So...i was still stopped in Mexico city, waiting for my camera for long time, but had really great time with my friends there, but this was also a perfect opportunity to meet my dad who jumped over for some buisness.
Really great to spend some time with my dad (even though sometimes hard cause we are so different) speak hebrew and sleep for a change on a nice hotel room bed (though i had to knock my self out with tequila some nights - we both snore bad).
My father brought with him the message that in Israel some articles were published about Mexico saying that it is risky and in the streets of Mexico city people are buying bullet proof vests. I think pretty fast like me he saw that this was not the case and Mexico city and Mexico in general is a pretty fascinating place and usually safe.
I must say that for me it is really ironic to see the injusrice that is done to Mexico's image in this way and it is very close to the same injustice people here and arround the world in general have for the image of Israel.
The things i remember the most from this time in Mexico city is the many demonstrations and freedom of speach we both experienced as our hotel was right on the main marching avenue.
Pretty unusuall was a daily demonstration of dancing naked Indians and they were living next to our hotel.
The other think is meeting the my father associates, warm Mexicans (Spanish in origin family) that are involved in the Wax buisness, an interesting visit in a basic candle factory (candles are still hand made) and some exotic meals in exotic places (rich). The most unusuall is the Mexican caviar = ants eggs (almost the size of little corn pieces).
The road to Guanajuato
After a few days we decided to rent a car and go to Guanajuato, a beatiful colonial town in the center for the Cervantino international music festival.
Amazing wide fields covering everything to the horizon are covered with corn and Dura (a crop wich is used as cattle food) has a brown flower and makes everything looks like ground.
Close to Guanajuato is also the world center of Srawbery production and on the sides of the roads are many farmers selling fresh strawerries with cream, jam and another local treat Cajeta=kind of caramel.
Yum Yum Yum !!!!
Tula
Another stop on the way, the amazing giant stone heads of Tula and checking if my fathers stomack can handle a local poor tortia stand.
Guanajuato
Upon entering the city, immediately i felt magic in the air (maybe like i feel when i go to Jerusalem), so many colors and beauty. Definetly one of the most beatiful towns i have seen here.
The city is built in a river chanel and has a few levels: underground caverns for the river, tunnels with roads and on top the city with extremely narrow alleys (one legend tells that too lovers could kiss from their windows over the street ignoring their family forbidness) . You go in in one entrance and you always ask yourself when you go out: how the hell did i get here...
Close to area are the richest silver mines in Mexico which still today after 500 hundred years of mining produce silver and gold (for a while the most active in the world) and with this wealth shaped what is seen today and the independence of Mexico from spain - this is where everything started.
We had the amazing luck to be in the area when the Cervantino festival was held (Cervantes = Don Quijote), and even more luck is that it is not visited by too many tourists and barely Israelies.
A full month of culture from any kind: singers, bands, unusuall Orchestras (where else will you see an orchestra with 15 guitar players), balle, Opera, films, street shows, many museums (the most amazing is dedicated to Don Quijote and how he is preceived by many artists in every period).
4 days where certainly not enough for me so after saying goodbye to my dad in Mexico city and pcking my camera up, i came back for more and stayed in my new Couchsurfing friends: Stefany (Germany) and Simon (Texas) house.
They where hosting tons of other people and there was always and international feeling with people from Germny, Austria, France, Korea, Argentina, Ireland. Even better, friends from Guadalajara and Mexico city came as well to what was Just a big party: drinking all night long on their terrace, shows, parties...
With usually Simon waking up every morning and discovers that he danced naked the night before. We both also discovered that after one party: drinking agua loca (crazy water), a special cheap students drink (usually made in 20 litter barrels) that we have a movie dancing with no shirts.
Nice times !
Day of the dead
The origin of this holiday goes back to Aztec times and even more but is also connected with the Chatolic churchand celebrated in the 1-2/11 the same date as "all saits day".
Traditions include building private altars honoring the dead, using sugar skulls, marigolds flowers and the favorite foods and drinks and items of the dead.
