Third Week in Morelia

Steve was supposed to leave Zacatecas at noon last Friday and get here at 8:00 PM. My plan was to go to dinner and a symphony with Ann and her friend Nancy, who moved from Albuquerque to Morelia a year ago. The symphony was free, so we had to line up at 6:30 PM to get into the 8:00 concert. I had planned to leave the symphony when Steve arrived in Morelia and he borrowed someone's phone to tell me he was here, but when I found out I was going to have to wait an hour and a half to get into the symphony, I decided I wasn't going to leave until it was over. I wrote Steve a nice note en español perfecto welcoming him to our apartment, and telling him to look in the refrigerator for the garbanzos I made for him. 

About 6:00, I got a text in Spanish telling me to call a Mexican phone number. I called, and Steve answered. He was on the bus in Aguascaliente, about three hours behind schedule, and some nice Méxicano lady had gotten involved in his drama and inability to reach me, and had sent me the text. His bus left Zacatecas three hours late, the driver stopped an hour later to let everyone out to eat fried chicken and junk food, then made another stop to try to get the videos on the bus to work, even though the seven passengers said they didn't care about the videos and just wanted to get going. And so on. 

The symphony was great, and I might have a new client if Nancy decides to move to Tucson. I went home and went to bed, hoping Steve's bus would actually arrive at midnight, and there would be taxis at the bus station, and the night clerk at my hotel would let him in, and it all happened just like that. I couldn't believe it when he knocked on the door at 12:15 AM. I am still amazed that he made it here, but he never doubted that he would. I guess that's the confidence that comes with surviving numerous disrupted travel plans without the benefit of owning a cell phone or using the internet. Steve's outgoing nature always enables him to compensate for his techno-adversion. 

Saturday morning we met Ann to see the Tapetes Florales, which is a series of paintings made of flowers, seeds, grasses, pine cones and other plant materials. The flower carpet is about five feet wide and extends at least 500 feet down the middle of a beautiful 250 year old tree-lined pedestrian walk way. The pictures depict scenes in Morelia and surroundings, as well as musical themes. 

On a stage at the end of the Tapetes, groups of small children sang. They were adorable.

Ann said a Mexican child that isn't cute doesn't exist. One of the children's teachers introduced a song: "We're going to do a song called The Burro. We are dedicating it to the president of a country whose name we can't remember right now."

We made one last visit to my favorite church in the world, Santuario Guadalupe (AKA Templo San Diego), and there was a wedding going on.

 After we had some limonada with Ann at an outdoor cafe and shared some travel stories, she left to have her last lunch with her host family. She's at the end of her two week visit, but she will come stay with me in Tucson for a few days in January.

Saturday night we saw a parade of high school students from about 30 nearby cities and towns. The students each wore a different version of a military uniform. Some were goosestepping like Nazis. Their jackets were double breasted and knee-length, with lots of brass buttons, gold braid and dingo balls swinging from their upper sleeves. From each school, there were drummers beating on snare drums and others playing bugles. Each school was led by a student carrying the school flag and a bugler who twirled his bugle as a drum majorette would twirl a baton. Steve had reported seeing the Zacatecas crew practicing their march in Zacatecas, and when they passed in the parade, he felt an affinity for these representatives of his new favorite ciudad Méxicano.  

One reason Steve enjoyed Zacatecas so much was he met a classical guitar player performing in an outdoor restaurante. When Steve told the musician that he also plays guitarra, the musician invited Steve to play a song for the crowd. He played Hotel California, which wasn't easy because the wide classical guitar neck and nylon strings are not what he is used to, but he got through it and the crowd appreciated it. Hotel California seems to be Steve's theme song, because the guys he plays with on Thursday afternoons said they have been playing it in his honor since he left for his Méxicano adventure. 

Every Saturday night at 8:45, the cathedral in Morelia is lit by colored lights, and fireworks fill the sky. The buildings here are even more beautiful when they are illuminated, and I realized that the designers and builders never got to see them in their full glory as we do at night. 

Sunday we went to the Regional Museum of Michoacán, a museum housed in a former palace with a two story colonnade surrounding a lovely courtyard. Admission is free on Sundays. We saw pre-columbian figurines, pottery, ceremonial obsidian arrow heads and a replica of a burial site with real skeletons in it. It's all very well done, and I had an opportunity to try to figure out the Spanish explanations. 

This area has been inhabited for at least 20,000 years. As they did everywhere along the Ruta Plata, or Silver Route, the Spaniards came here in the 16th century, asked the indigenous people where the silver was located, and then enslaved the indigios and forced them to mine the silver so it could be sent back to Spain and made into doodads for the royalty. 

