museum of plain yogurt

It was a great week for the kids. They enjoyed the varied topics and activities of the Natural History Museum class, and really took to the teachers.

the atrium of the natural history museum where the kids do their projects

zeiva and lucas with their own personal volcanoes, which
they made erupt with vinegar, baking soda and soap

We also found out about an art “workshop” offered at the Diego Rivera Museum (did you know his full name was Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez??!) and attended that in the afternoons on Thursday and Friday. They have a closing party Saturday that they invited us to even though we only attended two days (out of the two weeks), which was very kind and I think it will be fun for the kids to go. The teacher even asked me to write out their names so she could have diplomas for them. ;) There are probably seven kids that are also from the Natural History Museum, so it’s not a completely new crowd and Lucas and Zeiva felt really comfortable there.

when in the house where diego rivera was born? PAINT!

The rest of the week was also good for walking – the kids reached the point where they expected it so there wasn’t any more complaining or arguing, and we had enough time that I finally had a chance to document some of the “art” (graffiti?) on our regular routes.

this one (the part on the right) is my favorite

the kids explore a staircase on our way down the hill -
that is, from our regular route down, they climbed all the
way up this side alley for fun, reported there were more
stairs, and came back down to head on our way. i stayed
down below on the grounds that i had to take a photo.

i also got up the nerve this week to take a photo of the family at my favorite gordita's place

here she is serving up my favorite filling - puerco in salsa de pasilla.
i've almost purchased packets of dried pasilla peppers here,
but i'm hoping i can find them in seattle.

this is the owner and his son. i didn't have the guts to ask if/how
they are related to the women cooking and serving (though i'm pretty
sure wife and daughter)....maybe next time.

Despite being the walking Nazi, I surprised the kids Friday afternoon by saying we could catch a bus. It has been unseasonably warm here, getting into the 90’s, which is way too hot for me, especially when I’m carrying around a backpack full of snacks, water bottles, camera etc and shade is a rare commodity. For the Diego Rivera (potluck) party, the teacher asked if we could bring some little candies for all the kids. I said of course, but had no idea where to get them (we’re not talking the high-end, fancy sweets that I featured in an earlier post). She told me to go to the Mercado Hidalgo, which is a major landmark here. It is in the most commercial part of town, the only area that really feels like an urban zone, with two-way traffic, the busiest bus hub, tons of people in the street and on the sidewalk, and the sidewalks covered in street vendors’ produce. It is a huge hangar-like building that was supposedly meant to be a train station, but instead it is filled with stalls selling everything from sunglasses to pig’s feet. It is bustling with people and I had never intended to drag Lucas and Zeiva in there. I did a quick tour on my own once, and then took Django for a quick look as well, but wasn’t planning on going back. So we turned it into an adventure – the search for candies! At least it was something they could get excited about! The teacher gave me directions to find the candy stall, which were, as always, far too scant to get us where we needed to be. So we did a lot of asking around and finally found a little candy store tucked way back in a corner behind several butchers where we could buy treats and little bags for packaging. Success! But when we stepped outside at 4 pm into the blazing sun, the crowds, the heat coming off the cobblestones…I was in no mood to hike up the hill home. The bus fairies read my mind, because the moment I had the thought, Lucas yelled, “PIPILA ISSSTE!” (one of our home buses) and I said, “Vamos!” and we ran two blocks to beat it to the next stop. We felt so lucky! Amusingly, it was REALLY packed, so we were standing and squished almost the entire trip home, and Zeiva repeatedly said, “I want to get OFF!” So maybe she didn’t feel so lucky…

