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