The News from Mexico

We´re in my husband´s hometown of Cuautla, Morelos. Crazy as we are, we drove here (we couldn´t afford to fly)! On our way down from Laredo, Texas (everyone told us that was the way to go, but to get to Laredo takes so incredibly long!!) we managed to break two federal laws: First, we bought Mexican car insurance but forgot to register our vehicle with the government for temporary importation. About 6 hours into Mexico´s north east, a federale stops us and asks to see our import papers. We play up our innocence--which was true. I pull out my guidebook and start frantically leafing through it, both to verify the officer´s statements and to emphasize our good intentions. He tells us by rights he should confiscate our car, but since we´re in the middle of nowhere and with family, he won´t. In the end he lets us go with nothing more than a warning not to drive in daylight near Mexico city to avoid getting caught.

Federal offense number two involves eating some fried rattlesnake by the side of the road. As we´re eating it (tastes like fish), I look up and realize we´re under a large billboard that says buying wild products on the highway "es un delito federal." Oops. The woman who serves us the snake asks if we have any baby shoes she can have for her granddaughter, so I give her my son´s.

We stopped in Queretaro because we were exhausted, but ended up spending a wonderful day with family that lives there. My son loved playing with his cousins. The city is magnificent--I really want to go back. We saw a jazz band playing in the old centro, and lots of music everywhere.

We also got lost in Mexico City in the middle of the night, after we´d congratulated ourselves on making it most of the way through. Somehow we got off track and next thing you know Emilio decides to head in a random direction, swearing he won´t let this city get the best of him. To his credit, he normally has an infallible sense of direction. Meanwhile I´m yelling at him to stop so I can figure out on my maps where exactly we are. Soon it becomes clear that we´ve gone one and a half times around the entire city. It was tricky as hell to figure out, with arrows in conflicting directions, streets changing names suddenly and almost no cardinal directions included in the signage (at that moment I really wanted a compass--just figuring out if we were headed in the right direction on a given thoroughfare was near impossible). In the end I won and navigated us out--he was impressed that I had done it.

I´ll close with a story from today: Sitting for a few moments in the zocalo with my husband, a drunk approaches us holding a yellow duckling in one hand and a large bag of corn meal in the other. ¨Please, won´t you give me a few pesos so my duck can eat,¨ he slurs. ¨He hasn´t eaten in four days.¨Duckling is hanging his head in the heat but otherwise looks fine. ¨Give him 10 pesos,¨I tell Emilio, as a reward for this beggar´s ingenuity. ¨No. Get out of here!¨Emilio laughs him away. ¨I was doing that duckling a favor,¨ he explains. ¨If I gave him money he´d go drink some more and leave his duck somewhere. This way when he sobers up maybe he´ll realize he´s carrying the duck food in his other hand!¨ We laughed about this one all the way home.