Coincidentally, Lucas had recently asked if we could get him a wallet when we got back to Seattle. I guess since he’s been doing a lot of the financial transactions down here, he was thinking it would be good to carry around some of his money when he gets home. So I told him we could definitely do that. When we were in Mercado Hidalgo, we saw the many leather goods stalls and I thought it might be fun to look for a Mexican wallet for him. He found one that seemed functional for him and so I told him we could get it after buying the candy. Zeiva of course wanted one too, so she picked the same one as his except in purple. Ever the compulsive comparison shopper, once we got to the candy store I explained to Lucas that it was worth looking at a few more stalls to make sure he didn’t see something better or something similar for a better price. He immediately understood and so after buying the candy we cruised around to several other leather stalls. Unfortunately, not only did he not find something he liked better, but the first stand was all boarded up when we went back! :( Poor kid – I should have just gotten it when we saw it. But we’ll go back and I’m sure it will be there. Zeiva, meanwhile, found favorite little purses at every single stall. We finally narrowed it down to one stall and to a set of really tiny purses. Almost all of them were actually really cute – “designer” colors with a little flower sewn on the flap. Zeiva chose pretty much the only one that wasn’t cute. Zipper top instead of a flap, random ribbon sewn across it with colors clashing the purse color, and a touristy “Guanajuato” stamp image on it. She asked me if I liked it best. I resisted every temptation to even gently suggest that the other ones might be nicer. I mean, it’s her purse so all that matters is that she likes it, right? And I don’t want to start contributing to the sense that she’ll be fighting all her life that what matters is what other people think. But man, those other little purses were cute. And I don’t do purses and I’m usually not all that into cute. This evening she was asking where it was so she could show Django, and after she got off the call with him, she said, “This is my baby’s purse.”

“What, that’s Tucker’s purse?”

“Yes, it’s for Tucker.”

Me, imagining the other very cute little purses, “So…did you want a purse for yourself?”

“Oh, yes! I would like a purse, too, so then I can carry around some of my money when I need to go somewhere!”

We’ll see how the next round of shopping goes. ;)

Anyhoo, for me personally, the past couple of days have been marked by just a touch of disappointment over lost opportunities. Things panned out the way they panned out down here, and I don’t have any regrets, but there are a few things that have given me pause after just a week of attending activities in the heart of el centro:

• In general, because everyone is walking to drop off their kids at the Natural History and Diego Rivera Museums, people stick around and chat. The fancy club out in Marfil was in the middle of nowhere, so people arrived in cars or taxis and immediately zipped off to whatever they were doing next. Plus the club didn’t really let you in unless you were a member, so there was nowhere to linger. So I’ve spent more time talking in any one day this week to several different mothers than I ever spent talking to a single person over the entire month at the club. While we didn’t quite get there in a week, I feel like if we’d seen these families for several weeks, Lucas and Zeiva would have ended up being invited for evening or weekend play dates or even over to the families’ houses, which is a cultural dimension of our experience here that I had hoped for but that just didn’t happen.
• While asking around about activities for our final week here, another mother told me about a preschool that she used to take her kids to. I tracked it down and went to visit, and found out that they’d had a summer course that just ended for 4-8 year-olds, with a different visiting “professor” each week (painters, potters, musicians, etc). It sounded great, the facility looked like a real preschool and it was easy walking distance from us. That really made my heart sink, though when I told Django about it he reminded me that the kids had the opportunity at the club to play outside in beautiful green space and do all kinds of sports, which is very true. And this preschool was smack in the middle of town, all concrete/padding, not a blade of grass to be seen. So, trade-offs either way…it just would have been very different.
• After just two days at the Diego Rivera Museum, the teacher and I got talking and she told me that she was going home to make 100 tamales for the potluck party on Saturday. I asked her all about how she makes the dough, the filling, how she cooks them, etc and was telling her how much I love them and how I’d love someday to learn how to cook them. While she obviously wasn’t going to invite us over that afternoon, she very sincerely told me that if we came back next year she would absolutely teach me how to cook tamales.
• Another parent mentioned that she was going to look at a rental house because her sister, who lives in nearby Irapuato, was coming to stay in Guanajuato for a while. So I tagged along and this place was so perfect. Right in what I think is the best part of town (directly down the hill from us). It has a locked gate right on a main street, but then the private alley heads up and away enough that it was quiet. The back of the house opens up onto this beautiful plaza that I had never even seen before, with a fountain and huge circular area that would have been great for playing, kicking the ball, etc. Down on the main street are the bus lines, and within about 2 blocks, there is one of the few mid-sized markets – a regular grocery store (not a mini, not a super). There’s a tortilleria, a bakery, a butcher, my favorite gordita’s stand….basically everything you need within a couple of minutes. No need for the Mega! And it has two bedrooms instead of one, plus a real indoor dining room table that seats four comfortably. It obviously doesn’t have the gorgeous yard and view that our casita does, but I’m not sure that would be so hard to give up. The garden is really mostly cactus, and the kids going outside to play inevitably entails being with the neighbor kid so I’m always anxious about how much English is being spoken, whether they’ve gone into their house and are watching TV, etc. Constantly listening for English or a lack of noise altogether pretty much just causes me this constant low level of anxiety. To boot, the place I saw in town is part of a larger house and the Mexican woman who lives in the main house has three kids ages 10, 8 and 3!! It really seems like it couldn’t’ get any better than that. And, in case you’re wondering, it’s only $50 more a month than our place.
• After I’d seen this place, the NY mom was telling me how great it’s been to be just a couple blocks from the main roads of town because they can wander out in the evenings and see if things are going on. Unless I knew exactly what was happening and that it would be interesting for the kids, there is no way I would risk a trek down into town again, and staying from morning until night would be suicide. She was saying that the other night they just heard a bunch of music from their place so they walked literally a couple hundred feet to the church and plaza right by their apartment, and there was live music, dancing, tons of food stands, etc. I know Lucas and Zeiva would have loved it. But there would have been no way to find out about it in advance unless someone happened to mention it and we could have gone all the way down there to find out it wasn’t happening or it wasn’t of interest to the kids. Again, living down in town just would have been a very different experience. Given that Lucas and Zeiva are still quite young and obviously weren’t up for a ton of evening activity anyway, it’s not a huge loss, but I do feel like it would have been another neat cultural dimension to have seen the city come to life in the evening, even if just a few times.

