Moctezuma Exhibition at the Templo Mayor

Cape of Quetzal feathers.

Emiliano Melgar, son of Ricardo and Hilda, and brother of Dahil, is a forensic archaeologist who works at the Templo Mayo right in the heart of Mexico City. He offered us a private conducted tour of the exhibition there on the life and times of Moctezuma II, the last indigenous ruler of the  Aztec empire, who thought that Cortes might be a god, and was killed and his empire lost during the Spanish Conquest. We were joined by Dahil and her boyfriend Jose-Luis,  and a Japanese colleague of Emiliano's. 

The exhibition was originally shown at the British Museum, and the version on show in Mexico is supplemented by extra artefacts and materials.  Quoting from the link below:

The exhibition tells the story of Moctezuma II, the last elected ruler of the Aztecs, more correctly known now as the Mexica. From 1502 until 1520 he presided over a large empire embracing much of what is today central Mexico. This exhibition examines his life, reign and controversial death during the Spanish conquest.  The Spanish arrived on Mexican shores in 1519, led by Hernan Cortes. They were initially well received in the Aztec capital, but distrust and violence ensued. Moctezuma was captured and met his death shortly afterwards. Overcoming resistance, the Spanish went on to conquer his empire. Moctezuma’s life and dramatic death are explained through objects ranging, from sculpture, gold and mosaic items to codices and European paintings. The objects are drawn from Mexican, European, US collections and the British Museum’s own collection.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/news_and_press_releases/press_releases/2009/moctezuma.aspx

No flash is allowed and I am not much of a photographer under these circumstances, but here are a few photos that I took. I also took pictures of some of the captions in English to remind me of what it was about. and have included most of these in the web album, so you can look at them there singly or as a slide show if you are interested..

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/2010_08_13MoctezumaExhibitAtTemploMayorAndJuniorMelgars#

Emiliano, Reyna and Emilia

After our tour, we went back to Emiliano's apartment to meet his wife Reyna (also an archaeologist) and their cute baby. Dahil lives in a smaller apartment in the same building, and she had invited us to lunch.  Hilda and Ricardo met us there and after what I considered to be a sensible and delicious lunch based around salad, fruit, cold cuts and some grilled nopales and  peppers,  we went downstairs and next door to a restaurant which is part of a school of gastronomy across the road, where students train in the kitchens and as waiters, apparently for some "real" lunch. I had already eaten handsomely so just ordered a cup of tea, Barry had some apple pie, while the others, who had only nibbled at Dahil's, being more aware than we were of the plans for the meal,  ordered serious food. The baby was an angel for the entire time, not one grizzle even though she had had a tummy upset and they thought she might still be unwell.

Markets and parks.

Fencing in Parque Frida Kahlo

The use people make of the parks and gardens in Mexico City is interesting.   Did I mention the amount of snogging one sees? On park benches, on the lawns, under the trees, in fact everywhere, couples are making out in public, mostly young but not a few middle-aged. I think it is rather nice that when I look out of the window at the high fence across the street, there are often a pair of young canoodlers (and not always the same pair - it must be a renowned spot for it) kissing and hugging for extended periods.

The Parque Frida Kahlo is at the end of our short street.  It has a central fountain which sometimes runs and often doesn't , and in one corner there is a  bronze of a rather grim-looking seated Frida overseeing activities. And of course, as well as the signs saying no ball games, skate boards or bikes, all of these are there in profusion. The signs also say no pets, but there are lots of dogs, on and more usually off-leash, and huge amounts of dog poo. (this is not just in the parks, but all over the streets. I have only seen two people even carrying plastic bags apparently to pick it up - people mostly totally ignore their dog's droppings).

At this time of year each morning there seem to be school or college graduation ceremonies happening.  Along one walkway through the park (like the one pictured above where the fencers are)  a canopy is set up sheltering two rows of chairs arrayed along its full length.  The armed police/guards supervising admit only the graduates and a very few family members: many other friends and relatives gather in our street, which is often closed to vehicular traffic when this is going on.  I normally cut through the park on my way to the central squares or the markets in Coyoacan as it avoids having to walk along, or often right off,  a very narrow and obstructed sidewalk beside a very busy intersection.  They close the park gates except to people with the right papers, so for most mornings during our one-month stay the park has been off limits for a few  hours.

Did I mention the fencing?   Time  for me  to look back and see if I used the photos or video I took one Saturday morning.  I wandered over to where the group of fencers were, and as I was trying to video them, the natural progression of the match  was very Errol Flynn: they were advancing rapidly away from the area they started from and along the path I was standing on (no chandeliers to swing from, however) and I almost got caught in the middle.  Don't fence me in!

