photo shoot

a photo update to make up for all the words. all from mexico city
1. a cute child in a market
2. teotihuacan
3. candles outside the church of la virgen de guadalope
4. the biggest ever christmas tree in el zocalo (main square)
5. some chicharrones (deep fried pork skin)
ps. if you scroll down to the blogpost big fat fatties, you can now see a photo of the original big fat fatty, asleep on the job.

paul wayne mccartney

hi di hi campers

i have returned once again to belize, the land of the tiny ants and much bitier mosquitoes, and am at this moment fighting the urge to itch my bitten feet right off. i think i should receive a telegram from the queen to congratulate me for traveling back and forth the most times in recent history between mexico and a former english colony. which reminds me how strange it was on one of my many mexican bus journeys last week to be watching helen mirren in that film the queen – i felt like standing up, singing the national anthem, and announcing that this was a film about my country. i’m sure my fellow mexican passengers would have been too preoccupied playing games on their mobile phones, or snoring loudly, or eating their bus lunch cheese and ham and obligatory jalapeno peppers to take much notice. my conclusion was that tony blair is much more acceptable in spanish when you only understand about every 20th word he says.

wednesday 21

location – morelia; t minus to rod and sarah bullock’s departure – 2 days. we decided (or rather i did, in an apparently rather hitleresque way) that we would go on a day trip to some surrounding areas, as morelia doesn’t have too much to offer in terms of fun or culture. it is a nice place, and like most of the central area of mexico, is a unesco world heritage site, but knowing there was an interesting lake (lake patzcuaro) not too far away i figured we should explore this. we got a little bus from our hostel at 10am, then picked up some mexicans in the square. our first stop was a little town called quiroga, where they make lots of wooden things, like jigsaws, toys, spoons, and guitars. i also found a cello hanging up all on its own behind the guitars. i fought the urge to impulse buy an amazingly cheap guitar, as we only had 40 minutes in the town and i generally like to dither for at least a few days before making any sort of purchase, or decision in general in fact. i looked longingly at all the guitars hanging up as our little bus drove away.

our next stop was tzintzuntzan, near lake patzcuaro. tzintzuntzan means place of the hummingbird. i didn’t see any. not sure if rod or sb did, if so, they kept quiet about it. perhaps they got some wildlife photographer of the year winning hummingbird pictures that they wanted to keep under wraps. anyway, the native people of this area are known as p’urepeche, they still speak the language of the same name. when the spaniards came in the 16th century they brought some olive trees with them, which still live in the garden outside the 2 main churches there. the church on the right was for the natives who didn’t believe in jesus as much, it has more gruesome imagery. there are some outdoor altars there too, which is because the natives thought that the spaniards’ main aim in getting them to go to church was to trick them into all being inside one place at one time and therefore a sitting target for being massacred. so the spaniards made outdoor altars so the natives would more likely worship their god jesus in a non threatening place, and thus convert to catholicism quicker. the natives were one step ahead, and hid little images of their own deities behind the jesus figures, and worshipped these instead, whilst looking like they were worshipping jesus at these altars. they didn’t think to pass this wise trick on to future generations however, and thus their children did actually worship jesus. still they have both religions though in this area, the original p’urepeche one too.

from here we went to patzcuaro, which i would bet my bottom peso is a unesco world heritage site. we wandered around its 2 plazas, both very world heritage site-y, then had lunch with our fellow passengers. we had a comida corrida, which means a set menu of 3 courses, and a drink, all for around 40 pesos, which is about 2 english pounds, or 2 euros, or 8 belizean dollars, or 30 guatemalan quetzals, just to put it in geographically relevant context. our tour guide read out the list of choices for each course, and sb asked if there was any meat in the vegetable soup (she is vegetarian, and you never know quite what vegetarian or vegetable soup means out here, often it means it is full of chicken and bacon but no steak). tour guide said no there wasn’t, but was she ok with cheese and milk too as a vegetarian? yes, she said. not like paul mccartney then?, he replied. has paul mccartney done this tour? sb screamed in excitement. no, tour guide replied. oh. what would you like for the next course, said tour guide? we’ll have whatever paul mccartney had please, we all replied.

over the paul mccartney lunch, we sat next to a man called wayne, from canada. we think his name was wayne as we had seen it on a list of passengers when signing up for the tour, and all the others were mexican and i don’t think any mexicans are called wayne. he told us a story, which went something like this:

i’m not sure i should really tell you this, not while we’re eating [our ears pricked up, sensing some pretty exciting death defying adventure story from the hitherto mundane pedestrian wayne from canada]. i used to live in mexico for a year, in queretaro, teaching english. once i got a bus to morelia for a holiday. i got off the bus at what i thought was morelia. it seemed too small compared to what my guidebook had said. none of the places that were supposed to be in morelia seemed to exist in this town. i asked a taxi driver to take me to a cheap hotel for the night. i asked him where we were. we weren’t in morelia, but a small town nearby. when i checked my guidebook that night, the town we were in wasn’t even in it. the curtains on the bus had been closed when i got off. perhaps that was why it had happened.

we didn’t know quite how to respond to wayne’s story other than with feigned shock and horror. we weren’t sure why he felt he shouldn’t tell us this whilst eating. perhaps he feared we may have choked on our food in disbelief at his mistake? please make sure you never make the same mistake, readers, of ending up in a town that isn’t in the guidebook, or you could end up just like wayne. bless him.

we then went on a little boat across the lake, to an island called janitzio. there are 5 islands on this lake, which is the most important lake in the state of michoacan, even though only 1/3 of the lake is technically in michoacan. you can’t swim in the lake, as it is dirty, and fishing doesn’t really happen there anymore, just tourism. on janitzio there are 260 steps going up from the boat stop, to the top of the island. then there are 144 more steps that go up inside a huge stone statue of a man. this man is jose maria morelos y pavon, he is something to do with the revolution/independence. ie, one or the other, not both, as they were 150 years apart, but i can’t remember which and have therefore merged the 2 events into 1 - it makes life much easier, and i’m sure the mexicans won’t mind. jose is holding his hand high in the air, a la statue of liberty. you climb up inside him right from his feet through his legs and stomach and i suppose large and small intestine, to a smaller staircase inside his arm up to his upheld hand. the arm and hand bit is up some health and safety regulation defying stairs, where if you were to slip and fall you would plummet down to somewhere around his shoulders where the stairs widen again. at the top you poke out of his hand through a tiny head sized gap (luckily i have a small head), to view the lake from ahigh. great views in fact but slightly sick inducing. rod and sb removed their flip flops for the descent incase of flip flopping over down the stairs. after all this excitement and the 808 stairs altogether down and up, we got on our boat back to our bus back to our town. the driver/tour guide was playing the beatles love album which was a welcome change to mexican radio music, and would partially explain his lunchtime paul mccartney comment. there seems to be only a few variations of essentially one mexican pop song, which they never ever tire of playing on their never quite tuned in radios.

nb: sb had noticed that one of the mexicans on the tour looked a bit like sean connery, and tried to take a sneaky photo of him by placing rod near him and pretending to be taking a photo of rod.

thursday 22

t minus 1 day. departure from morelia, capital of michoacan, to return to mexico city. on arrival at the bus station, we had a bit of time to wait, so had some coffee, which was quite a debacle as they only had latte flavoured with vanilla, cinnamon or chocolate, but not just plain coffee flavour. instead we got a piping hot black instant coffee in a polystyrene cup. yum. i found a height and weight machine, and for only 2 pesos had the delight of finding out that i am now 0.3m high, and weigh 69.2kg. i thought this can’t be right (mainly it was the height i was disputing, as i can agree with the big fat fatty weight). for another 2 pesos, and on removing my shoes, i discovered that i am in fact 2.03m high and weigh 68.8kg. i’m pretty sure i’m not 2.03m high, and on the 3rd go it told me i was 1.58m high. i suppose i am somewhere between a hugely overweight dwarf and an underweight giant. not sure which i prefer.

