving that goal.

Sergio continues to be a very interesting man, with a great energy and sense of humor. I’ll miss our conversations…

It's almost time to come home! I'm ready and not ready... as per usual. I feel like I'm just getting the hang of conversation, but I'm also kinda tired of Mexico. I want to come back some time to visit!

Sniffly

I forgot to write about the visit to the orphanage last Thursday. I was anticipating that it was going to be depressing, or that I was going to hear about all kinds of things that would make me sad, but it was just the reverse! It's a great organization called Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos—it's mission is more about giving kids a home, a family and unconditional love than it is about getting them adopted or out to families. I think that people do adopt the children, but a lot of them stay at the orphanage until they graduate from high school (the orphanage has a whole school system, k-12, and if the kids make the grades, they help them go to university). After they graduate, they give two years of service back to the orphanage, working in the little sections as something like dorm mothers and fathers, role models for the younger kids, or nurses and teachers. It's like they're repaying what they were given when they were little. All the kids have clothes, they have a whole farm and orchard attached where they grow corn to feed their pigs and chickens and veggies in a green house to try and get the kids of a starch and meat only diet. I think the only thing that comes in from outside is milk and yogurt. The kids are taught how to farm, do crafts and trade and other skills so that they can get a job more easily when they graduate, if they don’t want to go on to the university. They survive on donations, and at some point a wealthy donor gave them the money for a swimming pool and a soccer/basketball/game court/area. The kids all seem pretty happy, and well fed. It's sooooooo wonderful to know that there's something like that going on in this country!

They also have 8 other "homes" (they call them houses or homes instead of orphanages, because they really are different than orphanages...) in Nicaragua, Guatemala.. and a whole bunch of other South American countries. The guy who gave our tour was an American who came to volunteer for a year and stayed for 3... Also, they have this program where you can be a sponsor for a kid--you give some amount, like $25 (or more) per month, and you write letters back and forth with them. And then there are visitor days where you can go visit the kid you sponsor. Our tour guide was saying that people always want to sponsor the littlest, cutest kids, but that they try to spread the sponsors around to all the kids because what they lack the most is personal, individual attention (for monetary purposes there's a pretty small staff). I think I’m going to do it!

My trips this weekend were really good, but I am exhausted and I have a cold. grr. On Saturday I went to Mexico City with a professor from St. Catherine's, a school that was doing a program at Cemenahuac, and with two girls from Trinidad and Tobago who arrived the same day as me. They're all really nice, and interesting, but man, I did not get the trip that I thought I was going to. Vivian, one of the Cemenahuac staff convinced me to go, even though I was feeling like I didn't want to--she told me that it wouldn't be that much driving and that it was totally worth it. This was not the case: I thought I would get to sleep in a bit, but we left from the bus station on the 9:30 bus (so I had to be there at 9, which means that I got up at 7 which is the time I've been getting up the whole time I've been here...), and then we were on the bus for an hour and a half. And then we spent 3 hours in the Saturday Bazar, which was cool, but not that great--just like other market places I've seen. There was some really beautiful art there; one piece which was kind of like a Japanese wave print, and SO beautiful... I wanted to buy it, but it was too big to transport, and I didn't even ask how much it was being sold for. I would have taken a picture, but we weren't allowed. Within that three hours we had lunch, and then we were supposed to go to Diego Rivera's house at 2:00, then Frida Kahlo's at 3:00. We didn't get to Rivera's house until at least 3:30 because the girls from T&T were shopping, and Pamela (the professor) is just about the slowest walker around. I was ready to leave the Bazar at about 1:30, but we didn't get in the cab until 3:30. Arg! I was sure that I'd get back to Cuernavaca by 6 or 6:30, but we didn't get back until 8:30! Awful! And I ONLY went because Vivian said it wouldn't be that involved, wouldn't be that much driving. Bullshit. I could have spent the whole day in Rivera's and Frida's houses, but instead we had to rush through so that we wouldn't be getting back too late. Ah well. I did see some beautiful things.

