¡Agua fresca!

I´m really enjoying life in San Cristobal at this point. I´m in the routine of getting up at eight, having a shower while my host mother makes me a breakfast with fresh-squeezed orange juice, sweet coffee, scrambled ham-and-eggs with beans, and hot tortillas (I can´t get enough of these tortillas)... then walking to school in the sunshine to spend the morning in classes. It´s only a very small school, and it´s a pretty cosy atmosphere amongst teachers and students. Very nice really. On Tuesday we went to Na-Balom, which is a museum that preserves indigenous culture and also regularly hosts artists (including Frida and Diego in the past) and does lots of other good stuff. It was very interesting. Tuesday night was a birthday party. It was mostly Mexicans. There was much dancing, much beer and tequila. The latter went straight to my head - it was a particularly cheap bottle with a worm in the bottom of it. Fortunately I had enough self-control to refrain from dancing. There were many amazing salsa dancers tearing up the loungeroom floor. I got talking to a Mexican girl who had even less English than I have Spanish, and ended up with a phone number. So I called her on Wednesday night from a telefono publico and arranged to meet again - so as to practice each other´s language... Wednesday afternoon I saw a movie on the Zapatista movement. It´s fascinating stuff. Thursday night I met the Mexican girl at Bar Revolution - a place almost exclusively for tourists, but the only place I knew to suggest. We had dinner somewhere else (hamburguesa for me, papas for her), and it was a funny experience with lots of laughing and apologising. Later we shared a table at Bar Revolution with her friends and my fellow students, with very little communication between the two groups. Everyone drank. The Mexicans left around midnight and the tourists went on to the nightclub next door, where we sat and yelled and smoked and danced until 3am, to horrible horrible music. Then, of course, I was up at 8am again this morning for school. Much fun to be had in San Cristobal.

Life in San Cristobal

It is my third day in San Cristobal, and I´ve just finished my second day of classes at the language school. Back on Sunday afternoon I got friendly with my dorm-mates, a bunch of Britons who were all travelling independently. We went to dinner at a dodgy taqueria and then had drinks at what appears to be San Cristobal´s most popular bar and live music venue, Bar Revolucíon. Back at the hostel we built a fire in the fireplace of the dorm and played cards, then went to sleep with the fire still burning. The nights are amazingly cold up here. Yesterday they all went on a bus/boat tour (which sounded incredible) while I attended my first day of school. Unexpectedly, I´m having one-on-one tuition. Two sessions per day with two different teachers. I´ve impressed myself with how much I already know and I think I´m going to get a lot out of my few weeks here. After school I was picked up by the mother of my host family - a tiny hunched woman with no English whatsoever. We walked back across town to her house, where I will be staying. She seems lovely and doesn´t seem to mind chatting to me despite the fact that I only understand snippets. My room is basic but typically Mexican... it even has a Frida Kahlo print hanging above the bed. As part of the deal I am provided with three meals per day, and she seems to spend a lot of time cheerfully preparing food for me. She has three grandsons staying with her and I have only met one so far. It should be a comfortable stay, but I´m still undecided whether I want to be there over Christmas, imposing on family celebrations... Later in the afternoon I walked to the big public market north of town. It´s mostly food and produce, with dogs roaming, and a big hall of butchers´ stalls that has quite an amazing stench. It was good to see a bit of local culture anyway... Last night I met with my former dorm-mates again for dinner, and we went to a swanky Italian restaurant before again spending the evening chatting by the fireside, before I made my way back across town to spend my first night at the family home. It was comfortable enough, but there was a rooster next door that was crowing regularly between midnight and dawn, so I had little sleep (I don´t know how I´m going to deal with that). The Britons all left town today and are all on their way to Guatemala by different means, so there might be an opportunity to catch up again on one of my weekends - we are very close to the border here. Today I´ve bought a Spanish exercise book and I have homework for the afternoon. Later we have a school excursion to a museum, and tonight all students are invited to a birthday party for one of the teachers. I´m going to try to keep busy here and it doesn´t seem like that will be too hard.