on arriving in mexico city, i went to stay at hostelhome, which in full circle style was the hostel me and sb had stayed at on our first 2 nights here over new year’s eve (and the one we had slept on the pavement outside). rod and sb stayed in a very cool boutique hotel round the corner, called condesa df. (df means distrito federal – the centre of mexico city is called mexico df, and for short they (ie people in the know) call mexico city el df). this hotel had a very nice roof bar/sushi restaurant so we sat up there for the evening, on a bed, randomly, and drank and looked at the view. there was a photo shoot going on with a mexican girl dressed in a silver shimmery mermaid type outfit standing in front of the roof top jacuzzi/shower area. she was very skinny and probably very cold too. we on the other hand ate lots of sushi and kept warm under some blankets they gave us. topics of conversation were – what trilogy would you have if you could only watch one trilogy forever – sb said rocky 1, 2 and 3 i think, rod said lord of the rings. i didn’t know my answer, and need to watch more trilogies. also discussed how good the news magazine the week is, and rod promised to post it over to me every month – i hope he keeps to his promise. sb filled us all in on the state of the economy and how economies in general work. as usual, i found i pretty hard to understand anything she said as she is super clever at these things i know nothing about, but i nodded and asked intelligent sounding questions like if you could only have one currency for the rest of your life, which would it be. i didn’t actually ask that, but i really wish i had, as i think it would have stumped her.

so that was the end of the rod and sarah bullock visit to mexico to see lucy pepinillo pixmania pickles. they flew back the next day, apparently with no free upgrade can you believe it, and are now in quesadilla and avocado rehabilitation clinics in england. thanks for coming it was ace fun, and thanks awfully for bringing out the various things i had demanded, this is much appreciated, especially the ribena which is still unopened due to me still getting used to its sacred existence and not wanting to get too close to it incase it turns out to all be a dream in the end.

friday 23

boring and long bus journey to tampico, in north east mexico, on the coast. at this point here is some background information as to why i did this. robert, who i have taken to calling bert, which he disapproves of, had last week flown up to america to collect 2 more ultralights, from the sky gipsy complex, the arizona desert ultralight playground, set up by john macafee, of virus fame. [nb: i have now touched john macafee’s ultralight which is in the hangar here in belize, does this mean i am now infected, or completely virus proofed?]. robert drove from arizona to the border town of mcallun, which took 2 days. his travelling companion for this bit was called john and talked incessantly, and claimed to have been in the mafia somewhere. then robert and denis, a belizean who drives between belize and america as his job and has done for the last 20 years – imagine how much driving that is – hung out at the border for quite some time, filling in all the forms and going through all the paperwork and bribes they needed to do to get into mexico. i, in the meantime, armed with just the name of the hotel i was supposed to be meeting them at, had got a taxi to altamira, just north of tampico. not a single taxi driver had heard of the hotel, nor was it in any of the phonebooks they consulted. so i went to a different one where robert later found me, by the medium of mobile phone. very clever, if somewhat annoying. altamira, incidentally, is not in the guidebook – i certainly won’t be recommending that it is, nor will i be visiting it again. wayne, if only i had taken your story more seriously.

saturday 24

we leave altamira and drive all day to a place called cardel, just north of villahermosa, a coastal town in the state of veracruz. the day was mainly uneventful other than driving. some stories from/about denis – he drives up to the states to buy cars that insurance companies have reclaimed eg from hurricane ike damage, drives them back to belize where they get reconditioned and sold on to car hire companies etc at a large profit. he has also driven around 150 of the ex school buses they use in belize as public (chicken) buses down from america and sometimes from canada. last year he drove 100,000 miles. he has been shot at in guatemala, there were 17 bullet holes in his van, but he was ok. he had numerous stories about mexican police trying to get money from you – they will stop you and ask to see your licence then confiscate it and you have to pay to get it back, or fine you for not having the right paperwork even though you have, or anything else at all they can think of. best thing is to not stop for them when they try to flag you down, or just drive off if they are asking stupid questions, or shoot them. obviously i don’t condone the latter option, but it is a different life over here.

that night we stopped for some food in a small town that was, no doubt, not in the guidebook. denis and david (his brother, driving a jeep down plus another jeep that it was towing), and robert ate fresh red snapper, complete with its whole head and eyeballs. denis ate the eyeball but i think he was just showing off. he also said that the girl that worked in the restaurant was one of his 4 wives. i wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. i ate chicken and chips. i think i will become vegetarian again soon. we also had 2 boys travelling with us, one america and one belizean, they were driving to belize from north carolina, and had met denis at the u.s border and were now in our convoy as they didn’t know how to do the journey otherwise. they were very grateful. robert thought maybe there was something suspicious about them as their stories about whose car it was didn’t seem to make sense, but the american was wearing an obama hat so i think he was above board. it’s quite easy to start thinking there’s something suspicious about just about everybody here, and usually it is the correct thing to think, but not always.

some local children came to sell us some little wooden bird sculptures they had made, i bought one as they were totally cute, both the children and the birds. i didn’t buy a child i hope you understand. one of them, ricardo, was 7, i asked him if the older man was his father, he said no, his boss. i hope ricardo gets to see some of the 20 pesos we paid for his bird, but i’m sure he doesn’t.

we stayed in a hotel that smelt funny but had a cool palm tree outside it complete with flashing christmas type lights.

sunday 25

up at 5am…. not my favourite time to get up but we had a long way to go today, all the way to chetumal on the belize border. i slept for a few more hours in the van – i wasn’t driving at the time – then took over after breakfast and coffee so robert could sleep, which he didn’t. the road at this point was a good toll road with lots of lanes, but i kept getting told off by robert for not quite being in any of the lanes. i always think its better to not be too specific about things like what lane you are driving in, but apparently not. i was amazed at how infrequently we were allowed to stop for either some food or a wee, 2 things which are quite important to me. i suppose if you do this much driving you get used to it and you have so much distance to cover that you can’t allow yourself such luxuries. we got to chetumal at 10pm that night, which is 16 hours on the road, maybe the longest i’ve spent in a van at any one time. we had had a chicken sandwich at a roadside café earlier, where there were some policemen busily eating and watching the football game on tv, and probably wondering how much more money they would make in bribes that day. it was a really good chicken sandwich and the french fries were the best i’ve had in mexico yet, so i will make sure i always eat where the police also eat, they obviously have good taste in roadside food. we stayed in another strange little hotel where there were lots of mexicans outside having great fun watching their photos slideshowing on a big screen and drinking beer and generally being quite mexican.

this hotel didn’t smell as much as the previous one.

monday 26

hooray so we’re at chetumal, which is only 3 hours from san ignacio where casa bert is, so we were looking forward to being home soon. how wrong were we. you get to the border, do lots more paperwork, pay duty on your cars, and other things you are bringing from america, wait around in a queue of other cars, do more paperwork, drive to the next bit of the border. here there is a huge belizean customs hall, where there is basically a big tv playing some crap which all the border customs workers are loving sitting around watching, and a big car park where you park your car, and wait for a random belizean to come and inspect it. denis disappeared off with some paperwork to sort out, then came back saying they were disputing the value of the ultralights and wanted more money, ie a bribe to accept the low cost of them and therefore the lower duty we would be paying on them [we should have pointed out that john macafee has just donated a million pound boat to the belizean coastguard and we shouldn’t be having to pay bribes to the belizean ‘government’ for his ultralight to come here]. denis went back to sort it out. you can pay up to 75% duty on a foreign car you bring over the border, which is a huge amount, but still in fact cheap when you have bought a jeep worth $20,000 for just $7,000. we sat around, ate rice and beans, went to the free zone, which is basically a load of belizean clothes shops and restaurants, selling the usual crap, but at a slightly cheaper price. it’s a little walk from the car park, and a nice man picked us up to take us there. we introduced ourselves, and he introduced himself as the president. we presume he meant president of the free zone, as he then went on to talk about something to do with the shops there, but you never know, perhaps he was the president of belize. if he was, i would recommend he doesn’t drive around unescorted in future. we could have been axe murderers.