Then, on Sunday, I had to get up early again to go to Teotihuacan (the link is to a good site about the archaeology and history of the pyramids), which was incredible. It’s north of Mexico City, so it was even more driving than the Saturday Bazar, but it was all in a bus, and we had a great guide (the same guy I went to Xochicalco with last weekend). The major down fall of the trip was that we stopped at the cathedral of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the way back from the pyramids. We were all exhausted and happy after the adventures at the pyramids, and then Charlie (the guide) made us get off the bus in Mexico City at 6:30 pm and stand outside in the cold (not really cold, just cold because we weren't properly dressed) for half an hour while he talked about the history of the cathedral (all very interesting, but man, at that point, I just did not care AT ALL). Then we went inside and saw the relic--a cape of the Mayan (?) peasant, Juan Diego, who the virgin appeared to and made an image of herself on his cape. He was later sainted. etc. And we listened to Charlie talk for another half an hour. By that time my cold was really feeling horrible (from walking all day and then standing out in the cold), and when we got back on the bus, there was a window about three seats in front of me the didn't close all the way (or someone had it open), and so I was cold for the whole hour and a half ride back to Cuernavaca from Mexico City, with no dinner, and worried that I wouldn't get any that night. I didn't get back home until a little after 10! When I got there, Celia, my house mom, was waiting up for me, and she made me tortitas (hard taco shells with beans, cheese, lettuce and jalapenos) and a cup of hot chocolate. She's so great! It almost made up for the bad end of the trip, but not quite....=)

My teacher this week has a different teaching style, but she's making me talk more, which is great, because that's the thing I need the most help with. I can read and write just fine, and I really understand most of what people say at this point, but I still have a hard time speaking. It gets a little better each day.... I have to remind myself not to get flustered when I make a mistake. Sometimes I can go on for a while without tripping up, but other times I can still barely get a word out! It's a slow thing, and one more week, unfortunately, isn't going to get me there. Ah well. I'm definitely going to try to keep it up when I get home.

Things I never knew...

I can't believe it's already Friday! I only have a week left! We have an exam each Friday to see how you progressed through the week and luckily, mine didn't seem very hard, even though everyone was talking about how difficult their exams were... I guess I'm also not stressed about it because my score does not matter AT ALL. What a nice feeling!

I'll have a new teacher on Monday, which is a bit sad... I really like the one I have now, but we'll see. I hope my next teacher is as good as the one I had this week.

I keep finding out all kinds of things about Sally; she and her husband have traveled all around the world--they were in India and Afghanistan in the 60's and 70's, with US governmental aid organizations, and she says that looking back on it she realizes how much of the time the US government had agendas utterly apart from what they were supposedly doing to help people. When I first met Sally, I was pretty sure that she was a conservative Connecticut up-tight Tupperware party sort of person who liked to travel on package tours... The reality is quite different! She's very liberal, and has been to so many places...She's a bit awkward socially, but she has some very interesting opinions and stories to share if you get her talking. What a surprise! She, however, is leaving tomorrow. I guess that's the thing about a school that starts a new session every Monday.

Sergio, my homestay dad, also is full of surprises, aside from being Mormon... He loves to dance (and knows all of the discos in Cuernavaca), he loves the ocean, especially when the waves are big and rough. He loves roller-coasters and extreme sports, and racket ball. Mind you, he can't be any younger than 60 and may be significantly older than that.... And he's such a sweetheart! His wife cooks comida, but he makes desayuno (breakfast) and cena (dinner) for us each day, and I've talked with him quite a bit more than with his wife.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Saturday market in the south of Mexico City, and then to Diego River's house, and Frida Kahlo's house--it's kind of an art tour with one of the professors from the St. Catherine's College program, but there were only two other girls who wanted to go, so we get the art historian all to ourselves!

Sunday is Teotihuacan, the famous pyramids in Mexico. If you're interested, google it (there's a ton of info).

Comida

Class has been going beautifully—I’m one on one with my teacher, and she’s great! I’m learning a lot about Mexican culture, and it’s great to be able to go at my own pace. We cover a lot in each 4 hour session, so I already feel like I’ve been here a week even though this was only my second day of class!

