We pass many places selling country antiques, strung out along the Delores Highway. Roadside establishments selling farmhouse pine furniture are hard to find in the U. S. But they're alive and well here.

The presence of these places is, for me, another throwback to the '50s; part of what makes living in Mexico so appealing to me.

Just try and buy an old farm wagon to adorn the entrance to your country property. In California's Sierra Nevada Foothills, they're almost unavailable and unaffordable if you do manage to find one. Around here, you can choose from dozens.

Casa Reyna (Queen House) sits on the Celaya Highway, just south of the glorieta (traffic circle) at the edge of San Miguel. A large motorcycle sculpture catches the eyes of passers-by.

The motorcycle illustrates the practice of converting antiques into decorator items, rather than conserving them. Although in this case you probably wouldn't want it in your living room. Two tractor wheels, some heavy-duty coil springs and an RCA public address speaker horn form a massive iron hulk maybe 12 feet long. Where would you put it?

The proliferation of these outlets is driven by the large gringo population in these parts. Few expats bring entire households with them when they move here. Like Jean and me, they sell most of their furniture up north, and shop here to replace it.

One of the larger establishments along the Delores Highway is Mexico Lindo. Virtually no piece in the place goes unmodified, usually by application of painted designs.

Puertas (doors) are in demand, either for use in remodeling old houses, or to convert into tables. Many are handmade from iron-hard mesquite strengthened with forged-iron studs. They're heavy, strong and beautiful.

Carved wooden statues of religious figures, especially St. Michaels, are in ample supply at Mexico Lindo. This one is life-size.

No telling if the painting on the figure is original, but the paintings on the door panels behind him are almost certainly new.

This 1930s-era panel truck has been converted into a... what? A hearse? A carriage? Whatever it is, we see here the first example of the whimsical, humorous painting that characterizes Mexico Lindo.

Other vehicles have been subjected to the paintbrush. They're not for sale, they're for advertising.

The bottom images are of the same panel truck: one side is painted as a coke truck, the other, Corona beer.

The pickup truck full of clay pots is resplendent with Mexico's coat of arms.

Decoration of the green pickup is problematical. Mexicans find my name, John, difficult to spell. What to do with that superfluous H? How do you get the J-sound? Chon? But with a J. Jhon. That doesn't look right. What the hell. Just leave it.

Words with double Es are tricky as well. I often see Chesse Pay (Cheese Pie, AKA Cheesecake) on menus. Deere appears to be equally difficult.

A cigarette-wielding hooker beckons alongside the entrance gate. Against the other gatepost, a man in lingerie waves a rose.

The presence of a public restroom at the rear of a courtyard is indicated by the figure of a man relieving himself.

As he sits, he's happily reading...

... a girlie magazine. Mexico Lindo's painter certainly is a free spirit.

Too bad I can't find any in Mexico.

I know it's here. Probably in Mexico City somewhere. I found a couple of places in Querétaro, but they were disappointing. All were operated by Mexican chefs who have a taste for more vinegar in the rice than I like. Smothers the taste of the fish.

There's a restaurant in San Miguel that offers pizza, paella and sushi. No thanks. A local Korean restaurant offers maki with cream cheese. Nasty. A new place called California Sushi opened up at La Luciérnaga shopping center, along with our first McDonalds. McDonalds is way better.

The other day, I stopped in at a supermarket in Delores Hidalgo for an ice cream cone. (Don't tell Jean.) Alongside the ice cream franchise was this:

"Japanese Fast Food." A horrifying thought. I can't imagine trying it.

What caught my eye was the mascot: Mr. Sushito in a conical hat wielding chopsticks, one in each hand. His face is yellow, his eyes are slanted. This image would last for about a nanosecond in the U. S. before the protests and lawsuits would start flying.

Not the most ornate or historical church in town, it is one of the more active. Besides serving as a focal point for numerous festivals, it attends to the more mundane needs of its parishioners. One source of community services is the Notaria Parroquial, the keeper of church records.

This place is more important than some of us Norteamericanos might think. For example, not long ago, the most important identity document a person could have was a baptismal certificate, issued of course by the Notaria Parroquial.

Sometimes you'll see several people lined up at the office doorway, waiting to transact some sort of Church business.

In fact, so many people visit the Notaria's office, it became prudent to post informational signs answering basic questions about office hours and the like.

The sign reflects Mexican cultural norms. Office hours begin at 10 AM. Of course. Nothing starts in Mexico until 10.

Then the office closes from 2-4 PM for comida (lunch), which can be a lengthy affair. It opens again until 8 PM, so there's your full eight-hour day—just later than gringos are used to.

The office sets your appointments for baptisms or readings of banns. These are performed in the church at specific hours on specific days only, perhaps for the sake of efficiency, or maybe so everyone knows when to show up to denounce a proposed marriage.

The office is closed on Mondays. Note that the Notaria didn't think it necessary to mention that it's also closed on Sundays. Of course it is.

Now, you can't get baptized or confirmed or married without meeting a bunch of fussy requirements. The Notaria issues tickets when you've met them all, after which the church will perform the appropriate ceremony. No ticket, no wedding.

For example, to baptize your baby, you need a birth certificate, the godparents' marriage certificate, and religious training for the godparents. Says so there right on the sign:

Almost as difficult as getting a Mexican driver's license. No wonder the Seventh Day Adventists are doing so well in San Miguel.

To have your banns read, you need a recent (?) baptismal certificate, a civil marriage certificate (?), and two witnesses, preferably your parents.

To a lapsed Protestant from California, the rules are draconian. That the Church can set such rigid requirements suggests that people accept them. And that the Church needs to maintain office hours to handle the traffic suggests that lots of people accept them.

The other day, I read that a Mexican Bishop spoke out against State restrictions on the Church and lack of religious training in public schools. Just making that speech is against the law. The fact that he would and could do it indicates the still-formidable power of the Church.

(By the way, the signs, like so many here, are hand lettered by skilled signpainters. Theirs is pretty much a lost art up north. I'm always fascinated when I watch them work, the letters flowing effortlessly from their brushes.)

They don't look like a happy couple, do they? My great-great grandparents look just as serious as these people, in our old family photos.

By the time I was born, fashion had changed. I remember a photographer who actually held a mechanical bird over the lens of his view camera to make me smile.

"Watch the birdie!" Twitter, twitter.

(That's a genuine WWII cotton shirt, held together at the neck with a safety pin. Thanks, Mom.)

Modern Mexican people relax for informal snapshots just like gringos. But many still treat portrait-taking as solemn occasions. Getting a smile out of Teresa, here rigidly posing in her new school uniform, required ingenuity and the intervention of a Boston Terrier.

I was reminded of the lingering Mexican propensity for grave expressions in portraits when I saw this display of the Management Team in our new Office Depot:

Look like mug shots, don't they. The grim expressions are bad enough; the institutional blue shirts and name tags just make things worse. Had their shirts been khaki, these photos could just as well have been taken at the county jail, just down the road from Office Max.

Paul is standing in front to it to give it scale. The sign actually is bigger than it seems, but I didn't have a normal-sized person to pose with it.

You see billboards like this all over Mexico. Government officials use them to inform the public about new hospitals or highway construction projects or such. In my opinion, they're no more than blatant political advertising with a veneer of legitimate communications function.

What are 800 signs communicating? Their entire contents read:

Guanajuato
We go with you
Governor
Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez

One could not fault an unsophisticated public for mistaking these signs as part of an election campaign.

Governor Oliva might want to clear this up. Assuming of course that his administration actually did put up 800 of these things. Otherwise he risks giving the impression of a rapacious politician co-opting public funds for personal gain.

It's street Spanish for

All of the above is a set-up for me to bitch about the water department. But before I do that, I want to discuss some differences between the English and Spanish languages; in particular, where a horrible acronym like SAPASMA comes from.

(Sounds like a sneeze, doesn't it.

"SAPASMA!"

"Salud."

"Gracias.")

—§—

Spanish has twice the syllables and one-third the words of English. So you can't say something like San Miguel Water Department in four words and eight syllables.

First of all, you have to specify which San Miguel you're talking about. There's at least 30 San Miguels in Mexico.

Second, compound nouns are rarely used. So you can't just say San Miguel Water Department. You gotta say the Water Department of San Miguel... oops... of San Miguel de Allende, not some other San Miguel.

So now we're building up to a whole lot of words, and we haven't taken into account that SAPASMA is a bureaucracy, so its name needs just a little more spin.

The name of the water department, then, is the System of Potable Water and Sewers of San Miguel de Allende: Systema de Agua potable y Alcantarillado de San Miguel de Allende. Eleven words, 24 syllables.

Now, nobody can remember all that; at least not without effort. So here's where the Mexican pastime of creating acronyms comes in. SAPASMA is a whole lot easier to remember and say than Systema de Agua potable y Alcantarillado de San Miguel de Allende.

Acronyms are everywhere in Mexico. One of my favorites is ISSSTE: Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado. The Institute of Security and Social Services of the Workers of the State.

—§—

In the photo above, we see a sign informing us that SAPASMA workers are on the job. Let's look at it a little more closely. Here's what it says:

SAPASMA Working
To give you better service
Thanks for your support

We'll overlook the shabby appearance of the sign. Probably just an artifact of the government ensuring funds are spent on stuff that matters, not on cosmetics.

But the slogan is a little hard to take. Better service? In Sergio's case, better service apparently means any service at all. Thanks for your support? Sergio's support is to provide his own water, saving SAPASMA the expense.

No one takes SAPASMA's fatuous slogans seriously.

