Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

Correos Méjico

A massive, ornate building in Mexico City's Centro Historico houses the central post office, the Palacio Postal. For my money, it is everything a public building should be: imposing, impressive, a statement about the rectitude and permanence of the State.

Marble floors, gilded columns, filigreed railings—it's hard to imagine that all this is necessary to house civil service flunkies hunched over ledgers.

It is a working post office even today: customers apply at barred teller's cages to buy stamps and mail packages. The dozens of windows are no longer necessary to handle the press of customers. The economy of email and the reliability of delivery services like Estafeta and DHL have eaten into Mexpost's business.

My primary interest in visiting the central post office was the rumored existence of a postal museum. I was an avid stamp collector when I was young, and I still like to look at old stamps. I was hoping to see stuff like this showpiece 1856 Hidalgo issue.

Alas, most of the exhibits are mailbags, mailboxes, and old photographs. I saw nothing there of philatelic interest. Instead I found this familiar image of the Chichimec god Huitzilopochtli perched on a cactus eating a snake, volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl in the background. What is it doing in a postal museum?

Well, it is a mosaic made up of thousands of canceled Mexican postage stamps. Someone laboriously soaked them off envelopes, sorted them into a palette of colors, and glued them onto a large board. The image is so big I could hardly cram it into the frame of my camera. Not exactly postal history, nevertheless one might charitably say it is postage-related.

So the museum has little to offer, but the central post office itself is so spectacular it hardly matters.

A legacy of the Porfirion Díaz regime, the Palacio Postal was designed by Adam Boari, who also designed Bellas Artes just across the Reforma. That it continues to be used as a working post office is remarkable. Undoubtedly it will be preserved, but in what form remains to be seen. When ordinary citizens can no longer mail letters there, something irreplaceable will be lost.

Mexico City's Policewomen

You see them everywhere in the Centro Historico, waving gloved hands and blowing whistles in frantic monotony: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. They are Mexico City's transitos and these days most are women.

Their presence gives evidence of liberal reforms undertaken by the Mexico City government. Over stiff opposition from male officers, women have been given police careers. Female officers are less prone to corruption, so incorporating them accomplishes two important goals: a more egalitarian society and less extortion.

Although women have broken into the formerly all-male bastion of the police force, they are used mostly in trivial positions. I've never seen one issue a citation, and drivers ignore their orders more often than not. Moreover women remain shut out of the more notoriously corrupt departments such as the transitos of Estado de Mexico.

Women now serve with the federal police in positions of real importance and, given Mexico's drug wars, of considerable danger. Female police, female prosecutors, female judges—Mexico is finally getting law enforcement working.

In the 9:00 PM darkness I sit writing at my desk in the Hotel Gillow. I hear the women, sounding like crickets, pushing the last of the rush hour traffic through the intersection at Cinco de Mayo and Isabel la Católica: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. Their sounds make me feel comfortable and reassured.

Zócalo Navidad

Back from Ecuador, I'm waiting in Mexico City for Laura's return flight from Seattle. I walk over to the Plaza de la Constitutión for a look at Christmas festivities. Commercial buildings face two sides of the Zócalo, covered with huge holiday decorations...

...that light up at night. Newspaper El Universal says the displays surrounding the plaza mayor use 80,000 colored lamp bulbs.

On the Zócalo I wander through snowy attractions, part of a program the city calls "La Magia de la Navidad." The centerpiece is the pista de nieve—the ice skating rink. Largest in the world at 200 by 100 feet, up to 400 people can skate on it at a time.

Other attractions include a ski slope that kids slide down on rubber rafts, tables full of snow for making snowmen, and a rink for motos de nieve—snowmobiles.

A large tent houses la guerra de nieve, a day-long snowball fight. Lines for this attraction are the longest: children wait for hours for an opportunity to pelt each other with snow. For most, this will be their first winter experience.

The line between private enterprise and government affairs blurs. Eighty percent of the funding for La Magia de la Navidad comes from private sources, paving the way for commercial attractions such as Toon's Land, "Where dreams come true." I'd say it's more like "Where we sell toys based on cartoon characters."

Domino's Pizza operates an outlet on the plaza, feeding festival goers with archetypal Mexican food.

As if all this isn't enough, a group of teenagers demonstrates, exacerbating traffic jams caused by street closures around the Zócalo. This group's complaint: their school has no water.

Every day, somewhere in Mexico, demonstrators shut down a road—a hallowed tradition.

The Metropolitan Cathedral seems lonely and forgotten amid all the activity. This is the biggest time of year for the Church, but nobody is paying it any attention.

Not everything is about winter sports or commercialism. The largest of the lighting displays depicts Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus—perhaps the lone reminder in all of the Zócalo that la Navidad celebrates the birth of Christ.