Yesterday I went down to the zocalo (main square) after comida (like lunch, but more food and at 2:30 or 3:00 p.m.--also, the food has been uniformally glorious since coming to south-central Mexico. What'll I do when I go home...?) and sat at a little café for a few hours, studying verbs. I get the feeling that I won’t be doing much besides studying while I’m here, which is just fine with me! I have been drinking way more coffee than I should. Oh well…. it’s so good and cheap here!

I’ve only met a few people so far, but I already miss the group from Tepoztlán. We all were on the same wavelength, and interested in the same things, but now at Cemanahuac I’m just one of many students who all seem to be here for disparate reasons (or who are with a school group who already know each other and so don’t talk to any one else). It’s possible that I’ll be in a class with other people next week, but the fact that I’m all by myself compounds the feeling that I’m not going to meet a lot of people on this part of my trip. This is also ok with me. I’m really here to learn!

On Thursday I’m going on a trip to an orphanage, and then on Saturday to Teotihuacan, the pyramids of the sun and the moon which are the second largest in the world after those in Egypt. I think I’m going to try to go to a nearby spa-town on Sunday to get a massage…..woo!

Whew!

Well, so much for updating my blog everyday, eh? It was a whirlwind week, and very wonderful. Here are the highlights:

Tuesday:

Moros, one of the museums in Cuernavaca, had an excellent collection of Frida Kahlos and Diego Riveras (including the famous one of the two indigenous women kneeling in front of easter lilies). It also had some great modern art, like a video of a fox trotting through the National Gallery in London; our tour guide told us that the same artist did another video, but this time with a flock of sheep that got progressively smaller throughout the video as though the sheep were one by one staying behind in the museum (possibly in the Louvre, but I can’t remember if that’s right or not).

The dinner at Hotel Bajo del Volcan (Under the Volcano) was very tasty, but the event itself was long and not very well organized. The table of poets ended up writing a joint poem instead of paying attention…i.e. one person writes a line and then passes it on. It was all we could do to keep from bursting out laughing during the very serious reading…

Wednesday:

Temazcal and the “Student” reading—Temazcal is a spiritual cleansing in an adobe sweat lodge. People hyped it to be way hotter than they made it for us, but it was still a great experience; the guy who was facilitating did a ceremonial cleansing before we went in, saying prayers over us, and then (women in one lodge, men in the other) we all crawled naked into this little hole in the hut, were given eucalyptus branches to fan the hot air down onto us, and lay down on a bed of eucalyptus. We also rubbed aloe onto ourselves. Quite the experience.

That evening was the student reading, which I put in quotes because it really didn’t focus much on the students…. Carolyn’s husband Harry presented his work; he’s a photographer of immense skill and sensitivity, and he and Carolyn have been in war zones around the world, so the show was intense to say the least. Harry’s talk through out the show was really amazing, emphasizing the importance of witnessing these events, and finding a way to educate others about atrocities going on in other countries without making those citizens voiceless victims. It is truly appalling what our country has been responsible for in the past (and the present!!!), and almost equally appalling how easy it is for us (as American citizens being fed what the press wants us to see) to blindly support perpetrators of massacres and violence. Harry’s photos are not only documentation—he has an eye for beauty within pain, and has captured some of the most heart-wrenching expressions on people’s faces in his photographs. I was deeply affected by his show.

So, as you might have guessed, a bit of a hard act to follow, no? A few people read, but the focus of the conversation was elsewhere. I read one poem, and I would say about 6 other people read (out of 10 poets, and at least 10 or 12 fiction writers…), but none the less, the house we used was beautiful and eccentric and the evening was lovely—they just shouldn’t have called it the student reading!

