Blood. Spandex. Glory.

Last night I got lucky and managed to see that great Mexican sport: LUCHA LIBRE!

If you've seen Jack Black in "Nacho Libre", you have an inkling of the glory at stake in a lucha libre match.

Los luchadores are Mexican wrestlers. They roughly fall into 2 camps: los tecnicos and los ruidos. Which roughly correspond to the good guys and the bad guys. Both groups have their fans, though of course the good guys get more cheers. Los tecnicos tend to be more clean cut, and spandex clad. Los ruidos tend to have long hair and display lots of bad behavior, like taunting the tecnicos and whacking the referees on the head, or grabbing their mikes away. They too wear spandex. It´s all about the spandex.

While I am told some of the pain and injury is real, the matches are highly staged for drama and camp effect. Each wrestler has a persona, like Ninja Pequeño, or Los Terribles, or the Blue Panther or Maximo or Mistica. (Imagine a deep baritone referee voice rolling out each name on the loudspeaker). It´s quite gymnastic when they get going, lots of backflips and twists as they dive onto an opponent, and sometimes the action spills over into the front row. Which is why you don´t want to sit in the front row. Each new match is introduced by large-breasted women in bikinis and go-go boots, who stand in a line and gyrate for the television cameras when they come by.

The final match was the best. A very famous luchador, Mistica, was in the group of tecnicos. They tend to follow a pattern of fighting, then the ruidos looking like they´re winning by beating up on the tecnicos. They tend to gang up 3 on 1 to kick the crap out of one of the tecnicos, dragging him around by his hair/mask, only the other 2 tecnicos are often just hanging out on the side, so I think that´s staged. THEN there´s a dramatic turnaround as the tecnicos start fighting back and throwing the ruidos around. Sometimes the ruidos run away.

This final match also had Marco Correlioni on the tecnico side. He had on the littlest spandex of the evening, did not wear a mask to show off his blonde hair, and kept periodically striking poses in the ring to show off his abs. I was amused by the fact that his teeny blue shorts had "Marco" written on his butt.

I saw a match at Aztec Coliseum on Friday night with a group from my hostel. Which was fortunate, because although the actual arena is safe, the area it is in is sketchy, which means I couldn´t have gone alone. It was most excellent.

More Sunburn and Surf!

Because the Zicatela is not safe to swim in, I ended up taking a cab to Playa Carrizalillo for several days of my stay. It's a quiet little bay of a beach, so the waves are much more gentle. You descend a long flight of stairs, but there's a big range of beach restaurants with shade there, and you can spend all day hanging out, swimming, taking surf lessons on the smaller waves there, or snorkeling.

My first time I got a sort of freebie lesson from some random guy I chatted with who offered to show me some tips. Hector is a Mexico City transplant to Puerto Escondido. He is not a surfing teacher, he explained, but he was happy to just give me the basics. I bought him lunch as thanks and just rented a board for the day to practice (at Playa Carrizalillo, it cost me 120 pesos -- it's cheaper elsewhere). I spent the whole day trying to just practice balancing on the board while lying flat on it and paddling! Not that easy at first. Standing up was a whole OTHER task I tried a couple times, without success.

Really, the trick to surfing is getting enough speed under you. Like riding a bike or roller skating, balancing is a whole lot easier if you're going fast. Going slow is more unstable. So you really have to get a good strong paddle going, then catch a wave, which will help you along with it's speed.

A couple days later I went back for a formal lesson with Pablo, a local surf instructor. He was just what you'd think a surf instructor would be: super-relaxed ("Tranquila, tranquila" he kept saying throughout the lesson), sported a punky goatee, and was a big flirt. It was 300 pesos for a lesson of 1 - 2 hours (depending on how much energy one had, because an hour will tire out a beginner). Surfing is a whole lot of waiting on your board for a good wave to come along. By the end I was able to stand up a couple times for a few seconds, before toppling into the water. I was so excited when I realized I was standing! On a surfboard! That was moving on the water! And I hadn't lost my balance yet! Then I lost my balance. At least falling while surfing is generally painless, since you hit water.

Later I realized I worked up an excellent sunburn, pretty much where I sit down. Ow. I used a lot of sunblock, but the waiting out on the open water, lying on a surfboard, just means your legs and lower back get a whole lot of sun exposure.

It was fun. As my hotel owner Olga said, (in Spanish) "You can't come to the surfing capital of Mexico and not surf!"

