Mom and Dad Visit Mexico!!

My parents braved a journey to Mexico! And survived!

Mom and Dad came to visit on Christmas. They got to see where I live and enjoyed the area around the Bosque, which was fun and nice. The little town nearby really is cute and quaint, and we sat at the bullring and drank crappy Mexican beer and watched the kiddos do crazy things to impress the gringos.

Then we headed to Uruapan, where we were able to do a day trip to Paracho, the guitar making capital of Mexico. Cool place! My dad loved it and got to buy some wood to make a new guitar with.

Uruapan was not a highlight for me. I'd never been, so it was nice to see a new place, and we've talked about going there to tour coffee farms, but the city itself was crowded, smelled terrible (it is in a valley and pollution here is pretty terrible-- no emissions standards), had loudness forever.

Uruapan does have a nice park area that is fun to walk around and enjoy. After we went there we enjoyed fresh trout at a nearby restaurant, yum! And there is a cool fabric making place that is fun to look/shop around. So, the city has attractions, but is otherwise noisy and irritating.

Next was Patzcuaro and Janitzio. Patzcuaro is a wonderful town, and Janitzio is always fun. We got jarros locos, of course. And my mom had fun shopping around downtown Patzcuaro. Cute shops with local artisan crafts, etc.

Morelia was the final destination. Both the parents got sick, unfortunate. But we all enjoyed the butterflies! All the monarchs fly to areas near Morelia during the winter every year. Strange phenomenon. We saw an insane amount of monarchs! They fly around when it is sunny and you can hear them all fluttering their wings, and when it is cloudy they form clusters on branches of fir trees. The branches sag with all the weight.

Morelia is a nice place to spend time in. We enjoyed walking around the downtown areas, and I enjoyed watching silly sitcoms (in English!) at the hotel.

Yay parents! It was great to see them and was great for them to see where I live!

Happy family.

Now to convince brother Tom & Wendy to visit. Hmm...

Happy 2008!

Las Posadas

Last night was the first of eight posadas. Las Posadas (The Inns) is a tradition here where the nine days prior to Christmas are celebrated by reenacting the difficulty that Mary and Joseph had finding a place to stay before the birth of Christ. Nine neighborhoods each take their turn hosting an evening where the kiddos sing from door to door asking for a place to stay. The third place they ask accepts, and this is followed by song and then: piñata!

So the village nearby has small parties for the next week or so, and each neighborhood takes a turn to host. It's fun! Although the piñata seems a little dangerous... normally the kid is blindfolded, and the piñata moves up and down as the kid wildly swings a giant heavy stick. Yikes...

And hot food is served along with ponche, or punch made of fruits and spices. Guys walk around with bottles of tequila and other booze to spike the ponche as soon as it is poured. And people from the neighborhood hand out bags of treats. It is nice to get a little holiday-ish stuff in my system. I barely feel like it is December here, let alone near Christmas. With no stores to constantly remind me, I kind of forget. Although, now that power is back on we played Christmas music this morning! Yay!

I really like the village nearby. Around 400 people total, and everyone seems very nice and accepting of the strange gringos who come to their parties. One man stopped us to make sure we would attend the posada his neighborhood will host. Very nice of him!

Today I walked down to Eronga and back which has made me quite tired. I will watch a movie tonight and then zonk out.

Las Posadas

Last night was the first of eight posadas. Las Posadas (The Inns) is a tradition here where the nine days prior to Christmas are celebrated by reenacting the difficulty that Mary and Joseph had finding a place to stay before the birth of Christ. Nine neighborhoods each take their turn hosting an evening where the kiddos sing from door to door asking for a place to stay. The third place they ask accepts, and this is followed by song and then: piñata!

So the village nearby has small parties for the next week or so, and each neighborhood takes a turn to host. It's fun! Although the piñata seems a little dangerous... normally the kid is blindfolded, and the piñata moves up and down as the kid wildly swings a giant heavy stick. Yikes...

And hot food is served along with ponche, or punch made of fruits and spices. Guys walk around with bottles of tequila and other booze to spike the ponche as soon as it is poured. And people from the neighborhood hand out bags of treats. It is nice to get a little holiday-ish stuff in my system. I barely feel like it is December here, let alone near Christmas. With no stores to constantly remind me, I kind of forget. Although, now that power is back on we played Christmas music this morning! Yay!

I really like the village nearby. Around 400 people total, and everyone seems very nice and accepting of the strange gringos who come to their parties. One man stopped us to make sure we would attend the posada his neighborhood will host. Very nice of him!

Today I walked down to Eronga and back which has made me quite tired. I will watch a movie tonight and then zonk out.

Arg!

Electricity has been out here for about a week.