Gangs have found a perhaps more effective use for the sign. The graffiti reads "Jotos los de la Cuesta. Por parte de los San Rafa."

"The Cuesta guys are cowards. From the San Rafael guys."

Apparently the boys who live in the neighborhood where the sign is located failed to show up for a fight, and they're being challenged anew by those San Rafa bullies.

—§—

So how is it that SAPASMA can't locate a water main leak, even after a week of looking? Consider this photo of a portion of the crew at the job site:

Yep. Everybody's standing around, telling jokes. Not working. In case you missed it, there are six guys in the photo. Look below the feet of the man with the orange safety vest.

That cowboy hat belongs to the only guy who is doing anything. He must have the lowest seniority.

Featherbedding crops up anywhere there's work to be done. And there's usually more of it when a department of a government is involved.

It's just that in Mexico, it's so blatant. You'll remember this post the next time you see a traffic cop with a can of coke in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, standing next to a double-parked car.

Many flags wind up on buildings; some are draped across the hoods of cars.

Civic decorations include portraits of Mexican heroes in tinsel frames, strung up over the streets.

I think this one is supposed to be Benito Juárez, Mexico's greatest president. Or maybe a character from Night of the Living Dead. You decide.

Fireworks are nothing special in San Miguel de Allende. Something explodes here at least once a week.

"Ho hum. Rockets again tonight. What's on TV?"

The night of September 16th features the biggest fireworks display of the year. During the day, elaborate displays are constructed in the plaza in front of the Parroquoia; they're called by the Spanish word for castle: castillo.

The Presidencia spends tens of thousands of dollars on these things, an expenditure questioned by some, given the social, health and infrastructure problems in our community. Bread and circuses, anyone?

Erecting the castillos requires skill and muscle. If one of these guys straining to stabilize a tower lost his grip on the rope, tons of steel and gunpowder could come crashing down on little kiddies crowding around toy vendors.

Just another example of this country's 1950s attitude toward public safety: risky, but curiously refreshing.

I don't have the courage Billie showed when she visited Delores Hidalgo for El Grito Saturday night. So I didn't attend the fireworks Sunday night. My idea of a great July 4th or September 16th is to hang out in the Jardín during the warm afternoon or go find lunch in a quiet restaurant somewhere. As El Guapo says, "Thats just the way I roll."

Independence Day is for dressing up. Saturday Jean and I went to comida at a friend's house. All the women being Mexican (except Jean), they were tricked out in festive outfits with ribbons or yarn braided into their lovely black hair. By comparison, we gringos felt kind of dowdy.

Mexican girls learn to dress up for festive occasions at an early age.

I sat in a shoeshine man's high chair (shoeshines are one of Mexico's great inexpensive pleasures), when I saw this member of a drum and bugle corps walking by. He belongs to the selfsame drum and bugle corps that practices five days a week in Parqué Juárez right beside my house, treating me every evening at six to endless repetitions of bugle tunes.

I know 'em all be heart, now. I wish I didn't.

I've never seen these guys in uniform before. I like the red yarn pom-poms dangling from his shoulders. Looks like a Napoleonic Hussar. Or a doorman for Leona Helmsley.

I sat at home around 9 PM, listening to explosions, holding shaking Rosita on my lap, and reflected on how disturbing all the noisy hoopla was when I moved here four years ago. Today it all seems so normal.

We were shown to our room by an energetic young woman who spoke only Spanish, but that at Mach 3.

Our room—more accurately, our rooms—were spacious and filled with interesting furniture, antiques and art. Pictured here is our huge bed, our couch and our coffee table.

From another viewpoint, here's our fireplace and desk. Not shown are a couple of easy chairs and occasional tables.

Downstairs, we had a private living room. Much of the art is for sale and some seems to be quite valuable. The small Madonna and Child on the stone wall to the right is priced in five figures.

Also not pictured is our dining room and kitchen. Basically we were given a house, not just a room.

The next morning we sat in an outdoor sala beside a warm fire and were served a huge breakfast of sliced fruit, fresh orange juice, coffee, pan dulce (sweet rolls), eggs and chilaquiles (tortilla chips cooked in salsa). Pepe had returned from Mexico City during the night and joined us for breakfast. A gentle, cultured man, he shared stories about his life, about how a bumper avocado crop had enabled him to buy the mansion, and how after each harvest, he has money to invest in improving the property, a little at a time.

Cost of our room, including breakfast, was $1,000 pesos (U. S. $90). Compare that with Villa Montaña's rates next door: $2,000-$4,000 pesos.

Pepe's B&B is not publicized anywhere. He says it doesn't make a profit and I believe him. That his other guests that night were relatives staying for free no doubt contributes to the situation. But he says he makes enough to pay the upkeep and taxes, and that's good enough for him.

It's good enough for me, too. If any of you get serious about staying there, send me an email and I'll send you Pepe's phone number. Tell him Cleen sent you.

The owner/waitress/cook brought us a tray with four kinds of salsa and a bunch of limes, a Diet Coke for me and an agua de jamaica for Jean. (Jamaica is hibiscus. Mexicans make a kind of sweetened tea from the dried blossoms.)

Jean ordered the chicken mole; I went for the cecina—thin slices of salted beef grilled over charcoal. Mitzi's was cooked to the consistency of crisp bacon. Wrapped in a just-cooked hand-formed tortilla, it was sublime.

I mentioned that Mitzi's was one of several restaurants, all right next to each other, all sharing the same parking lot. And all had signs offering cecina and handmade tortillas. So while about a dozen cars were parked in front, we were Mitzi's only customers; this on Sunday at 3 PM, the traditional time for a big weekend family comida.

I'll never understand the Mexican approach to business.

Mitzi's is one of the spiffier roadside restaurants I've visited. Lots of natural light filtered through skylights. Maybe 16 tables, each with six or eight hand-carved chairs. A harmonious decor.

Dozens of identical wooden planks were carved with a singular motif. It looked to me like an rounded cast-iron frame with rivets supporting a pair of auction paddles.

I had to stare at it for quite a while before the image resolved into a pair of horse heads eating a large, spotted mushroom. I think.

So that the colorful decor wouldn't unduly brighten customers' moods, a crucifix hung over one of the entrances.

I found myself staring at it as I munched my cecina while a fog of melancholy descended over me.

Mitzi herself exuded cheerful hospitality. She repeatedly brought us more tortillas, two or three at a time as they finished cooking. They were good enough to eat plain. Soon we were stuffed and back on the road to Morelia.

They were everything I'd hoped they'd be: Heads intact, little black eyes staring out, full of crunchy bones and very stinky.

As a kid, I wouldn't have gone near these things. Actually back then, I wouldn't even go near broccoli. Today, I try to expand my culinary horizons.

Charales are farmed in the lagoons of Michoacán—a local delicacy. Dried, salted and fried, you wrap some in a tortilla and add salsa to taste. Then it's crunch, crunch.

I saw similar tiny dried fish in markets in Tokyo. There I was told that a tablespoon of them would supply the daily calcium requirement. Well, all right, then.

Her facial expression is dour. I'll spare you the frame where she glares at me as I'm shooting. It would ruin your breakfast.

Her work fails to rise to the level of art, nor is her workmanship fine. She's just cranking out souvenirs for tourists, like this scene of "the Fishermen of Tzintzuntzan."

Four of her pieces contain the same image, hacked out in big, loopy stitches.

Most mercados have at least one vendor selling supplies for embroiderers. This one set up for business on the square in Erongarícuaro.

It offers cloth imprinted with templates. Some embroiderers just like to do the sewing; their forté may not be design. Fair enough. Just because you're Purépechan doesn't mean you have a knack for sketching patterns.

The designs on offer are generic; stuff you can find anywhere in Mexico, including the familiar image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. None of them relate to the culture of Michoacán.

So the patterns are sold to those who embroider for their own pleasure; not to those who are creating work for sale to travelers or decorators.

The point I'm getting to in this post is illustrated in the pattern shown below.

These figures have nothing whatever to do with Mexico. Looks like a scene out of Cinderella. Disney's Cinderella. The vacuous faces with their treacly expressions I would find offensive anywhere I saw them. But to find them in Erongarícuaro is to view an act of cultural rape. Is there no escaping this crap?

The only (minor) satisfaction is that nowhere on the pattern is there any copyright notice.

After looking at these, I have a new appreciation for The Fishermen of Tzintzuntzan.

To find him, you enter the courtyard of the Monastery of Santa Ana and walk through the ancient olive grove until the monastery buildings rise up before you. You then turn right and walk to a small, dilapidated building toward the right rear of the lot.

No signs tell you that you've found the studio. Peering through a sagging wooden door, you see a dim, mussy space. If you spot a kiln, you're in the right place.

I told Ernesto the English word, "kiln", and asked what the Spanish word was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said "horno".

Of course. Oven. How stupid of me.

Ernesto is carrying on in his father's footsteps. The two make pottery primarily for export to fine craft galleries in the U. S. They have no Mexican outlets, and none of the work in the Tzintzuntzan workshop is what you would call displayed. A dank cave lit by a single naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling has finished work stored on rough plank shelves. Ernesto will sell you some of it if you ask nicely.

The two potters do a lot of commission work, like this set of large faces, each more than two feet tall.

Decorative glaze patterns are applied freehand, with small brushes.

Jean unearthed a few pieces. A former craft gallery owner, she inspects the work with her sharp eye.

Nothing tempts Jean like pottery. A few interesting and unique pieces came home with us.

My friend Clint sniffed out this workshop. How he found it I'll never know. But it's fun to visit places off the beaten path, places that are not part of the masses of aggressive vendors lined up along the main drags, all selling charmless, commonplace items.