Thursday:

By Thursday, I think we were all getting pretty tired. That evening was a reading by Tomas Segovia, one of the greatest living Mexican poets. Since the event was in Spanish, not many people went, but I decided that since I’m here to learn, I might as well hear (tee hee) as much Spanish as possible. Mr. Segovia turned out to be quite a wonderful presence, and he talked and lectured a bunch more than he read; the “reading” was, in effect, a lecture on prosody and poetic forms with a few poems thrown in to demonstrate his point. I was surprised at how much I could understand (the poems were hard), and I got a lot from the lecture, mostly (I think) because so much of the terminology of form, syllabics and prosody are cognates in Spanish (so the words sound like the ones in English). The evening was a success!

Friday:

We did workshop differently than we had been on Friday because we decided as a group that it was important for us each to have some one on one time with Carolyn. So, we carried on as usual (discussing poems and manuscript projects in the order we had been using all week), but without Carolyn leading, and each of us went to talk to her for 20 minutes by turns. Workshop proceeded beautifully for the whole week. This group was such a joy to work with; all of us are close, sensitive readers of each other’s work, and we all came to this workshop with such different experiences (in writing and in life) that I feel like each poem got the widest possible reading and criticism. I am really going to miss having them all around!

During my meeting with Carolyn she told me that she thinks the poems I had in workshop this week are a big start to a manuscript, and that I should use the title of one of my poems as the title for my first book! (I had no idea going in to this that any of these poems had anything except the inner workings of my mind in common, so this is huge!) I’m excited to start working on these poems more, and working through all the comments from my fellow poets, but I decided that I’m going to let them ferment, if you will, while I’m still in Mexico and really get to them when I get back home. Also, several people suggested places that they think I should send poems, so hopefully my second published poem will be in a reputable journal or magazine instead of some weird hand-out!!

Saturday:

Some of us got up in the morning (after the Elena Poiniatowska reading on Friday night, which was great despite the crowd of loud teenagers in the back of the auditorium… and after whatever it was that we did that night…I’ve forgotten) and got on a tour bus to Xochicalco, the site of one of the great Tolpec (sp?) cities in ancient Mexico. It was a city built on a hill, and for years people thought that it was just a spiritual center with priests and only enough people to keep it going, but new discoveries have come to light illustrating that it had approximately 20-30 thousand people living in it at its height. It was apparently built more like a Mayan city than a Tolpec city because they decided that the Mayan design would work better for a hill-top. I learned many wonderful and interesting things, which, if you are interested you can read about here:

Xochicalco

That evening we had the closing dinner at another beautiful house in Tepoztlán, which, unfortunately, we only got to see at night. There was a washed-up (I thought…) opera singer who sang some songs for us, and then some of us went back to the roof-top for more wine drinking and chatter. It was hard to say goodbye—the thing that really made this program what it was for me were all the people I met, in my workshop and out. I will miss them all terribly! I hope we can all stay in touch!

Sunday: (today…)

I climbed up to Tepozteco, Tepoztán’s very own Aztecan pyramid. It was a bit of a mod scene, but a nice hike up steep stairs to the top of the mountain, and a spectacular view of Tepoztlán and out over to Cuernavaca. As soon as I’m no longer in the world of slow, expensive internet, I’ll post pictures!

Then, I said goodbye to my homestay family. They have been wonderful to me! I’m hoping that I’ll have time to go back to Tepoztlán while I’m still in Mexico to visit them, since it’s less than an hour, and the bus only costs $1.20. We shall see. So, I got on the bus, and came here to Cuernavaca. It is quite the change of scenery; Tepoztlán is truly a little village, even though it has many many gringos living outside of it and a Hippy colony nearby. There you feel like you’re outside of time, and the western influences have been integrated in a very Tepoztlán way… Cuernavaca, on the other hand, is very much a city. There are Burger King and Subways and Starbucks, lots of SUVs, young people who are chic and well dressed, and it sprawls. It feels a little like culture shock, even though I’m really not far from where I just was!