we then sat around back at the car park. we tried to name all 52 states of america to pass the time. we got up to 51 by the end of the day, i checked later on the computer, and we had missed out just delaware. sorry delaware, it was nothing personal. i also read national geographic, i had found it in english at the bus station in eldf. i read an article about north koreans fleeing from their country and their journey through china, and laos to thailand, which is the only country around there which will help them. they then go on to either south korea or the u.s or europe to start their lives again. it’s a long, terrifying journey, and they have to save up for ages to afford it. there are various humanitarian groups along the way which help them out, and offer shelter and food and advice. it made me think, once again, how privileged we are to come from england, or the u.s or any country where you have freedom of speech and fair human rights, and can go anywhere and pretty much do anything you like. then there was an article about mustangs in the west of america, and how there are too many of them and what they are doing about it over there, as the land has to be shared by the mustangs, other ranch animals, and used for oil and gas leasing too. mustang comes from mestengo, meaning stray. i inadvertently discovered an answer to an old blog question i had, which was where do horses come from originally. it is generally agreed that the genus equus (horse) appeared in north america about 5 million years ago, from where some of them wandered across the bering land bridge (now the bering strait) to asia africa and europe. these horses disappeared from north america around 12000 years ago, but the spaniards brought them over with them in 1519 when they came to conquer them. i don’t quite understand the bit about horses appearing 5 million years ago – from where? there was also an article about charles darwin, as it’s the anniversary of his birth or death or something, but there were no concrete answers in that as to how a horse just appears 5 million years ago. anyway it was all fascinating and i will subscribe to this magazine soon, and aren’t there a lot of things in the world to know about.

by about 5pm that day (8 hours later!), all the necessary bureaucracy had been dealt with in the car park and we went off in our vehicles to the insurance company to get insurance to cover them for the rest of the day. at this point me and robert realized we hadn’t had our passports stamped – we had had all day to do this but now when we were finally about to leave border control we only just remembered. we ran off through a few official looking belizean fences (ie full of handy holes for walking through) into the back door of the departure hall and then through an official looking corridor to the arrival hall. we tried to explain to the passport control man what had happened and how we had forgotten, but our explanation got all in a muddle and it looked like we were making it up on the spot, and he probably thought we were terrorists. for which reason he happily stamped our passports and let us officially in to belize.

we got home at 10pm that night, through the dark and the rain, totally exhausted, with not even enough energy to pick up a pizza on the way through town.

tuesday 27

recovered mainly and did some food shopping and washing. watched slumdog millionaire on dvd – there’s a great dvd shop in town that sells totally illegal burnt dvds of totally new films, for only 10 belize dollars, 2.50 pounds. good film i thought, india looks kind of smelly and poor and dangerous, but quite enticing too. the van with the 2 ultralights in came and dropped off the ultralights at robert’s hangar in the morning which was exciting, and meant that robert got to do manly things like unscrewing screws and carrying heavy things around, mainly ultralights, which aren’t actually that ultra-light.

wednesday 28 and thursday 29

more recovering. i have decided to write a book based on stories from robert’s life as there are a lot, and they are very interesting. the laptop i’m writing this on has the letter b missing so it takes a while to write words with b in as you have to hit the missing b key in just the right place. this could prove annoying as he is called robert and lives in belize. we watched notes on a scandal too which was I thought very good, especially cate blanchett, and it’s not often you see judi dench in such an evil role. as always she was mega we thought.

friday 30

nothing interesting to report today other than i had my first visit to a doctor’s in belize – dr sanchez, who was really lovely and not at all like the doctor in the simpsons. and as a totally unexpected and pleasant surprise, and very much against the belizean norm (ie slow and circuitous), any tests you need to do are done there and then and the results given back to you within the hour, so you can take your little result sheet back over the road to see dr sanchez with it again and he can diagnose you. not like in good old london where they send you off from your doctor's surgery on a crowded rush hour number68 bus to st george’s hospital to take a little ticket (like you do when you’re waiting to be served at the meat counter in old school delis or supermarkets) and wait in a big open waiting room to be stabbed in the arm and then pass out in front of everyone and wee yourself. you then have the pleasure of waiting at least a week to call your doctor for the result of your blood test, which they have lost as it wasn’t labeled properly in the first place, so you have to go back for more stabbing and weeing yourself. anyway, you will be relieved to learn (or not, depending on whether and or how much you like me) that i have neither diabetes nor a kidney infection.

in a topical turn of events robert’s computer has also died from being infested with viruses, including the infamous trojan worm. yes, i will be having words with john macafee, as rumour has it that these virus companies also infect your computers with the very viruses they protect you from, otherwise they wouldn’t have any business would they.

various addendums (i know the correct plural is addenda, but i prefer addendums):

mexico would be the richest country in the world if you included all the drug and corruption money in its gdp.

the american couple we met in queretaro had a friend called lucy bland, i wonder if if i met her we would self destruct as her surname is the opposite of mine.

i watched wonderboys with michael douglas and tobey maguire the other day, it’s really cool.

what does fm and am, as in radios, mean?

the temperature on the celsius and farenheit scales where they are the exact same is -40

sarah bullock thought magnum pi was called magnum pr, which would be magnum public relations. robert was a stunt double on magnum pi.

for the last 5 or 6 days of my travels i had been wearing my smartest black dress, as all my other clothes have disintegrated. not quite the appropriate outfit for a roadtrip through mexico. some jeans have been posted out to me here in belize but i fear as an overweight dwarf that they won’t fit.

robert has just informed me that you shouldn’t eat melon either before or after solid food – a handy way to remember this as he keeps telling me, is: melon – eat it alone, or leave it alone.

we had some green tea flavoured cake in eldf. i didn’t like it, but rod and sb did.

me rod and sb are planning a bike ride from mexico to patagonia in the next few years. we need ideally a 4th person so let us know if you are interested.

and finally, my favourite ever bit of mistranslated english, from our hostel room in guanajuato:

if you remain lodged, please go out before 12.00pm. in addition, it returns after 2.30pm. since it is the hour of the cleanliness, in opposite case i do not know it was cleaning your bed.

adios over and out for now.

senor banana, pollo feliz y reina de bebe

i have an announcement to make concerning my mobile phone annoucement in a previous blog. my mobile phone does in fact work, thanks to the miracle of modern science called plugging it in and charging it. it will however only be working for as long as i am in mexico, which is until friday or saturday.

so there has been quite a large blog gap. firstly, happy inauguration day, i hope you are all spending it in an appropriately american way. we are all draped in star spangled banners and eating huge portions of food and speaking very loudly.

so to continue the sarah bullock and rod holiday blog in a nutshell fashion so it doesn´t take me all day:

last friday, san miguel de allende
we wandered around san miguel, mainly looking for appropriate roof terraces from which to view the sunset over the town. strangely there was a bit of a dearth of these, which vexed sarah bullock quite a lot, but we did find one. we probably had coffee and cake there too, my memory is hazy but usually coffee and some form of cake is a safe bet. that evening we went out with the hostel owner, luis and his friend, enrique, who we renamed enrique iglesias, and also a french boy in the hostel called bousmaha bendida (cosi, does that name qualify for your strange name list?). we found our way to a mescaleria, and tried 5 different mescals, plus a few more free ones just for good luck. they were various flavours like chicken, orange, coffee. generally mescal makes your head spin. we accompanied it with some deep fried crickets, which were surprisingly nice and smoky and crunchy. we then went to mama mia next door and sarah bullock demonstrated a well kept secret talent for amazing salsa/ballroom dancing, while i just sat in a mescal haze thinking wow what amazing dancing. hardly a surprise as she does tend to be good at most things, but where does she learn it all?
we made it back to the hostel around 4am with spinning heads, but managed not to vomit or fall over, i think.
also of note that day were 2 motorcyclists who were driving from america to panama. one of them was apparently an amazing mandolinist but i didn´t see this with my own eyes unfortunately.

