Three-Day Weekend

Today is the holiday celebrating the birthday of Benito Juarez. I misled you in my last post; it's Emilio Zapata who is from Morelos, not Juarez. Juarez is from Oaxaca and was Mexico's only indigenous president.

Tepoztlán
Saturday I took a local bus to the town of Tepoztlán, about 20 miles and 40 minutes away. In this charming town there is an old Aztec temple called El Tepozteco that is dedicated to Ometochtli Tepoztécal, a tepozteco god of corn, good harvests, fertility, and good times. To reach the temple means climbing thousands of steps up a steep, steep bluff. It was exhausting and hot, and a challenge for everyone else on the trail. Safety precautions are not common in Mexico, but then neither are lawsuits. It's up to you, not the government, to take care of yourself. However, at the beginning of THIS trail was a sign that said, roughly, if you have had a heart attack or are prone to them, please don't take this trail.

I could see why. I was surrounded by children from a school in the state in Guerrero, and not all of them were happy to be working so hard. Their teacher kept yelling encouraging things like "Sí, se puede!" (yes, you can) and "Somos de guerreros, somos guerreros!" (We are from the state of guerreros, and we are warriors! because "guerrero" means warrior) They all made it, and so did I, after 45 minutes of climbing, resting, climbing, resting climbing. At the very top was a black cross commemorating someone who either had that heart attack upon reaching the summit, or chose that moment to fall off the narrow stone steps into a chasm. Oh well.

The view was outstanding. You could look straight down at Tepoztlán, or back across the valley at Cuernavaca, or up at the surrounding bluffs. The temple itself is quite small and most of its decorative stone has been removed, but it's a popular climb for people all over Mexico. Hundreds, in various states of fitness, were climbing, including some in running clothes who were obviously training for some ungodly event.

I had a lovely lunch with a woman from another language school in Cuernavaca, one that is apparently quite posh and caters to Mormons. We had beer and guacamole on a lovely terrace in a lush garden before walking back into town, where I went to the cathedral and the ex-convent. The gate features an intricate mosaic of corn and seeds, a la the Corn Palace. The convent is one of 11 in the state of Morelos that are UNESCO World Heritage sites, all built between 1523 and 1550 or so to house friars who came to convert the locals, who also had to buidl these structures and their accompanying cathedrals. One interesting feature is that many, like the cathedral in Cuernavaca, have outdoor chapels, because the new indigenous Christians weren't used to holding ceremonies indoors.

The highlight of the trip was ice cream at Tepoznieves, perhaps the most beautiful ice cream store I've ever been in. Turns out that the priests up at Tepozteco included in their rituals "nieve" or snow from the volcano Pococatéptel and flavored with maguey and other plants and fruits. This eventually became many flavors of ice cream and sherbet and this chain of ice cream is all over it. Click here to visit their site and see a picture of the temple.

Birthday and Baptism Party
Following my outing I showered, changed and went to a party down the street from my Mexican family's home. The hosts are the other grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of Angeles and Fernando's son's children. I was seated at a table and served a plate of meat, rice, beans and tortillas and a beer. There was Corona everywhere, and old people, young people, children in costumes (the party had a Peter Pan theme, and the baptized baby was wearing a Tinkerbell outfit), and babies being passed from one person to another. When I arrived at 7:45, the DJ was just getting to work. Outside on the terrace, speakers were stacked about 10 feet high and accompanied by ranks of colored flashing lights and a smoke machine. Once the dj got to work, the noise level was squared, or cubed, or increased by some large mathematical amount, so the walls and the floor truly were shaking. Cake was served. New, unopened bottles of tequila were distributed to each table. My "parents" Angeles and Fernando arrived and started eating. More people kept arriving. More food was consumed, all of it I think cooked back in the kitchen, because I could see enormous stainless steel pots lined up there.

When we left about 9:45, things were just getting going. Back up at our house, it was still loud, and across the barranca or ravine, another house was having a big party. Everyone was having a good time on this Saturday night in the Buena Vista section of Cuernavaca, but I kept worrying about those mariachis I saw the other day, sitting along the plaza waiting for work. Are DJs replacing them? Angeles and Fernando assured me that they have plenty of work, and are quite expensive. I guess you might have the mariachis for an hour or so, and then switch to the DJ.

Járdin Borda
Sunday morning I went downtown to this lovely 18th century garden, built for the man who owned all the silver mines in Taxco and eventually taken over by the French emperor Maximilian and his wife Carlotta as a vacation home. It's a lovely spot and on Sundays it is free, so many locals and visitors were present. (Lots of people from Mexico City come to Cuernavaca on the weekends.) In the rose garden was a really cool installation of paintings and sculptures representing the Virgin of Guadalupe. I took lots of photos and will post them soon. This was a lovely quiet morning after the excesses of Saturday night. Click here for a couple photos of the ponds and rowboats in the garden.

Bus tickets and Internet
Which brings us to Monday. Many things are closed but the woman at the travel agency that works with my school said she would be there after 11 or so. I´m trying to buy a bus ticket from Puebla to Oaxaca, where I will stay for a few days, and then from Oaxaca to Tapachula, on the Mexico-Guatemala border, and then I hope the TicaBus (run by "Ticas" or Costa Ricans) from the border to Guatemala City, where I can take a shuttle to Antigua, my next long stay. But this is my second attempt at buying the ticket, cuz she wasn't around last week. Otherwise I am staying home today ( after this interlude at the Internet cafe) and studying, studying, studying.

I have one week left in Cuernavaca. It has been a good stay, although my Spanish has been taking 2 steps back as I focus intently on some of my thorniest grammatical problems. Okay, more later. I have to go try to buy that ticket now!