It all makes me want to come back next summer and do it again even better, except, wait, I really just want to spend next summer in Seattle! At least most of it, anyway. ;)

On the flip side, and probably something that would be impossible from down in town, I finally got to do some star-gazing tonight. I brought down a map of the July and August night skies from a guide I have, but I was too fried early on to even think about it, then as we got more settled I realized that most nights the storms came rolling in and there was lots of cloud cover (not to mention torrential rain, thunder and lightning!). But the hot, dry, clear-skies weather this week has carried over through the nights, and the moon has finally ebbed enough (or is still hidden behind the house somewhere) that the stars are finally starting to show. It’s no thick blanket of pinpoints like Pearl and Hermes, but it was fun to see some old friends and learn a few new constellations. My favorite, Scorpius, was in full glorious view, very prominent, and she’s one I rarely see from home, so that was a treat.

I have to throw in a couple of language triumphs to cap the night off. Lucas has been joking quite a bit in Spanish, which I think is very cool. The really sweet, delicious “plain” yogurt here is called yogurt “natural”. So Lucas started calling the Natural History Museum (instead of the Museo de Historia Natural) the Museo de Yogur Natural. We crack up every time! We were also sitting on a bench at a plaza the other day and so Zeiva could join us I asked him if he could “correr” a little to make room. In Spanish, “correr” can be used in this way to mean to move (i.e., scoot down), but the most basic definition of the word is to run. So Lucas hopped up and looked at me and said (in Spanish), “Oh, you want me to run?” and he ran in a zippy little circle, goofy smile on his face, sat right down in the same spot and looked at me like, “ok, I did exactly what you asked.” It was pretty funny. Finally, Zeiva slept rather restlessly Thursday night, and at one point she was really thrashing around and said in her sleep, “Mira! No, quiero el otro!” (Look! No, I want the other one!) Who knows what she was dreaming about, but I like that it was in Spanish!

Also, my brother (Tío) and his partner Carolina arrive tomorrow (Saturday) night. We probably won’t meet up with them until Sunday morning, but we are all very excited to see them!