There are other martial arts, with people in black outfits carrying wooden poles doing some kind of ritualised paired fighting. Early (well, around 9AM) there are sometimes groups doing Tai Chi. At the much larger Viveros, there are organised and less-organised groups of runners/joggers, and at one end of the track I often see one or more of the runners getting a massage lying on a blanket on the ground.  There is a clear area in the centre of the park where groups of people can be seen practising bull fighting moves - one person may even be wearing a set of horns and charging as the person with the red or pink cape tries to divert the "bull"with passes of the cape and nifty footwork.  There are occasionally people practising walking on very high stilts. There are various martial arts, large and small  groups busy with formal and less formal strenuous and less strenuous calisthenics, and at the stretching stations, which seem to be a waist-high metal bar that I couldn't even consider getting my leg up on, many quite limber folk stretching after their run. There are many moves not shown in the 128 stretches poster I see at the gym, and most people seem to be stretching a lot faster than I would consider useful. I use a tree stump, a tree trunk or a bench for my less rigorous and vigorous but longer stretches during or after my walk. There are people doing yoga classes, bring your own mat.  Occasionally I have seen them doing an exercise where they walk around amongst the trees surrounding the relatively open but contained area where there class is held with their eyes closed - which strikes me as remarkably trusting, there are trees and bushes to collide with.

Another sign at Viveros cautions against feeding the squirrels, which are weedy little things, especially the black ones, smaller than the many pigeons sharing their turf.  Especially near the seedling nursery, the signs explain that they are growing trees for the streets and parks throughout the city and the squirrels damage the growing plants.  Notwithstanding, everyone buys peanuts in the shell and feeds the squirrels, who are not remotely timid about taking them right from your extended hand. Accustomed as I am to our nocturnal possums, I quite enjoy the squirrels' daylight antics in North America, though I wouldn't feed them myself, being far too law-abiding.

At home in Melbourne, large parks may have an area with football fields or cricket pitches, but it seems that in Mexico City at least there are often also children's recreational areas where there are classrooms with organised art and craft activities, ceramics, dance classes, music lessons, and various other educational activities. Rodolfo, a sociologist colleague of Barry's who recently spent a bit of time in Canberra with his high-school-aged daughter Elena, had visited us in Melbourne and recently returned to Mexico. He lives in Cuernavaca and his daughter lives with her mother in a more tropical area, and before going home they met us in Coyoacan with a niece who is at university, and took us out to lunch at a restaurant in the Pena Pobre Park a bit further south, in a relatively small area given to the City by its former owners from a much larger estate, most of which was acquired by Carlos Slim, the richest Mexican and one of the richest men in the world, for development as a shopping, office and residential district. The park is considered very safe as there is only one way in and out, and is well patronised by the locals.  There was a wedding on in a large part of the restaurant, so we had live music, maybe a little louder than was conducive to conversation. After our lunch we went to another little cafe right alongside which specialises in organic bread and cakes for dessert, then wandered though the park itself.  I took a bit of video of a robot-controlled little set of toys built by some kids, and saw something I had never seen before: best explained by the videos shown here. The first shows Elena getting into a bubble, which is then inflated with air and pushed off into the middle of the pool the bubbles are floating on.  The next one shows some of the fun Elena and her cousin had trying to control their bubbles.  I took these with the iPhone, so the quality is not the best.

Elena and her cousin called them hamster balls, as you can theoretically run like a hamster on a wheel.  From the girls' description, it was a lot of fun but very exhausting hard work. I think the cost was 50 pesos, or about $5 Australian,  for 10 minutes. The girls were big enough that only one can go in each bubble - there were some father/child combinations and 2 smaller kids together in other bubbles. I had never seen anything like this before - have you?

I am very taken with the service offered at the markets here.  At the many street or covered markets they will do whatever you like to the chicken, for example.  If you want a base for soup or stock, they will sell you frames, (heads and feet optional: they remove the skin and cut the fat and fatty bits off for you). If you want breasts cut into schnitzels, they will take the skin off, slice from the breast and flatten it for you, or cut it into fajitas - strips such as we would use for a stir-fry - and they will give you the bones to add to your frames for your soup. Likewise when I wanted thigh pieces for a Thai-style curry I made the other day, they took the skins off, removed the bones and the large pieces of fat, and cut it into nice chunky pieces.  I took some video of the chicken guy preparing the chook for me, using scissors and a knife.  In this little clip he is removing the bones from the thigh and cutting off the fat - he had first deftly removed the skin using a piece of cloth. At the end he is asking how big I want the pieces and if he should butterfly them first.

I am also fascinated by how they cut calves liver: so thin (excellent knives they must have!) it seems like silk fabric. I am reminded of how my father described the meat they put in the sandwiches in the canteen at Plessey's, where he worked as a fitter and turner during WWII in England - "so thin it only had one side".

At many of the fruit and veg stands at the markets they have pre-packaged and/or large trays or bowls of  pre-cut mixed vegetables,  appropriate for various common soups or "chop suey", but not exactly the mix of veggies we might use at home. For example, the mix I use as a base for chicken soup has some carrots, leeks, a bit of celery, chayote (choko), zuchinni, green beans, often a few slices of mushrooms, slices of corn on the cob, maybe a bit of cabbage, and a few herbs.  I add more carrots, celery and onions - and would like to add parsnip, but they don't seem to have  it here in Mexico, though there are two  words for it in my Spanish-English dictionary.