In the stairway was a 1951 mural by Alfredo Zalce depicting the never-ending struggle between good and evil. On the left in the mural, some modern upper class Mexicans are seen arm in arm with 16th century conquistadors. On the right side, you can see the saintly Miguel Hidalgo freeing the indigios from their Spanish chains in the 19th century. I told Steve he resembles Padre Miguel now that he's letting his hair grow, but he's not having it.

In El Jardín de las Rosas, modern day hippies, some with dread locks, spread handmade jewelry on blankets on the ground, and try to sell it to the few tourists. I never see a sale occur, but these young people still show up every day, mostly to talk to each other and occasionally play guitar. One of these would-be vendors has a white cat and two little dogs that patiently and calmly hang out with him, either in his lap or sleeping next to the wares on the blanket. I am amazed that these animals seem to think their life is perfectly normal and they are taking it all in stride, just as most Mexicans do.

In the portale across from the catedral, a huge red bloodhound with feet the size of a tiger's poses for photos. When seated, he is about the same height as the five year old children who are delighted to pet the gentle giant. Donations for his massive food requirements can be placed in a bowl atop a large plush dog bone. 

The third Monday in November is Revolution Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1910 start of the ten year struggle to find a successor to Portirio Diaz, who had been president/dictator for 35 years. Several revolutionary leaders including Pancho Villa were assassinated by the government before the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) was founded in 1929. 

A big Revolution Day celebration used to occur in Mexico City, but the 2014 disappearance of more than 100 student protestors from the college of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero resulted in national protests and unrest, so Revolution Day is now celebrated on a more subdued level in state capitols rather than Mexico City. 

We enjoyed the Revolution Day parade, which consisted of dozens of groups of students and some adult groups, all engaged in unique activities as they marched toward the catedral. Some did gymnastics, martial arts, tumbling, rope jumping, lacrosse, singing, folklore dancing in swirling dresses. Some made human pyramids, some waved hula hoops with tinsel attached, or flung a huge flag into the air and made billowing patterns. Some rode bicicletas in synchronized formations. A group of smiling deaf people walked with their arms raised above their heads and their fingers spread, shaking their hands in what we imagined may be a silent way of saying hurray. Hundreds of policía were last, lying on the street in radiating formations and doing sit ups while they barked out the count to 20. I especially appreciated this because doing sit ups while counting to 20 in Spanish has been part of my morning routine since I got here.

 

There were hundreds of police in riot gear, none of it needed. Although some of them gave terse answers when we spoke to them, two of them saw me standing in the middle of a street and waving my arm toward a store's sign to explain a point about Spanish pronunciation to Steve, and they approached us and asked if they could help us find anything. 

After the last group passed, the police closed the street. We got to the catedral just in time to see the mayor and other politicians high on a wrought iron balcony of a grand old building. The mayor's speech was over, and the police allowed people back into the street below. Workers set up a stage in the street for a mariachi contest. We came back later and heard lots of mariachi bands. 

We enjoyed another event in the Festival Música, a chamber music concert at the Centro Cultural Universitario by the Wiener Kammersymphonie from Austria. Three women played violin, accompanied by men on cello, upright bass and piano. They played Schubert, Beethoven, Gal, Mahle, and Korngold, ranging from the 18th century to the 20th. It was wonderful. 

During the first half of the concert, the colored lights aimed at the stage kept flickering off and on, randomly changing colors and making grinding noises. The musicians soldiered on, although I'm sure that never happens in Austria. Steve and I were both reminded of his father's comment when they were here on a family vacation many years ago: "Everything in Mexico is half-baked." Whenever something particularly Méxicano happens, like discovering that instead of having a proper fitted bottom sheet, the king size bed has a flat queen size sheet that can't be tucked in, so it ends up in a rumpled mess every day, I say, "Your father was right", and Steve knows what I mean. 

Another example: after Ann and Nancy and I had been waiting in line for an hour to get into the free concert, some ushers went down the line and told us that the people with free passes would get in first, then once they counted how many seats were left, they would let in that many people, but we weren't all going to get in. Ann protested that we had been there for an hour and we didn't know we could have gotten passes. It wasn't in the festival program, and wasn't on their web site, which both say simply Concierto Gratuito. The usher said the need for passes had been advertised on the radio since October. I said to Ann and Nancy they should just sell tickets so we don't have to go through this. Ann said then the rich gringos would get in and the locals wouldn't. That's a good point, but still it could be handled better. 

This isn't the first frustration I've had with this music festival. They don't announce the dates of the festival or the programa until two months before the festival begins, and the advertisements don't give the addresses of the venues. One venue was listed as CSAM UNAM, and no one could tell me what that means. I told Ann and Nancy I'm going to move here and help them run the festival more logically. Nancy said facetiously, "They really like people like you here." Ann said if it were run the way I want it, it wouldn't be Mexican, which is very true. One really needs to go with the flow in order to get along here.