saturday 10th
up early for our lift to the next little town in the tour, guanajuato. luis was driving to leon to collect his wife and child, and guanajuato is en route, so he kindly drove us there. we obviously had quite bad hangovers which even the strong coffee and eggs from over the road couldn´t fix. on arriving at our hostel there, casa del tio, we basically lay on our beds all day which was quite a waste of being in a really nice town. guanajuato is really wiggly and cobbly and windy, with lots of brightly painted houses and churches. it is now a university town and in the past was a very prosperous silver mining town. there are some really beautiful buildings therefore, built in its silver heyday. there is a town further north called zacatecas where there is a nightclub in a former silver mine - sounds like living claustrophobia hell to me. finally we managed to drag ourselves out for dinner that night to a nice italian restaurant on the hillside with a good view over the town. over dinner we made a list of fruit and vegetables that are used in mexican and or english festive scenarios - radishes (mex), pumpkins (uk), hollyberries (uk). also we tried to decide which 2 vegetables we would choose if we were only allowed 2 vegetables to eat for the rest of our lives (potato and spinach was one combination, but there was much debate, and we never settled on any firm rules for choosing the vegetable (like do they have to be salad vegetables or winter vegetables etc), so gave up after a while). it´s harder than it sounds.

sunday 11th
wandered around and ate mexican food. i have by the time of writing this, completely overdosed on guacamole, so avacado has now gone from being my favourite mexicano food to my least favourite. even the sight of it makes my stomach turn. i walked up to a viewing point where there is a big statue of a man who was one of hidalgo´s main men in his revolutionary gang. his nickname is el pipila, i don´t know what this means in spanish though. there is a granary in guanajuato near the market, which was the sight of a big revolutionary soldiers v native guanajuatans battle, and this man was sent in by hidalgo to start the shooting, using 2 huge stones as shields against the bullets. i took a lot of photos of the amazing view of the town from el pipila. sarah bullock´s direction radar struggled a little bit in this town due to the streets being so small and wiggly, i think she would have benefited from seeing it from el pipila viewing point. on the way back down the steps to town i passed a few turkeys trotting around in the street, and saw lots of washing hanging out on the rooftops.

we bumped into bousmaha from the san miguel hostel, and his friend mat, who is from canada, so we did some wandering with them and had some beers. then we met 2 other french friends of bousmaha called nico and christophe, christophe was also a guitar player but we didn´t hear him play his guitar either. we discussed how nice the library in san miguel was, and how many books there were there. this seems to be a feature of libraries worldwide. me and sarah bullock ate some more cheese based mexican cuisine, this time it was gorditas, which literally means small little fat things. they are mini tortillas filled with beans and cheese and deep fried. quite nice, but essentially all mexican cuisine is based on corn and oil and cheese, and however many different guises they serve it up in, there is no escaping these main ingredients. sarah bullock has overdosed on cheese during this trip, and i on avacado. i am craving a good old cottage pie and sprouts and gravy.

there was a german lady staying in our hostel room that night, who had also been in the hostel in san miguel. she was travelling alone and seemed to attract danger, or totally fabricated danger, wherever she went, and had nothing but horror stories of her travels so far. her story that night involved a suspicious man who had shuffled some bits of paper around in his pocket in a suspicious manner, which had alerted her to imminent danger, so she had gone to call the police and give a statement. this caused us lots of stifled amusement. i hope she is ok and out of danger wherever she is now.

monday 12th
after corn based breakfast we got a taxi to the bus station to get the bus back to mexico city. one comment on bus stations - they never seem to be called the same from one city to the next, sometimes it´s estacion de bus, sometimes terminal de bus, sometimes central de bus, sometimes central terminal de bus, estacion central, terminal central. etc. so i never know what to say when getting in a taxi other than bus. it´s quite demoralising for my spanish speaking ability self esteem levels not to be able to be understood for such a basic sentence. the taxi ride back to the bus terminal was not quite as hairy as the one the opposite way 2 days earlier - taxis all over mexico tend to drive at 200kph and overtake huge lorries on blind corners. much like buses but on a smaller scale. we saw the 2 french guitarists at the bus terminal going to san miguel. we chatted to our driver, whose name was rodriguez aurelia, he was very smiley and helpful. we got a little croissant and bottle of water, and gave the primera plus bus 8/10 - generally primera plus are very good.

we went straight to the airport to meet rod from his flight. it was a bit delayed (due to a broken engine that morning which the pilot had told them all was now satisfactorily fixed - phew) which threw sarah bullock into a panic, but we went for a coffee and a corona to calm down, and everything was ok. rod had brought out some ribena for me! and 3 different chocolate bars - dairy milk (leche lecheria), galaxy (galactea), and mini eggs (huevitos). this was all very exciting. we stayed in the zona rosa area that night, my dorm room had one mosquito in it who buzzed around my head all night, i tried to find him with my torch but he always got away. he had gone by the next day thankfully. there was also a full length mirror in my room which wasn´t very nice to look in after so much mexican food and chocolate.

tuesday 13th
we found a great place for breakfast so sat there for a long time and did crosswords. then we went wandering through a park and some nice streets, via another coffee stop. we ended up at the velodrome on the metro stop called veledromo. it was built for the 1968 olympics. we hung around waiting for a way to get in, as it was all padlocked up. there were some little kids waiting to get in so they could train too. eventually a man appeared and asked us all a lot of questions, i explained that we only wanted to look at it, he checked we weren´t going to take photos, i said of course not. we got in and looked around, it was pretty cool and retro, with a huge patch of grass in the middle being watered by a perpetual sprinkler. while our guide was adjusting the sprinkler bit, i managed to take a photo of one side of the velodrome. hope immigration doesn´t find it on my camera on my way out of the country.

that night we went to la lucha libre - mexican wrestling! this is absolutely ridiculous, but totally amazing fun. it´s like wwf, in that it´s totally fake and not real fighting at all. but the costumes are amazing, and the masks, and everyone chants rude songs at the ones they don´t like. there was a little kid sitting behind us with his family and we heard some quite obscene swearing coming from him, but i think in the wrestling arena it´s all quite acceptable. after 20 minutes of thinking god this is really stupid, we were all yelling like mad people too. they totally overdo it, and fly out of the ring and carry on the ´fighting´on the floor by the 1st row of seats. we were on the 2nd row so got quite close to it all and sarah bullock even touched one of them when he flew into our row. all in all it was brilliant but completely stupid. our favourite team (it tends to be 2 teams of 3 against each other at one time), was azteca, warrior, and red dragon junior. they won their fight. our wrestling names are pixmania, el torito terrible, and el fishing rod.

we went for a beer on the way home and rod and sarah bullock had a heated debate (aka a fight) about the origins of the cold war. i sat and did some doodling and spoke to robert on the phone who was about to leave for america to collect some more little aeroplanes to bring back to belize.

wednesday 14th
another great breakfast followed by leaving zona rosa for coyoacan where we were getting our night bus to the coast from. this is the part of mexico city where frida kahlo lived in her blue house with diego rivera. it´s a really nice house/museum, and a really amazing shade of blue. i don´t know much about frida kahlo and haven´t seen the film. diego was an artist, and architect and they were both very intellectual and she had lots of big parties and they both had lots of affairs. there was a good gift shop, which is the main thing.