Photo: Hajor, Mar.2005

The place looks like an Aztec-inspired Holiday Inn. All it needs is some animatronic Purépechans to thoroughly trash its authenticity. Or maybe one of those pathetic light shows like they've inflicted on Chichén Itzá.

I suspect that most of what we see today of Las Yácatas is modern construction, because it was razed by the Spanish to obtain building stones for the Monastery of Santa Ana and other structures. The Catholic churches are still standing, so they probably had to buy new stones at Rocks 'R' Us.

The grounds of the monastery have been maintained through the centuries and are today, a quiet, contemplative space.

They're also remarkably litter-free, perhaps because of the threat carried in this sign, that those who throw trash here will be rigorously fined. Rigorously. Whoever wrote that gets top marks, if you ask me.

Among the many achievements attributed to Vasco de Quiroga was the planting of the first olive trees in the Americas. Well, he didn't exactly plant them; he had them planted, I'm sure. Probably by some Purépechan converts who'd managed to survive the smallpox epidemic.

Those trees, now more than 450 years old are still growing in the grounds of the Monastery of Santa Ana.

This massive specimen is one of perhaps a score of trees. They all show the ravages of great age, but at the same time look as if they'll continue to grow indefinitely.

The restorers have treated the Monastery of Santa Ana more gently than Las Yácatas. I was captivated by this wonderful old building, held in a state of arrested decay. I like the plants sprouting from the eroded wall.

I'm more dubious about the murals undergoing restoration under this arch, where a community meal is in progress.

We spent only a few hours in Tzintzuntzan. It deserves more time, maybe more than a day. What's so nice about living in central Mexico is that it'll be easy to return.

The brothers are unconcerned about inventory control. Both sides of the highway are lined with hundreds of carvings. Some are mossy with age. I'd say they're lucky if they manage to turn their inventory in ten years.

But that's not what the Hermanos Lopez are about. They're about the pleasure of turning chunks of stone into art. You wanna buy one? OK. You don't? OK. Go away. I got another rock to carve.

(By the way, if you think the scene above is ugly, what with the tangle of power lines, I agree with you. Where is Ladybird Johnson when we need her? Marta Sahagún, President Vicente Fox's wife, could have taken a shot at cleaning up the landscape, but she was too busy enriching her sons through her influence.)

Along with columns and Guadalupes and stone spheres, there are many fantastic figures: A monkey seeing no evil, Neptune peering over the tentacles of an octopus, Bacchus's face intended for use in a fountain, a reproduction of an Olmec head. Most of the figures are quite large. I'd have a hard time finding space for one of them in my small house.

A figure of Chac Mool reclines beneath a directional sign. The pyramid designates the presence of prehispanic ruins.

Someone scraped away the arrowhead pointing the way to Tzintzuntzan. An alert motorist might notice the alteration and incorporate the data into his navigation. I didn't.

Sure enough, taking that right turn leads to a road that peters out into a muddy track a kilometer or so on. We performed a K-turn at a wide spot where tire tracks indicated many others had done the same, and took the other, correct fork in the road.

For any who haven't driven in Mexico yet, please understand that this kind of official misdirection is normal. Directional signs, when present at all, are often misleading and sometimes flat wrong. Rarely have I driven in a new place without getting lost at least once. It used to frustrate me. Now it's just part of the experience. Ho hum. Lost again. Big deal.

In the center sits a large kettle with a heavy brass handle to permit hanging over a fire, that Jean found in Santa Clara del Cobre (copper), near Pátzcuaro.

Santa Clara, like all good Mexican towns, has a central plaza featuring a small bandstand. Theirs is covered, appropriately, with a copper roof. The cast-iron lamp standards have been painted with cheap-looking metallic copper paint. The treatment of the cast-iron benches is slightly more successful, painted green to look like verdigris. It doesn't, but the green looks nice anyway.

Scores of workshops in Santa Clara del Cobre make and sell copper objects. Most are inexpensive decorative items or souvenirs for tourists, sold in stores or galleries lining the main street. Along the side streets is where you find the true artists in their workshops, where you can shop for significant pieces that cost an arm and a leg in San Miguel de Allende, but cost only half an arm and a leg here.

Most of the fine pieces are "raised from a single ingot." That is to say, the craftsmen start with an ugly lump of copper like the squarish black one shown on the left, below, and by repeated heating and hammering, turn it into an object like the pot on the right.

You can see how thick are the walls of the pot above. It's about 18" in diameter and it's very heavy.

In my imagination, the workers of Santa Clara went down into copper mines, refined the ore, and tapping patiently for weeks, created these masterpieces. Of course, that's not what they do.

I saw a pickup truck on the street, in the bed of which were coils of thick copper wire; material perhaps purchased from a scrap metal dealer. Just as likely, some small community recently experienced an interruption in its electricity supply. There have been reports of such theft, along with the disappearance of manhole covers, taken for scrap iron. A worldwide rise in commodities prices due to soaring demand fueled by the rapid growth of manufacturing in countries like China has made stealing copper and steel remunerative—and made acquiring raw material difficult for the coppersmiths of Santa Clara.

Whatever the source, scrap copper is melted down and poured into ingots. The ingots are reheated and the hammering begins. Here, one worker holds a red-hot plate of copper while three men beat on it with sledgehammers.

The four work in an elegantly coordinated fashion. The hammer-wielders beat out a waltz—BAM-Bam-bam—while the man with the tongs rotates the piece once each measure. BAM-Bam-bam(turn) BAM-Bam-bam(turn) BAM-Bam-bam(turn).

Somehow, I'd expected more finesse, more delicacy in the process. But, after all, we're shaping thick metal here. These guys hit that copper plate hard, and after a couple of minutes of vigorous hammering, I couldn't see any appreciable thinning or widening.

The plate cools and work-hardens, so it needs reheating. Back into the open-hearth charcoal fire it goes. Hechizos (bellows) provide air to obtain the intense heat needed. The young man on the left is pushing on the handles of the hechizos. The little boy helping him is training to become a zorrilo (little fox), a bellows operator. It's the entry-level position for coppersmiths.

The guy on the right has his hand on the switch controlling an electric blower that augments the airflow from the hechizos. The system is ugly, but it works.

At some point, the plate becomes wide enough, and a senior craftsman takes over to begin raising the walls of the vessel. He uses no forms to shape the work; he works entirely by eye.

Eventually he has to bring the walls of the pot inward. He hammers against an anvil that reaches through the neck of the vessel.

Looking at the beat-up pot above, it's hard to visualize that in the end, he will produce a beautiful piece, perhaps one like this prize-winning fluted pot

Works of this size (24") and caliber sell for many hundreds of dollars at the workshop. But a significant portion of the cost is in the value of the copper it contains. It took several workers months to produce it, so none of them receive a lot of money for all their work and skill.

Mexico has a serious unemployment problem: witness the hundreds of thousands who brave the deserts and the Minutemen and the Border Patrol for the opportunity to go north and clean chickens on an assembly line. Some, though, develop skills and are lucky enough to find a niche as craftsmen and artists. Then, as sometimes happens, out of poverty comes beauty.

Restaurant food is expensive. Might cost you as much as $30 pesos ($2.70 US) for breakfast. These young women are economizing, buying a bowl of pozole (pork and hominy stew) for $10 pesos from a vendor at up an informal setup on the sidewalk. Her prices reflect the low overhead.

It's socializing time, before the workday begins at ten. Assuming there is work, that is.

Friends stand or sit together spreading gossip, the glue that holds a community together.

You don't see faces this careworn in the USA anymore. Our lives have become so much easier since the dust bowl days.

On a small square, a weekly pottery market sets up. No tourist items are for sale here—just utilitarian ware intended for use in the homes of ordinary people.

Utilitarian or not, Jean is there, looking for pots to use with her new parrilla (grill). Jean allows no shopping opportunity to slip by.

This evening, we order salads in a restaurant decorated with a mural of typical Lake Pátzcuaro life.

OK, it looks like a scene from 1948, the mustachioed man serenading the shapely woman in dishabille, her four-inch heels improbable for hiking to the bank of the lake.

A romantic view of a Mexico that never was.

—§—

Later, sounds of sirens and a drum and bugle corps announce the arrival of torch-bearing runners in Plaza Don Vasco de Quiroga.

They're getting a head start on the celebration of Mexican independence, the anniversary of which falls weekend after next.

The runners make a spectacular show. But after they form up on the plaza, they have to stand and listen to a long, boring speech by the Mayor. We watch the youngsters wilt.

Seems like whenever the people do something creative and noteworthy, politicians horn in, grabbing a share of the glory.

Carved wooden columns and lintels, some quite massive, line the street for a hundred yards or more.

Most workshops are a jumble inside. Headboards, pedestals, busts, dolls, crucifixes, doors, spoon racks, clocks, murals—if you can carve it out of wood, it's here.

It's always dangerous to bring Jean into a place where handcrafts are for sale. I don't know what she's considering here, but I do know it's probably coming home with us.

Oh no! She chose this banal cute carving of a besotted friar.

This figure is common, like the trite sculptures of Don Quixote you see in every workshop. You see him everywhere. Looks like something out of Disney. It must be a character in literature. Anybody know who he is? Friar Tuck?

He's a cliché, and, thanks to Jean, he's now my cliché.

—§—

I also mentioned on Saturday the bizarre sign in the Erongarícuaro churchyard telling people not to defecate in the churchyard. In another churchyard on the other side of Lake Pátzcuaro, in Tzintzuntzan, I found another sign.

"The person caught 'making the bath' in this area will be fined $500 pesos."

