Peace

Sunday I took a bus home from Mexico city and sat next to this woman. She was petite with dark, short hair and and her eyes twinkled from the streetlights outside the dark bus. I started talking to her and found out she was an art history graduate student in the university in Cuernavaca and that she spoke English perfectly. I told her that my mother had also been an art history major and I started asking her about what I should see, what she had studied, and so on. I learned that the Robert Brady museum, which I'd already been to, was the best in Cuernavaca, but that I should definitely go back to Mexico City to see the museums there.

I also learned a little about the artist she is writing her thesis on. His last work was to sail off in a boat which was never found again (I think she's talking about Bas Jan Ader). She said that his works of art were acts of living, things he did. This reminded me of Thoreau, and also a little of myself and what I was doing this year. Maybe meaning in life comes, in part, from aesthetics. It's not why we do things, but what we do that has meaning.

Next she said something that startled me because it crystalized something I'd been starting to feel. We were talking about traveling, and she was telling me about the time she spent in Prague. She said that traveling was very comforting. I had been thinking, so far, that traveling was very stressful because I was constantly asking myself who I was and why I was where I am. But more recently I'd been relaxing more, because I was noticing that if I was unhappy I need only wait because things will change as my journey continues. This is different than normal life where difficult or troubling things accumulate. It makes sense that this year off should feel liberating, but that moment was the first time I actually felt it, experienced it.

After an hour and a half of talking to her, I started to wonder if I should get her email or connect on Facebook or try to hang out with her some more, but before I did she said she had to go, got up, and the bus driver let her off. Just like that. I didn't mind. Instead, I was reminded of something I read about Tibetan buddhists who visited Berkeley a few years ago. They spent days creating intricate art from pieces of colored sand on the floor. On the day they were revealing it to the public and everyone was standing around admiring and photographing it some kids were playing nearby. One of the kids fell onto the work, scattering the individually placed pieces of sand. The crowd gasped in shock, but the monks just smiled and laughed. Later, they swept the floor with brooms, completely erasing all of their work.

Spanish classes in Cuernavaca

I've been here for two weeks taking spanish classes at Chac Mool. The school itself is beautiful. The "classrooms" are actually those thatched roof areas you can see on the web site. The classes run in the morning and there are activities in the afternoon. I'm also staying with a host family that makes my meals and with whom I practice spanish.

A dog lives outside my window who wakes me up every morning at 7am barking. Click to watch a video of him eating a brick.

I have a 20 minute walk up and down hills to go to school. These are some things from my walk: a little ad hoc restaurant on my street and a typical rusty gate:

Every house has a gated lawn or parking area for the cars. There's an element of exclusiveness to this city which, I think, dates back to its colonial past. Sometimes you can peak through gates like these to see manicured yards with tropical flora.

It's been in some ways very hard and in some ways very easy to live here. It's hard because almost every detail of my life is unfamiliar. It's also a struggle for me to understand and speak spanish, so much of the time I feel unable to be myself and unable to follow what's going on around me. On the other hand it's easy because my days are, to a large extent, structured. I don't have to worry about what to do or how to get by because I need only go to school and do what my teachers and my mexican "mom" tell me to do, or follow the other students around in the evening.

I thought I'd have free time to work on some projects, study spanish, photograph, and explore music and art in the city. So far I really haven't had any time or energy for these kinds of things. (That's possibly due, in part, to the fact that I've got a group of friends that go out drinking until ridiculous hours of the morning so when I'm not at school I'm sleeping.... but they are leaving this weekend, so my next weeks might be different.)

I've taken some photos in the city center which includes a palace built by Hernán Cortés:

The Cortés has a beautiful photography exhibit now

as well as Diego Rivera murals depicting the history of Mexico from the battle between the Aztecs and the conquistadors to the integration of spanish and indigenous culture:

One day I went to the Robert Brady Museum. It's his house, converted into a museum since his death. It includes works by the two Mexican superstars, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, among others.

The place is stacked floor to ceiling with his art collection

His house has the most beautiful bathroom I've ever seen - not that I think about bathrooms much, but this is really incredible. The toilet is behind a wall on the right, and the bathtub is below floor level in the back under the buddha. It also has a sky light.