we sat on a bench and drank coffee and ate more huevitos and looked in our guide books. between us we have lonely planet, time out, baedekkers, and rough guide. pretty cool hardcore tourists. between us we found a cool bar to hang out at, it belongs to diego luna, who is a mexican actor, he is in films with gael garcia bernal - like y tu mama tambien, and a new one out over here called rudo y cursi. he wasn´t in the bar unfortunately. there was a jukebox playing lots of english music from the late 80s and early 90s, which was a bit out of place in a mexican suburb but we got used to it. we had a few beers and tequilas and mescals, and lots of guacamole, and rolled into a taxi rather drunk to the bus station for our bus at 11pm to zihuatanejo. this was an estrella de oro bus, i hadn´t been on one of these before but it was very good, possibly the best one yet in terms of reclination of the seats. the air conditioning wasn´t so great, so we woke up in the night sweating like pigs and took our jumpers and shoes and socks off. other than that it was fairly uneventful.

thursday 15th
arrive in zihuatanejo. very hot, even though it´s winter here. how do people survive in the summer in mexico is what i want to know? went straight out for breakfast, then lay on the beach for around 4 hours in a post night bus haze. not a good idea with no shade or suncream. consequently i went back to the hostel at 4ish feeling very strange and slept for the rest of the evening, feeling sick and achey and like a stupid english person who´d lain in the mexican sun too long.

friday 16th
lay in bed all day feeling quite the same. funny how with sleep you can´t save it up, like if you have 2 days of loads of sleeping, you´d think you wouldn´t need much for a few more days and could stay awake for like 48 hours, but it doesn´t work like that. the hostel - angela´s hostel, run by greg from canada and angela from mexico, and 2 really cute cats - overlooks a market street, so is very noisy. it is also very hot, even with 2 fans blowing on you. the market stalls open at 5am, and they feel that that is a good time to play very loud disco music, maybe to keep them awake while they set up their stalls. this is not appreciated. at all. i got up for a few hours in the evening and went for a pizza with rod and sarah bullock at pizza loca. we totally overordered and felt sick.

saturday 17th
felt 50% better so went out for breakfast. sarah bullock didn´t feel too well today though, so we spent most of the day hanging out at the hostel and not in the sun. me and rod played travel scrabble, i finished black swan green by david mitchell, which was brilliant, and i want to read all his other books now. i started midnight´s children, which is hard to get into, but once you get past the first few pages and used to the style, is amazing, a la 100 years of solitude type amazing i think. will have to be more disciplined with it due to the brain power it requires. there were lots of small ants in the hostel, like the little ants you get in belize who swarm around 1 tiny miniscule crumb. there are harmless but i thought i would mention them. me and rod wandered around town in the evening, and found a nice part of the town down by the pier where there are lots of shops and restaurants. zihuatanejo is essentially yet another americanised touristy coastal town, but it retains quite a lot of its mexican-ness, as most tourists go a bit north to ixtapa, which is a purpose built tourist hotel haven, if that´s what floats your boat. i think generally i prefer inland and mountainous areas to coast areas in mexico, i can´t handle the heat or the tourists or the lack of things to do other than lie in the sun, and the amount of sand that ends up getting on every bit of you and your stuff. bah humbug what a yorkshire comment.

sunday 18th
all feeling better, and rod hadn´t succumbed to the mystery sun related illness, so we ventured out on a little boat to a beach across the bay called playa las gatas. there were rows of sun loungers so we got some and stayed on them all day, under an umbrella. i had a naranjada (orangeade) that i managed to make last all 5 hours of sun lounger-ness. rod had 2 buckets of beer. we swam in the sea, it was much cleaner and bluer here than the beach in the town, but was quite rocky and shallow. sarah bullock sustained a rocky seabed related leg injury, and we did a bit of sea urchin panic but unecessarily, it turned out. there are quite a few parascenders in this area (where you go up in a parachute off the back of a boat). sarah bullock really wanted to go on one, but i said robert would kill me if i did something as naff as parascending and he would never take me ultralighting again. rod wanted to go on a banana boat, but didn´t get round to it either, maybe due to beer consumption, or maybe due to it being too much fun for him to handle.

we met a man from oban in scotland, who had come to zihua as a tennis pro years ago, and now worked in property out here. he told us another nice beach to go to called barre de potosi. we managed to get rid of my torn 500 peso note that no shops would take due to it having a lot of the corner missing. some cute old men played a song to us on their guitars. rod played with a dog which sarah bullock was convinced was rabid, but she does tend to think that all mexican animals are rabid. i wore my new headscarf in an audrey hepburn style way. rod managed to buy a hat which fitted his totally massive head, after trying all the hat shops in the whole town. he looks very mexican now. we got the boat back and had a sunset game of scrabble on the beach, then went out for dinner at a place called angelo´s, run by a crazy italian called angelo. he told us he had worked in london for 5 years and had had the best time of his life there, and that the best pizza in all of england can be got in leicester, but we can´t remember the name of the restaurant.

monday 19th
we went off to barre de potosi, as recommended by mr oban and various other people. this involved getting a local bus 20 minutes south, then you get on the back of a little pick up truck like a refugee, that takes you another 10 minutes to the town of barre de potosi. there were a few locals on the camioneta, and a mexican guitar player who was very talkative and jokey which was funny for a while, but then kind of annoying. the town here is much more rural and basic, with a few palapa restaurants on the beach where the guitar player turned up and continued to be vaguely annoying. the sea is a bit murkier and wavier, but generally it´s a very beautiful place. behind the beach bit is a little lake so me and rod did a boat trip round the lake and saw lots of herons and pelicans and swallow like birds. there were some fishermen in a little boat throwing fish to the pelicans which was exciting. there were lots of vultures swooping around the place too. sarah bullock stayed lying on the beach to top up the sun burn. a mexican family in the sea suddenly freaked out and ran for shore, then stayed in a line looking out to sea, to see if they could see the thing they had maybe just seen in the sea. we don´t know what this thing was, perhaps a whale, or dolphin or shark, or maybe just a giant tortilla gone astray. but it was quite amusing trying to figure out what they were looking at. we watched the sun go down and ate an ice cream then got in our refugee truck back to the main road. an old lady in the truck had a little crab in a plastic cup of water. we went back to the hostel to pack and then went for some dinner, italian rather than mexican.

tuesday 20th
today. obama inauguration day. up at 6 to get bus at 7 to morelia, which is 5 hours away inland, the capital of the state of michoacan. nice to be inland again, and see some mountains and not be too hot and sandy. going to go and look at some museums maybe or lie in the park and read our books.

that´s it for today. bit of a factual update, but it gets quite stressful when the blog gets so behind, and it´s hard to be amusing when you´re stressed.

on january the 25th it´s my 6 month anniversary. apparently january 26th is the most depressing day of the year, but i think that doesn´t count in mexico in the sunshine.

adios x

chancellor of the exchequer

we are now in san miguel de allende, an hour north of queretaro where we wrote our last blog from. or rather ghost sarah ghost wrote it. and i was very impressed with it as i hope you all were. one addendum is that my glasses aren't really that straight anymore, they did seem to be for a day or two as we got them straightened in mexico city, but they seem to be wonky again now. i am starting to think it might actually be my whole face, or both my eyes, that are in fact wonky, and not the glasses. another addendum is that i have since found out that sarah also once got stung by a wasp on her back too. i don't think i've met anyone with that many wasp and bee sting stories. i have never been stung by a wasp or a bee, but i did get stung by a jellyfish in los cabos, which i forgot to mention at the time, so now is a good time to mention it. i think it just brushed past me and didn't fully grab me, but nonetheless it hurt a lot, and i'm glad it wasn't so bad that the only remedy would have been weeing on myself, or getting someone else to wee on me. luckily it was on my foot so it wouldn't have been too awful if someone did have to wee on it i suppose. and that someone would have been robert i suppose.

