A few more tidbits from Mexico City on Palm Sunday:
At lunch in a tarp-covered cafe Sunday we were approached by a stream of vendors selling the following items draped over their arms or carried in baskets: candy, flowers, pirated CD's, fruit, palm fronds woven into Catholic symbols, necklaces, bracelets, fake mustaches and metallic false eyelashes. I was only tempted by the false eyelashes, and this not because I foresaw a use for the product but because the vendor, a slight man perhaps in his 50's, made his pitch by the simple expedient of wearing three false mustaches at once and blinking at us to display a startling set of enormous, beetle-green eyelashes appended to his eyelids.
This happened in Xochimilco, a neighborhood of small houses set in tangled gardens built upon Aztec-constructed islands divided by lovely, narrow, polluted canals. We hired a flat-bottomed boat with a man to pole it, a canpoy to shade it, and small rush-bottomed chairs to sit upon around a narrow table three boards wide. It was just incredibly pleasant to glide along peering through thickets of undergrowth and crumbling masonry and back gardens and melon vines at the people playing badminton in their yards, and the lazy matted dogs curled up in dirt nests, and one giant birthday party featuring canopy tents and a small inflatable bouncy castle. We also saw one half-grown green heron sidling along the edge of an empty, half-submerged flat boat, and a lot of big shiny grackles.
Once we left the backwater canals of tranquility and entered the main drag we also encountered boat after boat after boat, each painted in gaudy carnival day-glo colors and named after a woman (Lupita, Valeri, Elizabeta). Some were rented, as ours was, by a single group or family for an afternoon's outing (one carried a blue banner saying "Felicitaciones Abuelita Maria" - Congratulations, Grandma Maria); others were collective conveyances with benches along both sides filled with anyone who cared to slide slowly from one end of Xochi to another. (We took a collective boat back from lunch.) Being poled, the boats moved at approximately one-third walking speed. Quite often four or five would knock past each other simultaneously, filling the canal and actually sliding their sides together -- it was advisable to keep elbows in.
The passenger boats were courted by smaller vendors' boats hawking beer and soft drinks (kept cold in small buckets of ice), baskets of roses, woven palm fronds (it being Palm Sunday), wind-up toys, corn on the cob and elote cooked over a brazier of coals in the bottom of the boat, and more. There were also marimba and mariachi boats, and if you decided to hire them their boat would grapple alongside yours and ride along beside you while the band in full regalia stood and played you dancing tunes.
It was all just marvelous, and absolutely worth the hour and a half commute by subway and bus. (The Mexico City subway is clean and pleasant and easy to navigate, and is often the subject of rhapsody by my sister Abby.)
After boating all day, a group of us visited the church back in the part of town that's on solid ground, arriving in time for the Palm Sunday mass. We watched the bells being rung by a man in a suit pulling a very long bell cord, admired the fanciful woven palm leaf offerings one could purchase along the sidewalk out front (in the shape of crucifixes, plaited flowers, tall feathery spires, intricate globes, and more, all giving off a sweet spicy grassy smell), and paid 30 pesos apiece to use the WC outside the church where the two functional toilets were flushed by dunking a bucket in a barrel of water and pouring it down the loo. (We learned long ago to carry hand sanitizer in the backpack.) We then emerged into the street to find ourselves walking into a whirling mass of masked dancers accompanied by a band, dancing down the street in a sort of twirling, weaving procession and led by two women with baskets scattering rose petals in their path. The dancers wore bright costumes, tall fringed hats with insignia ranging from the Virgin of Guadalupe to Micky Mouse, and mesh masks made to look like dark men with pointy beards. There was also a huddled group under an enormous green umbrella in between the dancers and the musicians. A woman in this group held a small wooden casket under her arm, and while she didn't appear to be the nexus of this group I wondered if she might be carrying some sacred icon or relic to the church - I know that's often the reason for a procession on a holy day.
My cousin, who had arrived at 2:30 a.m. the night before from New York, was tired, so we squashed ourselves (and I do mean squashed) into a taxi for the return trip to our apartment, driving by the UNAM (University) on the way which afforded us a glimpse of the buildings covered in murals. (We also saw some Diego Rivera murals downtown at the National Palace and in an old market -- bulging, opinionated, communisit, vivid, amazing scenes.)
Lastly, I think I should mention that on my first day in the apartment I was attacked by a cheese. It was a sharp cheese. Upon being removed from the refrigerator cheese drawer it made a desperate leap from its plastic wrapper and plunged through the air to embed its pointy end in my foot. I was laughed at until (well, to be honest, also after) it was revealed that my toe was actually bleeding from a small indentation.