San Cristobal de las Casas

I´m writing from San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, southern Mexico. My few days in Mexico City were exhausting. Getting to Toronto airport was more trouble than it should have been, but only because I was stupid enough to spend 45 minutes waiting in the wrong place for the shuttlebus, in pre-dawn Toronto cold. A homeless guy befriended me and offered me a sip of the mouthwash that he was drinking... ¨the first drink´s a little tough, but after that (hiccup) it does the job.¨ I made the flight, and after a brief stopover in Atlanta, I was landing in Mexico City. My hostel was in a safe upscale part of town, which nevertheless had loads of activity around the clock. I was a given a white-noise machine to drown out the street noise, but fortunately it wasn´t quite bad enough to warrant that. On Thursday I went to some modern art museums. Sadly the main attraction at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Frida Kahlo´s Las Dos Fridas) was out for restoration. Otherwise lots of beautiful stuff. The Palace of Fine Arts had some amazing murals, and the Diego Rivera Mural Museum houses only one painting, his most iconic mural. I wandered the historic centre and the Zocalo. Market stalls seem to take up any available space in this city, selling everything from pens to hardcore porn DVDs. The subway system is incredibly cheap and efficient, with the only major hassle being the guys who get on with speaker-backpacks blasting music, trying to sell compilation CDs. On Thursday I visited the main university campus and sat around for a bit... Later I went to the Museum of Anthropology, which is enormous and the most amazing archeological collection I´ve seen (although the scope is limited largely to the Americas). Friday I shifted hostels for a change of scenery but stayed well within the ¨safe¨ confines. I went to the Basilica de Guadalupe (the most significant Catholic site in the Americas), which is a horrible 1970s mega-church that houses the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Ugly as the building is, it was moving to see people approaching the basilica on their knees from hundreds of metres away, and the image itself is a beautiful choice for a national symbol. Friday night my dorm-mate invited me on a taco crawl, so the two of us went to some of the city´s most popular taquerias, and had some fantastic food. He was keen to explore the gay scene in Zona Rosa so I tagged along. It took a lot of walking to find the places he had heard about, and for a Friday night it all seemed pretty quiet anyway. Yesterday we went to Coyoacan south of the city. The Frida Kahlo Museum (where she lived with Diego Rivera for 25 years) and the Diego Rivera Studio Museum are within walking distance of each other. Both are very small and intimate, apparently left largely as they were when they were inhabited: Kahlo´s unfinished portrait of Stalin, etc. And the whole neighbourhood between was beautiful as well. At night we ate Thai and went to a disappointing reggae bar then a skanky Irish pub, leaving me about three hours sleep before I had to be up for my flight to Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiapas. The taxi I had booked did not show up, but I managed to share with an American couple heading back to Chicago, and I effectively rode for free. Awesome. From Tuxtla airport I came by taxi and bus up a winding road into the hills through some amazing landscapes punctuated by bright orange soils. San Cristobal is high, so it is also cold. The people here are shorter and darker than in the North and there´s a lot of indigenous people getting around, barefoot, lots of babies. Chiapas has been Zapatista territory since 1994 but they don´t seem to have been active in the last few years (judging by a quick glance at Wikipedia). I saw several road signs pointing the way to ¨Mexico¨ between the airport and here, indicating they were serious about wanting independence. At the art/craft market you can buy Zapatista dolls complete with tiny balaclavas and wooden rifles. And there´s loads of revolution-themed bars lining the streets. Anyway, San Cristobal feels very safe. There´s loads of backpackers and the hostel that I´m staying in for the time being is particularly nice. I´m taking it easy today, given that I have five weeks (hopefully) to soak this place up. I´m starting at a Spanish language school tomorrow and I will be studying full-time while staying with a local family from tomorrow night. It seems like a great place to settle down for a while.