after the ghost blog writing, we had returned home to our bed (and ghost breakfast) after a panini in the square. the panini waiter said i saw you this morning having a crepe for breakfast. he then said ah ha you are from england the land of the rhymes. we looked quizically at him, and he started banging on about having a picture or something. after a while it turned out he was saying a butcher's, as in a butcher's hook, as in a look, as in cockney rhyming slang, and then some apples and pears. it was all ok in the end, but quite strange at the time. after this i got really bad indigestion, i think from all the cheese consumed, but perhaps the panini waiter had put some strange hex on me. we marvelled at how amazingly well folded all our washing was that we had given to the b(&b) to do that morning, and how cheap - 42 pesos to wash, dry and iron and fold it and put it all in a vacuum packed bag for us. that's around 2 pounds.

today we have just been sitting on a rooftop cafe place here in san miguel eating chocolate brownies and drinking a)a cup of tea, and b)a beer, depending if you are a)lucy, or b)sarah. i seem to have become extremely middle-aged since stopping smoking, i hope sarah isn't having the most boringly sedate holiday of her whole life, but i suspect she is. pretty much the craziest thing we've done so far is have 2 quesadillas in one day from the same quesadilla stall, and then feel cheese sick for the rest of the day. bit like a hangover but not quite as rock and roll. we have vowed to make up for this ridiculously well behaved behaviour when rod arrives and we hit the beach next week. perhaps i'll push the boat out and stay awake past 11pm.

so, basically we left queretaro yesterday morning on another amazing mexican bus. we had fruit for breakfast as we didn't want to fill up on mexican food too early in the day. when we got on the bus they give you a little bag with a sandwich in it, and as soon as we sat down i had wolfed my sandwich down. i told sarah she could eat hers too by taking out the ham (she is vegetarian, and it had cheese and ham in). she said that perhaps she would do that at lunch time, and not 5 seconds after breakfast number1. i explained that it was to do with stopping smoking, it makes you really hungry, even for really really crappy wilted ETN bus sandwiches. the ETN bus was really swanky inside, massive reclining seats, and a little tv came down from above and showed a film. we regretted that we were only on the bus for approximately 75 minutes and not a few days.

75 minutes later we got off the ETN bus in san miguel de allende, and got on a local bus which cost 5 whole pesos to take us into el centro. you may think i am being sarcastic but 5 pesos is quite expensive compared to the amazing 2 pesos you pay to travel anywhere at all on the mexico city metro. san miguel is a really pretty, hilly, colourful town, with lots of churches and cobbly streets, and a policeman on a horse and little mariachi men having their shoes polished in the square as nobody wants to hear their mariachi music. lots of very cute children everywhere, and old men in little hats resting in doorways on steep streets. our hostel is called hostel alcatraz and is opposite the local library which is one of the best libraries in mexico i reckon. it has a room with a huge mexican style mural painted all over the whole room.

san miguel is a very popular retirement village for old americans, there is a big american community here. this is neither a good or a bad thing, merely a thing. we went for a coffee and breakfast number2 for sarah, and number3 for lucy, at a cafe next to the library. we met an american man there who asked us where we were going next. we told him acapulco maybe. he vetoed this idea, adding to the even increasing pile of acapulco deniers we keep encountering. we had been feeling bad karma about the fact that we didn't know what to do about the acapulco part of our trip. basically rod wanted to go there so he could sing that going loco down in acapulco song for the whole week in the geographically correct place. the nice american man told us not to go there, but to go to zihuantanejo, which is further north up the coast and much much nicer. so we changed our plans and are going to do that instead. nobody has so far said anything bad about zihuantanejo, except perhaps me but only in relation to it being a very hard word to spell and pronounce.

after this we wandered around town, oohing and ahing at how quaint and steep and beautiful it is. it is apparently internationally famous for its quality of light, and it does indeed have very clear lovely blue skies. we walked up to look at the view from the top of a hill at a mirador (viewing area). somehow we managed to not be able to find el mirador which was bizarre as we were right by it. we wandered back down the hill thinking we were heading the right way, but really how could we be when a viewing area technically does have to be at the top of a hill and not at the bottom, but perhaps my nonsense of direction is rubbing off on sarah bullock's innate direction radar, as even she couldn't untangle this pickles induced mess. anyway we passed by a casa de la cultura, where there was an amazing exhibition of handmade rugs. we told the man that made them that they were beautiful, and indeed they were the best rugs i've ever seen. if i ever become a san miguel based american retiree, i will furnish my home here with these rugs. we then watched some girls practising their flamenco moves outside the casa de la cultura.

we found a nice restaurant to eat dinner at whilst watching the sunset over the hills and the town. i had enchiladas with chicken, and sarah bullock had enchiladas with cheese. the day before, whilst spending some of our money on some more coffee and beer, we had figured out our budget for the rest of the trip, based on the credit crunch lack of funds. after factoring in travel and accommodation, we have allowed ourselves 300 pesos as pocket money per day for food and fun. in classic bugetting style, yesterday, day one of budget 2009, my expenditure was 840 pesos. we had found a really nice market and i bought a scarf because it was made of both my favourite colours and was truly exquisite, also 2 pairs of little socks, one with dogs on and the other with pigs, and a new bag. i suppose none of this was what you would term necessary in the true sense of the word. sarah bullock bought a large rug, 2 bags, and a tablecloth. ditto.

i also blew 150 pesos of my 300 peso budget on a cd of a man playing spanish guitar whose concert we went to after our sunset rooftop dinner last night. he was called sergio, and also played some songs on a little harp. sarah bullock found it noteworthy and stunning how much harp music comes from paraguay, as she thought they were all too busy being involved in the narcotics industry to turn their hands to such a delicate profession as harp music composition. i agreed, it is rather strange, and perhaps a front for something much more sinister, perhaps there are subliminal messages in between the innocent arpeggioic harpy notes. anyway, sergio was an amazing musician, especially his flamenco repertoire at the end, how do they do that ripply wibbly flamenco strumming, mum can you do it? mum, also, he played that really nice romance one that you can play the beginning of, except he played the middle bit too, but it does seem like it gets harder, so that's ok, plus the beginning bit is the best bit i think. do you know the one i mean?

after some more trip planning after the concert we mentioned the fact that we are being quite militant in our planning. i thought it would be amusing if somehow we could turn our hostel room into one of those rooms they use in films like downfall where they show hitler doing his war planning, with a huge map of the world (or atleast the battlefield) on a central table and little models of warships and army men, and they push them around with sticks like you get in casinos for pushing all the blackjack tokens around, and the room is quite dark and dingy and they are smoking cigars and looking really stressed because the consequences of pushing the ships and men the wrong ways will be disastrous. we would need army uniforms, moustaches, cigars and guns, but these shouldn't be too hard to procure in mexico. we might add a cactus in the corner to give it that sense of joie de vivre that those rooms seem to lack.

and here is today's activities - we went to some hot springs just outside of town, called la gruta which means the cave. on the leaflet it says you go through a 44 metre tunnel into a cave where hot spring water comes in through the roof. i said there is no way i am going down a water filled 44 metre long tunnel into a cave, i will have a claustrophobic panic attack fit. we couldn't even find the cave for ages, so went back to reception to have a hissy fit at the woman for false advertising. i would have demanded our money back but she showed us a little map and told us how to get to it. as usual all the slagging off of the place we'd engaged in was turned to amazement and wonder as we found la gruta at the end of a not at all scary and very man made and light tunnel, which didn't induce any sort of fear in me at all. people queued up politely to have a go under the hot water pouring through the wall, but you had to be careful the force of it didn't rip your bikini off. then we sat around and had some food and talked about very deep and meaningful things like how stupid most boys are. this has been a large theme of our trip so far, and hopefully we will have got it out of systems by the time rod arrives, and maybe robert a few days later. i think they are already aware of their general stupidity so we shouldn't need to point it out to them too much.