I have recently discovered that if you want anything else they will add it and peel/ cut it up for you.  For the kind of stir-fry I would make at home, or for a curry, I have adapted other packages of veggies, adding some peppers, mushrooms, red onions, and maybe broccoli. There will be a few things I would never use at home, but it is really great that you can make a stir-fry without spending so long prepping the veggies.  I am reminded of the conversation at a recent WW meeting.  We were discussing snacks and having fruit and veg  prepared and ready to eat when hunger strikes. As we went round the room, nearly everyone said they had their muchacha peel and prepare theirs for them so it was ready - I can't get used to the idea and reality that all middle class people here have servants, but I guess I could maybe get used to having others, whether at themarket or at home, to help out with the food prep!

If you choose a pineapple they are happy to peel it and cut it into slices or wedges - likewise a water melon - they will peel what they call tuna, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, though these are really easy to peel at home, as they have already removed the spines. By contrast, in the supermarket they will cut you a smaller piece of watermelon or a piece of papaya if you ask - but first you have to find someone to ask, which is not easy.  Then they go away and don't come back for an extended period.  The quality is often comparable, and prices vary up and down, but the service is really a differentiator. Also the supermarket has more imported produce.  In general my experience with buying stone fruit, apples and pears (which largely seem to be imported) is that you shouldn't bother. Whether it is the distance, the handling, the storage, or all of these, I have never eaten an excellent apple or nectarine in Mexico. I am salivating at the prospect of the stone fruit to come from the Berkeley Bowl, Monterrey Markets, the organic farmers market or even the supermarkets  once we hit Berkeley next week .

Chile en nogada at Dona Maclovia

At this season of the year, they sell pomegranates whole, in sections, or just the ruby seeds in a container, ready to be used in whatever dish you would like, notably chile en nogada, the national dish which is red, white and green. I have probably mentioned this in earlier Mexican blog entries: a chile is stuffed with a mix of minced meat, fruit and nuts,  baked (or sometimes fried in egg batter) and served with a sauce made from cream and walnuts.  I wondered how the sauce was so white, as ground walnuts such as I sometimes use in baking at home seem brownish - and saw a guy at the Coyoacan market the other day  hand-peeling the walnut kernels, leaving them pristine creamy white. They crack the nuts with a special implement, like a small hammer with a spike on it, not a nutcracker, so they don't injure the kernels. They are pretty expensive: this obviously is very labour intensive. Walnuts in Mexico are called nuez de castilla, literally nuts from Spain, whereas the far more common pecans are just called nuez.  My chile en nogada lunch today,  pictured, had an extra Mexican touch: the pinkish sprinkles on the middle section are Mexican pine nuts, which are pink rather than cream in colour, and maybe a bit smaller than the pine nuts we see in Melbourne or California. The orange thing on the edge of the plate is a tinned peach - not your conventional garnish. They claim the recipe is from la abuelita, literally,  Grandma's recipe - but I did wonder about the tinned peach. I must note that it was absolutely delicious - the chiles they stuff are just a little picante, more in some parts than others - Herzonia thinks it depends on how well they remove the veins and seeds. I had been determined to eat one and damn the consequences at my next Weight Watchers weigh in, as they are so special.

An unconventional day at Xochimilco

Papel picado on display at factory

Herzonia (Left) and Eire

Back in 2007, I blogged about a trip to Xochimilco with Bev and Judy, where we boarded  a trajinera (a boat, Xochimilco's equivalent to a gondola) and floated up and down canals, were serenaded by musicians on other boats, bought lunch from  hawkers on different boats, bought some earrings from the itinerant artesania salespeople, and generally did what people do at Xochimilco on weekends. You can check this out if you look at the entries from October 2007.

Quite a menagerie here

Herzonia's niece Eire is getting married to Enrique in September, and wanted to choose decorations for the wedding.  Herzonia had bought specially designed papel picado (literally, cut paper - the fluttery little paper banners they use in Mexico for festive occasions, a sample pictured at the top of this post) for her 50th birthday party at a "factory" near Xochimilco, and had promised to take her there, and invited me to come along.
Eire and Enrique were talking to people about the venue and other wedding-related activities in one section of Xochimilco,  as the ceremony will take place on a trajinera surrounded by about a dozen others transporting the guests, and the entire wedding will take place within the ecological park section of Xochimilco. So Herzonia and I wandered around one of the nursery sections till Eire was done and ready to join us.

I do like colour and movement

As my close friends know only too well, I am not a gardener's bootlace.  I am not really interested in plants and gardens, though landscapes entrance me, and I tune out when my garden-loving friends discuss plants, garden design, compost, whatever. Yet in Mexico, as in Australia and Berkeley,  I am surrounded by people who love this stuff, and the sheer exoticism of going to a nursery in Mexico  made me think it might be blog-worthy. You will see from my selection of photos that I like bright colours (whether in plants or pots), am intrigued by topiary, enjoy landscape-like displays, and feel as it is Mexico I'd better include some cactuses (or perhaps cacti)  and a few chillies. Also I find some of the kitsch elements irresistible, and I like tortoises.