What's going on here? I'm getting the impression that there is a runaway problem with churchyard pooping in the Lake Pátzcuaro area.

This has gotta be more than a simple problem of incontinence. Perhaps people are making some sort of political statement? Are these signs evidence of government trampling the people's rights of free expression?

I also note that the cost of relieving oneself in the Tzintzuntzan churchyard is only half of that in Erongarícuaro.

Passing under the reindeer antlers (or moose or whatever), we found ourselves on the shore of an artificial lake. Tables on decks overlooked the water. The scent of pines filled the air in this charming and peaceful, if unexpected, place.

A young Mexican waiter wearing a pleated white shirt and black bow tie seated us at the water's edge. He handed us menus.

Lets see... Arrachera. Guacamole. Sopa Tarasca. Hmmm. This is a Bavarian restaurant?

Turn the page. Trucha (trout). More trout. Fried trout. Stuffed trout. Smoked trout. Trout paté. Trout soup. Truite en Bleu. Half the menu is devoted to some kind of trout.

Got salmon? No. Whitefish? No. Huachinango? No. Just trout.

Campestre Alemán is a trout farm. From our table, we could look down into the murky green water and see hundreds of them floating lazily just below the surface.

Not exactly your sparkling Alpine lake, is it?

Somewhat reluctantly, I ordered the... uh... trout. On the principle you should always play to a restaurant's strengths. I also asked for another of their specialties: shiitake soup. A kind of Japanese-German combo, I guess. Axis fusion cuisine.

"Sorry. We're all out of shiitakes."

(Darn.) "OK. Bring me the Sopa Tarasca then."

Following Clint's advice, we ate lightly, leaving room for Apfel Strudel mit Eis. It was very good, as were the smoked trout and the bean soup. In all, a great place to stop for a moderately-priced meal. Beautiful setting, attentive service, good food. If you like trout.

And for $10 pesos you can rent a fishing pole, to catch your own dinner.

At the Jose Mamorelos Elementary School, mothers gather at noon outside the security bars to pass hot lunches through to their children. Heaven forbid the kiddies should have to eat sandwiches.

Erongarícuaro boasts a couple of churches. This modest one, framed by strings of papel picado, is the largest in town.

It's hardly worth mentioning but for a sign on one of the walls.

The annoucement roughly translates as: "People who poop in the church will be fined $1,000 pesos."

(OK. It doesn't use the word, "poop." It actually says, in that delicate Spanish way, "... persons who would make their necessities..." But the meaning is unmistakable.)

Here and in other small towns along the way, I saw signs warning about cholera.

Cholera! I thought we'd beaten that disease—except maybe in places where there was severe flooding or some other disaster.

Around Lake Patzcuaro apparently, cholera is still a fact of life. The sign advises residents to boil their drinking water and cook their food well. The tag line reads, "We worry about your health."

Another sign I saw orders people to dispose of excrement in their houses. I guess that means not outside where it can get into the water supply. Sheesh!

—§—

What's unique about Erongarícuaro is the central plaza, one of the few remaining vestiges of old, real Mexico. My friend Clint insisted I come here to view it before it disappears.

The center is inviting: beautiful plantings, fountains, benches.

Virtually every business and government institution needed by the residents of Erongarícuaro is located behind the arcades that surround it. Not a single souvenir shop, tour company or tourist hotel dilutes the Mexican-ness of the place. Nobody selling foam puzzle maps of Mexico. No kids selling Chiclets.

Vendors, like this woman selling whitefish, set up makeshift tiendas under the arcades.

Flores de las calabasas (squash blossoms) are a common food in Mexico. Rosario frequently makes us soup or quesadillas using them.

The old woman haggling with the squash blossom vendor has bowed legs—often a sign of childhood rickets. Nutrition wasn't so good sixty years ago.

A carefully made up young woman completes a call on her cell phone before returning to frying gorditas. The younger generation is more ready to adopt 21st-Century technology than their elders.

Anyone unsure about the concept of Asians crossing the Bering land bridge to inhabit the Americas need only look at her face. High cheekbones and almond eyes tell the story.

All over this part of Michoacan, signs are lettered in this font with odd serifs and spurs, the letters always in black except for a lone red one at the beginning of each word.

This carniceria (butcher shop) entices customers with a mouth-watering picture of a steer head.

Perhaps the meat from the butcher's cabezas (heads) finds its way into this woman's tacos, as advertised on the wall behind her.

Erongarícuaro is a take-no-prisoners Mexican town. Nobody speaks English to you here. You won't find any galleries to peruse. No sit-down restaurants. There isn't even a bar—at least not near the plaza. And because there's no tourists, there's no beggars. Even the poor manage to find a productive way to make their livings.

The pace of life is slow and pleasant. Shopping in the arcades is a time-consuming social event. If you need a little rest, you can always kick back and relax on one of the plaza benches.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I've been living my life all wrong.

The hotel is housed in a restored colonial mansion. Two patios filled with plants offer soothing places to sit and relax.

An excellent breakfast is included, served in the large dining room. It's prepared in the original kitchen. A collection of folk art adds to the ambience.

A WiFi broadband internet access point is available in the dining room—a sine qua non for me.

Our bedroom is airy and light, and has wooden floors—a real treat in Mexico. For a wonder, the mattress is soft, unlike the rigid slabs we usually put up with.

Our room costs on the order of $1,000 pesos per night. La Casa Encantada is the #1 rated hotel in Patzcuaro by contributors to the TripAdvisor website. Jean and I highly recommend it as well.

Interesting note: The hotel is owned by a couple of Canadian women, whose marriage certificate is posted on the wall next to the kitchen. It's the first evidence I've seen of Canada's sensible and humane policy.

The area is heavily forested. Jean says it smells piney, like Wisconsin. I'm reminded of high Sierra campgrounds: tall trees, the scent of wood fires, thin air—we're at 7,200 feet.

We notice some architectural differences. Here the roofs are all pitched and tiled, unlike San Miguel where they're nearly all flat. Why? Heavier rains? Snow?

Adobe is extensively used in construction. Soil here is deep, less rocky, so not as much stone is accessible for constructing walls. For some reason, there isn't much brickmaking, either.

I've mentioned in previous posts that regional color schemes influence the appearances of Mexican communities. In this part of Michoacán, buildings are painted white above, brick red below.

Much more wood is used for building. No silver mines, so Michoacán wasn't deforested by miners. Wooden columns formed from single logs attest to the availability of large pines. They give arcades a warmer, more rustic feel.

An early morning walk yields a scene or two. Here a woman sweeps the street with her homemade broom. She seems to be lost in a sea of cobblestones. How will she ever sweep it all?

An old man takes his morning constitutional. His sweater could have come from Scandinavia. People dress in layers because mornings and evenings are cold. We're sleeping under a comforter.

An enterprising young man operates an informal panaderia (baked goods store) on the platform of a shrine.

He's doing a brisk business. Street food vendors buy wholesale quantities of bolillos or pan dulce from him.

Few tourists seem to be here this time of year. School has started in Mexico. Many Americans have been scared away by reports of drug-related violence or political strife; others have changed travel plans owing to the quagmire created by the Department of Homeland Security's botching of passport requirements.

For Jean and me, it all means we have a beautiful, uncrowded place to explore.

It's the beginning of the school year, and all the kids are wearing spiffy new uniforms. No holes in sweatpant knees, brilliant white new shoes—they almost sparkle.

I remember the soaring joy I used to feel when allowed to run flat out in P. E. class. The expressions on the kids' faces bring those same feelings back.

Of course, we're all enthusiastic at the start of a race. By the third or fourth lap, the loneliness of the long distance runner sets in. We ask, "Why am I doing this?"

This guy is supervising the races. Part of his job is to hand out lollipops to the winners. Looks like he's a winner, too.

My favorite ice cream vendor, who usually hangs out at the Plaza Civíl, is targeting of the crowds of youngsters, setting up shop in the Jardín.

He knows that kids are his best customers. Doesn't look like he's getting a whole lot of play today, though.

In San Miguel de Allende, if you have a hankering for strawberries and cream, you go to this cart on the east side of the Jardín. The nice vendor will fix you a large cup of strawberries with however much sugar you want and lots of sour cream.

Yeah. That's sour cream. You can get strawberries with whipped cream in Mexico, but this dish is not as commonly available: if that's what you want, you have to ask for fresas con chantilly. Fresas con crema means strawberries with sour cream.

A word about sour cream in Mexico (where it's called crema acidificada). It's not as sour as sour cream in the U. S. There's just a hint of sharpness to it—enough to keep the cream from being cloying. We spoon it onto various fruits, on leek-and-potato soup, fajitas and, I'm embarrassed to say, Jello. (Yes, Jean and I have rediscovered Jello (gelatina), which, with crema acidificada on top, is really, really good.)

—§—

There's an eatery in San Miguel called La Fresa—The Strawberry. But the name in this case isn't referring to fruit. It's referring to the shapely woman in the high-style hat, a fashion plate from the '40s.

The Urban Dictionary gives fresa as "a social slang term used in Mexico ... to describe stuck up ... girls or boys that have picky tastes, are extremely spoiled and always get their way, have little concern for the needs of others, and are snob[s], rude, and ... obnoxious." I mentioned this usage of the word fresa to my artist friend Brian. He said (sounding as he does like Richard Simmons), "OH the FREsas! You SEE them in the caFÉS with their CELLphones and their CIGarettes. They're SO SPOILED, they just make me SICK!"

I kind of like the place. There it sits, slowly decaying. Its appearance gives it character and interest.