Yesterday was my final day in Puerto Escondido. I think I really am a big city dweller, because I was a little bit bored by the end of a week in paradise. I had even taken to going to movies at the little bitty expat cinema house here: Cine Mar. It's such a great idea. Cine Mar is mainly a used book exchange for the many expats here, a video rental, and a makeshift cinema house. They also rent surfboards and boogie boards and have coffee and ice cream and sodas there. They show 2 English language movies a night. 45 pesos gets you entrance and either a popcorn, a beer, or a soda. And air conditioning. Not a bad deal, even if the movies might flash "Property of Paramount Pictures: not for showing" across the screen while it plays. If you come before 5 pm, you can pick out whatever movie you want from the collection and have it screened for the price of 2 tickets. "Slumdog Millionaire" is currently showing there a couple times a week.

I soaked up all I could my final day. I went back to Playa Carrizalillo in the morning for some serious relaxing on the beach. I scored that gem of a find right before I left the beach: the dude who comes out of the water in a wetsuit carrying a big bag of oysters in his own net, then cracks them open and sells you a half dozen of them with limes and hot sauce for 40 pesos (about $3). I was such a happy camper eating the freshest oysters one can get, with my feet in the sand, right before leaving Puerto Escondido.

Back at Casa Olga, I made myself a final lunch in the open air kitchen and took a last swim in the little swimming pool under the bouganvilla, patted the dogs Osso and Pirata goodbye, and got the fancy overnight bus back to Mexico City. I arrived this morning at about 7:30 am, and took the metro and collectivo bus back to my hostel in Coyoacan.

Sunburn and Surf

The hotel I ended up at, Casa Olga, has no internet access. Which is a bit of a blessing because it really focuses the attention on doing nothing at all. Which, really, is the point of being at the beach, no?

Puerto Escondido is a formerly rustic surfer's town on the Oaxacan coast, now undergoing a whole lot of construction to keep up with the money. There are many parts that are ramshackle, and apparently a fancy area tucked up further north, with mostly moneyed Mexicans buying property near the prettiest cove beaches.

I have not had a whole lot of motivation to seek out all parts of the town and report back on its character. So I only know what my end of it looks like.

I am staying off the south end of the Zicatela. The Zicatela is a ridiculously beautiful loooong stretch of serious surfer beach. It's also dangerous. You don't really go into the water unless you're a professional surfer. Watching the break, the perfect curl of water repeat again and again from the shore, is mesmerizing. There are the pros bobbing on their boards out there. Even wading in up to the knees and waist, I got dragged around a bit by the intense power of the waves before scrambling back out.

The rabid construction ends shortly before the quiet hotel I'm staying at: Casa Olga. Close to where I am are loads and loads of retaurants, palapas, stores, and rather expensive swimsuit and Haviana flip-flop shops. The bikinis are selling for about US $80, which is an odd juxtaposition with the inexpensive nature of being here. $80 for a bikini is expensive even for New York City. A typical beer here is less than $2, no taxi ride around town costs more than $2, and the downtown is all cinder-block mercados and taco stands and such, so it's uneven.

Yesterday I learned the harsh lesson of wearing a smaller bikini than usual: there are previously never-exposed parts of you that will burn a lot faster than the rest of you, and you will be most unhappy about it. When you discover that you should have applied extra sunblock on key areas, it's already too late for you. I stayed out of the sun all day today and probably will have to tomorrow as well. Which unfortunately rules out of most of the activities here.

Yes yes I know the world's smallest violin is playing for me.

I had plans to move on to cheaper, more rustic accomodations in Puerto Angel, another beach town nearby that is supposed to be really charming and secluded, but I am liking the hotel I'm at so much I abandoned that idea, even though I'm basically paying for a much larger room than I need (there are 3 double beds in it, and I am paying US $30 a night). It was the only one available when I got here with all my luggage, and I grabbed it when I saw the place.

Casa Olga is a short New York City block from the south part of the Zicatela. It's lovely and very clean, although there is a bit of construction happening around it. I have a shaded terrace with a view of the little swimming pool and open kitchen below, and the beach beyond. I can even see some of the surfers from my terrace, in fact. There is a hammock on the deck and a little table and chair set. My room is bright yellow and the tiles are a rich red-brown. The front wall is all windows, with floor-to-ceiling white drapes for privacy. I get up in the morning when the sun comes up and go running on the beach. So do a lot of other people here. There are plenty of night activities - there's apparently a great jazz concert going on right now in town - but I just haven't been up to figuring it out on my own. At night, I can hear the ocean surf crashing from my room, while going to sleep. It's really nice.

Midday is brutally hot. Even without being in the sun or being on the beach, I find myself sweating at about 4:00 every day. And forget about being on the beach then -- the sand gets so hot then it burns your feet.