Lana: for prosperity

One little cultural oddity I couldn't resist was this jade plant with coins stuck on some of its leaves, in a sheep planter.  Sheep have wool, lana in Spanish, and lana also means money in Mexican slang. The jade plant stands for prosperity, adding the sheep means more lana, and the coins speak for themselves! Several years ago as part of a Xmas gift from Maguie we got a very cute little sheep, so I already knew what lana stood for, but this little object took it to a whole new level.

Another plant that caught my eye is this striking one, with red and white flowers against its green foliage. I immediately thought of the Mexican national colours, which like Mexico's  flag are red, white and green - and Herzonia informs me that this plant is called bandera - Spanish for flag.

Red, white and green

 

You have no idea how many hours I put in trying to get my photos and a video up on Flickr. Last year I got my Lake Tahoe pictures up easily, as I recall, but this time I had many attempts which ended up in duplicate copies on my hard disk and none on Flickr, hence had to spend a lot of time deleting spurious copies,  and on a fourth attempt, after downloading a new copy of the software, I got some photos over - but there are multiple copies of several. And before I completed the upload, I went through deleting all the duplicates, I thought - and also deleted two photos I found  from Ben and Lissy's wedding in January 2009 which had somehow inserted themselves amidst these from Xochimilco. (maybe if you stay in Mexico long enough, Magic Realism starts happening in your life and photostream?)
Here is the link, I hope:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29461072@N07/

or else you might need to go to flickr and look up bjoymarsh's photostream and the set called Xochimilco: Nursery and papel picado. The set also includes the video I took at the papel picado factory, which I am also trying to post right here.

 It shows the people punching out the patterns from a stack of paper resting on a heavy lead plate, using a template, employing an assortment of different-shaped chisel-like tools. I am sure if they did something like this in China they'd be using a laser cutter of some kind! I wonder if they will all end up with arthritis in their hands from the repetitive shock absorption, and lead poisoning (apparently they recast the lead bases as infrequently as they can get away with - the ones we could see certainly looked very bashed about, but at some point they must need to melt them down and recast them as flat base plates again.  This process is pretty toxic, and I am pretty sure bashing holes into lead isn't great for your health at any time either.)

Cardboard Day of the Dead figures&papier mache skull

The factory was quite fascinating, operating on two levels. It is a fairly dilapidated building and the top level, where the video was shot, is reached by a mostly outdoor iron fire-escape type staircase with some concrete steps with no handrail.  Going up was less scary than coming down. The floor upstairs is covered in the brightly-coloured offcuts from the papel picado, in effect very odd-sized and -shaped confetti .  On our way out we saw  trays of empty eggshells (from real hen's eggs, none of your plastic rubbish!), which they fill with this confetti and sell. Waste not, want not!

Papier Mache Bull

A rather decrepit long-haired and white-bearded old man came in while we were perusing the designs and selecting Eire's choice, a composite of several, to use for the wedding decorations. The woman in charge introduced the man as her father and founder of the business - nice to see it still in the family. As well as the papel picado, they hand make all kinds of things out of paper, cardboard and papier mache. Money boxes in the shape of hares (looking like figures from the pre-Columbian codices), paper flowers, day of the dead skeletons, skulls (calaveras),  brightly coloured and variously shaped and sized paper lanterns, crepe paper hot air balloons, and I even saw a large papier mache bull under construction (I am going to take a photo of the bull in this apartment that is clearly a close relative, though smaller).

And I will close with a photo of a bush with black chillies, you might need to double click on this to expand on it as they are tiny and get a bit lost in the foliage.

See the tiny black chillies on the largest plant

Movies and the Mexican revolution; Trip to Cuernavaca; Dolores Olmedo Museum; Rivera Mural Reproductions

 Set of posters for early movies about Revolutionary Hero, Pancho Villa

Barry planned this trip to Mexico so we'd be here during the Bicentenary of Mexican Independence and the Centenary of the Mexican Revolution.  Of course there are many exhibitions and special events commemorating these anniversaries at the multitude of museums in and around the city, but because he is also spending most of the working week in various archives pursuing his current research interests, we haven't been going to museums most weekdays.  (I have done a bit on my own in between walking and cooking and seeing friends - and will do more in the next two weeks before we head off to Berkeley.)
Last Sunday we managed to catch the last day of an exhibition highlighting the role of film in the myth-making of the Mexican Revolution. It was very helpful to have Barry around to identify who the various be-suited and be-hatted and moustachioed men were in the documentary footage, stills and movies we saw bits of.

A highlight for me was seeing a young and handsome Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata in  the Hollywood movie Viva Zapata. An informational placard in the exhibition stated that Zapata was portrayed in the movies as someone with deeper and firmer revolutionary beliefs than Pancho Villa, who was more prone to frivolous escapades. Having seen the teasers, now I want to get hold of some of these old movies - maybe Netflix will have them when we rejoin in Berkeley?

