México, México

After visiting Acapulco for the AGU Joint assembly I took the bus to Mexico City yesterday afternoon. Now I live in a nice hostel just northwest of the main square (Zocalo). The weather is comfortably cool and the city looks great at first sight.
Well, time to go exploring my surroundings. I only have two weeks to see one of the biggest cities of the world...

El Crustaceo

Well, you can't really live in Colima without going to the Crustaceo Cascarudo. It is the bar in town. Open from Wednesday to Sunday with most business on Friday and Saturday it offers live music (Los hijos de la mama bulinga) and beverages of all kinds. Ranging from my favorite, the limonda, that is made from real lime juice, over normal beer, cheladas, micheladas to the moped. While a normal beer is quite easy to imagine, a chelada is a beer with lime and salt on the rim of the glas and a michelada in addition gets a mixture of tabasco and Maggi soy sauce. The moped is something on the order of Tequila and gets poured into the victim whose head then gets shaken while a helper honks loudly. It is given to people having their birthday and - well Ida and Anna got two in a row each when they left.

Preparations for the michelada addon

Clear orders

The music varies over time. On Wednesdays you will usually only find Memo playing the guitar and the closer Friday and Saturday get, the more of the band appears.

Sometimes people can join the band for a song or two

While on Wednesdays you might be pretty much alone in the bar, on the busy nights it can be difficult to find a seat.

The setting is - of course - with an open courtyard, that is somewhat protected by a tarp. This open construction has the great advantages of keeping the temperatures in a reasonable range and permitting the cigarette smoke to leave the place so you don't have to ban your clothes from your room after going here. In the back room there is a pool table where we regularly try to get the right balls into the pockets. Putting the white one is commented on as [gluc] in Mexico.

Aldo [La sella]

Fuentes Georginas

Well, seems as if I had left out the Fuentes Georginas in my reports. They are volcanic (surprise!) hot springs near Xela. Located pretty high up the hill in a beautiful forest ambient the hot water comes steaming from the rocks and drips into a not really natural basin where you can have a little swim or just slowly get cooked.

Forest at the Fuentes Georginas


The main pool

So, after sorting out my return flight on Tuesday, April 10, I went to these hot springs on Wednesday with Nadja from the hostel. Starting with a chicken bus and continuing in a truck we went up to the hot springs. There we spent a while and went down again walking for most of the way. This was a pretty good warm up for the volcano hike during the night and maybe part of the reason why my legs were telling me off the next days...

Looking at Santa Maria volcano on our way down

Visiting the Zapatistas

A sign on the other roadside next to the village

It is about time to write this entry or I will forget about all that I saw and heard.
On my way back from Guatemala I had a one day stop in San Cristóbal. On this day Andrée and Viernes, a friend of hers from Puebla went to visit a Zapatista Carracol near San Cristóbal for two days and I joined them for the first one.

When we arrived at the Carracol we had to ask for permission to enter at a gate where two women with bandannas over their mouth were waiting. They went into a house and after a moment we were allowed to follow them. Here our names and countries of origin, our occupation and reason for the visit were asked and noted down by a man that seemingly was learning to write by doing this work.
From here we were sent to the building of the Junta (del buen gobierno(?)) where we were asked the same questions and obtained a permit for visiting and talking [platicar] to somebody from the school and the hospital. As we learned later, it is important to have platicar written on the note from the Junta because otherwise the people will refuse to talk.

Houses in the village

At the place in front of the school we met Sara from France who was already talking to a teacher [promotora]. After a while we joined them.

The escuela secundaria

The teacher had been to Mexican primary school [primaria] were Spanish was the only language and since she only spoke Tzozil she did not really learn anything there. From there she went on to the Zapatista secundaria, where the classes were in Tzozil and she had Spanish classes. After three years of secundaria she had to decide what she wanted to do and became a teacher by visiting classes of other teachers for about three months. Now she teaches math, but could not tell us what exactly is on the curriculum in these classes. She lives mainly on the toastadas and frijoles that the students bring to school for the common lunch.
The other subjects on the school (there are 6, one hour per subject and day) include besides the two languages Humanismo [=neoliberalism and other ideas on how a society should work] and some kind of sciences. Maybe the sixth subject was agronomy. I don't really know any more.
According to the promotora, most of the students later decide to become teachers in Zapatista primary schools.

The escuela primaria rebelde

After visiting the school we went to lunch where we had some quesadillas. After lunch we visited the hospital where we were told that it lives on donations and there is a physician from Italy visiting the Zapatista hospitals in the region. The rest of the personnel is just trained on the job. They even have two ambulances of which one is in repair (for most of the time?).
According to the coordinador a big part of the problems they have to treat is because of malnutrition since people mainly live on toastadas and frijoles they grow around the village.

The hospital