There are a whole lot of different tourists here: an international crowd ranging from young to old, macho surfer-types from everywhere, bratty Mexican teenagers in big groups, wealthier Mexicans from places like Mexico City who have resettled here, a handful of wandering hippie types. The locals here are nice -- when I offer a greeting to anyone local, I almost always get a pleasant acknowledgement.

I made a trip to the local mercado today with some Puerto Escondido regulars staying next to me. I stocked up on lots of fruits and vegetables there, and got other items from a supermarket like a handful of imported products and ice cream and meat. So I am now making my meals in the open air kitchen to save a bit of money. John and Cristy (the regulars who come here almost every year from Canada) and I are planning to buy fish up along the beach tomorrow and grill it for dinner, and make some coconut rice and salsa too.

Although none of this is all that exciting, I hope, my readers, that you are more relaxed after reading this post. There's pretty much nothing going on, and that's a beautiful thing.

Buenas noches!

A Maze of Autobuses

It is surprisingly difficult to figure out bus schedules here. Considering how efficient and nice the bus system is generally, it's a bit odd.

It was near impossible to figure out my bus route to Puerto Escondido, but I finally got feedback on message boards to book a ticket out of the southern bus terminal, Taxqueña. Because it's a long, overnight bus to Puerto Escondido (12 hours), I went all out and got the Executive Class ticket. I will confess I am way PSYCHED to take one of these, I've always heard they're like the Rolls Royce of buses. Fully reclining seats so you can sleep, bathroom on board, my seat is separate from the rest of the row.

A Day in Coyoacan, Mexico City

This is a post for the friends and family. Because they're the only ones who really care what I ate for dinner and whether my flight had any turbulence. At least I think they care. Sorry to disappoint the rest of you looking for the sordid tales of daring and adventure I normally write about :-)

So I have safely landed in Mexico City and a pleasant hostel in Coyoacan. I was advised by a poster on a travel board to get my feet wet in Coyoacan before tackling more of the Districto Federal, or D.F. (what Mexico City is commonly referred to here).

Coyoacan is a neighborhood that is almost like it's own little city, far to the south of D.F. In fact it was at one time, before D.F.'s intense urban sprawl swallowed it. It's a chilled-out, safe area, with walkable streets and lots of little shops and restaurants close to its parks. It feels like Oaxaca in its neighborhood-iness, and I feel very comfortable walking home alone at night.

My hostel, the Cuija Coyoacan, is all of 4 blocks from Frida Kahlo's house. La Casa Azul. I walked there today and went through the rooms she shared with Diego Rivera. It is painted bright blue and filled the energy of their intense life together. The objects displayed throughout articulate their trangressive and outspoken and creative lives. Correspondences of friendship or business or acquaintance with Albert Eistein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Modigliani, Trotsky, all on display. Diego's portraits of women he had affairs with. Frida's corsets, which supported her damaged torso, turned by her into objects of art.

I was also accosted by a mike-wielding reporter for TV Azteca and his camera crew in the local park. I wasn't exactly sure what their show was about, but my crap Spanish and deer-in-the-headlights expression ended the interview quickly.

I had lunch at a little family-owned retaurant, with a set menu of simple food.

For dinner, on the other hand, I splurged out at one of the nicest foodie restaurants in the city, which just happens to be 8 blocks from my hostel. Los Danzantes means The Dancers, I suppose a reference to the playful and graceful menu drawn up by the chef.

I had a tequila, a huachinango fish served on top of tomato chutney with squash blossoms and capers in a brilliant lemon broth, and goatcheese cheesecake with passionfruit sauce. And an espresso. Normally I like a coffee to cut the sweetness of a dessert, but this dessert was surprisingly not sweet. Rich and delicious, yes, but the goat cheese added more tart to the cheese cake than normal, and passion fruit also has a tart edge.

My hostel has really nice people running it. It is clean and friendly and pretty enough (there are plesant pockets of greenery to sit in outside), but it is certainly a hostel-level accomodation. Sound travels easily, and I can hear people talking in the common areas from inside the room. And my dorm room is a little stuffy with no windows to the outside, only ventillation windows to the interior of the building. It's perfectly fine for a couple of nights though, and for US $10 a night, I can't complain.

The exchange rate is currently about 14 pesos to $1.

Lunch was 52 pesos.

The Frida Kahlo museum was 90 pesos with an audio tour.

My fancy dinner was 335 pesos.

My safe taxi ride from the airport to my hostel door in far off Coyoacan was 190 pesos. And it took about 30-40 minutes, late at night.

Blessings. Fate. And Other Things.

