I think Coyoacan is going to be my point of focus for this entire visit. I spent another beautiful time there walking the narrow winding streets and seated again in Restaurant La Pause where in the garden I drank coffee, feasted on sweet Mexican pastries (my fave contained buried inside it two cylinders of solid chocolate) all for around five bucks Canadian and continued working on my drawing. I am going to try to produce a small series of coloured drawings while I´m here that take off on the colour theme of opals. If anyone wants to see them please let´s meet for coffee or whatever when I´m back and I´ll be happy to share them. The waiters there are also very friendly and I found myself chatting a lot with several of them and it´s great being able to speak so much Spanish in a day. On the other hand I found them quite hilarious the way they would whisper among themselves using very inelegant language given the elegance of this restaurant and I am not going to repeat here any of their comments about certain female patrons of size (gorditas). In many ways I find Coyoacan a huge and pleasant contrast to neighbouring San Angel, where I walked into an informal men´s clothing store under a canopy to be greeted by a vicious, and fortunately securely chained British bulldog. Now bulldogs on their own are ugly enough but generally very gentle and passive (still why anyone would want such an ugly thing for a pet is beyond me), but this one looked like he wanted to make a happy meal out of me so I told the young man at the store if they get rid of the dog I might return sometime. San Angel is primarily Old Money and although there are beautiful neighbourhoods and wonderful bookstores the whole place has a harsh vibe. The main streets are lined with ugly brutalism office buildings, chain stores, private colleges and private clubs, among them a lurid looking place called Caligula Men´s Club. And of course, there´s the traffic: Vancouverites, try to imagine a cross between Kingsway, Knight Street and Broadway in all their worst aspects and you´ll get a good idea of what I´m talking about!
I also found myself getting particularly pissy at some of the drivers here and I had to demand of some of them in Spanish to please let me finish crossing the street (I was on a crosswalk but they didn´t seem to notice) and fortunately they did eventually stop. I guess they didn´t want my blood on their fenders.
By the way I have been finding it very difficult to get any further information online in this hotel about Hugo Chavez. Everytime on the CBC website I have tried to click onto an article about Chavez, the Vatican or Israel the access is blocked. hmmmmm........
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Nothing interesting to report. I´m feeling tired from walking fifteen miles a day and today I had to wait for my laundry to get done, ready at 6 which somewhat circumscribed how far I could go today. Just as well because I really needed to slow down today. The laundry service in this hotel is extremely expensive so I am using the laundry service around the corner that charges around $6.50 a load. The elderly housekeeper here, Isabel, bless her heart offered to do it for me for free but there is no way I´m going to exploit her good nature. She´s been here at least eight hours today and still isn´t finished. I get the impression that she also enjoys working and who knows? maybe if she sat at home knitting all day she would have kicked the bucket years ago from boredom.
The people here work hard, harder I think than a lot of Canadians. The family in Mexico is very strong and this has to be because if you are alone and without work you will drift either into crime or end up on the street. In Canada we still have it pretty good.
Generally I still find people here very kind and helpful and for the most part friendly. Their children also seem better behaved than Canadian kids. They still run around and play and make noise but I still have not heard the kind of shrill strident squealing of pigs being butchered here that Vancouver brats are notorious for. I wonder if this is partly because the family here is so strong so that the children feel more secure and better loved. Perhaps also the parents here don´t put their kids under the same kind of pressure to succeed at everything that Canadian parents do.
I had dinner at a vegetarian restaurant off Reforma called Yug Vegetariano. It´s been around for many years but the ambience is quite unusual for a vegetarian place. Although there are the requisite images of Buddha on the wall (three huge and metallic, one made of stone or plaster) the ambience is anything but tranquil. It is very busy and the waiters all look like they moonlight as cab-drivers or race track workers. Very unpretentious.
In some of my conversations here with people about Canada and multiculturalism it has occurred to me that maybe the reason why Canada does multiculturalish better than a lot of other places has to do with our national identity. We are like tofu, bland and susceptible to absorbing other distinct flavours and odours while still retaining our distinct identity as tofu.
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