A Canadian writer's life

Friday, November 25, 2011

Día de la Revolución November 20th, Isla Mujeres Mexico!

High School Band in Día de la Revolución parade.

Rat-a-tat-tat, blam, blam, bang, tootle-toot, and bang again!

A dozen or so high school students have been practicing with drums and bugles every day on the basketball court across the street from our house, practicing for the Día de la Revolución parade last Sunday.

This group is much improved over last year's group, but oh my, listening to the discordant clatter and crash for two hours every day increased our need for aspirin, or Tylenol, or whiskey, or anything to obliterate the headache. They're a good bunch of kids, just lacking musical skills at the moment. (But, who am I to complain? I have been tossed out of community choirs and school bands several times for having absolutely no ear for music.)

This is a very serious event for these ladies!

The Day of the Revolution (Día de la Revolución) is celebrated annually in Mexico on November 20th. It is the anniversary of the 1910 start of the popular movement leading to the overthrow of dictator José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori after 34 years of military rule. The revolution ushered in a decade of civil war, which ultimately led to the creation of Mexico’s constitution in 1917.

To be honest, we still get Independence Day, September 16th, 1810, and Day of the Revolution, November 20th, 1910, confused. They are both very important holidays in Mexico, we just have trouble keeping them straight.

Take my picture, take my picture!!

On Sunday, the parade was scheduled to start at eight in the morning instead of the usual nine o'clock, due to the large number of groups that expressed interest in participating. The Parade Marshall was expecting several of the dance troupes from the 6th Annual Caribbean Festival to join the parade.

I meandered over to the designated reviewing stand around eight twenty in the morning, thinking I had at least an hour or more to wait until the parade appeared.

Much to my surprise, the first groups were just arriving at the reviewing stand! The parade had apparently started on time. Amazing!

Another part of the high school group.

While I was shooting a bazillion photos of the various marching contingents with my new camera, I bumped into Janet Davison. Janet and I walked up and down the route clicking lots of photos, but we never did see any of the dance troupes, so I assume that they cancelled at the last minute.

I saw many island friends and their various offspring. I tried to take photos of any of the kids that I recognized. Some of the kids were camera-shy, others hammed it up as soon as they saw me pointing a camera at them.

And the high school band, who were driving us nuts all week with their practice sessions, well, they looked and sounded pretty darn good.

Hasta pronto, Lynda and Lawrie

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Ahoy! Dead ahead be pirates on Isla Mujeres, Mexico!

Garden area of Hacienda Mundaca.

The story of Isla's most famous islander - pirate Mundaca - could have been taken straight from a bodice-ripper romance novel, complete with the love triangle between a sixteen-year-old beauty, her childhood sweetheart, and a fifty-three-year-old pirate who yearned to make the young woman his wife.

The small fishing village on Isla Mujeres in the late 1800s must have been one of the most romantic settings imaginable for the melodrama of these ill-fated lovers. Imagine: torch-lit nights, hammocks hanging in palapa-roofed houses, and whimsical paths winding between coconut palms to the gentle bay where the fishing canoes were pulled up on the sand-swept beaches.

Pirate Mundaca's home on Isla Mujeres

The pirate Fermín Antonio Mundaca de Marecheaga was born on October 11th,1825, in the village of Bermeo, Santa Maria, Spain. When he finished his education, he shipped out to sea and eventually became a famous and wealthy slave trader in the Caribbean, selling Mayan slaves to Cuban plantation owners. In 1860, when the British campaigned against slavery, Mundaca rented out his ships to the Yucatan Government, which continued to capture rebel Mayans and sell them to Cuba, nearly decimating the population of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Mundaca then set about building a large hacienda on Isla Mujeres that he named "Vista Alegre" (Happy View).

It eventually covered over 40% of the island. There were areas for livestock, birds, vegetable gardens, fruit orchards and exotic plants that were brought from all over the world. Fermin Mundaca is said to have built the Vista Alegre using stone taken from the abandoned Mayan structures on Isla Mujeres.

While building his hacienda and expanding his giant estate, he fell in love with a young local girl, 37 years his junior, named Priscilla (some sources say Martiniana) Gomez Pantoja. Born in 1862 on Isla Mujeres, Priscilla is described as a slender, sensual woman with long wavy hair, deep green eyes and light skin tanned bronze by the Caribbean sun.

Isla statue honoring La Trigueña

He built her a beautiful garden with great stone arches where he carved her nickname, La Trigueña, above the apex.

But the dark-haired beauty married her childhood sweetheart, and Mundaca became isolated, lonely, and slowly going insane, reportedly due to syphilis.

Even though he was still wealthy, he abandoned his estate, allowing it to fall into disrepair, preferring instead to live in various other locations on the island.

Vegetables and fruits ripened and rotted, cattle wandered everywhere, destroying other people's gardens. The locals feared Mundaca.

Garden area of hacienda Mundaca

When he passed along the beach at sunset, the friendly chatter would suddenly die, as someone muttered in a frightened whisper.

"There goes Mundaca!"