On Saturday we drove down to Cuernavaca with Herzonia, to visit friends of hers and of ours. Her friends, Manuel and Beatrice Bennett, have recently celebrated their 60th year in Mexico.  From New York, they came to Mexico with their 2 year-old son.  Manny had returned from WWII, and under the GI Bill he could go to school just about anywhere, and he opted to attend La Esmeralda, a renowned art school in Mexico City.  He had studied art and graphic design before the war, and working with mapping and surveillance during the war had learned a lot more about printing, reproduction, colour separation, architecture and design, so got deeply involved in this newly emerging industry in Mexico.  Obviously quite an entrepreneur as well as an artist, designer and engineer in these fields , he built a career he didn't really want running a 24*7 factory and consulting to very major clients on their printing needs.  He withdrew from this time-consuming activity, which was not giving him the life they had come to Mexico for, and became a consultant to many of his former and new clients.  Meanwhile his wife also finished college and became a teacher at The American School, initially so they could get their son into the kindergarten there (which is where Herzonia and her family first met them) .  Subsequently she ran her own school for many years.  They loved Mexico from the start, made many friends, and found the opportunities and life choices offered them were far broader and more interesting than what was on offer to their friends and family in the USA at the time.

We were so busy nattering that I didn't take any photos, but here is a link to Manny's web site, where you can see some of his beautiful sculptures, books and art. Well worth looking at!

http://members.dslextreme.com/users/vbennett/index.html

They moved full-time to Cuernavaca after retiring (and had spent weekends there for years before) and have been there over 15 years in a wonderful house, which he designed and supervised himself, utilising his experience in extending and constructing factories. They're very delighted that none of the structures he built, in Cuernavaca or in Mxico City,  has ever been damaged by earthquakes, even the massive 1985 quake  and its  aftershocks.  The house is like a museum, full of Manny's sculptures and art works. We also got to see some of the many books he has written and/or illustrated, including some of his children's books , covering subjects from Olympic sport to Judaica, including an illustrated book of a translation from the original Yiddish stories of Sholem Aleichem, which were the basis of  Fiddler on the Roof. He also has designed several cards for UNICEF whose sales have raised more than US$1M for the charity, and he is still working collaboratively with all kinds of artists and film-makers.
Beattie considers Herzonia her honorary niece - they go back a long way indeed and some of the artworks around the house populated Herzonia's childhood. What a rich relationship indeed.

Photo below from January,2010:  Hilda Melgar with Barry and me in Melgar living room in Cuernavaca

 Barry and I left Herzonia there with some other guests and went on to have lunch with the Melgars. Ricardo, Hilda and Dahil were there - not sure if I have mentioned them before but we often see them.  Ricardo is a colleague and occasional collaborator of Barry's. He and Hilda are originally from Peru, which may account for why I find it so difficult to follow Hilda's Spanish in particular. Before she started Uni here,  Dahil studied English in Sydney for a short while, and when she visited Melbourne, we spirited her away from the Backpackers' place she was in and took her home with us, so we have an independent relationship with her.  She has since graduated from Uni and is working as a Research Assistant for a couple of different academics, at least one of whom seems to treat research assistants as cheaper secretarial staff, so it isn't as much of a learning experience as it should be for her.

In photo below, Ricardo Melgar on the right in the Garden at home in Cuernavaca, taken January 2010
 

For lunch, Hilda as usual produced a Peruvian speciality, this time a dish with a base of potatoes topped with chicken which may have been processed to its very fine texture in a blender or food processor - no idea what was mixed with it - it was delicious but I worry about how many Weight Watcher's points I actually consumed (I was pretty good not to eat any cheese at all from the starters, just a few olives and some baby corn, and there were heaps of veggies, but I also faltered and tried the lemon tart and dulce de leche ice cream, if only little bits.  Stuck to one glass of wine, however, but did drink the agua de jamaica, a drink made from a type of hibiscus flowers,  which I usually avoid as it has sugar. Theirs was a lot less sweet than many, though I prefer to avoid all added sugar if I can , but it can be very hard in Mexico.  Incidentally, for those of you who know about Caroline and Joy's Tamarind restaurant  and cooking school in Luang Prabang, Laos, Caroline makes something similar there from the same stuff which they call rosella).

Gorgeous riot of colour and plants

Huge variety of pots on sale.

One of the vendors whose display I liked

On Sunday I went to my Weight Watchers meeting, which is always a challenge for my Spanish but worth the effort, especially as I lost 300 gm this week. It is across the road from Viveros,  where I walk most days with Herzonia, other friends or alone.  It is a morning meeting, so I only  have a cuppa and a yoghurt  before walking the 20 minutes there.  It feels like I am cheating a bit, but once I started doing this, I worry that if I had a full breakfast before weigh-in, I would show up as gaining weight that week.  At home, where my meeting was just before dinner in the evening, the same thinking applied, and I was careful not to have an afternoon snack before my weigh-in.

I am taking the opportunity to post a few photos I took last week in the  Viveros - we usually walk through the treed area and the areas where they grow the saplings for the city's parks and gardens, but this day we were in the commercial plant nursery, where the colours really caught my eye - of the pots on sale, as well as the plants. I took a few shots in the cactus area too but as it was a dull day and I was using the iPhone rather than my camera, they look  rather dreary. Their annual dahlia exhibition starts this week, and Herzonia thinks it is worth another visit to the nursery to catch it.