Happy Passover!
At lunch in a tarp-covered cafe Sunday we were approached by a stream of vendors selling the following items draped over their arms or carried in baskets: candy, flowers, pirated CD's, fruit, palm fronds woven into Catholic symbols, necklaces, bracelets, fake mustaches and metallic false eyelashes. I was only tempted by the false eyelashes, and this not because I foresaw a use for the product but because the vendor, a slight man perhaps in his 50's, made his pitch by the simple expedient of wearing three false mustaches at once and blinking at us to display a startling set of enormous, beetle-green eyelashes appended to his eyelids.
This happened in Xochimilco, a neighborhood of small houses set in tangled gardens built upon Aztec-constructed islands divided by lovely, narrow, polluted canals. We hired a flat-bottomed boat with a man to pole it, a canpoy to shade it, and small rush-bottomed chairs to sit upon around a narrow table three boards wide. It was just incredibly pleasant to glide along peering through thickets of undergrowth and crumbling masonry and back gardens and melon vines at the people playing badminton in their yards, and the lazy matted dogs curled up in dirt nests, and one giant birthday party featuring canopy tents and a small inflatable bouncy castle. We also saw one half-grown green heron sidling along the edge of an empty, half-submerged flat boat, and a lot of big shiny grackles.
Once we left the backwater canals of tranquility and entered the main drag we also encountered boat after boat after boat, each painted in gaudy carnival day-glo colors and named after a woman (Lupita, Valeri, Elizabeta). Some were rented, as ours was, by a single group or family for an afternoon's outing (one carried a blue banner saying "Felicitaciones Abuelita Maria" - Congratulations, Grandma Maria); others were collective conveyances with benches along both sides filled with anyone who cared to slide slowly from one end of Xochi to another. (We took a collective boat back from lunch.) Being poled, the boats moved at approximately one-third walking speed. Quite often four or five would knock past each other simultaneously, filling the canal and actually sliding their sides together -- it was advisable to keep elbows in.
The passenger boats were courted by smaller vendors' boats hawking beer and soft drinks (kept cold in small buckets of ice), baskets of roses, woven palm fronds (it being Palm Sunday), wind-up toys, corn on the cob and elote cooked over a brazier of coals in the bottom of the boat, and more. There were also marimba and mariachi boats, and if you decided to hire them their boat would grapple alongside yours and ride along beside you while the band in full regalia stood and played you dancing tunes.
It was all just marvelous, and absolutely worth the hour and a half commute by subway and bus. (The Mexico City subway is clean and pleasant and easy to navigate, and is often the subject of rhapsody by my sister Abby.)
After boating all day, a group of us visited the church back in the part of town that's on solid ground, arriving in time for the Palm Sunday mass. We watched the bells being rung by a man in a suit pulling a very long bell cord, admired the fanciful woven palm leaf offerings one could purchase along the sidewalk out front (in the shape of crucifixes, plaited flowers, tall feathery spires, intricate globes, and more, all giving off a sweet spicy grassy smell), and paid 30 pesos apiece to use the WC outside the church where the two functional toilets were flushed by dunking a bucket in a barrel of water and pouring it down the loo. (We learned long ago to carry hand sanitizer in the backpack.) We then emerged into the street to find ourselves walking into a whirling mass of masked dancers accompanied by a band, dancing down the street in a sort of twirling, weaving procession and led by two women with baskets scattering rose petals in their path. The dancers wore bright costumes, tall fringed hats with insignia ranging from the Virgin of Guadalupe to Micky Mouse, and mesh masks made to look like dark men with pointy beards. There was also a huddled group under an enormous green umbrella in between the dancers and the musicians. A woman in this group held a small wooden casket under her arm, and while she didn't appear to be the nexus of this group I wondered if she might be carrying some sacred icon or relic to the church - I know that's often the reason for a procession on a holy day.
My cousin, who had arrived at 2:30 a.m. the night before from New York, was tired, so we squashed ourselves (and I do mean squashed) into a taxi for the return trip to our apartment, driving by the UNAM (University) on the way which afforded us a glimpse of the buildings covered in murals. (We also saw some Diego Rivera murals downtown at the National Palace and in an old market -- bulging, opinionated, communisit, vivid, amazing scenes.)
Lastly, I think I should mention that on my first day in the apartment I was attacked by a cheese. It was a sharp cheese. Upon being removed from the refrigerator cheese drawer it made a desperate leap from its plastic wrapper and plunged through the air to embed its pointy end in my foot. I was laughed at until (well, to be honest, also after) it was revealed that my toe was actually bleeding from a small indentation.
Happy Passover!
No comments:
Post a Comment