He died at age 55 in Merida, still in love with La Trigueña. Before he moved to Merida, he built a tomb to be closer to his lost love, which remains empty and can be found in the colourful, crowded downtown cemetery. Etched on his headstone are the pirate symbols, a skull and crossbones, with the words he carved as his epitaph, "As you are, I was. As I am, you will be."

Empty grave of Pirate Mundaca

I wonder if there are any remaining descendants of La Trigueña on the island, cousins, or great-great-grand kids?

A visit to the remains of the Hacienda Mundaca in the centre of the island costs about two dollars per person. It is well worth the time to see some of the amazing structures in the abandoned garden. Wear lots of bug repellent!

His empty tomb is in the original cemetery at the north end of the island.

Source of details: Alice D. Le Plongeon's book, written in the 1880s.

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Valladolid Centro Public Park

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Live chickens, auto parts, and sexy lingerie at the Sunday market in Cancun!

Peeling oranges for juice

Last Sunday, following somewhat vague directions from two gringo friends, we caught the early car ferry and headed off to Cancun to explore the Sunday market.

Holy cow, it's huge. The market takes place only on Sundays, starting early in the morning and ending around two in the afternoon. It is located at the western end of Lopez Portillo Avenue in Cancun near one of the many Chedraui Grocery Stores, and across the street from the bright orange building of a company called Arcelor Mittal. We wandered up and down a mere handful of the dozens of streets encompassing the marketplace.

We were quickly engulfed in dense crowds of shoppers shuffling past countless tiny impromptu stores, with merchants shouting out inducements to buy their wares. It reminded me of market day in a French village!

Dog kibble and eggs for sale

We meandered past stalls displaying eggs in flats of 30, piled on a table, unrefrigerated, as is the custom here in Mexico, Europe, and South American countries. The reasoning is that people typically buy fresh and eat fresh, and eggs are better at room temperature for baking and cooking. You can purchase one/two/three eggs, and since home refrigerators are so small, or nonexistent, most people do not buy more eggs than what they need for the next meal. In some stores, you can buy eggs that were laid that day.

The eggs occasionally come decorated with little feathers and aromatic chicken poop. Eggs apparently last longer if you don't wash them until just before you use them. I was told that it was because there is a light film on the outside of the egg that helps keep bacteria out.

One of many stalls selling fresh fish.

These eggs are not date-stamped with a "Fresh Before" date that we see in our manufacturing plant-style eggs that roll off the assembly lines and are trucked to the major North American cities for distribution. The difference in taste between a just-laid egg and a long-distance-market egg is amazing, with bright yellow, firm yolks that hold their shape in the frying pan. Maybe marketplaces like this are the origin of "Buy Fresh Eat Fresh" slogan that marketing gurus like to take credit for inventing.

Other market stalls offered a variety of fresh fish, likely caught the previous night by the large boats that we see in the evenings, fishing just east of our island. Many stalls sold small plastic sacks of dry dog food, scooped from the fifty-pound bags, enough to feed the family dog for a day or two. Keeping open pet food around longer than that is like putting out the welcome mat for cockroaches and their extended families to set up housekeeping.

In between the numerous stalls are tiny restaurants of three or four tables, cooking wonderfully aromatic meals. The big challenge is that there are no public washrooms anywhere in this vast area of private homes and impromptu stores, but for about 30 cents, a number of the homeowners will let you use their bathrooms. Just keep an eye out for the signage.

Flowers and furniture!

Everything imaginable is available for purchase from new and used auto parts, hand-made furniture, fresh flowers, fresh produce, very provocative lingerie in a variety of colours and sizes, shampoo, toys and live chickens. (Er, no thanks! I like fresh, but not that fresh. I'm the person who can't look lobsters in the eye when I see them contained in restaurant display tanks, awaiting their fate.)

Unfortunately, our Sunday market excursion was cut short by the rain.

We'll return on another Sunday. There is a lot more to see.

Hasta Luego
Lynda and Lawrie

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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Valladolid Mexico: the colourful "sultaness of the east"

Cathedral Valladolid, undergoing restoration.

It is always great fun to see our world through the eyes of our friends. Last spring, we took a road trip to another of our favourite colonial cities, Valladolid, located on the eastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

We left Isla Mujeres on the 9:30 a.m. car ferry, as we couldn’t see the point of dragging everyone out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to catch the earlier boat. I was up early anyway, in excited anticipation of a road trip; a Christmas-morning-can’t-wait-to-rip-open-the-packages feeling. The drive to Valladolid is always a long, boring trip on an almost dead straight road through a dense jungle of trees just tall enough to block your view.

The road has one well-marked but very gentle S-curve and one tollbooth stop. Other than that, if we had had an autopilot system, we all could have tucked pillows behind our heads and snoozed for a couple of hours.

By North American standards, Valladolid is a very old and beautiful colonial city. The city was originally established on a lagoon a few miles away, but the early Spanish settlers complained about the mosquitoes and petitioned to have the city moved further inland in the mid-1500s. I can sympathize with them. I hate mosquitoes! The City of Valladolid has undergone a major facelift in the last year or two, with a repaint of all of the city square businesses and homes in shades of pale pink, soft green, sherbet orange, glowing amber and glistening white. The cathedral and city square park are also being refurbished. It’s a visual feast for the eyes.