The structure is unoccupied. That San Miguel has so many vacant buildings mystifies me. The lot this one stands on is quite valuable. The owner isn't deriving any benefit from it. Why doesn't he sell it or fix it up?

Visible on the right is the power meter, or more accurately, the hole where the power meter would go if there was one. A gray column of new plaster rises from the sidewalk to the hole, covering the conduit for the new underground utilities. I point this out in ironic appreciation of our city's beautification efforts, removing all those ugly overhead wires.

I've always wondered what the words on the front of the building meant: El Golpe de Vista. Transliterating with my limited Spanish, I came up with "The blow of the view." Of course that's not right.

I called Patty, my consultant in all things Mexican. She said, "I know exactly where you are. You know, that place used to be a cantina."

Oh great. My neighborhood apparently is seedier than I thought when I moved here.

Patty explained that El Golpe de Vista means "a relief," as in a desert traveler coming across a waterhole: What a relief!

Good name for a bar. After a hard day at work, it's a relief to visit a cantina.

El Golpe de Vista has one other meaning: "An eyesore". Which this place most certainly is.

As we passed the gated entry under the tiled roof, a startling image flashed in the corner of my eye. I asked Paul to stop so I could take a closer look.

¡Hola Mamacita! I guess this place isn't selling cantera fountains after all.

It appears to be some sort of night club or roadhouse, sitting there isolated out on the highway. An out-of-town place to go, maybe, if you don't want to be seen visiting a strip joint by your neighbors or your wife.

The slogan at the top of the banner reads, "We want to see you happy." Indeed.

The previous images fail to fully convey the horrid color scheme. Here's the front door, clashing unforgettably with the stucco wall.

The orange broom with the green handle only adds to the chromatic cacophony.

The place was closed indefinitely for remodeling. I had to peer at it through locked iron gates. I wondered what the Lucite sign beside the door said, but it was too far away to make out. So I zoomed my point-and-shoot Olympus to the max and shot it for enlarging and reading at home. The effort was rewarding.

The sign announces some restrictions. Minors are denied admission. That would be 18 in Mexico. Sort of. Wouldn't want to compromise the morals of teenage boys, would we?

The second regulation provides a really interesting Spanish lesson. Persons in an "inconvenient state" are not allowed. That one sent me scurrying to my dictionaries. Turns out Inconveniente is a polite way of saying "drunk". I guess the equivalent English term would be "intoxicated."

That's gotta be one of the more politically correct expression I've ever seen.

The third rule is a mystery. You're not allowed in if you're wearing pants or shorts. (I didn't think pants or shorts were Spanish words.) But the real question is, if not pants or shorts, then what should you wear? Kilts? Nothing? What the girls in the poster were wearing?

Just what kind of a place is this, anyway?

Huizaches have yellow, ball-shaped flowers, creating a heady fragrance in the spring. The fuzzy seed pods appear in the summer. I love sitting in the shade of these plants on a sunny day, breathing their scent.

An apparently related plant—tough and woody, feathery leaves and ball-shaped pink and white flowers—blooms in the summertime.

I don't know what it is called, nor the names of the blooms pictured on the right and the bottom. I include them because they're interesting, and sooner or later, I will learn their names.

All the above are dryland plants. In the wet canyon, the flora changes.

A mat of algae grows on the surface of a pond, wildflowers grow at its edge. There seems to be a lot of nutrients in the water—a subject I'll cover in a future post.

Duckweed colonizes the surface of water standing in a granite crack.

I fondly remember rambling beside ponds in New jersey's well-watered countryside. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could do it here in arid Mexico, too.

Many of El Charco's plants were collected and placed in grouped plantings.

Yucca, agave, cactus and succulents combine to make an eye-pleasing landscape. Artificial, yes. But you'd have to travel for years to see all the varieties gathered here.

Golden Barrel Cactus were rescued from a canyon which was flooded when a dam was built. They're thriving in their new home.

Another large type of barrel cactus was rescued from the same site. These visiting children give it scale. (Also a little awwww value.)

A tiny fraction of the plants growing here are pictured. You simply have to come and see them for yourself.

And doing it soon would be a good idea. Development on its borders is affecting the park. Instead of vistas of a natural countryside, we're beginning to see new, large houses.

Some were built in violation of zoning ordinances, but in Mexico, the law is a flimsy reed when attempting to block entrenched interests.

But for today, the park remains a magical place, attracting botanists, tourists and photographers.

Here, Paul (El Guapo) peers through his battered Nikon FM2, attempting to capture the wily Ocotillo. El Charco is indeed a blessing, in that it keeps him off the street.

What a sweetie, eh?

Trying to get her to smile, I stupidly said "Teresa ¡Sonríe!" No luck.

Finally, Jean came over holding Rosita, our Boston Terrier.

See? Everybody's smiling now. Except Rosita, who is barely tolerating the indignity.

Photo: Paul Latoures

Birds peck at them, hollowing them out. Beetles and ants follow along, taking advantage of holes made by the birds in the fruit skin to get at all that sugar.

Small mammals and reptiles apparently eat their fill of them, too. I've never seen them eating, but their scat tells the tale.

That red coloring and those seeds came from tunas, still identifiable after passing through some creature's alimentary canal.

Fox and lizard droppings lying on the ground are acceptable to those who walk in the botanical garden, 'cause it's natural, you see. The same is not true for human scat. In response, El Charco's directors provide sanitary facilities.

A few years back, the main restroom was a shack walled with the reed called carrizo, which grows plentifully in riparian zones and is widely used for fencing and privacy screens.

The privacy afforded by carrizo is marginal, but probably adequate for most people's needs. Certainly someone so inclined could peer at bathroom occupants through the screen. But I imagine few peeping Toms visit El Charco.

But at least one visitor would disagree with me. Leafing through the visitors' log, I encountered a statement by an outraged woman who claimed that the caretaker had peered at her through openings in the carrizo while she was using the facilities. Her entry was made in 2002. She called the man a pervert and demanded the directors do something about him. She strongly suggested a new, more secure bathroom was in order.

A couple of pages farther on in the log, an architect drew a sketch of a possible new bathroom for the gardens. (We have such talented visitors in San Miguel.)

A while later, a new bathroom was built, with flush toilets, vanities, and much better privacy.

El Charco, however, is big. It's probably a couple of miles from end to end, especially if you include Parque Landeta, the municipal park on the eastern border that is under the same stewardship as El Charco itself. Parque Landeta solves the sanitation problem with a couple of trench latrines with—you guessed it—carrizo screens.

At the west end of El Charco, a second public bathroom was constructed on the reconstructed ruins of the old mill after which the botanical garden was named.

The building is nice, although our sensitive visitor would probably have been dismayed at the lack of signs for gender assignment. The toilets are the vault type—never pleasant, but welcome when needed.

But these lack stools. They're squatters. Now, probably five billion of Earth's six billion people use squatters. But we Norteamericanos don't. Moreover, Norteamericanos like me have long lost the flexibility to use one. When I try to hunker, I fall over.

Anticipating this, the management presciently provided a length of pipe secured to the wall and floor, to be used for support while squatting. You won't find one of these in an old-fashioned Japanese toilet. You will at least find toilet paper there, but you won't find a grab bar.

(Note: In Spanish, a prickly pear fruit is a tuna; a tuna fish is an atun. Go figure.)

Photo: Grace Brown

The image of Paul holding this baby says something profound to me. I'm just not sure what. There's something about El Guapo's face, bearing all those physical scars and reflecting all the injuries and injustices of a long, hard life, looking down at Nathaniel's placid expression. The baby rests contentedly against Paul's comfy tummy, quietly observing his benign world.

Nathaniel, I imagine, is living entirely in the moment, something I have pretty much forgotten how to do. And Paul, too, seems to be immersed in the aura of his godson.

But words like these don't really explain why this photo so fascinates me.

Map: El Charco Del Ingenio AC

Most of the water is impounded in a reservoir, the Presa las Colonias. It's silted up now, which makes it an ideal refuge for waterfowl. Small islands have been built in the water for use as nesting sites.

The brown color of the water is caused by suspended fine clay particles. They are a sign of erosion, caused by deforestation and primitive farming methods. Little topsoil remains; mostly clay subsoil that washes into the waterways with each rain. The suspended particles would take years to precipitate out of the water.

Las Colonias Reservoir is formed by a dam constructed of stones and mortar by hand early in the 20th Century.

This rare view shows water cascading over the spillway, owing to recent rains.

Originally, water was carried in the long pipe running near the top of the canyon leading down from the dam. It was used to generate electricity at the Aurora fabric mill in town, an early application of hydroelectric energy in Mexico.

The factory no longer makes cloth. It has been recycled into a posh collection of galleries and boutiques. The great pipe that once carried the water down into town is broken.

The waters in this canyon had much earlier power-generating use, though. A mill, built at the end of the 16th Century, was used for grinding seeds and fulling wool cloth.

Actually, the name of the botanical gardens derives from this old mill. When I first tried to translate Charco del Ingenio, I was flummoxed by my Spanish-English dictionaries. The word meanings I found meant something like "mechanism puddle." Hmmm. That can't be right.

Charco del Ingenio probably means "mill pond." The Spanish words undoubtedly carry Mexican meanings, a situation that has tripped me up frequently. (Is there such a thing as a Mexican-English dictionary? I could sure use one.)

The old mill building still stands, but it has been converted to another use which I'll discuss in a future post.

The canyon below the dam is a lovely spot with sheer rock walls and year-round pools—a shady place to relax by quiet waters on a warm day. Here's how it appears during the dry season.

During the rainy season, small waterfalls cascade into and out of the pools.

