Festival of the Arts

The week of November 6th through the 15th was an international arts festival in Puebla.  This festival is similar to Reno's Artown with tons of free concerts.  We headed in on Monday night to try to see a floutist for FHE, but the theater was full so we went over to the concert in the city center. 
Then on Wednesday Karl and I snuck out for a date.  We went out to eat at a fun seafood place with a live Veracruz-style band.  Karl was excited to hear them do La Bamba in the traditional Veracruz style.  They were great.

This is one of the dishes we ordered.  It is half a pineapple filled with a kind of seafood soup with octopus, shrimp, and possibly oysters or some other kind of fish.  It was topped with cheese, merichino cherries, cilantro, and bell peppers.  It was delicious.

After dinner we waited in line for an hour and a half to hear Tony Sheridan who wrote music for the Beatles and others.  (We were waiting for the concert before him to end).  It was a fun concert with music we knew like renditions of "Yesterday" and "Johnny B. Good."

On Thursday the whole family and Marcela went to the city center to hear Pablo Milanese.  He is a Cuban singer with a beautiful voice reminescent of Andrea Bocelli, very renowned in the Spanish speaking world.

On Saturday we had volleyball in the morning - we're having a stake tournament for both men and women. Both teams are undefeated! Then we headed back downtown with the kids to check out the markets and attend another concert and watch some dancers.  The concert was given by a classical group from England and Elena and Stephen enjoyed talking to them and getting autographs when the concert ended.  The kids also liked sitting in the theater's box seats.

It was a fun week!

A Wedding

The other English teacher at Karl's school, Angeles, invited us to the wedding of her nephew a couple of weeks ago.  She met us near the highway and we followed her to a small town about an hour or so away from Puebla.  We stopped at her father's home first, and he showed us his fruit trees and geese.  Then we headed to a tiny church on a hill.

Here's a picture of the church all decorated for the wedding. The ninety-two year old man to the right is Angeles' father.

Here comes the bride! You can see how small the church is.  Everyone arrived at the last moment, so by the end of the wedding there were more people standing under the awning than sitting inside the chapel.

Here is a picture of the bride and groom covered with confetti (we don't know who is standing with them - but we guess they know them somehow:)).  Our kids enjoyed throwing confetti and blowing bubbles as the bride and groom came out.

After the wedding, there was an outdoor reception.  Mole is the traditional food at weddings, so we were treated to that along with rice and tamales.  Everything was delicious.  This is what the pot of mole looked like after feeding around 100 guests.

The cake looked beautiful.

Karl and Angeles, the English teacher who invited us.

Chiara makes friends with a dog.

We loved these beautiful red birds that we saw there.  They are a type of cardinal.

We passed an onyx factory on the way from the reception back to Angeles' father's house where we left our car.  The man working there showed us his shop . . .

. . . and some of his work.  This piece still needs the final step which polishes it.  After leaving the town where the wedding was, we stopped in the next closest town, Tecali.  This town has a lot of onyx factories and onyx gift shops.  The kids really enjoyed looking around, and Joseph was especially happy when he found an onyx "sacrificial knife" with a bone handle which he purchased with his money from Grampy.

Days of the Dead - Nov. 2nd

November 2nd is the Catholic holiday All Soul's Day, and Karl had the day off from school.  November 1st is All Saint's Day.  The Days of the Dead are centered around these Catholic holidays, and they are mostly celebrated by Catholics; however, the traditions (like the ofrenda) are Aztec and are actually thousands of years old! 
On Monday, Nov. 2nd, we decided to take a trip to a very old town near Puebla called Huejotzingo.  It was only about 45 minutes away.  There is a very old fortress style monastery there which was one of the first ones built in Mexico after the Spanish conquest.  Unfortunately it was closed, but we still got to see some fun things.

Popocatepetl was looking beautiful that day.

We decided to check out one of the cemetaries in Huejotzingo.  These cute girls were bringing flowers to the graves of their ancestors.  The Days of the Dead are a time to fix up the graves of your family, and the cemetary was really a happening place.  There was music blaring from a sound system in the center, and people were painting, sweeping, and decorating tombs with flowers.

The cemetaries here are full of tombs, so we were suprised to see these fresh graves out in the open.  It looks as if the coffins were placed above ground and then covered.

This picture gives you an idea of the size of some of the tombs here.  We saw even bigger ones in Puebla, but also smaller ones.

Someone had hired a Mariachi band to play at their family's tomb!

We stopped at a private school where they had public bathrooms (for a small fee), and Karl noticed this wasp nest hanging from a second story balcony.

Notice that the door next to the nest is open!

This is still at the school.  There was a man cutting down a tree with a machete, and the boys were facinated.  They didn't want to leave until the big branch that he was working on had fallen.