Years ago, I had a dream about fate. I retold it recently to friends, and the details came vividly back to me.

I was running with a stray dog in a dark field with long grass, behind some buildings. We were playing. I got it to "shake" the way dogs do if they're trained, then laughed and pretended to turn its paws over as if I was reading its palms and predicting its future. In my dream, where logic is not exactly linear, this was comical because it was a dog and had no hands to read. But then the dog unexpectedly spoke in a dead-serious voice.

"It's not right for the customer to try to read."

Staring at me, the dog morphed into a little gnome-like man with an intense look on his face. He gripped my hands and turned my palms up. In a flash, I understood that he was going to read to me all the details of my life, written out on my hands. When I would die. How I would die. If I would have children. If I never have children. When I would lose my family. If another atomic bomb dropped somewhere in my lifetime. Everything.

Because he was a supernatural, otherworldly creature, I knew that whatever he told me would be my true unchangeable fate. This was no fortune teller with wiggle room on how things would come to pass in my life. I would be condemned to live out the rest of my life with the knowledge of every important detail before it happened, with no ability to change it. He was about to steal my life.

I was scared out of my mind, and tried to yank my hands away, but couldn't. I knew that this was a dream. But even so, I realized I would still wake up and wonder if whatever he said would be true. I began screaming to wake myself up before he could speak, and woke up.

Grim post, Christina! You might be thinking.

Yes, well. I think a lot about how blessed I am, normally. Simply by virtue of having an American passport and a roof over my head and more than enough food to eat at each meal. My family is not in danger of a militia wiping them all out in a day, or famine. Because the world is not an equal place and some people begin with luck and others do not.

I have had a strange string of condensed good luck in my life recently. I really don't know what to make of it. Is the universe just messing with me?

We have a new President and a hurting country. Everyday feels like we are on the cusp of something momentous, but we don't know what it is. A disastrous collapse or a slow healing or both entwined. Or something completely other than that.

Fate unfolds itself in small bits of paper, you read the message as it's being written. And that's all you're given by time to work with and understand.

I realize this is not a travel post. But when you've got the electronic microphone in hand.... Travel makes me pause and count things. In whatever way one is grateful for life, I am grateful.

Squash Blossoms, Chiles, and Mezcal

My humanity mostly restored by Friday, I took a cooking class with Pilar Cabrera of Casa de los Sabores. This was a very special class. Pilar teaches it in the courtyard/kitchen of her b&b, which is a very pretty space.

Our group of 9 began with a reading of the menu we were about to prepare and a trip to a local market here to shop for the ingredients, including several types of chiles, purple tomatillos, squash blossoms, potatoes, rice, masa, Oaxacan string cheese.

We would be making quesadillas with green tomatillo salsa, squash blossom soup, yellow mole (which, as Pilar explained, was actually more of an orange mole) with chicken, and rice pudding. Pilar took us to one of her favorite markets -- La Mercéd in the eastern part of the city, on the corner of Murguia and Calz de la Republica. It´s not in my guidebook and felt much nicer than the big one everyone goes to. It is mostly a food market, and has a section of fondas -- small eateries with benches set up that locals come eat cheap fresh meals at. Pilar pointed out that as far as food is concerned, women do most of the shopping, selling, and cooking of food at markets, and as such, because each eatery was named after it's owner, they all had women's names.

There was a lot Pilar was able to explain to us along the way that would have gone over our heads had we been on our own, of course. One surprising thing was the bright yellow color of the plucked chickens. Apparently in this region that is desirable as a sign of freshness, and so vendors might rub the chicken with marigolds to make it even more yellow and appealing (think of how farmed salmon is fed certain mixtures of things to get the exact shade of fresh pinkness that entices us to buy it because we think that color means it's fresh). Pilar said you can't really tell how long chicken is out at market (she had bought our chicken for the class earlier at an organic place).

Another thing she pointed out was a stand of medicinal plants/foods. Among the items were 2 baskets of eggs. For children suffering from illness or evil spirits, an egg may be traced over their face and body, drawing away the bad, and then the egg is cracked open and discarded.

Back at the kitchen, Pilar and her assistants coordinated the class with a lot of skill. I know from trying to put together multi-part meals how hard it is to time everything the right way. Much less involving several people in the cooking while teaching about the cuisine. If there is one observation that stands out and that Pilar made sure to emphasize: good Oaxacan food is good because it is made FRESH and FROM SCRATCH, everyday. It is an intensive amount of labor, actually. Grinding the salsa alone in a stone mortar is a tough task, to crush the seeds of the chiles and tomatillos and get things smooth. Even something simple like whether something is processed in a blender or whether it is ground in a stone will affect the flavor. Pilar told us that her father would tell her if she had made a dish using a blender: he could taste the difference between that and preparing a dish via stone-grinding.