My new family seems great. Sergio and Celia Rojas are the patriarch and matriarch; as far as I can tell they have one daughter (very possibly more) who has two children—a boy and a girl. The boy (man) just got married, so the daughter in law is also around a lot. I found out over dinner that they are Mormons! The son was talking about having recently finished his mission (I guess they all have to do that…). Seems a bit odd and incongruous, but I really want to ask how the family ended up being Mormon… The house is big and beautiful, with a lovely courtyard/garden, and an open design, which is great because Cuernavaca is also quite a bit warmer than Tepoztlán. I haven’t yet been here in the middle of the day, but it’s definitely about 10 or 15 degrees warmer tonight than it ever was in Tepoztlán, so I can only imagine!

There are three other people staying here, Sally, from Connecticut who came three years ago with an Audubon Society group and decided to return on her own, and two girls from St. Catherines College in Minnesota who are here with a class about women in Mexican communities (I’m not clear on details). I think that all three of them will be gone by next week….Anyhow, more on all of this soon!

Roosters and Firecrackers

I feel as though I haven’t had 10 minutes alone for the last three days… It’s been a bit of a whirlwind (in a good way)! So:

Saturday:
The lunch at Magda’s was excellent (more sopes and more different kinds of flowers to eat—they eat all kinds of flowers here, depending what’s in season). Her house is beautiful, with a big garden and a kind of rambling structure. We had our first meeting with workshop, and went around introducing ourselves. Things we had in common:
Skidmore—Michelle is also a Skidmore alumna, she was there about 35 years ago…and she took classes with Prof. Boyers, my thesis advisor. How odd!
Virginia
Travel in India, Japan and South America
And a whole bunch of other little weird things that are showing up in our poems, like eastern religion, arrows, and faces that are both recognizable and not recognizable.

We had dinner at a good but expensive place, and then, as Georgiana and I were headed home, the younger sister of my homestay father, Mariela stopped us on the street and convinced us to go to Telón to go dancing. I wasn’t sure about going clubbing as I was pretty tired, but it was SO much fun! There was a live band who played Cuban music which was very much like Buena Vista Social Club—in fact, they played a few of the same songs—and the lead singer was this incredible woman who poured her entire soul into the songs. She was gorgeous, and I could have spent the whole night just watching her. But! The dancing: the music was, of course, such fun to dance to, but the people who were there were equally compelling. Quite a few of the men are excellent dancers, and they are so polite and respectful! We went to the club with Mariela and her friend Ivan, so we danced with them, but both Georgiana and I were asked to dance by other guys, and we got free Salsa lessons. What a blast! The club is only open on Fridays and Saturdays, but I’m planning to go again next weekend.

Sunday:
Now, having gotten home at 2:30 am from Telón, I naturally slept in a little, and then had to scramble a bit to get the new poems that people had passed out read before workshop at 2:00 pm. Rosi cooked an incredible breakfast, the main course being fried eggs with something kind of like tomato sauce, and these little purple flowers. It was absolutely the best eggs/breakfast I’ve ever had.

Our workshop went really well. Carolyn gives us all numbers, and I ended up being number two, so I had one of my poems talked about. The group as a whole is really intelligent and insightful, and they give tremendously helpful readings and advice. We also get off onto crazy tangents about writers and craft, and philosophy, and all kinds of things that get brought up because of our poems.

For dinner we went to the Indian vegetarian restaurant in town. It was not quite traditional, but really good. Tepoztlán is a spiritual center in Mexico, and I think it attracts the same kind of people who would go to India looking for spiritual guidance. I’m not sure if the Mexicans have also traveled to India or what, but there are several stores in town called “Taj Mahal” or “Mandala” or such names with Indian trinkets and incense and clothing. It’s quite the contradiction, and fun to watch. The spiritual energy certainly runs high here.

Sunday was also el dia de Los Tres Reyes, the day of The Three Kings, which is treated like Christmas here—instead of Santa Clause, kids here believe in the Three Kings who come to leave presents for them, and instead of milk and cookies, apparently parents here bring horse poop to the court yards of their houses to say “Look! The Three Kings on their horses were really here!” They have a sweet bread baked in the shape of a wreath that has little baby Jesus dolls baked into it; everyone has to cut their own piece, and if you get the doll, you have to buy everyone tamales for the other holiday/party they have around here on February 2nd. Both Georgiana and I got little baby Jesus’ and we decided that we should just buy the family a present since we wont be here to buy the tamales!