A small market was set up in front of the cemetary.  There was all kinds of food and treats for sale (cotton candy, ice cream, etc.).  One young girl was selling nuts and other snacks including chapulines, which are a kind of grasshopper that has been roasted in some kind of seasoning.  We decided it was time to try some, since they are very well-liked here.  Everyone, even Chiara, ate at least one . . .

Elena wanted to make sure that we got a picture of this!  She was our child who was the most picky about anything "spicy" before coming to Mexico, so we have been pleasantly surprised at how willing she has been to try new things.

Stephen has also been a champ at trying new things.  Some other interesting foods that we have tried have been snail, octopus, and shrimp tostadas (the snails were kind of slimy), fried cactus, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus (it tastes like honeydew melon, but has seeds throughout it that you just swallow), and mamey (a sweet orange colored fruit).

Karl wasn't too sure about this, but the pressure was on since everyone else had tried one.  They didn't taste too bad - kind of crunchy and salty like eating a sunflower seed with the shell - but the thought of eating grasshoppers was a little too weird for all of us, so no one ate more than one or two.

This was a five hundred year old church at the town center of Huejotzingo.  The front has the famous blue and white talavera tiles on it.

Here's another church that we saw in Huejotzingo.  The state of Puebla is known for it's churches.

We returned to Puebla in the afternoon, and that evening we went to the cemetary in Puebla for a fun family-oriented show.  This picture isn't the best, but there was the host (with the red wig) and several other monsters like the mummy in front and a werewolf, frankenstein, yorona, etc.  They told jokes and sang songs, including the Monster Mash in Spanish.  It was fun.

This picture with Daniel gives you an idea of how big some of the tombs in the Puebla cemetary were.  They almost look like small churches!

Days of the Dead - Nov. 1st

(Karl's writing)
Every year when I talk about Day of the Dead in class, I always lament that I have never seen the rich tradition in person. While on my mission, I had no knowlege of Day of the Dead commemorations and so the days came and went without noticing. Since learning about it myself, I have always wanted to experience it in person. This was our opportunity, and I wanted to do as much as we could, see and experience as much as we could. Of course, the best would have been to travel to the areas best known for the celebration, like Patzcuaro or a town in the state of Mexico where the tradition is supposed to have started. Instead, we tried to find the best of what was around us.

As previously stated, on Oct. 31 we went downtown to see the ofrendas in the town center with the family members of my colleague's late husband. At a taco shop for dinner, we raised a toast to Gustavo's memory and thought he would enjoy the circle of circumstances that brought us together for this, of all celebrations. We returned in time for the cross-cultural tradition known as "trick-or-treating" in our own little neighborhood, thus precluding any disappointment on the part of our children.

On Sunday, November 1st, we put the kids to bed and decided to go check out the scene at the local cemetary. Notice the quantity of cempasuchil (marigold) flowers for sale, the Aztec flower of the dead. Unfortunately, we found the graveyard closed, not the festive nocturnal scene I had hoped to find. Apparently, the tradition of staying the night in the graveyard is only practiced in those cultural focal points mentioned, like Patzcuaro.

Not wanting to miss out, I persuaded Krista to trapse outside the city in search of a town called Huaquechula. A teacher colleague told me this town has the most elaborate customs for Day of the Dead in the area. It was said that they maintain a community vigil in the cemetary all night long, so the goal was to find the town and share the spectacle. Leaving around 10:00 pm, we followed the map until the pavement ended in sugar cane fields. This was about 11:30 pm. We asked a local resident if he knew how to get to the town, and he gave us two options for arriving there, one to return to the highway and go back a ways, but the shorter way was to follow the dirt roads in a rather complicated route. He mentioned that if his brother were there with a pick up truck, he would take us to the town. I thought that if he had the time but not the truck, perhaps he would accompany us and we would return him home. So I asked, and he accepted! Here we embarked on a most unusual adventure, driving on dirt roads through towering sugar cane, seeing occasional owls and foxes scurrying in the headlights, passing midnight on a wet, slick dirt road with a stranger we picked up in the middle of the night in search of a graveyard. Perfect!

Unfortunately, after so much effort to find the cemetary in this town, we found it abandoned. Whoever meticulously decorated the graves during the day had returned to sleep at an hour more conducive for mortals. Two tombs still had candles burning in silent sentinel, one of which is captured in this picture. If you look carefully, the picture captures a spirit in the candle light. Whether it is coming or going, we cannot say:)

Note the centuries old colonial church within the cemetary. While not finding exactly what we were looking for, the sights were hardly disappointing!. . .

Nearly every house in the town had a trail of cempasuchil petals to guide the dead back home for the preparations made for them upon the altar.

We also heard and saw the "campaneros," boys in the belfry of a local church ringing the bells as a vigil of the dead for 24 hours straight. Unfortunately, the picture of them did not turn out.