A little bit of snow

I'm flying to Mexico City early tomorrow. On Friday I walked all over Toronto, spent a lot of time in bookshops and music shops. I found a classic skid-row diner just off the main street. Lots of suspicious looking men sitting around in a sparsely furnished room, drinking beer and watching TV. I've had more than one meal there over the last couple of days. It rained in the evening so I went to see a movie at a hellish mega-mall type of place in the middle of town. Friday night I didn't get much sleep because I was sharing the dorm with five Canadian guys - all big black boots and red flannel shirts - who had come to the city for some kind of concert. They brought some girls back with them and I feigned sleep... while they, you know... Once everyone had passed out the snoring began and there was no more sleep for me... Fortunately they were just in for one night. I met Kristel and Miguel on Saturday morning. We had a big brunch in Old Toronto, wandered around the farmers' market, and then into town. We passed the Art Gallery of Ontario - the grand reopening of the gallery, celebrated with free entry for the weekend, meant that an enormous queue snaked around the block from the entrance. So instead we walked around some of the more interesting streets to the west of the city, music shops, book shops, etc. At my request we ate dinner at a horrible Canadian chain bar-and-grill (akin to Hog's Breath or something like that I guess). There was a big clock on the wall counting down the seconds until the next hockey game, and the place was designed carefully so that each table had a good view of a TV. The rain picked up in the afternoon and it was pretty inhospitable weather by nightfall - we saw a movie, but were running a bit late so we had to sit in the front row. Had an early night. In the morning we met outside the gallery and decided to wait in the enormous queue anyway... It moved pretty quickly thankfully, and the collection inside the museum was great. A lot of Canadian art, but plenty of important European stuff, etc... The Contemporary levels were interesting - particularly some cartoonish works by Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, who paints with rootbeer (which is awesome in itself). Lunch was at a dim sum place in Chinatown, and then I said goodbye. Meanwhile the annual Santa Claus parade was progressing down Yonge Street and it had started to snow. Sadly the snow didn't last and nothing stuck. Neverthless it was bloody cold. I took myself out to dinner last night in Toronto's gay district. The restaurant turned out to be gayer than I was expecting... All the waiters were dressed as cowboys and the menu was decorated with pictures of drag queens, with lots of fruity cocktails on offer. Their chicken parmesan was alright though. After food I went up to an open-mic comedy night at a bar near the university. It was awful. I was not aware comedy that bad existed. I finished my Guinness and left. Today I had to post a bunch of stuff home, including my cold-weather jacket. So it's been a challenge staying warm today and it won't be a very comfortable walk down to Union Station at 5am tomorrow. Oh well. I'm excited about Mexico. It should be a lot of fun.

oot and aboot in Toronto

I arrived in Toronto yesterday from Montreal via rail. My first day in Montreal, having arrived without any sleep, my hostel wouldn't let me check in until 1pm - so they made me pay to put my bags in a locker and I was left to wander the city for a few hours... I went straight to the Drawn & Quarterly Store - a fantastic comic shop. They were playing a Leonard Cohen record, as in actual vinyl on a turntable. So it was a fine first stop in Canada. I slept in the afternoon, but it was a horrible restless sleep, and I have vague memories of sleep-talking (confused babbling) to one of my dorm-mates and not understanding why he looked so scared of me... I think I'd rather be totally unaware of my sleep-talking episodes. Tuesday I went to the Musee des beaux-arts for their special Andy Warhol exhibition. I always hated Andy Warhol for being so popular with seemingly such minimal effort or talent. Still, none of his art impresses me much - mostly horribly outdated in my eyes. But the biographical layout of the exhibition was interesting... beginning with an eerie Liza Minelli soundtrack... with entire rooms lined with tin-foil to recreate the Silver Factory... looped reels of his most tedious films (tedium being the point of it all) and scaled down elements of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable immersive art experience... Velvet Underground footage and photos... An awful lot of wankery but there's no doubt he was an original thinker, and you have to admire his ability to appreciate the most vile, insidious aspects of pop culture. I guess. They even had one of the wigs that he wore in the '80s, and the signed photo from Shirley Temple that he treasured in childhood. At night I went to a popular alternative music venue called Sala Rossa to see some bands. It's a big hall at the back of a Spanish restaurant that would be completely hidden if not for the obvious musicians smoking outside the front door. The bands were good, and there was a vending machine that sold independent mini-comics, so I had something to do with my hands while I was waiting for music. Wednesday I went to the museum of contemporary art (or whatever the French-language equivalent of that is). They had an exhibition on "art and rock 'n' roll", with some overlap with the other gallery in the form of Velvet Underground material. They also had original drawings by Ray Pettibon (the Black Flag poster cartoonist who once lived with Henry Rollins - I was impressed). And original drawings/paintings by Yoshimoto Nara, the iconic Japanese artist only tenuously related to the rock 'n' roll theme. It was pretty cool... Wednesday night I was desperate for some home cooking, so I bought ingredients, made enough pasta for four people, then ate alone. I got talking to a few nice people in the kitchen but noone wanted my food... so it mostly ended up in the bin. Yesterday I caught the train to Toronto, on an overpriced ticket ironically called the "comfort economy" fare. Six hours through some typically Canadian landscape. Fields of dead crops and lots of barns and farmhouses seemingly built to the same designs. Toronto is a big place. It's nowhere near as cold as Montreal was, which has come as a relief. I did some walking around and covered a lot of ground. Last night I walked to the far corner of my map, to Lee's Palace in a university district for some "Japanese sludge psych metal". It was a popular gig. The band was good but not Japanese (i.e. quirky) enough in my opinion. Except for the drummer in the leopard skin blouse who was in charge of back-up hooting and yelling... I didn't stay until the end. I have a few nights here before flying to Mexico City on Tuesday.