She started with the rice pudding first, and quickly went into fire-roasting the chiles to prep for a side sauce. Tomatillos were also roasted before being used, on a big ceramic heated plate. In going over the ingredients for a mole, she showed us just how many natural thickeners there are. Rather than use cornmeal, this mole leaned on potatoes, green beans and a green squash to thicken the sauce. She got us all outfitted in big poofy colorful embroidered aprons (yes very sexy) and one by one got us going on a side task or another, juicing limes or peeling and dicing squash, de-seeding chiles.

At the end of the food juggle, we finished in the inverse, with making the appetizers -- quesadillas -- last: rolling masa (pre-prepared cornmeal) into little one-inch balls that were then placed into a tortilla press and flattened. Then the tortillas were placed onto a ceramic plate that was being heated on her stove, and cooked from the contact. These were then filled with julienned chiles, mushrooms and Oaxacan string cheese (which melts well and doesn't get watery, so is good for quesadillas), and folded over.

Then it was time to sit down and start the serious business of eating all this deliciousness. Pilar started us with a drink of mezcal, which is very popular in this region. It is preferred to tequila, but hardly anyone outside of Oaxaca drinks it. She showed us how to take a piece of lime, sprinkle it with chile powder, bite it, hold that juice in the mouth and then sip the mezcal, mixing the cocktail in your mouth, so to speak. I have to say I'm not a mezcal fan. It's really strong. This is my preferred way to drink it though.

I'll allow the photos to tell the rest of the story of the food. It was all beautiful and delicious. Pilar's talent is clear.

I also made friends with: 1) Annabelle, a Filipina-American graphic designer who lives in Brooklyn (do we come in a 6-pack or something?), and 2) the most happy grey and white kitty cat. Who wouldn't be a happy cat if you lived in Pilar's kitchen, searching for mole drippings twice a week?

I later ate at Pilar's restaurant, La Olla, which is at 420 Reforma. That was probably the best Oaxacan food I've eaten the whole time I've been here. She really is an artist, and you can taste the thoughtfulness in everything coming out of her kitchen.

Sick and Sicker

Saturday and Sunday mostly passed getting acclimated to Oaxaca City. I mainly just walked around, saw a couple museums, and hung out in the zócalo (which is the big public square here). It's like a constant party in the zócalo. Vendors, musicians, performances, parades commemorating la revolucíon, kids tossing enormous oblong balloons into the air and chasing them... that's the scene. With historic buildings framing things -- old churches and pillared buildings and such.

Hamburgers from the vendors come topped with a slice of ham, melted cheese slice, mayo, onions, tomato, lettuce, and chillies. Mmm. The corn of course comes slathered with mayo, then dusted with chili powder and the local cheese, and a squeeze of lime (it is called "límon" in Spanish, not to be confused with lemon).

I was feeling pretty worn out quickly, so didn't really DO much those first 2 days other than hang out. But clearly it was because some vicious bacteria was working on my system.

Sunday night was the start of a full-on fever. I'll skip (most of) the gory details except to say I've been pretty incapacitated for a few days. Oh and there was an injection in the butt involved, once I saw a doctor, since my fever ran up to 103F and things were starting to spin. A little scary. But all is well now. Also, Tuesday was probably one of the most underwhelming birthdays I've had in awhile, hacking up my second lung through my eyesocket while lying in a bunkbed all day, alone. Perhaps the only notable birthday moment was, by pure serendity, chancing to read a short story called "Birthday Girl" by Haruki Murakami, on my actual birthday.

I haven't talked with a whole lot of the travelers coming through because I've just, well, not had the motivation to make chit-chat, but by-and-large they are friendly enough here at Paulina and will respond if you extend yourself. There is a wide age range, though there is certainly a cluster around 20-somethings.

Today was the first day I began to feel like a human being again. I slowly eased on over to the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, which is part of an enormous 2-block complex that also contains a beautiful, thoroughly gilded, ornamented, painted church (el Templo de Santo Domingo), and a Botanic Garden that is filled with large, shapely cactuses and other fuzzy dessert plants.

The museo itself houses some incredible artifacts taken from, among other places, the temples at Monté Alban. There is some wonderful, expressive and intricately articulated sculptures, vessels, and tools. Animals are a big subject, and both the animals and people look, to me, very geometric. Some of these ancient pieces hundreds of years old look an awful lot like creatures out of "Wallace and Gromit".