this morning we had had breakfast at the same cafe as yesterday and there were a few ants in my pancakes, which was strange. after some military style investigation i discovered that they were inside the maple syprup bottle.

and here are today's questions:
aquaducts - how do they work?
reagan - was he shot, or is he still alive?
the falkland islands - why does england own them and has argentina ever owned them?

big fat fatties

i have a few announcements before today´s blog starts:

my mexican mobile doesn´t work for some reason, just in case anyone had texted me

actually that´s the only announcement i had.

today´s blog is being ghost/guest (?) written by sarah bullock. here are some preliminary facts about sarah bullock:

she used to be a really good ice skater
she is 5 foot 7
she is the first guest writer to feature on my blog
she really hates photos of soft focussed flowers
she got stung by a bee on the palm of her hand once whilst doing a cartwheel, and once at brownie camp got a wasp stuck in her hair, and once had a wasp in her knickers which stung her on the bum 3 times. (nb none of these were recent events)

drum roll.....

where to start? firstly, i would like you to know that i am under strict instructions not to capitalise any letters throughout this blog. regular blog-followers will know this is a pickles trait which i have been forced to uphold as inaugural ghost blogger (this introduction is mainly for siobhan who will immediately notice and no doubt comment on this writing style).

as the first of lucy´s visitors, i would like to share a few observations i have made since seeing lucy again after 5 months:

1. her hair has become slightly lighter with the sun meaning she is looking less, rather than more, like a native mexican.

2. however, she is more mexican than before with her impressive uptake of spanish. this has evidently been detrimental to her english as she rarely can understand english-speaking people.

3. she is not smoking at all...yay!

4. her wonky glasses have been straightened. this has done nothing for the size of her head in case you were wondering.

5. she may not have a great sense of direction but does have a sound sense of adventure and is excellent at appropriately planning.

now, an update on what lucy (and i) have been doing since the last blog. you may be wondering why this entry is entitled big fat fatties. it is not because lucy and i have been living off a diet based predominantly around cheese (although that is true). the phrase big fat fatty was coined by pickles upon sight of the shortest and fattest mexican man in mexico, asleep on a chair in the middle of the pavement in the middle of the day in the middle of mexico city. he was literally a square and so called "big fat fatty". lucy will upload photographic evidence when it is next possible to do so.

after the big fat fatty sighting (made in zone rosa - mexico city´s answer to soho - while trying to find accommodation for our return trip to mexico city next week), we wondered back to centro historico for our last night before leaving for our road trip north. before a dinner of predominantly cheese-based cuisine at the local restaurant, pickles decided to speak to the germans who had previously been snogging so loudly that she needed to leave the room. turns out that any mention of the war would have been entirely fruitless as the couple were in fact swiss. they are travelling for six months and wanted some advice on english schools in oaxaca. lucy spent 20 minutes or so sharing her experiences with the swiss who were really grateful for some advice. when they left to go for dinner, lucy says "they were nice weren´t they?". a turn up for the books indeed.

after some quick packing and some freezing cold coffee, we left centro historico and were north bus station bound. pickles had mentioned the buses in mexico are 1. cheap as chips, and 2. amazing. she was not wrong. our first planned stop on the road trip from mexico city was to queretaro which was one of only 4 destinations on special offer at the bus station. we paid 100 mexican pesos each for a 185km journey on the coach of the year 2008 including almost fully reclinable seats, juno on the tv in spanish and snack-attack-pack of the highest standard.

we arrived in queretaro just under 3 hours later. the helpful big fat fatty (although not as big or fat as the original big fat fatty) taxi driver helped us find our bizarrely situated bed and breakfast. all the roads in queretaro are either east or west, or north or south of the main squares which makes navigation a little difficult. especially for the taxi driver who clearly had no idea how to do his job. eventually we found our b&b which turns out to only be a b as there is no breakfast on the menu. pickles has threatened to send a strongly worded email to the hostelworld.com for false advertising. no one comes between lucy and her first meal of the day.

after wondering around queretaro and deciding not to go on any tours, we went to the most authentic mexican bar we could find - the wicklow irish bar. in our defence, it was one of the only places open (jan 6th is the day of the three kings which is effectively a christmas day equivalent in mexico) and we did drink mexican beer and tequila. it was also a good choice as we met a cool couple (hello shane and kirsten) from michigan. shane was helpfully wearing a t-shirt outlining all the lakes around michigan which help show that the state is much like the shape of the hand. shane and kirsten were then able to use their hands to show us where in michigan they are from. lucy had less trouble explaining where belize is and i found london even easier, but needless to say, less trouble meant less fun. the only downfall of the wicklow irish bar was the five people there suggesting that acapulco is basically shit and that we should probably go somewhere else. we promptly left after hearing this and drowned our sorrows in a sweet mexican restaurant around the corner where there were no english-speaking people to tell us how rubbish we are for going to acapulco.

today (after a crepe breakfast thanks to hostelworld.com oversight) we have been looking more around queretaro (on foot and on a tiny tram) seeing the aquaduct, templos and bars. on the little square in the middle of town, we were having a drink (me = beer and lucy = 3rd coffee of the day) when a nice american (but from mexico originally) man called jorge guzman started talking to us. not only did he chat to pickles about how teaching in queretaro is cool but he also suggested that acapulco is not basically shit. he didn´t exactly rave about it either but we´re considering it as 5-1 so acapulco is clawing it´s way back.

and that spells the end of today´s blog and the end of my career as pequeno picklo ghost writer. fyi (for your interest) and ffr (for future reference) it will be bau (business as usual) as of the next blog (tla - three letter acronymn - usage due to anecdote about jim and his love for them during his previous life as a banker). thanks for reading (even if you´ve only got this far in the hope that lucy will be writing something interesting after i´d finished).

sacrificial ducks

hola

today me and sarah bullock went to a place south of mexico city called xochimilco which has a huge canal system and lots of floating gardens and plants. we didn´t see the floating gardens, but we did go on a boat on the canals for 2 hours which was nice as it´s still really hot here during the days. lots of other boats tootling along, and other little boats selling stuff to the tourists on the boats, like beers and corn and mexican handicrafts like rugs. there were also floating mariachi bands playing to some boats. all quite surreal actually but fun.

yesterday we wandered around various different areas booking accommodation for when we come back to mexico city after our trip to the north tomorrow. we found a cool hostel in zona rosa which is the pink zone, ie the gay zone. lots of really good places to eat and drink and generally have fun around there, which will be cool as we have been quite middle aged and not done much drinking and/or dancing so far in 2009. then we wandered to an area called la condesa where we saw a house that was owned by a previous president of mexico, but is now empty and apparently might be haunted. there was a small elephant in the garden but i don`t think it was a ghost elephant as it turned out ok when i photographed it.

at one point we wandered into a vaguely strange area called san rafael to check out a hotel called hotel oxford, which was recommended in lonely planet if you like run down and drab kitschy type places. it was like the hotel out of the shining. while we were standing in the reception some strange mexican boys dressed in blue lycra or as reindeers came over to talk to us. they were doing some mobile phone promotion stuff. we took a photo of them as they looked quite silly, but then we got the hell out of the area as we decided it was potentially dodgy, plus sarah said one of them smelled of tuna. we ended up in a little fair ground near a monument to the revolution which was also kind of strange. so that was yesterday. also of note i finished my book and have started my next one which is black swan green by david mitchell. sarah finished her book too which was by james frey. our room in our hostel which we have had to ourselves so far has now been invaded by 2 germans and someone from somewhere in the east. the german couple were being all couply when i was trying to have a siesta which i found slightly rude so i mentioned the war. not really but i did leave the room quite loudly.