After dinner we went to the hotel that a bunch of the group is staying at, and had some wine up on the roof. They were setting off fireworks from one of the churches, as well as from many different roof tops around, and one of the locals came up and said that it was his turn, and that he had to set off his two fireworks from our rooftop at 8:30. And he did. It was pretty great. Everyone had been under the impression that all the fireworks have been for the Three Kings celebrations, but Laura told us that in Mexico, they set off firecrackers at dawn to ward off, or scare away evil spirits. So, looks like the very loud explosions that make the roosters go nuts will continue… I love this country!

Today:
Without meaning to at all I had another late night last night because the wine party on the roof got philosophical as only a group of wine-influenced poets and writers can… This morning was a bit tough, but Magda has hired a few of the locals to make coffee and lunch for us each day, so with the help of the coffee and a few gallons of water, I made it through the workshop. I was so happy to come back here and take a nap! I feel much, much better now.

Also this morning, I went to Magda’s early to do yoga with Georgiana and Mark. Mark was leading (though he has knee problems and can’t do most of the seated poses), and he asked if I would like to lead it tomorrow. It’s all very informal, but I’m kind of excited to get a chance to try out teaching yoga….I’ll report on that tomorrow.

Tomorrow afternoon we’re going on a museum tour in Cuernavaca (where I’ll be taking my Spanish class), and we’re going to have dinner there and have a group reading of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano”; apparently he lived in Cuernavaca and Tepoztlán for a while, and much of his novel is set here. Sounds like it will be great fun!

Not a whole lot to report today—I spent most of my time reading and commenting on other people’s poems. I had lunch in the market again, and tried the pumpkin flowers on a sope (a thick tortilla with its sides folded up to keep the fillings in. They’re a bit crunchy too, and very good!), which was excellent, and read for a while in the church courtyard.

This afternoon the two other people from my workshop who are staying with my family arrived. Georgiana, from Romania, who’s in a fiction class, and Elva, from Virginia (I think…), who’s doing a class called “The Shape of an Idea” with Magda—I’m not really clear on what this is. Then, this evening, we had the opening reception, and I met the rest of the people in my workshop. It’s always fun to put faces to the poems you’ve been reading… I think it’s going to be an excellent workshop! We found out at dinner that several of us are Aries—Georgiana, me and Brian (who’s in my workshop) have birthdays on the 24^th, 25^th and 26^th of March. Like I said yesterday, the strange connections continue to emerge! Brian was a dancer in NYC, and danced with a group who split off from the Graham company right around the same time (I think…) that Echo (my cousin) stopped dancing with them…. It was a fun dinner!

It was so great to see Carolyn again! She was glowing as ever, and seemed to be everywhere at once. It was also fun to see my friends Brandon and Jeanie again—they both had long journeys and are happy to be here in such an idyllic setting.

Tomorrow we have a lunch with the whole program, and then we’ll break up into groups for workshop info, and to distribute hard copies of our work (we’ve already sent the poems around via email). There’s also supposed to be dancing at a club (probably THE club…) in Tepoztlán, so that should be interesting! I’ll be sure to give a full report…..

I should probably make note— I’ve been typing these entries up in the evening, and posting them the next day, so when I say “today” I mean yesterday…. Hope that’s not too confusing… not that it really makes that much difference! Onward:

Today was quite a good day—it was still cold in the shade, but I had lots of opportunities to warm up in the sun outside. I believe I will be quite well fed here! I had toast and eggs with salsa and home-made tortillas and tea and papaya (I’m not big into papaya, but it was so fresh, I had some anyway—by far the best and biggest papaya I’ve had) for breakfast. I’ve been speaking only Spanish in my homestay, so I’m getting lots of practice. After breakfast I haltingly explained that I wanted to do laundry, and Fernanda (the 11 year old daughter of Rosi, my homestay mother) walked me over to the “lavanderia.” They have a hanging scale where they weighed my dirty clothes, I paid 24 pesos ($2.40), and I go back to pick it up tomorrow morning. Easy!