Our friend and host allowed us to visit the altar in his home. Following which, I offered him a $50 peso bill for his time and trouble, but he adamently refused, saying that if nothing else, we should say we have been served.

Then he grabbed a tall candle and took us to this house down the street, the only one still lit this late at night, now past 1:00am. The tradition is that if you show up with a candle for the ofrenda in a given house, the family will invite you to eat with them even if you are a perfect stranger.

This is the family we spent a surreal moment with. The man on the left is our friend and guide to Huequechula. The woman in the middle lost her husband just ten months ago. Since this is his first Day of the Dead, the altar is especially grandiose. Friends of the deceased supplied the flowers and candles and the wooden cross, the second in a series of three: one when the person dies, one for the first Day of the Dead following the death, and one for the first anniversary of his death. The crosses are then taken to decorate the tomb. In fact, they brought out pan dulce and champurrado (hot chocolate) and invited us to stay for mole. We enjoyed the pan and champurrado, but, alas, it was a wee bit late for mole, now about 2:00 am, so we declined.

We traveled home grateful to have the Monday off of school to recuperate from arriving home at about 3:00 am. While we did not see everything that is Mexico's Day of the Dead, what we saw was truly unique, extraordinary, and most memorable.

Trick or Treat

Trick-or-treating is an American tradition, but it's made it's way to Mexico in a slightly different form.  Kids dress up and walk around downtown, or stand on street corners, and ask the people who walk by or stop at the stoplight for "something for their skull" (the shape of their baskets).  Some people give candy, but most give coins.  When Karl asked his students if they would be participating in this activity, most said no, and one commented that his father told him "You have a Papa."
We lucked out, however, because our neighborhood does trick-or-treating.  Most of the neighborhood kids participate, and they just get treats, not money.  The kids said only about half the homes had lights on, and only half of those actually had treats, but they had a great time, anyway.

Chiara was a chubby elephant.

The boys were luchadors (a kind of wrestling that is popular here).  If you've seen the movie Nacho Libre, you'll remember the masks and capes worn by these wrestlers.

Here's a sampling of their loot.  Notice that they got several unwrapped cookies, an orange, and packaged cookies.  Some of the suckers had a spicy powder with them that you dipped your sucker into, and some candies have a spicy coating.  The kids like them all.   The bag in the front is popcorn with chili powder on it.

Days of the Dead - Oct. 31st

(Karl is going to write this entry.)

One of the occasions I was most excited about experiencing in Mexico was Day of the Dead. While we were not able to experience 100% of what I had hoped we could, the 95% we did experience was extraordinary. To begin, clowns were on hand to make the festive scene:

On Saturday the 31st we went downtown with Julie Lozada Ocampo's sister in law and nephew to see the "ofrendas," altars in honor of deceased people. Julie has been my partner teacher for the last 12 years at Dayton High School and her first husband, Gustavo, was a Pueblan. Tragically, he died about 7 years ago. We have enjoyed coming to know his family - four generations in the family house (mother, sister, niece and nephew, and niece's infant son). We thought of Gustavo in our excursion and marveled at the coincidences of life that brought us together to think of him on this particular day. We thought he must have enjoyed the connection from his vantage point.

Everywhere is the incursion of Halloween into Day of the Dead festivities. Not the same, but cultures do blend together!!

This poignant offering is in honor of a day care that burned down in the state of Sonora. 49 people, mostly children, perished in the fire. This is the same event honored by Elena's class in the school observance. Notice the children's snacks of popcorn, candy, etc., toys, pictures. Very sad!

This altar honors the students massacred in a square named Talteloco in Mexico City Oct. 2, 1968, prior to the Olympics in Mexico City. Excessive government response to say the least!

Day of the Dead Folk Art!

The "death" of Rock and Roll. . . or it's legends. Can you identify the pictures?

Reminder: "Rock is not Dead!"

This altar honors children who have died. It was appreciated by Gustavo's sister who has experienced the loss of a child.

Many altars honored political leaders past and present. These are the heroes of Mexico's struggle for independence.

This altar honors the many, many unsolved slayings of women in the city of Juarez during the last decade or so.

Not sure of the subject, but very colorful!

Dedicated to the children who perished from the swine flue.

In honor of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Quotes of the artist, translated: "I want to arrive so full of life at death"

and "The heighth of happiness is not to have been born."

The death of a luchador / movie star.

This one honors the Aztecs, whose tradition became Day of the Dead.

Notice how the cultures fuse with the cross prominent in the post colonial altars?

One of Stephen's favorites . . . a representation of Mictlantecutli, the Aztec god of the dead.

Twin "Catrinas"

La muerte sonadora

The life and death of art.

Traveling minstrels as plentiful as the clowns.