People also beleive that in these days it is easier to oomunicate with the dead in this day.
So you can find people drinking all night together with the beloved deseased, playing him the music that he liked, bringing toys for their kids who passed away and i have heard in some places even wash and clean the bones.
The total conseption of death is different here than our western one. Just to have a feeling, a friend that i met told me that when her grandmother passed away, her family went to her grave and made a small party (happy one) with music, drinking, bringing up memories...
I guess it maks me think about my dead as well, and i sure like this version more.
But there is the other side...
In old times, dead was not important at all, Life was just a phase and there was before and after.
I guess this comes hand to hand with the day of the dead and the sometimes easy attitude towards risk and death. So if death - the end of life is not so dramatic and important what does this make life then ?
Offerings to the dead
Tremendous amount of altars to the dead all over. Everything is made from cardboard by special artists and decorated with flower, candles and colored corn.
Pretty ironic, even the skeletons worship the deads.
Even the public personel are skeletons...
Huge skulls are projected on buildings in the Zocalo
(Israeli kids whould never go to sleep after this thing...)
Kids walking arround in the streets like Haloween or making road blocks for money or candies
Skull candies
An altar in the middle of a bus station
Patzcuaro and Xanitziu
I couldnn't say no when my friend Daniel from Guadalajara was organizing a big internatnational group of couchsurfers for spending the day of the dead together. So he rented us a nice cabin on a lake and we went exploring the area.
Close by the pictureous town of Santa ana del Cobre where everything is colored white and brown and made from copper: benches, street lights, trash cans...everything !!!
Xanitziu is a heavily populated island in a middle of the Patzcuaro lake, where all of the Mexicans i have met told me to go in the day of the dead.
Eventually a big dissapointment (also because not all of the group was fun...)
I guess i was not the only one that got this tip and the place was crowded with tourists, over commercialized, the cemetery looked like disneyland and i really fely pitty for the people who wanted to follow their traditions...i guess it woul have bee much better to go to a small village somewhere.
But together with this it was still beatiful and you could still see some traditional customs and get some of the feeling of this day.
volcano
So with a little bitter feeling Stef, Simon hope that nature will lift us back up, so we went to a remote indian village to ride to a close bye volcano.
Immediately you feel in a different world, everything is extremely simple, mudy roads, people speak the native language and hardly Spanish. When we entered speakers where shouting things all over (a little scary at first) and i got the feeling of walking in an Arab village in prayer time, but they where actually notifying what every buisness was selling that day.
The whole area is covered with lava stone fields and many pics that have been ancient volcanos (some still emit smoke) and you can actually see old rivers of lava all over.
This church was completely covered and surrounded with Lava.
Last visit to Morelia and last party before saying good bye, doing some more couchsurfing.
This couchsurfing thing actually works quite well...
The hugest quessadia(tortia with cheese) in the world =40cm.
Oaxaca
What can i say ?
Everyone all over Mexico told me to go there. Actually in the city itself i didn't find anything really special (didn't even take a single photo), but the big difference was the people. But there was something different in the air, a different atmosphere. Most of the people you see in the streets for the first time are short dark indiginous people. People are kind, seem happy and smily and they are not affraid and sometimes start them self an interaction with you - a complete opposite to what i have seen so far. There is also a rich culture life and a small village atmospheres, with the local orchestras give free shows in the center and other activities.
This is also what brought a lot of foreighners (many Americans) to settle there.
Not known by many, Oaxaca was once one of the important places in Colonial world due to a strong red dye that is produced from an insect that groes on Cactuses (Cochinel).
The meso-american cultures used this color to dye fabrics and their buildings. The Europeans who never had before such a magnifiscent color adopted it and it became a necessity for dying cloths among the European novelty (it was also used to dye the English cavalry uniform). This centered Oaxaca as the second important trade center in the new world (after silver).
For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
Oaxaca is also an extremely rich botanical place and it is likely that cultivation of corn started there and also chocolate. There is an amazing Etno-botanical garden holds which holds a magnifiscet collection of all of many plants of the area used by indiginous people for many purposes: from dealing with diabetes to making candle wax, making musical instruments consreving food with an anti-bacterial plant and the list goes on.