The natural amphitheater formed by the canyon walls is occasionally used for concerts and other gatherings.

[Siesta image: Don and Carmen Sellers, Our Retirement to Sayula.]

I was wrong. It was the huge inflated bottle of Sol beer that drew Paul—unsurprising once you get to know him.

Photo: Paul Latoures

Something in the juxtaposition of a glass ball and the beer bottle inspired Paul. Much later while examining the image he shot, it realized that I had seen this composition before.

When shooting, I didn't notice that a fly was resting on the ball. (Apparently flies can be a hazard when photographing in Paul's vicinity.)

Next, I took a self-portrait. (See? No flies.)

Shooting into reflective spheres is like using a 180° lens. Forget framing. You get everything. The sky looks like another planet hanging there above me.

A sphere makes a cheap fisheye lens. The only problem is, you can't avoid getting an image of the photographer whenever you use it.

Photo: Clint Hough

Recently, Clint took a short trip to Michoacan to do some trading with artisans of the Lake Patzcuaro region. Driving through the state capitol, Morelia, he photographed this fire engine. Why?

Firefighters in Mexico are called bomberos—pumpers. One of the Bomberos Morelia apparently backed this pumper into a phone pole or something because some bodywork has been done. You can tell because the paint on two of the rear equipment hatches doesn't match the rest of the truck.

Nor has the lettering on the side been re-done yet, resulting in an unintended statement for those fluent in English.

Photo: Clint Hough

Given the (literally) explosive civil unrest in this country, if Morelia's city fathers understood this message, they'd fix it pronto.

Pollo Felíz is the ultimate restaurant franchise in Mexico, a sign that our adopted country is moving inexorably into the First World. That logo, with a mouth-watering feathered chicken giving us the thumbs-up, is as familiar here as the golden arches up north.

Our outlet is a huge store. I bet it seats 500. It's run with unusual attention to procedures and detail. Very Un-Mexican. Here, the troops fall in for their morning briefing.

Pollo Felíz sells pollo asado—grilled chicken. Happy grilled chicken.

This young man is cooking about 300 orders on an industrial gas grill. He's using a custom-designed tool to manipulate the chicken; he's wearing his logo-bearing shirt and hat. He has spiffy black boots to keep liquids off his feet and he's wearing a mask to prevent either exhaling of germs onto people's food or inhaling of greasy smoke into his lungs or both.

Are you sure we're not in LA?

The grill hood contains a fire-control system. Huge extractors whisk smoke out to a chimney on the roof. The resulting savory cloud drifts across San Miguel de Allende, bringing hungry patrons on the run.

The cooking philosophy is the same as in the hamburger chains up North: cook the hell out of it in the hopes that no customer gets sick. So Pollo Felíz chicken tends to be a little dry. Chicken jerky, actually. Even so, it tastes surprisingly good.

Jean picks up four half-chicken orders, five bucks each.

A smiling señorita gives Jean her change.

What a concept: Uniformly prepared product quickly and courteously served in a clean facility at low cost. No wonder Mexicans flock to Pollo Felíz.

But you don't get something for nothing. As the franchises take over, they displace the mom-and-pop restaurants that make each dining experience different.

Knowledgeable Sanmiguelenses don't buy their pollo asada at Pollo Felíz. They go down to the ratty-looking outdoor grill near the bus station, where chickens are cooked not over gas by some teenager, but over charcoal by the proprietor, who has been grilling there for years, turning out juicy, perfectly-grilled meals every time.

For me, part of the charm of this arch is because no one has tried to restore, or to even preserve it. It is what it is. Authentic.

One problem with ruins, though, is they're often not where you want them. Maybe you want to create a faux hacienda out in the Golden Corridor, on the highway to Delores Hidalgo. What could give a more immediate sense of antiquity than a broken arch?

Their artful appearance makes them popular. You see them all over Mexico, wherever someone wants to evoke the image of a simpler age: of courtly haciendados giving employment to campesinos, of brown-robed sacerdotes uplifting heathen Indian hearts.

I guess they look nice, sort of like a federal-style façade pasted onto the front of a McMansion in a Boston suburb.

—Mars Bonfire

—§—

Three days a week I walk down a shady, tree-lined street to Lobo's Gym. A few weeks ago, a couple of bizarre machines were parked there. They've not moved since.

Pictured above is one of them: a chopped Yamaha. We've all seen lots of chopped Harleys, but I've never seen a chopped Japanese motorcycle before.

Somehow it just doesn't seem right. Harley-Davidsons reek of attitude—even stock machines do. When chopped, they're the ultimate bad-boy ride. Japanese bikes, by comparison, are like family sedans: sedate, unremarkable, well-mannered. Chopping one is like dropping a Chrysler hemi into a Nash Rambler—kind of cool, but you get no respect.

The other machine is a Volkswagen trike: a vehicle that can hold its head up at any chopper rally. Many years ago I knew guys who made these things. They bored out 1200 cc VW engines and improved the timing and aspiration until the horsepower tripled. And since the trike weighed a third of what the original car did, the horsepower-to-weight ratio increased by a factor of ten. Dangerously overpowered, these things are.

In the States, you could never have driven this trike on the street. Those are straight exhausts, one per cylinder, completely unmuffled. The noise it makes must be shattering. Ticket city in L. A.

If it looks a little worn to you, that's because it is. This thing looked hot in 1987. But time and weather have been unkind to it. The flames cut into the steel floor plates look particularly forlorn. The parking brake lever is missing. The battery is gone. Scraps of electrical wire and pine needles litter various surfaces. It's no longer the pride of Jalisco.

Nor is the Yamaha bike. The seat and saddlebags are composting, sagging. Black plastic garbage bags are protectively draped across vulnerable components. It's rusty.

They're not the chick magnets they once were.

I wonder if their owner looks the same. Or if, like me, he looks a little sloppy, a little out of date. Forty years ago, Steppenwolf urged us to get out on the highway. These bikes would have been the way to go then, but today they are as dated as Born to Be Wild.

All I want anymore is a quiet dinner out with good friends and bedtime by ten. And to delay the inevitable decline. Better get down to the gym.

The concert series is always held in the Angela Peralta Theater, so named for Mexico's Nightingale and great soprano. Sra. Peralta opened the theater in 1873, starring in Verdi's Rigoletto. Those were the days.

It's a small theater, only 200 seats, and we like it that way. It offers an intimacy and a connection between performers and audience not often found in San Francisco or New York. Moreover, it's easy to get tickets and they are inexpensive by big city standards.

For the second year, the Turtle Island Quartet was the headline act. For the opening night, they played an entire concert based on the music of John Coltrane from their new album, A Love Supreme. If that doesn't redefine chamber music, I don't know what does.

The couple sharing our season tickets went to the opening concert; we attended the second. The program consisted of a cross section of Turtle Island's music as we have come to know it over the years.

Classically trained musicians—a classical string quartet no less—playing what? Jazz? Not really, although much of their music was drawn from jazz composers and artists: Chick Corea, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis.

The hit of the night, for me at least, was a composition by quartet leader David Balakrishnan—I think he called it Snakes and Ladders—that contained classical, jazz, folk and Indian influences. In one section the quartet sounded like sitar and tabla, evoking memories of KPFA's feature, the Morning Raga—a great way to get your heat pumping. They used their violins as drums: Turtle Island knows no boundaries.

Two intrusions did little to interfere with the experience. At one point we had a precipitation event: a violent downpour drumming on the roof drowning out the quartet. And then, there was the usual scattering of egotists in the audience who felt it necessary to shout "Bravo!" at the conclusion of each number.

If I had to use a single word in connection with this group, it would be rhythm. You tap your toes, move your pelvis as you listen. Yet the music is as demanding as Shostakovich, and it is performed by masters.

All four players took turns chatting with the audience, creating a playful intimacy. They allowed one encore, a blues number that was the one piece that didn't work for me. Their blues sounded as convincing as Aaron Copeland's Hoe-Down—stilted, like folk music interpreted by classical musicians.

Overall, it was a thrilling evening. As one reviewer said of the group, "The Turtle Island Quartet have the chops, the guts , the soul, the spirit and the taste..."

Then Clint said, "John, we gotta stop and take pictures. It's just too much." He pulled over onto the inadequate shoulder of the carretera and I jumped out to capture a few frames.

Traffic whizzed by. I was nervous because the truck was half sticking out into the slow lane. No time to find good vantage points. No time to compose, set exposure, wait for the sun. It was just "f8 and be there." Point, shoot and jump back in the truck.

We stopped twice. We could have stopped a dozen times and not run out of worthy subjects.

Unusual yuccas and barrel cacti jumped out at me.

A forest of cacti shaped like telephone poles spread up a hillside. I love the patterns they make.

This is a region empty of settlements but full of beauty. It's about a day's drive from San Miguel de Allende. I'll come back some day.

—§—

The periférico, the ring road around Mexico City, isn't actually a ring. It's more of a C. If you want to stay on carreteras all the way around the city, you have to detour to the northeast, extending your trip to Puebla by an hour and a half.

Or, you can do what we did: Take the ring road and close the loop by driving for a couple of miles on one of Mexico City's surface streets. But we knew we would be gambling when we did that, exposing ourselves to Mexico City's hopelessly corrupt traffic cops.

On our outbound leg, we hit the notorious surface streets at the same time as a powerful downpour. Water ran in the streets as high as our door sills. The upside was the rain drove the cops off the street, and we continued on to Puebla without being stopped.

On our return, the weather wasn't as cooperative. Getting off the periférico, we came to a single block in which were parked three police cruisers with maybe 20 cops standing alongside. They were looking for one thing only: out-of-state or foreign license plates.