Not really a problem, except I had been working on a webpage as my main project right now and was almost done (!) but still have to fix a few things and need power to do so... grrrr....

And, at night, it is nice to have light if you want to read without a headlamp, watch a movie, or cook anything after six.

The problem was with the fuse, or so it was thought, but the fuse used for this solar system needs to be specially ordered. And trying to retrofit a cheaper fuse did not work, but did not blow the cheap fuse, just kind of clicked the whole system on, then off. So who knows!

At least I'm getting lots of reading done! Never a bad thing... And I made two cool terrariums a couple of days ago, which I should take pics of and post.

It has been slow here lately, which is a nice change of pace. Two people come today, near my age! Wow!

Hair

Before I take a shower I usually spend about ten to fifteen minutes yanking through gnarly tangles that have developed over the week of not brushing or paying attention to my insane mane.

Last night it was particularly bad. After laying in the grass for awhile, plus a few days sans shower, plus working outside in wet-ish conditions, my hair was sooooo messed up!

So I gritted my teeth, combed through it, and carefully put it into two neat ponytails.

Then I chopped both the ponytails off.

Now my hair sits in a plastic bag, waiting for my parents to come and take it with them to the States so it can be donated. Locks of Love only requires that the hair be kept in a ponytail or braid of at least 10 inches length. My hair will make a pretty wig! Yay!

The bad part of all of this is that I didn't really pay attention to what I was doing, so my hair looked a little f'ed up. Eh. Maybe I will try to fix it today.

Pictures soon!

Earthquake!

Today I felt my first earthquake! Very strange feeling. I am sitting upstairs in one of the cabanas and the whole building moved around a bit. Trippy!

The star is where the earthquake happened, and the small blue dot north of the star is near where I am:

It measured 5.8 on Richter scale! Wow!!

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I got to eat two great big feasts this week! I went to the community center in Eronga on Thanksgiving which was nice and fun. On Saturday we had a harvest dinner here in the bosque with some folks from the area, which was totally cool. Brian cooked a turkey and I cooked other things and other folks brought things and we ate a great humongo feast!

I meant to take pictures of all the food but I forgot, and then people started eating and the food got way less pretty. But, this is what we ate:

Smoked turkey yum! It was delicious. I made soup stock from it yesterday and that is delicious too.

Chickpea nut loaf, Risotto with chard stuffed into a pumpkin, veggie stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes with garlic and rosemary (very tasty!), another rice-ish type thing, pasta with stuff in it, pumpkin/apple pie type thing, and apfelstreudal (amazing!).

We also made mulled wine and spicy apple juice (cider does not exist here...).

Very fun and I am still full!

People learned how to play Jenga which was entertaining to watch. Very good game for bilingual events!

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There has been some rain this week, which is a good change. It starts to get dusty here now that rainy season is over. The rains have gotten rid of a lot of dust for now. The air is a bit cooler than normal as a result, but that is an ok trade-off.

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Today I have been reading about saunas and cordwood building. Maybe we will do a test wall to see if the wood here is good to use for this style of building... it is very pretty! And it allows for adding bottles to the structure to allow for light to come through the walls, which would be neat and would recycle. Maybe maybe.

SALAD SPINNER!!!

Some of the most recent guests brought a very very VERY important tool with them: a salad spinner. I am so happy!! There are tons of fresh greens here to eat, and the season is slowly ending, so now I can make the most of all the spinaches and lettuces and kales etc without spending a half hour cleaning them. Here is me happily making salad:

Whoever invented the salad spinner is brilliant. They are impossible to find here, likely because salad is not often consumed. YAY SO HAPPY SALAD YUM!

In other semi-related news, I am definitely no longer a vegetarian. The dogs here killed another cow the other day (another cow, yes... the first one was old, and by the time we found out it was killed it was no longer usable), so we went to town and watched the butcher do his thing. Very interesting experience... similar to the goat experience in Tanzania. Quite graphic, so I won't post the pictures. Plus it was a calf, so it was intrinsically sad. Brian gave most of the meat away, and one of his workers kept some cold overnight for us to try the next day.

It was tasty. Definitely different than eating an adult cow. I prefer eating meat this way, though the dogs-killing-cow thing is less than optimal. It is nice to see the meat butchered, know exactly where it came from, and know that it isn't pumped with hormones and poison from factory farming.

So I've gone from vegetarian to veal-eating CARNIVORE!

The dogs now have a fenced in area where at least a few of them are at all times. They've begun to form an apparently vicious pack, even though they are sweetie cutie puppies around me. We've started to de-packasize them, and so far so good. Happy cows and dogs all around... except apparently dogs attacking livestock here is not totally uncommon. Different world! But, all in all, much happier cows than in factory farms. Cows here roam free and graze all day all over the place. Kind of cute.