Our favourite restaurante in Valladolid

We arrived in Valladolid shortly after 12:30 p.m., and drove on a meandering route through the city, trying to remember the way on their narrow one-way-only streets to the Taberna de Los Frailes (The Friar’s Tavern).

About the time our friends became convinced that we didn’t have a clue as to where we were going, and they were surely going to starve to death, or die of dehydration locked inside the car, we found it! Well darn. The restaurant was closed. I glanced at my wrist watch and realized it was only 12:45, and the lunch hour had not yet started. I popped around the corner to the outside patio, where a waiter was setting up for the day and asked him in my really bad Spanglish what time they were due to open. Twenty minutes –perfect.

Convent of San Bernardino de Siena

Across the street from the Taberna de Los Frailes is a large structure that had been the Convent of San Bernardino de Siena. We decided to walk around it and take a few photos while we waited for the restaurant to open. Much to our delight, we discovered it was open and available for self-guided tours for a small entry fee of 30.00 pesos (about $3.00 CDN).

Built from 1552 to 1560 by the Franciscan monks, the Convento (actually a monastery) of San Bernardino de Siena was in use until 1755, when it was abandoned. At some point in time, an effort was made to restore the building as much as possible and to use it as a church, meeting hall, and community gathering place. The soft peach-pink tones of the ancient sandstone exterior have been accentuated by the lovely pink colour of the interior plaster.

One of my favourite photos, inside monastery

To the locals, this imposing cathedral is called “Sisal,” the ancient name for their small town. Part of the building was erected over the vault of a very large cenote, an underground water-filled cavern that was created millions of years ago in the soft sandstone by rainwater.

The monastery was created to be self-sustaining with huge orchards, vegetable gardens and fresh water from the cenote. (No mention was made of whether or not the monks operated a distillery on the property, strictly for medicinal purposes, of course. Maybe Tequila? Or a Tequila-brandy?)

After wandering through the monastery, we enjoyed a wonderfully tasty lunch and a glass of wine at the Taberna de Los Frailes.

I then dragged my friends into my favourite store in the centre of Valladolid. Yalat is a wonderful store, with hand-made linens from various areas in Mexico. Expensive! But fabulous.

Surinder, Lawrie and Jenda waiting for car ferry

Happy, tired out, and ready to head home, we retraced our route, catching the last car ferry from Punta Sam to Isla Mujeres.

Hasta Luego
Lynda and Lawrie

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Friday, November 11, 2011

When you were 13 - could you dance like this?

Mindy and her dance troupe

What I remember of the school dances when we were 13, 14 or even as old as 15, the girls stood giggling on one side of the gym, and the boys stood on the other side of the gym pretending to be bored.

When we were invited to the "Señorita Secundaria" (Miss Secondary School) competition finale on Sunday, we had limited expectations. Wow, were we wrong!

The seven candidates were between 13 and 15 years old, and for the talent portion of the competition, they put together dance routines that were amazing.

One of the contestants, our favourite Mindy Poot, the 13-year-old daughter of Fredy and Ana Poot, did two different dance routines, complete with costume changes. Our cheering section of ex-pat friends, along with Mindy's family and school friends, did our best to create a lot of enthusiastic noise.

A small part of the cheering section for Mindy

The "Señorita Secundaria" was a very ambitious event that started a few weeks ago with the first talent portion. That night, Mindy and her group of ten dancers performed a Lady Gaga routine.

As for this Sunday night, the first activity was a runway walk with all of the young women dressed in simple and attractive outfits created by Gladys Galdámez, a local seamstress and clothing designer.

Then they switched into originally designed dresses that were created from recyclable or recycled items. The outfits were very impressive.

Mindy's dress made from recyclable items

The third part of the evening was the musical performance with very complex dance routines that would have left me tripping over my feet.

Finally, the young women had to answer a spontaneous question chosen randomly by the judges, finishing up with a short speech from each of the candidates.

The speaking part brought back gut-wrenching memories of high school when, at age seventeen, I was asked to compete in a speaking contest in front of six hundred students. Sadly, I missed that event, as I was mysteriously ill with a very rare and debilitating disease that left me unable to speak. However, I miraculously recovered in time for school the next day.

Mindy in ball gown

During the evening the candidates for "Senorita Secundaria" were judged in five categories; the runway walk was worth 5%, the dresses created from recycled materials 10%, the musical performances 10%, the question and answer period 10%, the final speech 15%, and the final 50% of the mark was based on how much money each candidate raised towards the building of a new classroom at the school.

The amount of money collected made a big difference! Our favourite, Mindy Poot, came in third. Drat!

Mindy, on far right. Her supporters go wild waiting for results

However, her big brother Tony says she's okay with that, as she knows she performed well and did her best. Again, such confidence and poise. Most 13-year-old girls would have been a weeping mess of tears to lose after such a stellar effort.

Mindy currently wants to be a television or radio personality when she finishes her schooling, and we think she'd be perfect.

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