I went on a few excursions which I'll write about some other time. I'm also pretty excited about checking out Mexican wrestling next week:

Snorkling in Cabo Pulmo

I wanted to get away from my resort to see more of Baja. I rented a car and headed east to Cabo Pulmo to go snorkling. Cabo Pulmo, on the gulf of California, has the only coral reef on the west coast. It also turns out to be the Baja California you'd picture Baja California to be, not the disneyland-on-crack that is Cabo San Lucas.

The first hour or so was on paved roads, but eventually you're riding on washboard dirt roads. Yeah, the beach in CSL was amazing, but the open space and quiet of the east cape made it feel like a different place altogether.

The landscape was fantastic. Harsh brush and cactuses, all thorny and crooked, withered under the relentless sun.

Cows, goats, horses and dogs wander the roads freely. Vultures and hawks circle above, or rest on cactuses. The only thing that scared me was the dogs because I had my windows open and they were in a pack chasing my car.

I finally reached the dive shop, rented some snorkeling gear, and drove up to the beach. The dark spots in the water are coral reef.

I didn't have any underwater photo equipment so you'll have to use your imagination. The first thing I saw was absolutely nothing. It was late in the day and the waves had dragged a lot of sand out, clouding the waters. I swam around a little bit further and started seeing small minnows. They were in schools organized by size from pencil-tip to pinky-finger in length. The school moved as one organism, the boundaries shockingly distinct, almost like a giant amoeba moving around with the currents. Before long I was in a place where my entire field of vision was minnows. 10's or 100's of thousands of them. It was like being out at night in a rain storm with a flashlight.

Further out were all kinds of huge, bright tropical fish. There were intense blue fish that swam alone on the floor, big fat black fish with yellow dots, razor fish with noses as long as the rest of their body, giant yellow angel fish, skates, and huge blue fish with lips at the end of a long pencil-thin mouth, sucking on the coral. Maybe the goggles magnified, but most of these fish seemed at least as big as my head. I tried to follow a pelican around for a while as it scooped up buckets of fish, but I could never quite get a good view.

Next I returned my gear and got back on the road. Everything seems to be in a slow state of eternal decay.

I found this place called Crossroads Country Club that was excellent. They had a library, satellite Internet, and the best fish tacos I had in Baja.

As I got closer to civilization, I found more modern houses which were also interesting.

The last hour or two were the diciest. I'm pretty sure I made a wrong turn following some bozos going 15 in their 4wd SUVs and spent an extra hour on the dirt roads. I didn't get home until way past dark.

First international stop: Cabo San Lucas

I arrived in Cabo yesterday after a pretty rough day of travel. So far I haven't done much besides sleep and look out the window from my room at Pueblo Bonito Blanco. So far so good!

Looks like there's some fun stuff going on outside:

4th in Nebraska

People were kinda surprised when I said that Nebraska was my first stop of my world travels...

but the truth is that I've got some awesome friends there and made some new ones this visit. Plus my travels are not just about scenery or exotic places. Seeing Jen and Lateef's life, including their young kids Ivy and Scout, and their extended family which they moved back to Nebraska to be around, meant a lot to me.

Nebraska is also a place where they know how to do the 4th of July right. Jen's niece Faithe's husband Ryan lives in a neighborhood where they have BBQ, a mega water balloon fight and fireworks. Everyone decks out their yards with red, white and blue. Someone even pulled off patriotic jello.

The water balloon preparation starts early in the morning with several filling operations like this one:

In the late afternoon, with dozens of people on each side of a cul-de-sac and a thousands of water balloons, the battle begins. Here's Jen firing one round:

Last was Ryan's fireworks. He spent since Christmas prepping for his show which included a few thousand artillery shells.

They used 6 blow torches to set them off on the same street where we'd had the water balloon fight.

I also got a tour of Jen's dad Spike's apartment, flush with Nebraska Corn Huskers paraphernalia and pictures of his family.

We spent evenings at the fire pit drinking some beers and talkin' shit. They threw in an Arkansas fire log. I guess their neighbor learned how to make this from some guy camping in South Dakota. Basically you take a copper pipe, drill some holes in it, and fill it with garden hose (the cheaper ones are better). Probably not something you'd want to do around the kids, or when sitting down-wind.