Montreàl

I`ve just arrived in francophone Montreal, which should explain those strange inverted apostrophes in this post. Thursday night I went out to Brooklyn, with R.L. in tow, to meet Jess for dinner and some bands. We ate at a Columbian restaurant and then went to the venue - Southpaw. A bunch of Canadian alt rock bands were playing, and the crowd was surprisingly small considering how good the music was. After the last band left the stage we went to the downstairs bar, where there was live hip-hop and many Black people. This basement bar was made out to look like a bunker, with sandbags and camouflage netting. It was amazing really... the artists took turns to play their backing CDs and rap over the top - naturally there were lots of props to Obama. Friday I was exhausted. I went down to Chelsea and walked past the Chelsea Hotel (the foyer looks nice). Then I went out to Greenwich Village... lots of delis and organic supermarkets, but not a particularly exciting part of town. I spent most of the day back at the hostel, reading and painting some watercolour postcards. Friday night R.L. was flying out, so we had an early dinner at a Costa Rican restaurant and I was in bed soon after. Saturday I went to check out the Hell`s Kitchen flea market. The rain was just setting in so the stalls were few and far between, but I managed to purchase some nice items. It was an interesting area. The rain only got heavier, so again I spent the afternoon back at the hostel. Saturday night I met Jess and her friend for dinner in the Lower East Side, then some amazing bands at a tiny venue deceptively named the Rockwood Music Hall. It was absolutely packed. I said goodbye to Jess. Yesterday I went back to the Hell`s Kitchen flea market. There were many more stalls, many more people, but nothing else I wanted to buy (except maybe the old leather gun holster and the three-stringed banjo - but I refrained). In the afternoon I took the last ferry to Liberty Island to see the statue of the same name. It wasn`t quite as big as I`d expected, but we were definitely there at the right time of day, just as the sun set behind it. Amazing views of Manhattan from there as well. Anyway, as I said, last night I boarded the Greyhound to Montreal. So it`s 9am and I have had no sleep, although I`m buzzing with a big mug of weak American filter coffee (sadly they seem to prefer the same shit here in Montreal). So I guess I should go to the hostel and crash...

