Out and About: Guadalajara, Mexico's Second Largest City

Fire and Grace

'Flamenco...at its heart, has always been and always will be an intimate form of music. You have not heard authentic flamenco, if you have not been in a juerga, with a small group of friends, at midnight somewhere in the south of Spain,

where there is nothing around but the voice, the guitar and the body of a dancer moving in the moonlight.'

Out and About: Puerto Vallarta First Glimpse

Mexico Diary - I vow to tease you until my last breath

It was just a moment. So tiny, I might have missed it had I breathed.

The sun was high in a sky coloured a perfect cloudless blue. I was strolling around an art and crafts market with our Spanish class teacher and the only other student in my class, P from Zurich. Amidst the colour and festivities of the artisenias, I saw them.

She was seated, her hands busy with cross-stitch or embroidery or something of the sort, something wonderfully feminine and totally alien to me. Before her, a delectable spread of her delicate work was proudly placed on a table cloaked in white fabric.

He wore a white cowboy sombrero made of fine weave straw. His personality showed through his swagger as he came up behind her, slowly he bent over and leaned in until his mouth was only a breath away from her ear. She stirred as though she knew he was near. His mouth moved slowly, and as he spoke, the corners of his mouth turned up into a mischievous smile. She wriggled free from his grip on her shoulders and shooed him away like a pesky fly and refocused on her work, her nose crinkling to make a little face at him. He came back with the same gusto and bravado as a kamikaze fly plagued with hunger. Except his hunger appeared only to be the need for his senses to be filled with her. Once again his mouth curled up into a grin, as he whispered gently in her ear, this time with a firmer grip on her shoulders so she couldn’t get away. Then when he’d finished speaking he gently pulled her toward him so he could plant a soft kiss resolutely on her cheek. Her resolve was admirable, but her eyes gave away everything when she finally glanced up to behold his face for just a moment. Instinctively, I reached for my camera as I could never resist perfect beauty, but I found my hand shrinking back as it reached its quarry. The camera remained in my bag respectfully, and instead I replaced my sunglasses to hide my eyes for I could feel them start to moisten.

From their hands, I guessed a possible age, they testified to a long full life of honest hard work. But their faces were soft and smooth like a child’s, and the sunlight danced in their eyes. I smiled as I thought back to my urban friends…that perhaps love is the best anti-wrinkle cream.

When the moment receded, I became angry. I didn’t understand why life chose to keep bringing me back to love. When I was trying to focus elsewhere, to ponder my raison d’etre, figure out my next career move, decide on my next meal… But everywhere I turned I was being confronted by it…a mother gazing down on her baby in a crowded bus, a little girl reaching up to grab her father’s hand as she called out ‘Papi’, a couple embracing like it was their final embrace even though they were only parting for an hour. I was an unwilling, unwitting witness to love in such pure forms, as though I was an open book that refused to be closed.

Mais ca c’est la vie. It is not always up to you, when Life chooses to deal the cards that are meant to teach or show you the path to change or to evolve. It is sometimes when you are the most vulnerable that you are also the most open to her.

Mexico Diary - What do you call your beloved?

Mi tesoro

Mi amor

Mi vida

Mi corazon

Mi almar

My treasure

My love

My life

My heart

My soul

 

How intensely, passionately, madly, wildly, unashamedly do the Spanish love.  When was the last time you called a beloved your life, your heart, your soul? 

Makes me wonder if this should be the only way to love. 

Crazy, with abandon, with every fibre of your being.  (notice no reference to ‘my mind’, who fucking says I love you with my all my mind anyways??!??)

But does it last. 

Does this flame that burns so furiously, burn out all too quickly…

Or is it love that comes in silence, quietly at first light, as you watch the rising sun caress his sleeping face and run your fingers gently over his lashes as you smile to yourself.  Is this the love that burns for a few lifetimes...

Fuck if I should know.

Mexico Diary - Six degrees of strangers in one night and a weekend out of sobriety

Bereft of interlocution with human beings, I crave activity and drag my sorry ass out of the flat to explore, for the first time, the nocturnal scene on my own. 