La Magia de la Navidad still exists, but perhaps not on the Zócalo. I find it in the posadas, in singing the old carols, and in my heart.

To all of you, Felíz Navidad.

Cotopaxi

After hosting me at his family's dairy farm near Quito, Federico offered to drive me to view one of Ecuador's volcanoes—19,347' Cotopaxi. We approached the mountain via a gravel road that winds through ranch country. Along the way we crossed many streams fed by snowmelt from Cotopaxi's glaciers.

Cotopaxi hasn't erupted in more than a century. When it does, the forces unleashed are amazing. In 1877, an eruption melted the glaciers, creating lahars (mudflows) that reached all the way west to the Pacific Ocean and east to the Amazon Basin. The volcano hurled large stones, scattering them in this field some twenty miles from the mountain.

Cotoaxi receives many visitors. Small hotels and campgrounds provide rustic lodgings

A charming practice: protecting signs with thatch roofs.

Ordinarily you can see Cotopaxi from Quito, but I hadn't been able to because of persistent cloudiness. On this excursion, the clouds briefly lifted—fortunate for me.

A billboard image from a few years ago shows more extensive ice cover on Cotopaxi than today. Federico says global warming is causing the glacier to shrink.

Scores of Quiteños and foreigners climb the volcano every week. Unequipped and without time for such a venture, Federico and I instead found a cozy mountain inn. We sat before a fire sipping cinnamon tea and talking about mountain climbing. These days, I'm better at discussing than climbing. A twenty-something athlete, Federico intends to scale the volcano some day.

An Ecuadorian Farm

One reason I chose Ecuador over other possible destinations is because a friend introduced me to her relatives who are citizens of the country. One morning, in an act of incalculable generosity, her cousin Federico drove me out to the family dairy farm south of the city. He spent an entire day showing me around.

Ecuadorian farmland is beautiful. In the USA farms are laid out in a boring rectilinear grid. A national survey begun in 1785 ensured rural property would be parceled out in an organized fashion. Land was divided up into sections one mile on a side: 640 acres to a section, 36 sections to a township, all precisely aligned north-south.

Lacking such a survey, farm boundaries in Ecuador (and in Europe) were set using other criteria: ridge tops, streams, a neighbor's encroachment. Fields are irregular, curving, making for attractive looking countryside.

In France, farm roads like this one would be lined with poplars. Ecuadorians chose eucalyptus: similarly fast-growing trees that produce arguably better timber.

Federico runs about 300 cows on just over 400 acres, a density made possible by ample rainfall. His animals look contented grazing on all that lovely green grass.

The farmhouse is lovely too. The family lives in Quito where they have friends and other businesses. They use the original farmhouse built by Grandpa as a weekend getaway. The house was constructed entirely of lumber cut from the farm's own timber.

A spring satisfies water needs. Tumbling down hillsides, it reaches a system of ditches where it is directed to provide water for the livestock, the humans, and for irrigating pasture during the dry season. I find it somehow satisfying that the farm derives so many of its resources from the land itself.

Nearby, Federico's uncle runs a cheese-making operation. He used to live in this log house although he has since moved to the city.

He makes artisanal cheeses. They look and smell yummy and sell to the luxury market. One of his buyers comes all the way from Belgium. Talk about bringing coals to Newcastle.

 

On Federico's farm, the cows are milked at 3 AM and 3 PM using modern milking machines. The milk is sold to Carnation, so the farm is a small capillary in a vast artery that supplies all of Ecuador.

Nearby, an even smaller capillary sells milk to no one except for maybe a couple of neighbors. An indigenous woman milks her two cows by hand while keeping an eye on her two-year-old daughter.

 

It's a marvel that people still milk cows this way. Maybe there's hope for us all.

Walking about on Federico's smallholding gives me a good feeling. The milk and cheese-making operations show that small farmers can succeed, at least in Ecuador.

Good Eats in Ecuador

A folk saying says that Mexico is a land where nobody goes hungry. That seems to be true in Ecuador too. Food is tasty, plentiful, and cheap. Even people subsisting on handouts can score enough nickels for café y humitas.

I make an effort to eat traditional foods wherever I travel. What am I eating in Quito? Llapingachos (fat cheese-filled potato pancakes colored orange from some spice), guatita (tripe and potato stew in peanut sauce), empanadas verdes (plantain flour empanadas stuffed with cheese), and chifles (crispy fried plantains).

My favorite so far is cheviche. It's different than the Mexican kind. In Ecuador, it's served in a pink thickened sauce with onions and herbs. My cheviche came with cangil (popcorn) instead of rice. Apparently popcorn is a perfectly acceptable starch in Ecuador.

Secos are thick stews, as in secos de pollo (chicken) or secos de chivo (goat). I just had to try the latter.