See, travelers passing through are not going to want to stick around Mexico City for an extra day to clear a traffic ticket, legitimate or not. So they're good prospects for extortion.

Two of the cops waved us over to the side. We had a nice pickup truck, a gringo driver, and Texas license plates, so we were a fat juicy mark. One of the cops swaggered over to the passenger door: Mirrored wraparound sunglasses, bushy mustache, no ID tag on his chest. He asked for Clint's license.

On Clint's advice I kept the window open just enough to talk through, not enough to reach through. I held Clint's Texas Driver's license against the glass so the cop could read it.

That was all it took. The cop realized we were not afraid of him, that we were going to resist extortion. He had too many easier fish to catch, so he walked off without another word. We took his exit as permission to leave.

The extortion is so blatant, surely Mayor Marcelo Ebrard knows about it. Why doesn't he do anything? A simple drive down the street in an unmarked car, and he couldn't miss it. He might even suffer a shakedown attempt of his own before the cops realized who they had.

I wonder if he cares. I wonder if he benefits from what's going on.

If any of you are stopped by a cop for no good reason, know this: You don't have to get out of your car. You can refuse to hand over your license. Let him read your papers through the window. You can refuse to discuss anything. You can demand to see his ID. You can demand your infracción (ticket). You can ask to be taken to the nearest judge. If he's angling for a bribe, he'll give up. Just stick to your guns.

The single biggest single cause of Mexico's poverty is corruption (See note). If you pay a bribe, you're contributing to it. Please don't.

—§—

Finally, I thought you'd like to see how Chiapas travels.

He rides on his perch for miles. Then he climbs on one of our shoulders to gnaw our ears or crawls into the back seat and chews bag straps (until Marne or I catch him). Outside of that, he's the best traveler I've ever met.

—§—

Note about corruption:

The World bank ranks Mexico as the world's 14th largest economy. It ranks ahead of nations like Australia, the Netherlands, or Sweden. But these are rich countries; Mexico is poor. Income per person ranks only 79th. among nations. Given its population and resources, Mexico should be something like the world's #3 economy: maybe between Japan's and Germany's.

Investment in Mexico is the only way it'll get there. But investors, even Mexican investors, are wary because there's so much corruption that they are afraid their returns, or even their principal will be stolen by crooked government officials. So they divert their investments to safer countries, which is why Mexico's economy remains anemic and the people remain poor.

Chicharrones are rarely eaten out of hand like the cello-paks of pork rinds (what a euphemism) we used to buy in the States. Here, you buy walk-away servings with chopped vegetables and chili sauce dumped on top. Cooked in broth, chicharrones make good fillings for tacos. I've eaten them in stews and soups.

If chicharrones aren't exotic enough for you, there's chapulines—fried grasshoppers.

An Oaxacan staple eaten for thousands of years, chapulines are seasoned with garlic, chiles and lime, giving them a salty-sour flavor. I find them quite savory, either eaten out of hand, or as a filling for taquitos.

A long, roofed section of this mercado, festooned with papeles picados, houses carnicerias (butchers) along the sides, while asadores (grills) conveniently line the center. Pick out the meat you like and someone will cook it for you.

In the [hoto we see those wonderful fat little Oaxacan chorizos (sausages) on the grills, as well as carne asado (beef).

Pollo asado (grilled chicken) is one of my favorite Mexican foods, whether it's the succulent kind expertly prepared in a mercado stall, or the dry, chewy but flavorful meal you get at Pollo Felíz—Mexico's answer to McDonalds.

(I've mentioned before that Mexican people don't throw things out. They repair or recycle or make do. No product has so long a life cycle as one in Mexican hands. In the photo above, the cook's knife is stuck into the pile of chickens. It's been repaired with soft iron wire. Let that be a lesson to us all.)

Mexican meat is cut thin. Takes some getting used to. I was struck by the light shining through this carniceria's wares.

It isn't simply a matter of taste: there's a practical reason why Mexican meat is cut so thin. Mexican animals are not finished in feedlots. They come right off the range where they've been eating dried cornstalks if they're lucky and chaparral if they're not. These beasts are tough and stringy. A Mexican Rib-eye or New York steak is difficult to cut and chew, to say the least. Believe me, I've tried. Besides, from a Mexican standpoint, they're way too much meat for any one person.

Most chorizo and other mexican sausages are made by specialists using commercial casings and machines to form them. But in rural areas, you can still find ground meat and seasonings stuffed into intestines, the way God intended.

But they don't look as appealing, at least to my eyes, as the uniform, manufactured kind.

You can buy prepackeage unshelled peanuts at convenience stores for snacking whle driving down the carretera. More commonly, though, peanuts are boiled and served soft. In the southern U. S., we call them goobers.

Served this way, they're more of a staple than a snack. This somewhat distracted little girl is selling cacahuates (peanuts) intended for boiling.

Mexicans eat many other seeds These pods are called guaje.

They're pods of the mimosa tree (Leucaena leucocephala?). They're shelled, and the bland, high protein seeds cooked and eaten.

A reader commented that I had not been in a U. S. supermarket for awhile and wasn't familiar with today's prices. Guilty as charged. But even compared with Safeway's prices five years ago, the values in mercado stalls are astonishing.

At ten pesos to the dollar, the cantaloupes are priced five for $1.50-$2.00; the potatoes, $1 for 4½ pounds.

(The slogan at the top of the potato price sign says, "In war, everything is lost," a reference to the ongoing conflict in the City of Oaxaca.)

I find it interesting that cornmeal for making tortillas isn't sold much in the mercado, nor is unground corn. Apparently you grow your own or you buy it direct from a neighbor. In either case, you grind it yourself or you take it down to the molino (mill). My friend Berta relates how one of her chores as a little girl was to take a bucket of corn to the molino for grinding.

Dried beans are more in evidence, but there's still not a lot of them offered. Beans and corn, the foundations of life in Mexico, can be found in any restaurant or supermarket. But in the country, in the mountain villages, everyone produces their own. They have to, in an economy where cash is scarce, where much commerce is still done by barter.

How old is that face? Could be 70. Could be 50. His face is marked by a hard life, so it's difficult to tell. His hair is gray, not white, so it's possible that he's younger than I think.

He's wearing two sombreros, one over the other. His Sunday best hat is covered by a sweat-stained felt one, to protect it from soiling and the intermittent rains. He's wearing a Goodwill tee shirt under a heavy, long-sleeved shirt. The temperature today is pushing 90, but he doesn't want to get chilled. I'm often surprised at how warmly Mexicans dress.

He probably does not live with a woman, on account of he's grimy. Indigenous women are scrupulously clean, even if they're living on dirt floors. How they do it is a wonder.

One thing for certain: There's no way they would tolerate their man looking like that. It's a matter of pride, a reflection on their homemaking.

His sandals are beat up, yes. So are his feet. Which part is leather, which part skin?

Four thousand years ago, we all had feet that looked like his.

This place might look poverty-stricken to you. Well, for rural Oaxaca State, it actually ain't bad. The proprietor is fairly wealthy by local standards. She's an employer, after all. A member of the power elite.

Clint went right in and began discussing business matters with her. I wandered around her place, camera in hand and Chiapas the parrot on my shoulder. Right away, we met two other parrots, a couple of parakeets, a dove and two chicks of undetermined species.

Foolishly, I carried Chiapas over to meet one of the parrots. He took one look at the overhanging tree branch and gleefully climbed onto it. Free at last! When I grabbed for him, he squawked and bit the hell out of my finger. Clint and Marne ran over, and between the three of us, we managed to get him down out of the tree. Note to self: Don't walk under low tree branches while carrying bird.

This place was unlike any manufactory I'd ever seen. An enameled pot of beans bubbled away on a charcoal brazier.

Two grandchildren emerged from somewhere and greeted me. They insisted on posing for pictures, asking to see each frame as soon as I shot it.

A junkyard dog, chained to a tree, barked threateningly and incessantly, until the owner broke off her discussion with Clint long enough to beat it with a broomstick. (I have a hard time accepting the way animals are treated in this country.)

Clint negotiated with the embroidery lady for a couple of hours. This photo was taken late in the discussions. Does she look happy?

She does not.

Her rigid position was that she wanted Clint to buy the pieces on the table in front of her. Clint wanted her to embroider the box of jeans jackets he had brought with him from the States, as she had promised to do at their last meeting.

For years I was involved negotiations like this with suppliers and customers in the semiconductor industry. Not fun then; not fun now. The only difference today was the size of the deal: ten thousand pesos instead of ten million dollars. But it still boiled down to two hardheaded people trying to get what they wanted. Some things never change.

I snapped my photo and retreated to the yard to talk with the grandkids some more.

We knew right away we were in for a treat. She's patting the masa (tortilla dough) out by hand. Nobody does that anymore.

Handmade tortillas, rare in their own right, are usually made with the aid of a tortilla press.

Photos: gourmetsleuth.com

But for my money, tortillas made with a press aren't as good as the ones patted out by hand. They lack the imperfections and tenderness of the truly handmade. They have a sharp rim that detracts from the mouth feel of the ones shaped in the cook's palms.

Restaurante Donají makes tortillas the hard way, the traditional way, the centuries-old way. Dried corn is soaked and boiled in lime water, the softened kernels ground in a mill (their one concession to modern times), patted to shape one at a time and cooked on a sheet of iron over a charcoal fire. I can't emphasize enough, how different, how much better these are from any factory-made tortillas. We're talking mom's buttermilk biscuits vs. Wonder Bread.