Funny how it’s ok, even cool and mildly sexy in a broody sort of way for a man to sit alone in a bar nursing his drink swaying on his high seat boring the bartender with his woes.  But let a woman sit at a table with a Mojito, smoking revolting Camel Blues taking in the atmosphere of the bar and some pretty jammy Cuban music, and lo and behold awkward sympathetic glances abound.   Waiters are extra attentive and groups of girls afford weak attempts at kindred smiles.  When all you want is to blend in, and simple observe.  I mean how fucked up is that.

A stranger in golf shorts and white leather loafers approaches, and asks if I am bad?  Through narrowed eyes that say what the fuck, I ask cordially what he meant to which he replies saying that my ‘mean look’ gave off an attitude of  being bad… Oh I see, never realized I had a mean look.

An invitation to join their table (F from Mexico City who was also the one with the white loafers, and P originally from Melbourne now living in San Francisco) and a few more Mojitos later (well they were supposed to be one of the best in town), the conversation kicks up a notch, and I graduate from being ‘bad’ to being ‘beautiful’ then ‘an angel’.    

The pub crawl takes us next to Roxy’s.  The local ‘rock house’.  A friendly, laid back sort of place with watered down rock and roll and then reggae as a second set, where you go to kick back and let it hang loose.  Whatever ‘it’ might be.  P whispers that watching the older couple in Bermuda shorts, lobster tan complete with white visors reminded him of why he doesn’t dance.  I tell him not to be such an ass and that it’s great to see old people still remembering how to have fun, then suggest pool as an alternative.

A few warm up rounds, and wicked long shots against the cushion later (my all time favourite)…and we attract a couples friendly challenge.  J from Vallarta, and his date L originally from Denver, now resident in Vallarta join us at the table and soon a rowdy competition is in full swing, where a growing line of 5 peso coins soon forms on the side from local punters eager to take on the winners.  I believe that the key to playing good pool, my friend, is to be in just the right state of inebriation.  Not too much so that you can’t see the damn balls, but enough so that you relax and don’t cock up your angles and cueing.  (Nic – if you’re reading this, you will remember the night we won the comp and our bottle of vodka J).  L and I decide that our newfound profession will be pool hustling.  Just to make rent, we’re not greedy.  Of course I tell her that she needs to get in a few hundred hours practice before we’re getting our Thelma and Louise gear on.

The next day, we head out 45 minutes or so north to a lovely hippie beach called Sayulita.  Our bizarre little posse – F in his cowboy straw hat, is driving and pulling on his weed stick, P in his zebra tight-fitted pants and Ramones teeshirt, a lovely little soft brown spaniel named Saul, me and my hangover.  And of course the boys insist, the perfect cure for my headache is a six-pack of Modelo beers and some pot.   All of which we stash under the seat, as we simultaneously buckle up seat belts, and remove caps, hats and sunglasses when we cross the state border.  What a riot! 

Here, we are all without a past.  Some come to escape…the law, a lover, a spouse.  Some run from life, from love, from pain.  Some merely want to get lost.  Here, you might simply be.  The present.  Today.  And I wonder, where I fit in, what brought me here, to this day, this moment.  Why did I come to Mexico…

(I promise, my dearest darling friends and the illiterate bereft of imagination, that visuals will follow soon.  As soon as I find the inclination to go walkabout with camera in tow….likely after the Mexican spring break which has still another week to go, and I imagine is the equivalent to Mumbai when Shah Rukh Khan is in town. 

But know, that when the Mexican sun sets and I am trying to finish my cheap white rum coz an even cheaper yours truly refuses to throw it away after realizing I had bought the wrong sort, that I think of you all fondly and miss you madly.  Yet another occupational hazard of the gypsy soul.  And that a piece of you is with me, always.)

Mexico Diary - Adjusting

The days sometimes go by slowly, when once again I find myself in solitude…occupational hazard of a gypsy. It can be stifling. Alone in the bell jar of my mind.

I have experienced the warm embrace of strangers, yet my heart remains closed to this place. My feet are blistered from walking, and walking, and walking…the path of a wanderer lost in space and time without reason or agenda.

Mornings are intrusive as the hollow feeling returns, when I stir from neutral sleep. Another day begins.