Post laundry, I went back to the little internet café I found yesterday to print my poems and poems from the other workshop participants to read before the workshop begins (on Friday). I think the woman who runs the café thought I was a bit odd—I had over 100 pages to print. But apart from one jam the printer did quite well. I decided to make copies of my poems so that I wouldn’t have to print a whole lot more pages, but the copy shop turned out to have a much worse machine than the café, so I’m going back tomorrow to re-print the poems that copied illegibly. The copy shop, however, had a hairbrush (my other goal for the day) and lots of other random items for sale, so I didn’t have to go looking for one of the “farmacerias.”

After my large dose of computer time, I went over to the market and got lunch at one of the little stands. They have dough for the tortillas ready, and they have a machine like a flat waffle iron (not heated) to press the dough flat. They do this while you wait, and you get to watch your tortilla cook. They have a wide variety of fillings for tacos, quesadillas, etc. including pumpkin flowers (which I’m planning to try tomorrow…), but I went simple with cheese and mushroom quesadillas. The salsa was spicy! An excellent lunch over all.

Yesterday I had emailed Laura, another of the poets who has already arrived, and we had decided to meet in the main square for coffee. I had a few hours to kill before meeting her, so I took the time to start reading the poems of the other people in the workshop. They are quite a talented bunch! There’s a really big range of styles (which always makes it more fun), but we are doing that thing that workshops do: we have all written about some of the same things—it’s like some strange collective unconscious where we are presented with ideas for poems simultaneously without knowing it. I’m really excited to meet everyone, and especially to see my friends from the Skidmore writer’s institute, Brandon and Jeannie. What a great place to meet up with them again!

While I was hunched over someone’s packet of poems, Laura walked up and recognized me immediately from my cliché writer’s pose of hand on chin. Laura is 36 and has been living in Mexico for 10 years. She said that she came without meaning to stay for that long, but decided to anyway! We had coffee and got to know one another a bit, and then walked around town. She has traveled extensively, to Japan and India among other places, and writes beautifully about her experiences. She owns a piece of land in a city north of Mexico City (I forget the name), with her house and then 5 or 6 guest houses, and she works as a translator and editor. I got to see her hotel, which has a stunning view out the back window of the mountain over the town, and she showed me some of the places she’s discovered so far in Tepoztlán (she’s been here for about a week already). Given her interest in meditation we naturally had lots to talk about. She’s also a vegetarian. The strange connections continue to abound!

I returned to my homestay and unwound for a bit in my room before dinner. For dinner, I had French toast and yogurt with granola (?!). It was unexpected, but excellent. It reminded me a lot of when my family used to have pancakes with yogurt…

Tomorrow evening is the welcome reception for the workshop, when we’ll get our packets with info about the town… I’m glad that I’ve had these two days to get settled before launching into the workshop—I feel ready!

Whew! These keep getting long… I’ll try and make them a bit more manageable in the future!

One more thing—I was cold last night, but I spied a blanked on top of the dresser/closet. It turns out it’s a Little Mermaid blanket. Sweet. I also have a wide variety of stuffed animals and games in my room…I think it must have been a kids’ room at some point…. The mirror is pink and definitely mounted for someone under 4 feet tall. ¡Tan excellente!

Well, since I’m in Mexico and now actually have something to write about, I thought I would sit down and start a blog. I don’t know how consistent I’ll be while I’m here, but I figured this would be the easiest way to let you all in on my adventures.

To begin, a recap:

I am now in Tepoztlán, a village in the mountains under a volcano (hence the name of my writing workshop, Under the Volcano). The streets are all cobbled and windy, and covered with markets that remind me a great deal of India. It’s all very colorful. Mixed in are strange reminders of Mexico’s emergence: American cars are all over the place, there are several ATMs in town, and there’re probably about 5 internet cafes per street. It’s very hilly, so you get beautiful views of the mountains surrounding the town on every corner. More on all of this later.