saturday we went on a day trip to teotihuacan, which is an amazing ruin in the north, 50km away. en route we stopped at plaza de las tres culturas which was interesting for many reasons, being mainly:
it´s an old aztec site, but also has one of the first spanish colonial churches built in mexico, which is built of the stones from the aztec buildings which the spaniards destroyed
the aztecs used to sacrifice 2 people per day, 1 at sunrise and 1 at sunset, mainly their enemies, so it was useful to stay friends with the aztecs generally
they used to use chocolate seeds to buy things, a slave cost 20 chocolate seeds. i´m going to buy one
the name mexico comes from co-xi-me (mexico backwards), which means place of the belly button of the moon
the mexican flag picture is of an eagle eating a snake, which was based on a hallucinogenic peyote trip somebody had that was something to do with when you see an eagle eating a snake, that place will be the centre of the aztec world, and that was mexico city
the aztecs used to eat ice cream as a special treat by having runners that ran the 26km to the nearest volcano to get ice, and then relay raced it back to mexico city and sold it
in 1968 the government introduced taxes to pay for the olympic games that year. people started protesting in the square in la plaza de las tres culturas, and soon began protesting about other things in general. one day, the army, on goverment orders, went into the surrounding apartment blocks and shot all the protestors in the square, all 500 of them. the next day they swept all the mess up and life carried on as usual, as did the taxes, and the olympic games.

then we went to see the iglesia de la virgen de guadalupe, a bit further north. this is an amazing church and is full of people all the time. you go on a little travelator past the mexican catholic version of the turin shroud. this was apparently the rug which juan diego wrapped himself in when he witnessed la virgen for the first time, along with some roses which was proof that it had happened as it was winter and there shouldn´t have been roses. la virgen is more important than jesus in mexican catholicism because when they first saw images of jesus they couldn´t understand why they would worship a human who was in pain and suffering, as this wasn´t something their gods would do. but the image of the virgin of guadalupe has a sun behind it and she looks like she´s standing on the moon, she has darker skin, plus she is pregnant which reminds them of one of their gods too, so it made a lot more sense to them. we took lots of photos of the church as it is really interesting architecture, and quite art nouveau. there are no pillars in inside it. i also discovered that afternoon that sarah really doesn´t like photos of flowers where the flower at the front is focussed and the ones behind it are blurry, nor the other way round where the background is focussed and the foreground blurry. i told her she would come to appreciate these types of photos as she grew up a bit.

we then stopped at an artesiania workshop thing. a man showed us how many cool things you can do with an agave cactus, which is what you make tequila from. you can pull bits of its leaves off it and use them as paper. also you can make a needle and thread from it and do sewing which could be useful for me as i now have holes in my last remaining pair of trousers. i tried to buy some jeans but mexican clothes are different sizes, ie they are smaller and a bit rounder. we also drank some tequila and looked at some obsidian at the workshop, and i did some dancing when the band were playing. sarah videoed this, and i will try to put it on the blog at some point.

then we finally arrived at teotihuacan. this is a really huge site, about which nobody seems to know anything. it wasn´t built by the aztecs, but they lived there for a while. i suppose it was built by the teotihuacans, but nothing of who they were remains, so it´s all a mystery. it´s very impressive, there is a huge pyramid of the moon and of the sun at either end of the avenida de los muertos. we climbed up both pyramids which was quite steep and exhausting, so we sunbathed on top of the pyramid of the moon to recover.

that night we had 3 beers in the hostel rooftop bar. somebody tried to get us to go on the nightclub tour organised by the hostel. we decided we´d rather eat our own vomit than hang out with hostel freaks on the hostel party bus.

tomorrow we are leaving for queretaro in the north west, then san miguel de allende, then guanajuato, then back to mexico city to meed rod.
that´s all for now.

pixmania

happy 2nd day of 2009 everyone

i am now in mexico city with sarah bullock. she arrived on new year´s eve at the airport. i had been there for a few hours having flown from chetumal on the belize border. when getting on the plane at chetumal they had hoovered my rucksack with a little hoover, then got the dust out and put it through a machine to test it for drugs. was all a bit weird, i have never seen that before. thankfully it was all ok. i discovered in mexico that there is only one exchange place in the whole of mexico that will exchange belize dollars, as nobody wants belize dollars here. fortunately that one place is in the airport. unfortunately they were closed. i will try again when we go to meet rod at the aiport next week.

we went out for italian dinner on new year´s eve, because most other places were closed, as were all the bars and most of the clubs and all the shops. nye is a family thing, so people don´t bother going to work even if maybe they could make loads of pesos as it is new year´s eve. anyway we found an italian place and had pasta and wine and not tortillas and tequila. we wore party hats and purple necklaces that they gave us. a man on another table said we reminded him of patsy and that other one from ab fab, i suppose because we were laughing loudly and drinking wine. then we watched some fireworks on avenida reforma, and blew our party horns in some policemen´s ears and ate 12 grapes. these 12 grapes are some mexican tradition but i don´t know what. i think you are meant to eat one on each strike of the clock of it going midnight on new year´s eve, maybe to keep away evil spirits, that´s usually what things boil down to over here. we then went back to the hostel via looking for a place to have some drinks. we found one club with nobody in it, playing really really loud music, so we didn´t stay there, but we did steal a little party hat from the table. then we got back to the hostel and slept on the doorstep until the people that work there returned at 2am. it was freezing. a man asked us if we wanted to go to his house for a coffee. we thanked him kindly but decided not to as he could have killed us. he looked very nice and friendly but you never know.

in the hostel there were some strange germans (is there any other type??), a swedish boy with long hair who told funny stories, a boy from mozambique and america who spent the whole time plugged into his laptop watching movies or something, a really annoying australian girl with nice clothes but wonky eyes, and an american boy with the most old school digital camera i´ve ever seen. he´d bought it in a thrift shop for like $5. he was a bit napoleon dynamite.

i opened my parcel of things that sarah had brought over from england for me, which was very exciting. i am now the proud owner of a moroccan headscarf from jim and ginny, a new camera complete with some photos of the pickleses at home in england on it (but not the new greenhouse which i really wanted to see), some pencils, some english newspaper articles (with crosswords completed), 3 books, and some avon skin so soft moisturiser, which apparently is the best thing in the whole world for repelling mosquitoes. thanks mum for the things, and thanks sarah for bringing them. rod can you bring some ribena too please?

sarah has the most amazing sense of direction i´ve ever come accross, so i leave her in charge of leading the way. she doesn´t even use a map, it´s totally amazing. makes a change from wandering around in circles. she has noticed quite a few rabid dogs on the pavements, which i have reassured her aren´t rabid, just mexican. we went to the park in bosque de chapultepec yesterday for a walk, and she accidentally threw the map in the bin, so we had to go back and scrabble around for it, which was quite amusing as there were lots of people standing nearby. we found it. there is a giant digital clock in the main square here which is counting down to the revolution centenary and independence day bicentary, both of which are about 621 days 23 hours 15 minutes and 39 seconds away at this moment. that is a long countdown, but obviously these 2 events are very important to mexicans. there is the most huge christmas tree we have ever seen, i don´t think it is real though. there are also lots of massive christmas lights up on the buildings and hanging above the streets.

tonight we might go to a mexican wrestling match, and tomorrow we will go to see some huge mayan ruins called teotihuacan to the north of mexico city.

hope you are all having a lovely 2009 so far. my resolutions are to keep up the non smoking, and to be better at budgetting.

ps i have put 2 photos on the previous blog. i will attempt to put more on my blogs this year, that can be another resolution in fact.

adios x