After WW,  I walked back home for brunch and headed off with Barry to the Dolores Olmedo museum, in a wonderful old Colonial building called La Noria, which Olmedo extended and used as her home as well as a gallery for her extensive collection of Frida Kahlo (this collection is on tour in Europe, Germany I think, as it has been touring each time I have intended to to go to see it),  Diego Rivera, and Angelina Beloff.

Dolores Olmedo (from a postcard of one of  Rivera's portraits of her)  was made the custodian of Rivera's works and had the largest Kahlo collection anywhere.  Since her death, her private quarters and personal collections have been opened to the public - lots of pre-Columbian figures, jewellery  and artefacts, and such things as  lot of Emperor Maximilian's silverware, displayed in a wonderful tiled former kitchen.  Photography is banned, unfortunately, and even when I took out my iPhone just to take some notes on a particular painting I wanted to look up later, a guard insisted I put it away.  You can check out the museum at the website:

http://www.museodoloresolmedo.org.mx/english/museo.html

The grounds are lovely, and there are peacocks (and at least one peahen with 2 small chicks which were so cute all the visitors were taking forbidden photos in the gardens) and other birds, as well as a healthy looking pack of  native bald dogs,  escuintles, in various visible but fenced off sections. These were about all I managed to photograph.  My compromise here is to post photographs of two of the postcards Barry bought, one of the museum and one of a Rivera portrait of Dolores Olmedo, with apologies for the resulting lack of quality.

Pea hen and chicks (one hidden)

One of the Rivera reproductions  in the Jardin Hidalgo.

I am a big fan of Rivera's paintings, and it was interesting to see such a large collection n the museum, from his early landscapes and cubist works painted in the 20's in Europe, and later in the Soviet Union. Displayed as they are, juxtaposed with the pre-columbian figures he collected , I could see the continuity and evolution into the style he used in his most famous murals, portraying the sweep of Mexican history and representing the Indigenous peoples, the Conquistadors, and the archetypes of the military, the priest, the capitalist, the worker.  The ban on photography was really irksome! In older posts, maybe 2007,  I am sure I have shown some of Rivera's wonderful murals, but right now there are life-sized reproductions of some of his Ministry of Education murals on display in the rotunda of the Jardin Hidalgo, the plaza here in Coyoacan, which I photographed today with my phone.  I took a photo of each of them: I see they are a bit over exposed, but they do give an idea. Remember, if you click on an image you can enlarge it and see more detail. I have stuck them all on Picasa so you can see the lot:  As the Rotunda is in the open air, the light conditions as I went around varied a lot (and I didn't take them in order as there were people in the way). Some of them are displayed on a walkway and I took  a few close-ups of details here: to get far enough away to capture the whole panels I couldn't avoid the tape (apparently property of the Senate?) you can see in these on Picasa.


http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/2010_08_02DiegoRiveraMuralReproductions#

Museum of Popular Culture, Coyoacán

Schematic map of Mexico showing the typical regional styles of dress, from early-mid Twentieth Century.

Boy, did I get my packing wrong for this trip.  I thought it would be hot, with a couple of hours' rain most afternoons.  Apparently this is how the weather used to be, but climate change is here and we have had quite a bit of drizzle most days, occasional thunderstorms mostly in the afternoon and evening, and today we have had at least 5 hours of continuous quite heavy rain. It isn't exactly cold - but certainly not T-shirt and short skirt weather either.  For my various outings today, I wore the only long pants I brought, which are the ones I would normally wear with a smart top to go out in the evening - but I have no smart tops with me, and in fact packed only one long-sleeved top for the Mexico stay. So I called that into service and put my shower-proof jacket, which I fortunately dug out of retirement and threw in the suitcase as a last minute afterthought, on top.  Later on I bought a scarf at the Coyoacan Artesanias market to keep my neck warm!  

I decided to head to the Museum of Popular Cultures close to home,  in the centre of Coyoacan, late this morning, as Herzonia was not available for a walk and Barry was not up for a major outing.  It has been renovated since we were here last and in its newly opened spaces had a special exhibition of images and symbols relating to Mexican identity, in the context of the bicentenary of Mexican Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution, both being celebrated this year.  Creating a nation from all the different regions shown in the map above, with their different Indigenous populations, religions and traditions, required quite a bit of national myth-making. The exhibition looks at many different aspects of this process, from male and female stereotypes through food, music, costume, national heroes, etc.  

As well as the exhibition, there was a series of events which seem to constitute a kind of folk fair, featuring handicrafts, food, lectures, traditional music, songs and dance called .La Guelaguetza - Viva Oaxaca  (here is where I tell you that Oaxaca, the state with a very large indigenous population, many wonderful handicrafts and many different musical traditions, is pronounced "wa-ha-ka").  Entry to the guelaguetza  is free as opposed to the roughly $1 charge for entry to the museum proper.

Clay Musicians on display at the Museum of Popular Culture.

