homenaje a cielo

i think the title of today`s blog means homage to sky, but i haven`t got the brain power to bother checking in my spanish dictionary.

we left guzman this morning and i am now in mexico city, and skye will be in the sky somewhere. nacho (the owner of ictc where we did our tefl course, mentioned in previous blog as it was he who lent me la bicibura, and also who picked me up from the bus station on my first day in guzman 2 hours late due to a time change - but now that i know him a bit better i can accuse him of it being due to his having a hangover that morning which is indeed the truth) picked us up from our houses and took us to his house in guzman where we were transferred to his dad who drove us to guadalajara, which was very nice of him, otherwise we would have had to take the bus, and that would have been stressful, though we would have got a free can of mango juice on it. nacho used to be the number 1 tennis player in mexico, but doesn`t play anymore. they have a very big house with a library, can you believe. which tangentially reminds me that this week in guadalajara it is the international festival of books - bizarre that it happens here when in mexico the national average of book-reading is half a book a year. nacho said it`s so that the world has the impression that mexico is into reading books. how mexican of them, i like it. the featured country this year is italy, which would explain the italian art exhibition me jen and joe stumbled on last weekend in gdl. when we got to skye`s house i noticed after a while that nacho wouldn`t actually come in past the tiny little dog who was growling and barking madly at him, which really made me laugh. he said once a dog had bitten him. the dog then ran up on the roof and carried on barking like a mad dog.

anyway i digress. so mr nacho senior got us to gdl safely, not sure skye enjoyed being in a car too much and she was in quite a lot of pain. we stopped off to see some friends of hers, i went and got a chocolate brownie as was flagging a bit, and also slightly distressed to be in gdl after planning on not visiting it again so soon. the sun was shining so it wasn`t too bad and there was a nice fountain to look at while i ate my brownie, how superficial of me. then we got a taxi to the airport, the taxi driver was listening to opera excerpts, so obviously scored 100% on my approval scale. i like to rate everything i do with a %, it makes things much easier to understand and compare and contrast. for example, right now i`m 0% hungry (i just ate free hostel spaghetti), and 80% tired, 90% hoping i am still awake enough to finish reading my book tonight, and only 20ish% travelling wall-ed.

a nice lady at the check-in in gdl brought us a wheelchair and i pushed skye around in it, a la andy and lou of little britain. we even started calling each other andy and lou. i was lou. skye managed to carry off the greasy hair and headband look quite convincingly as andy. we got priority boarding on to our flight which was exciting as it was a busy flight. there was a blind man too, i offered to carry his bag but perhaps he was deaf too. i managed to not be scared on the flight, which was a major achievement for me, i looked out of the window at take-off and landing and even at one point when we were inside a cloud. i had a whiskey too, because it was free, not because i`m an alcoholic. mexico city airport is massive, and we had to get a taxi to a different terminal, me with the luggage trolley and skye in her wheelchair with an airport man pushing her. we had a lot of luggage between us, mainly lots of grammar text books we picked up on the course, some of which skye had to remove from her luggage as it was 2kg overweight. the check-in lady wasn`t very helpful and probably wouldn`t have cared if we tried to explain that the extra weight was grammar. then another man appeared to push skye around into the business class lounge and that was that, and i went off to join a long taxi queue. so skye i hope that you recover fully in the probably much safer medical care of england (no offence mexico but you know what i mean), and with your family looking after you, and i hope to see you back here very soon with both legs working properly.

my taxi driver was nice - people in mexico city are much friendlier than in gdl i`m sure - and he talked to me about mexican stuff, and what oaxaca is like - he said it was nice. i am staying at the hostel catedral in the centre behind the cathedral, i came here last time i was in mex city and saw a really good band playing. so i asked the guy at reception if there was some music again and he pointed to a sign on the wall that said suspension de actividades, and explained that just that morning the council had come in wanting to shut the whole hostel down. they wanted all the guests to get out right there and then, and to close the whole place down. apparently there had been a complaint from next door which is a nightclub, so i guess it`s because the hostel are taking business away from the club. the guy in the hostel said probably they just have to give them a big enough bribe and all will be ok because this is mexico. i hope so as me and sarah bullock are supposed to be staying here for new year`s eve, so if it doesn`t exist that will be a problem. i got free spaghetti for dinner, it`s included as is breakfast, which is really exciting when you`re counting every peso.

other than today`s adventures which i will soon go and recover from by sleeping a lot, the last few days in guzman were fairly non eventful, which was just what i needed. wandered around the town, got some photos developed from the crap disposable camera i had to buy in baja last week due to my broken one - all the photos have my finger over the lens pretty much, and the quality is quite bad, but it`s always exciting going to pick up photos from having them developed - so old fashioned. we did some wheelchair trips out, i pushed skye into a hole one day - the pavements here are really not designed for wheelchairs, especially ones being pushed by partially sighted people, ie me. we tried to watch some dvds but they were all in spanish. i bought a new cardigan from a school uniform shop. we had our last guzman don rigo hamburger from the best hamburger stall in all of mexico. i saw a big spider in my bathroom (at rosa`s where i stayed again). we found a good place for chips so ate quite a lot of chips one evening.

there is a big ice rink in the square in mex city just where i`m staying, and loads of christmas lights up. weird being christmassy where the weather is still summery, quite disorientating. hope you are all enjoying the snow and rain in england, that`s all for today.

pepinillo cansada x