Conor and I woke up this morning at 4:30 and had a harrowing taxi ride to the airport—he flew home, and I started my trek here. Before this, we were in Baja at quite a unique little “resort” called El Cardonal’s Hideaway along with Conor’s mom, Cate and brother, Ian. We were, naturally, expecting beach weather and a quirky-but-fun place to spend Christmas, and what we got was…interesting. You really had to be there. I’ll give it to you in bullet form:

• The Owner: Eddy Beauline, an exorbitantly grumpy 60-some year old gay lawyer, who at first told us he was 87 (we later deduced that he was lying because of a comment he made about the year of his birth). He dressed up as Santa on Christmas, and proceeded to give Cate and Ian the long story about his 23 year old lover who has kidney failure, and who—despite Eddy’s support and money for a kidney machine—has become a “bitch.” He and Eddy are no longer emotionally involved. “He was beautiful.”—Eddy
• The Help: Javier, an androgynous young Hispanic who wore very short army shorts and a pink midriff-baring tee-shirt. Part way through the week he died his hair sort of pink. He was also the cook. Carla, a friend of Javier’s sister, all-around the most cheerful and helpful person of the bunch.
• The Gringos: There were several, and we had Christmas dinner with them.
• Dan, the Vietnam veteran/doctor of some kind, married to a Mexican woman whose name I can’t remember. His hobby (apparently more than a hobby before he met his wife two years ago) is restoring old cars. Pre-marriage he had upwards of 15 cars in his shop in Seattle. Post, he’s whittled it down to 8. He told us a harrowing story about his daughter (from a first marriage): When she was in high school she tried to play truant. After the 2^nd time she did it, Dan told her that if she did it again, she would be sleeping on the floor, with just a pillow, and would have to remove all of her belongings from her room. She skipped again, and what happened? She moved all of her stuff out of her room that day, and spent the next month sleeping on the floor with just a pillow. She came home from school and went to her room. She received her meals on the floor in her room. “That’s what you get with an army man. Boy, you don’t disobey orders.”—Dan. He told us another harrowing story about crossing the border by car at 3 AM and being forced to pay off the Mexican border police. His reaction? He’s going to get a gun license. He had a wonderful saying to justify this move that I cannot remember. It involved the number 6 and 12 and sounded like one of those sayings that our fearless leader would have botched in a speech.
• Diana and Frank: Frank seemed to be an ex-hippy, and Diana was a well-meaning bimbo with a broken arm. The real entertainment was their son, Sam, and his girlfriend, Soshiko (???). Sam and Soshiko are seniors in High school, and so I asked if they had met at school. Hah! Soshiko, it turns out, is from Canada, and she and Sam had been dating online for 2 years. Sam is homeschooled. This trip to Baja with Sam’s parents (the whole lot living in a trailer while Diana and Frank build a house) is the first time they have ever met in person. Amazing.
• The Weather: Really, really windy. If it hadn’t been for the wind, we could have spent the whole time snorkeling, but instead we read a lot. A LOT. And sat outside wrapped up in blankets. We did get a few nice mornings, so we got to see some cool fish, but during our first attempt (on one of the windy days) we lost two of the mask and snorkel sets we had come with. Good times.
• The Food: Not half bad, as we had a kitchen. However, we ate a pretty serious amount of cheese. We had some excellent fish, especially on our last day, at the fancy hotel down the coast (with private landing strip).
• The Roads: The power of relativity is truly amazing—on our way in to El Cardonal’s, the mountain road up the coast seemed like a serious death trap with sandy, rock-filled cliffs on either side, just waiting hurl a boulder down on the car, and big holes in the road where car-sized chunks of asphalt have slid away into the ravines. However, after driving the rental car into one of the arroyos to go for a hike to see “cave paintings” and after playing on ATVs on the coast road and in another arroyo, the drive out back to La Paz seemed wonderful: the road was paved! The car wasn’t bottoming out on big rocks and sand!

I have left a great deal out of our scintillating vacation, but you get the idea… and I’m tired of typing. As soon as I have a chance I’ll post some pictures!

Next installment: Exploring Tepoztlán/Trying to find a decent printer. Woo!