There is a new mural on the outside wall between the two exhibition halls, evocative of Mexico's strong mural tradition but executed by some of today's Mexican graffiti artists. A film shows various stages in the preparation and construction of the mural, with people working with spray cans on large moveable scaffolds - a bit different to the scenes from the movie "Frida" showing Diego Rivera at work  (do get this Salma Hayek movie out on DVD if you haven't already seen it - it's really good!).  Oddly enough, given that this reference just popped into my mind, on Sunday we were at the Institute where those murals were painted and where Frida Kahlo met Diego.  Barry mentioned this to me and I figured I'd better put in something about that.  More of Sunday's exhibition probably on my next post (or at the end of this one) 

If you go to the link below you'll see the photos I took at the exhibition, please ignore  the first shot which I don't seem to be able to remove.  Later in the day I returned to the Museum with Barry to see a concert of music and dance from Oaxaca as part of the guelaguetza, and this shot shows a local poet acknowledging the singer Diana Velasco, who was actually pretty good and sang between each of the dance sets.  (as usual, if clicking doesn't work, copy the link and paste into the address line of your browser.  Also note you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.)

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/20100724NationalMuseumOfPopularCultures#

I tried videoing a range of the items on display but quite apart from the fact that Picasa won't load them from my memory card, they are hopeless and not worth looking at in any case.  Videoing an activity seems to work a lot better than trying to pan across a lot of still images, I have discovered.

I found many of the images from the mid Twentieth Century were extremely evocative - and I only started developing a conscious interest in Mexico in the '70's after I met Barry, so they must have seeped into my consciousness long ago.  There was a large section dedicated to the stereotypical masculine charro and ultra-feminine china poblana.  Loosely translating from the information at the museum, the china poblana was a  traditional fokloric feminine representation that gained prominence in the first decades of the 20th Century , immediately after the Mexican Revolution.  Beautiful mestizas, coquettishly dressed in petticoats and embroidered regional outfits, with accentuated feminine traits, riding side-saddle,   provided a counterbalance to the exaggerated masculinity of the virile charros.  With the growing urbanisation of the Twentieth Century, these stereotypes remain as folkloric icons rather than any kind of reality.  

The shot of the set of display photos of little kids dressed  up in these styles also evokes what one sees a lot of on the streets around here - the little ones don't seem to mind getting dressed up even for an ordinary Sunday outing.  These days one sees more kids dressed up in superhero  or furry animal costumes than traditional folkloric garb, though there are still a few - apart from the children of some of the Indigenous vendors or beggars , who wear their style of dress totally un-self-consciously (and look comfortable and grubby and unkempt, with their hair uncombed, unlike the dressed-up little ones.)

In this video I took of some of the dancing at the Oaxacan concert this afternoon here is one style of - there were many costume changes and many different dances to enjoy, but given my upload problems you'll have to live without them.  I need to do some research on compressing videos and finding a site to upload them to, as it takes an age to get them up on the blog directly, and my attempts often fail.

If you are particularly keen to see some more, email me and I will send you the odd video directly.

The stage and seating for the concert was mostly covered by a series of large canopies, extremely fortunate for performers and audience alike as it poured the whole afternoon.The booming rain on the canopies also has affected the sound track. At one stage when we may have all been feeling a bit chilly, one of the organisers appeared with a couple of bottles of Mezcal, which is produced by artesanal methods in Oaxaca, and poured tiny plastic cup  tasters of it for whoever he noticed in the audience.  It certainly is warming - a flavour like tequila but much more smoky.  After one sip I passed mine on to Barry. The amount of clapping in rhythm and singing along increased noticeably!

Needless to say, there is a bookshop at the Museum and Barry ended the day there, picking up two heavy bags of books.  We thought about dinner then, so I left him in the queue to buy a rotisseried chook at a place a few doors away and took one bag and one umbrella home with me and had prepared some veggies for a bit of balance by the time he got back.

Back in Mexico - Central de Abastos, July 17, 2010

 A few of the bewilderingly many types of chilli on sale at the Central de Abastos

I don't know that my life in Melbourne is any more boring than my life on the road, but somehow when I am home I never get around to blogging about my adventures at Queen Victoria Market, lunches with good friends, new babies in the family and my circle of friends, the classes I take, the operas, concerts, plays or movies we see, or picnics down by the Yarra. However, once we arrive on the other side of the world I am immediately struck by its exoticism and a strong desire to share its difference from home with everyone I know, so here I go again, chronicling my adventures here in Mexico.

We chose to stop over in Berkeley after our Melbourne-San Francisco flight to get a better- priced non-stop connecting flight on to Mexico than any available on the day we arrived. It also enabled us to drop off two large suitcases at the house we will be renting from mid-August until Xmas to have less to schlep to Mexico, and to do some paperwork on campus, which will expedite the procedures when we arrive for our extended stay just before Barry's semester begins. Sonya and Philip had generously invited us to stay over at their lovely house in the Berkeley Hills, complete with a glorious view across the Bay to the Golden Gate bridge, clear on the afternoon we arrived but deeply shrouded in fog the next morning when we left for the airport again.