The pink sauce in the cup is aji, spicy like salsa. It was served with every meal. For some reason, most dishes include a wedge of avocado and little triangles of white cheese that you cut up and add to your main course. A fellow diner taught me to do this with my tripe soup—which improved it considerably.

Here's what I'm not eating: cuy. Cuy is guinea pig. They gut the cute little things and roast them whole. On the plate you can't tear your eyes away from the mouthful of pointy teeth.

But for a real gross-out experience, a street vendor offered me a skewer containing a grilled cat-sized rib cage, nicely browned. She told me it was guanta. Wikipedia explains that a guanta is a large rodent, known to most of the world as a paca.

Photo © Hans Hillewaert

To drink: various fruit juices. The glass next to the seco de chivo contains fresh jugo de mora (blackberry juice), every Quiteño's favorite. It's always squeezed from fresh berries. Exotic juices I tried were naranjilla (a small, sour orange), maracúya (passionfruit), and tomatillo. A tomatillo is not the green husk tomato of Mexico, but a strange fruit called a tree tomato.

Sort of look like pointy tomatoes, don't they? You peel them like you would a mango.

The peeled fruit goes into the juicer and out comes an orange liquid that tastes like a combination of peaches and… tomatoes.

All of these fruits are also offered in batidos: milkshakes made with milk, not ice cream. I got hooked on them.

Hot drinks are a problem. Ask for coffee and you usually get Nescafé. Ecuador grows coffee, but most of the beans get shipped to rich countries. An alternative is candelazo (cinnamon tea spiked with aguardiente). The booze is served in a separate pitcher so you can add to your liking—a practice that relieves me of the awkwardness of asking for a virgin candelazo.

Ecuador has a tremendous variety of fruits, vegetables, and meats to choose from. And most are quite inexpensive if you stay away from beef. But with chivo, cuy, and guanta to choose from, that shouldn't be a problem.

Menestras del Negro

The back of this hobbling shoeshine man's coveralls bears an ad for a Quito restaurant: Menestras del Negro.

 

Latin Americans have no trouble with this image, but I have to be careful finding unoffensive wording when translating. It might be expressed as "Blackie's Beans." I'll let you struggle with finding a less awkward translation.

The cartoon face would probably be insulting to many in the States. Is that a bone in his hair? Or is it a fork?

In Ecuador, El Negro is considered a friendly nickname, sort of like what I'm sometimes called in Mexico—Pelón (Baldy). The restaurant—actually a fast food chain—may be trading on a popular assumption that black people really know how to cook beans. Like we used to with Aunt Jemima's pancake mix. Whatever the case, I get the impression that nobody in Ecuador is offended by the name or the cartoon.

As expatriates and travelers, we frequently encounter cross-cultural land mines.

The TelefériQo

Museum-ed out, frazzled from dodging speed-crazed cabbies, and sick of listening to trolebuses tootling Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer on their horns, I looked for some way to get out of Quito's city center. I found it here.

 

The TelefériQo runs up the side of Pichincha Volcano. One of the highest gondola lifts in the world, it carries visitors up a 1½-mile cable to an altitude of 13,400'. I've only been higher than that once, when I hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney in California's Sierra Nevada.

The ride to the top took forty minutes and as we ascended, the fog rolled in. I figured the outing was a bust. Then the fog started to lift and I saw this enormous antenna farm. Bliss! I was so intrigued that I didn't notice the snow-capped peak of Volcán Cayambe peeking through the clouds until I examined the photograph.

Stunning views, 360º of them, can be had from Cruz Loma, the lookout at the top of the TelefériQo. The building in the foreground is a chapel. In Catholic countries, the Church is never far away.

The fog lifted enough to permit a misty view of Quito.

To the north, I looked down on the airport. For a city of two million people, a one-runway airport doesn't seem to be enough. But compared with U.S. cities of like size, air traffic here is surprisingly light.

I spent a couple of hours walking trails, gasping for breath, and listening to my heart pound. It was worth it.

Trouble in Volcano City

Ecuador is a poor country. Per capita income is half that of Mexico. Something like half the population lives below the poverty line. The citizenry is troubled.

Many work at marginal occupations. Street vendors sell food and gadgets at prices like 10¢ or 25¢. (Ecuador uses the U.S. dollar for its currency.) Competition is high and sales are thin. Like many other vendors, these women are selling lottery tickets—everybody's last hope.

A while back, the Columbian army crossed the border chasing FARC guerillas. In response, the Ecuadorian government cut diplomatic ties with Columbia—which retaliated by cutting deliveries of electricity to Ecuador. Since Ecuador can't afford to build enough power plants to meet its own needs, today Quiteños have to live with rolling blackouts.

