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.