As soon as we arrived in Mexico on Thursday night we felt right at home in the apartment, which feels like our home in Mexico. We popped out to the local Superama (part of Walmart's Mexico chain) to get in a few breakfast things  and grabbed a late dinner at VIPS, a Mexican family restaurant chain which also seems to be associated with Walmart and is often co-located. (Barry tells me that they used to send people around the tables asking if you needed anything from the supermarket while you were dining there, quite a good service especially for people who don't like to grocery shop!) They have introduced a "light" menu - they list calorie counts and grams of fat for these items, but not the saturated fat content that I need to compute points using the Australian Weight Watchers system (I went back to meetings and counting points as I had put on a few kilos and had climbed above my goal weight, so decided to stop the rot before it got worse. After a few weeks on the programme in Melbourne, I am just about back to goal weight but aim to get off at least another 3 kg, where I have mostly been for the past several years, to get really comfortable in my jeans.) Somewhat to my surprise, the dish I ordered, fajitas, was really nice, very un-oily, with the small sides also being low fat, so I estimate it was an acceptable amount to eat within my points allowance.

Bulk lollies on sale at the Central de Abastos: fortunately coloured sugar is not a serious temptation for me

On Friday we had breakfast with a US colleague of Barry's at a café overlooking the Plaza Centenario in Coyoacan, and later Barry bought some new shoes as the one pair he is travelling with need new soles. Buying shoes here is quite hard as the sizing doesn't cater well for wide feet (nor for large sizes for women: many styles I have looked for over the years stop about 2 sizes smaller than my feet). As Herzonia pointed out, looking at Diego Rivera murals you can see that many indigenous people have feet like tamales, short and fat, so it seems odd that they only make shoes for narrow feet. But it is nice that we saw many shoes made in Mexico, including this purchase - when did anyone last see a pair of shoes actually made in Australia?

Then Herzonia took me to the Mega Supermarket (a Mexican-owned chain) in the car to do a major grocery and fresh food shop, and also helped me get local phone chips to use while we're here - the prepaid deal supposedly available for my iPhone is not good value for only one month, so I am using it on WiFi only and am again carrying my old phone with the Mexican chip. I hope to get a better deal in the US so I can revert to having just one device to carry with me.

 One of hundreds of stalls selling fish and seafood at the Central de Abastos

Today is Saturday and in the early afternoon Herzonia and her cousin Vicky had planned a trip to the Central de Abastos, the big Wholesale and Retail Market, so I was able to join them. We covered only the fish market and the section dealing with things like nuts, seeds, spices and lollies. I used the iPhone to take lots of photos and videos , I think they're of lesser quality than my camera delivers, but the main problem is I have no idea how to shoot a coherent video! But the ones I am posting do give a great sense of the colour and movement. I bought some fillets of huachinango (red snapper) and will report next time on how they taste - but the prices are less than half typical supermarket prices and there's no doubting the freshness.

I seem to have posted the wrong video below, but it took so long that I am loath to delete it!

First impressions of the fish market : sorry about the poor quality and bad technique!

Vicky bought some mojarra - the guy scaled them before I thought to video him, but I caught the rest of the fish preparation and some of the banter that goes on in markets everywhere: let's hope this is the right video!

I seem to have got a bit confused between Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery and where I actually loaded the iPhone images and videos and whether I have uploaded them to the web, but I am excited about this post so am going to publish without a link to the very questionable quality videos, wherever I may have posted them. I promise to try and get myself better organised by the next post!

Local Colour in Coyoacán, July 2010

This morning, Sunday, I walked to the local meeting of Weight Watchers, where I was delighted to find I could follow everything the leader said and most of what the members shared. There were a couple of people who spoke too indistinctly for me to follow, but overall it was really a good meeting, though as the systems used here and in Australia differ quite a bit, I can't get much guidance on computing Aussie Points from Mexican food labels. Never mind, my estimation is OK for the most part.

As I exited the meeting, I saw the woman with her hammock cart which resembles a fully rigged sailing ship - I saw it from the car yesterday so was delighted to find it on the street where I could catch a couple of photos. The meeting place is right across the road from the Viveros (the nursery which grows all the trees for the public parks in the City). So after the meeting I walked a couple of times around - it boasts a 2 km tan track, very busy on Sundays, with families, joggers, walkers and watchers. In the open areas groups of people of all ages were practising various martial arts and bullfighting.

I walked home via El Jarocho, my favourite coffee place here, where a skinny cappuccino costs about $1US. I took the rest of the photos I am linking you to within 2 blocks of the coffee shop - the food stands demonstrate why Weight Watchers is so needed, as do the many shots taken in the local panadería , and the artesanías on the street, while perhaps not as high quality as those in some of the better markets and shops, are really tempting. All this is within a few blocks of where we are living, the same apartment we have rented several times in the past for up to 6 months at a time. Now I see them on the web, I realise the iPhone photo quality is not as good as my camera takes, but they do give a sense of the local colour. I hope you enjoy them: here is the link to go to or to paste into your browser. By the way, the odd-looking bald dog at the end is a native Mexican variety that you may have seen in Frida Kahlo's paintings- I think it is called an escuintle, I will check with Wikipedia before posting.

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/20100718LocalColourInCoyoacan#