Restaurante Benalcazar copes by using a genset to keep the lights burning and the roaster turning. Many others follow suit; the sound of hammering generators followed me everywhere during blackouts.

When your restaurant seats twelve and the average check is three dollars, you can't afford a genset. The cook at La Colmena works by candlelight, ladling out my bowl of guatita (tripe and potato stew in peanut sauce).

In the USA, idle gangbangers tag walls to mark their territory. In Latin America graffiti gets political. Recently a leftist gang assaulted Édgar Samaniego, Rector of the Universidad Central de Ecuador.     Sympathizers of the attackers tagged walls all over the city.

Last night a group of protesters demonstrated outside the Palacio del Gobierno, where President Rafael Correa works. Since he's a socialist buddy with the likes of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega, I assume the protesters are from the right. Either that or they're pissed off about the electricity.

A couple of ominous-looking cops approached the demonstrators. But all they did was have a quiet chat with the leader. When they left, the chanting and whistle blowing started up again.

Street crime is rampant and oppressive. The Lonely Planet guide warns about pickpockets and muggings and recommends walking only in restricted areas at restricted times. A Quiteño told me that the economic crunch has made many desperate, and that President Rafael Correa has made matters worse by declaring the theft of less than $600 "is not a crime."

As I walked around town, strangers repeatedly approached me saying I shouldn't be carrying my camera in plain sight. I camouflaged it by draping my jacket over it. But despite precautions, someone got to me. On a long bus ride a thief opened my day pack and stole my camera.

The loss more than doubled the cost of the entire trip, a amount well in excess of Rafael Correa's definition of a crime. For whatever good that does me. Ironically, on the return trip, the driver warned me to keep my day pack on my lap. "No ponga la mochila abajo. Hay muchos ladrónes." Don't put your backpack under your seat. There are lots of thieves. Right. Thanks.

Poverty, desperation, and zealotry—there's trouble here amidst the volcanoes. At first glance, the problems seem overwhelming, intractable. Ecuador is a beautiful country, but social disorder gives it a dark undercurrent.

[I had managed to upload a number of photos to my laptop before the theft, so I have images for a few more posts. After that, this blog may have to get wordy, at least until I can replace my camera.]

Quick Visit to Quito

Laura is attending a writer's workshop in Washington State. Instead of moping around the house while she's gone, I'm spending a week in Quito, Ecuador. Well—I felt like I had to do something.

From Mexico City Laura flew north on American Airlines; I went south on the Costa Rican carrier TACA. My ticket cost way less than Laura's. TACA fed me meals and provided roomy seating. The airline is totally professional and efficient. I had forty minutes to make a transfer in San Jose; it involved no more than a relaxed walk from one gate to another. It was like air travel in the '60s. Just get on the plane and go.

The air's thin here. Quito's altitude is over 9,000 feet, half again as high as San Miguel de Allende. I'm better off than most Norteamericano visitors since I'm partially acclimated, but many of them live close to seal level. Still, I'm having to take it easy as I walk through the city.

San Miguel de Allende boosters claim the weather is springlike year-round. It isn't. But Quito's is. A light sweater and an umbrella is all you need anytime, day or night.

This view of Quito is to the south overlooking the Old Town. The hill in the distance is the Panecillo, the Little Sugarloaf, in deference to the big one in Rio de Janeiro. A winged statue of the Virgin crowns the hill. Quiteños are very proud of it.

I did what you do when in any Latin America city: I visited churches. Lots of them. This is the Plaza and Monastery of San Francisco. Building commenced in 1534, when Quito was founded. For the Spanish invaders, first things first meant get the church built right now.

The plaza is a pleasant open space, and my favorite restaurant, Tianguez, has outdoor seating there. You can just make out the umbrellas on the left of the yellow building.

The conquistadores scooped up all the Andean gold, and they stuck a whole lot of it on the walls of the Jesuit Church, La Iglesia de la Campañía de Jesús.

Responsible for this kind of thing were guys like Sebastián de Belalcázar. He looks pretty tough to me. I'm a little mystified that in Latin countries where most residents carry indigenous blood, statues of their conquerors are tolerated.

Quito managed to preserve many old buildings like this 16th-century mansion. Lack of economic growth hindered redevelopment which ultimately worked to the city's advantage. Quito was the first city to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so recognized because it had the best preserved historical center in Latin America.

Quito has more hills than San Francisco, California. You don't stroll here, you climb. Situated in a valley surrounded by volcanoes, the terrain is rarely flat anywhere. But I enjoyed lovely climbs up narrow streets and stairways past beautifully preserved old buildings.

With artful photography and carefully chosen words it's possible to paint a picture of Quito as a quiet cultural gem. It is that—and it isn't. Quito has all the ills of a modern city, perhaps even more than some. But I was able to get away from the tumult to find the attractive side of the city.