Black is the new President, bitch

I went to the Guggenheim on Monday morning. A crazy building, but they were placing a pretty heavy focus on one particular photographer who was not all that interesting. I met Jess as planned at the Museum of Natural History, but we did a lot of talking as we walked around and it was hard to appreciate the museum itself. The Human Origins room was cool. We hung around Times Square and stuff, and went to a comedy show in the evening in the Upper East Side. Apparently it's a club where Jerry Seinfeld got started, etc... It was good comedy in general. Tuesday morning I went to the Met (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) - a sprawling museum full of antiquities and a neat section in one corner of European paintings. I spent a couple of hours there but still ended up power-walking through many of the exhibits. It's much like the Louvre in terms of sheer overabundance of stuff. Tuesday afternoon I had a snooze and then went to meet Jess and her friends for a private Election Night party that I had managed to invite myself to. There were many Australians... It was about 11pm when a Newsflash announced that Obama would be the new President. We decided to get a cab down to Times Square and join in the celebrations. Giant screens showed Mccain making his concession speech to much booing and jeering in the New York crowd. It was around midnight when Obama finally appeared, live from Chicago, and gave his straight-faced victory speech. Everyone was ecstatic.. it was such a beautiful atmosphere. Lots of people in tears... We had the real sense it was a very important moment in time.. But I can't help but worry that he can't possibly live up to all the hope that he's aroused in people... Yesterday morning I went out with my Israeli dorm-mate, R.L., to Harlem just to walk around. We stumbled upon a midday church service and went inside. It was a classic high-energy Black baptist service. People rising from their seats in religious rapture, calling out "Yes suh!" and "Praise Jesus!" and so on. The preacher kept referring to Obama as a tool of God, sent to heal the ailing nation, and referencing Dr King's "dream" speech with so much excitement that he looked ready to faint. R.L. recorded the whole sermon covertly. We walked a bit more around Harlem then travelled back through the city to the East Village, where we played pool in a big billiards hall until the rain stopped. Later I met Jess outside a club in the same area and we watched some bands in their basement bar - starting with a UK girl punk band and ending with a rollicking gothic country band from Brooklyn. Lots of fun. Today I went with R.L. to the Museum of Modern Art, yet another huge museum with an amazing collection of paintings (amazing!). Countless modern European paintings, as well as a few beautiful Edward Hoppers, a token Frida Kahlo, some Francis Bacons, and a George Grosz among many more that were particularly exciting to me. R.L. busied himself taking secret photos of gallery-goers - making for an interesting theme, I thought. They were controlling entry to the special Van Gogh exhibition, so I had to hang around until 3.30pm for my turn. Many of the paintings I had already seen at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam but many I had not. I'll be meeting Jess again soon in Brooklyn for dinner and more live music. It will be the first time I've left Manhattan since arriving in New York. Should be good. At this stage I plan to go to Montreal on Sunday.

Noo Yawk

Okay, so, this New York monster hostel charges through the nose for internet access - the Internets are expensive in the USA, obviously. So, a quick run down then... Back in Tel Aviv in rained a lot. I had dinner with a voucher at a place right on the beach. And the beaches are beautiful.. white sand, perfectly manicured, with lawn furniture for public use (I assume). I left early the next day to fly to Dusseldorf and then make my own way to Cologne, where I would stay with Lena for another few days. Thursday I made risotto for lunch and spent the afternoon in a cheesy torpor. Thursday night I was taken to some bars... On Friday I went with Lena to a lecture on treatment of depression (for medical students, in German). It looked interesting but felt like a nightmare... sitting through a lecture on stuff I feel I'm meant to know, and not understanding a single word that's said. In the afternoon I finally got around to climbing the tower of the Dom - the big cathedral in the centre of town, you can climb it and have 360-degree views of the city. Although it was raining, and apart from the Dom itself, Cologne's skyline is pretty undramatic. Oh well, lots of stairs, good fun. Friday night we saw an American movie with German subtitles. Not such a great movie, but the popcorn was memorable. Saturday not much happened, but at night we rode bikes to a punk club to see some bands: The Sonic Negroes (Sweden), and the Hip Priests (UK). It was a small grimy smoky club... Both bands were cool. Sunday I had to leave early, get back to Dusseldorf and fly to New York. Lots of waiting around at Newark Airport for a passport check, but I eventually made it here.. to the biggest hostel I've ever seen. It's like a college dorm. I'm in the Upper West Side, which feels like a "good" neighbourhood, unfortunately. I walked a bit last night, had a burger and beer at a diner... the mexican waiter put a lemon wedge on my German beer. Heh... Today I meet Jess at the Natural History Museum. Oops, I think that's everything.