The cactus in the picture is arround 2000 years old and grows only 2-3cm a year.
The yellow flowers that we all know from almost every garden are also used as chicken food, and all of the chickens in the markets have extremely yellow color.
The process of chocolate making
Oaxaca is known for it's chocolate = the real thing ! Every where there are small chocolate shops where fresh chocolate is made a few times a day. And you can have your own custom made chocolate.
The Oaxaca version of chocolate is: grinded coco beans, sugar, cinamon and almonds.
No Milk and a very different taste than what we know.
Mole negro (chicken in chocolate)
is another amazing typical dish, which is a basically a thick souce made from many ingredients including chile and chocolate and cooked with chiken.
A small market round...
Inscense for rituals
The local grasshopers - pretty nice...
Cooling as in old times
The meat row - service is not included. Buy your meat and take it to the griller and enjoy.
Also very nice BBQ - they make it with Avocado leaves which gives it a nice Anis flavor.
After a couple of days, as usual found some great friends in the local bar and a lot of fun began.
First i met Alicia who is one of the friendliest people i know and has a really unusual proffession: a biologist that works for a clinic and grows fly magots to treat people (especially diabetes patients). The magots eat the bad tissue and prevent (nemek).
From there i have stopped counting the number of people i met and places that i have seen.
Just a day after and found myself going out to drink Mezkal with 20 electrical engineers from Mexico city who arrived for a convention.
Midlle eastern terrorista and Columbian Gurillera having Tlayuda (the local version of Pizza=hude toasted tortia with cheese, thin stakes avocado and tomato).
Carlos, a cloumbian electrical engineer who is here for his master, became immediately one of my best friends so far. Tons of fun and laghter, calling me terorosta all the time and trying to fool me and teach me new words in Spanish with a completly different meaning.
I'm on the other hand laghed at his viagra tablets (actually something for the stomack).
Also interesting are his stories from Columbia: he was also in the Culumbian army and has 16 Gurilla figthers hit by his gun and trying to understand his master idea in Spanish.
Rouins Rouins Rouins...sick of it already?
Yea yea, Another ancient archeological site, but it got extremely famos for it's unique architecture and distinctive samples used.
And once again of course the Spaniards brutaly conqured this culture as well and built a church on top of the Mixtec building.
The ultimate cinicism = a saint on top of Mixtec desgins.
Monte Alban
This time just photos...
On to the beaches...
Mazunte
small town on the pacific with low tourism with my 3 amigas from Oaxaca.
What the hell does a goos doing on the beach in a tropical climate ???
Punta Cometa - the southest part of Mexico at old times, it is considered sacred and we had the luck to widness an ancient marriage ceremony conducted by a Shaman.
Betty, me, Alicia Mariana and Pablo.
Puerto escondido
One of the best places for surfing, over crouded with tourists, but a little far from the main beaches some nice pieces of heaven and the best fish i have ever had in my life (A la diabla - devil style, for it's red spicy salsa).
Tehuantepec
I wanted to go and see the real Oaxaca, so i went to a small town in the area of the Ismuths of Tehuantepec - the area that Geographicaly seperates North America and Central America.
It was suppose to be extremely traditional (by the crap book) by i didn't find it special at all.
So i was there, the only tourist again, feeling alone, asking my self how the fuck did i end up here? and started to roam arround and home for something to happen. Soon enough i met some nice kids. The most intreging was the champion of Mexico in Karate for his weight, the most pleasant guy, looks very small thin, but immediately makes you understand he is a lethal weapon. So actually it was quite nice, they showed me arround and made me understrand that i'm actually in the right place for the next day - the celebrations of the Revolution day (didn't know).
Was amazed to find a big david star in the middle of the night.
Apparently there are 2 Jewish familis living there.
The local version for a Taxi
Little kids dressed as revolutionaries dancing La cucaracha
That's it, until next time...