The restaurant is famous for its moles; that's MOE-lays, not the little critters that burrow under your lawn. Brown, red, yellow, green mole; the variety is endless. Most moles contain chiles and chocolate, the latter unsweetened of course. No respectable mole has fewer than eight other ingredients.

English-language recipes for mole offered online are disappointing, listing commercial chile powder and unsweetened Baker's chocolate as ingredients. I wouldn't eat that stuff. Restaurante Donají, befitting it's traditional approach, begins with fresh chiles and cacao beans, roasting them in a wood-fired oven.

They make the best mole I've ever eaten. (Excepting, of course, that made by our cook, Rosario. It takes her two days to make her sauce, using her grandmother's recipe.)

A big, open kitchen is where it all comes together. It looks a little questionable, but everything in there is spotless.

Chicken is grilled, sauced and served from there. A boy runs outside to the tortilla lady to get fresh ones just before serving your order. As you eat in blissful satisfaction, you gaze at a bucolic mural of a mercado as it looked in the last century.

Today, a hundred years after the period depicted—the mountains, the mercado, the sellers, the produce, the stilt walkers, the costumes—look exactly the same as today. Maravilloso ¿no?

Like all good Mexican businesses, Restaurante Donají is more than a restaurant. For example, they raise ostriches...

... although they don't serve them.

They weave traditional Oaxacan rugs when business is slow.

As if that's not enough, a family member makes furniture in a shop out back.

That's an electric bandsaw on the left; pretty sophisticated for woodworking in these parts. Note also that the shop serves as a dormitory. A couple of hammocks provide perfectly satisfactory sleeping arrangements in this warm country.

Restaurante Donají has been a fixture for decades. Oaxaqueños who have cars and can afford to eat in restaurants (a minority) make the one-hour drive out of the city for a special afternoon.

If you English speakers want to enjoy a meal here, you're gonna have to brush up on your Spanish. But the friendly owners are used to Norteamericanos. They may address you in Spanish, but they speak slowly and articulate clearly. Talking with them was one of those rare experiences for me, where I understood everything they said.

Women in particular wear traditional dress. Our local friend Eric says he can tell which village they come from by their costumes.

Of course, not all women dress in the old style. The older woman on the left makes a nod to tradition with her head band, but her apron is exactly like those worn by anyone doing housework anywhere in Mexico.

The woman in the flowered dress clearly dresses in modern style, while to her right, another woman creates a scandal by wearing pants. Young people. What can you do?

Many rural Oaxaqueños wear braids interwoven with ribbons.

Ends of her braids tied together, this woman reminds me of the girls in Diego Rivera's painting, Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita. The look hasn't changed in 70 years, and probably many more.

These vendors from a remote village, don't like to have their pictures taken. Had I realized this before I shot, I would have respected their wishes. As it turned out, I got a photo of women holding cloths over their faces.

Disabilities abound in the mercados. The crawling woman is paraplegic. She is a vendor, selling items woven from palm fronds.

Her life must be incredibly hard. But I later saw her sitting up with a group of women, gossiping and smiling. Her debilities haven't broken her spirit.

Men tend to look like cowboys. Most work in fields or the jungle.

You rarely see people with prominent birthmarks in the States; they're removed, usually at an early age. This man almost certainly had no choice in the matter. Cosmetic surgery isn't available for people like him. I would have liked to ask him if his markings bothered him, but how could I have done such a thing?

This young cholo looks much like one of his peers in East L. A., except he doesn't quite manage to carry it off. The ragged pants and the Goodwill golf shirt spoil the effect. Still, he's doing what he can with what he has.

Staffing a stall can be stultifying, especially when you're merchandising a low volume commodity like lime, used for boiling dried corn to remove the kernel coverings.

That's the wooden handle of a hammer sticking up in front of her. She uses it to break the lime into consumer-sized pieces. Notice the white dust on her hands.

Some vendors just can't stay awake.

It's not all old women in the stalls. Here. a young mother sells cantaloupes.

Another young woman sells garlic. She and several other ajo sellers have no stalls; they just wander around and push bunches of bulbs in shoppers' faces.

If you want to meet real Mexicans, the place to do it is in the mercados. Here, Clint is engaged in conversation with a woman preparing tostadas.

Toward the end of our trip, Clint came down with a case of food poisoning. He thinks he got it from a mercado restaurant selling grilled chicken, and I have to defer to him, on account of it's his system that took the hit. But I can't get rid of the feeling that it might have been food from an operation like this one.

This is not to say that Clint or I avoid this kind of food stall, as all the wussy tourist guides advise. Every day millions of Mexicans eat food prepared this way, and so can we. Being overly cautious, we'd be cutting ourselves out of one of the great pleasures of visiting or living in Mexico—sampling the incredible variety of street food.

We didn't visit the greatest of markets, Abastos. But we didn't miss anything. The places we visited offered more than we could absorb. Nor did we miss the tourists who troop along in docile groups through Abastos. Nor the pickpockets who prey on them..

They don't make 'em like this anymore, do they? Looks like a county courthouse. The factory as monument.

In the early decades of the last century, hundreds of workers trooped up those steps to work for less than a dollar a day. Today it provides paid employment for maybe a dozen residents of San Augustín: custodians, maintenance workers, guards, administrators, who provide all the services needed to make the place function as a museum, a gallery and a place for art-related events.

This summer, the first floor is being used for an exhibition of contemporary ceramics—cerámica utilitaria—pottery. But what pottery!

The work on display is not folk art, not pedestrian crafting by amateurs. These are serious works worthy of deliberate appreciation.

Half the second floor houses a temporary showing of drawings, which don't particularly appeal to me. But the room they are in does. The unused half of this floor is empty, permitting an unobstructed view of this incredible space.

The high roof is new, the rest is original. The wonderful rank of arched windows, the scarred oak floors, heavy enough to support massive iron machinery, the absence of posts, create a vast, open space capable of displaying works of any size without crowding them.

In the center of the second floor, some of the huge old bobbins, still wound with yarn, and a couple of looms have been left to mark the building's original use.

They are installation art in their own right.

Other examples of incorporating the old industrial facilities into a compelling design include retaining the old incinerator, now surrounded by a reflecting pool.

Another part of the pool contains a drift of submerged ceramics: more architecture as art.

A whimsical staircase leads to the thorny trunk of a ceiba tree.

Empty, this place would be worth visiting on its own merits. Containing as it did, an exhibition of extraordinary ceramics, I found my attention hopelessly, but happily divided.

I saw plenty of guajolotes being raised in dooryards. They're handsome birds compared to those white-feathered, insipid turkeys that are all breast meat, the kind sold in American supermarkets, and in Mexican ones too, where they're called pavo. But in the rural south of the country, most people buy their turkeys in the mercados.

Like this.

Oh yeah, it's a live one. They sell dead ones, too. But they sure sell a lot of them that are still kicking.

Wandering around rural Mexico—never in the cities—I'd see signs advertising pollo en pie—chicken on foot. We might say "chicken on the hoof." I correctly surmised this means live chickens, feathers and all. But why? Are they better that way? Maybe some Mexican cooks are sticklers for freshness?

None of those reasons seem very Mexican to me, not in a country where good enough is good enough.

(Look closely. The woman above is carrying two turkeys. Must be expecting company.)

The answer, of course, is lack of refrigeration. People who live in the campo often cannot afford refrigerators. Many do not even have electricity. So whatever's for dinner has to keep itself fresh until the family is ready to eat it.

The women in the markets haul their live purchases around so nonchalantly. It's no big deal. It's just the weekly turkey. Gotta buy some tomatoes, too. So they shove the birds under their arms and pick over the produce. Nobody gives it a second thought, except the slack-jawed gringo tourist who can't believe what he's seeing.

During their back-to-the-land days, my parents had a chicken coop. On rare Sundays, my father would catch one and lop its head off with a machete. My mom would dip the still-twitching carcass in boiling water and pull its feathers. She'd gut it (which grossed all us kids out) and give us the feet to play with. (We would tug on the exposed tendons to make the claws wiggle.) Mom went to a lot of work for chicken and dumplings—which I never liked anyway.

These women do it every week. Except they dispatch their birds by wringing their necks. They cook them in mole sauce and serve them with tortillas made from corn they ground themselves. Mom had it easy.

(Incidentally, one word in Mexico for slaughter, as applied to animals for food, is sacrificar, to sacrifice.)

It's not just turkeys that are sold on the hoof. This young man is leading his goat around the mercado. I don't know if he's buying or selling it.

Jean grew up in midwestern farm country. She's never seen a live animal taken for food. Her parents, like mine, bought cello-wrapped ground beef in the supermarket, or ready made burgers at the Rensselaer Dairy Queen. We've come so very far from our roots.

Located in a beautiful mountain jungle setting, the plant is ideal for water-intensive paper making processes. Below are a couple of large tanks in which maguey or other natural materials are soaked to begin extracting fiber from leaves.

Paper making equipment looks crude to my rich-country eyes. The stove is used to boil dyes and binders.

José, the head paper-maker, demonstrates a guillotine used for cutting long fibers into workable lengths.

Only materials found in nature are used. The jars on the left contain roots, bark, dried flowers and minerals, used as colorants or inclusions in decorative papers.

The bucket contains sliced pads of nopal cactus (prickly pear), being soaked to extract a subtle dye.

Fibers are soaked to soften them and then put into this machine, which José describes as an industrial-strength blender.

Dyes and binders are added to the pulp...

... which is then scooped onto a hand-held screen that holds a thin layer in place while water drains off.

The layer of pulp is inverted onto a worktable and a sheet of felt laid and pressed on top to absorb more water. Fine paper is pressed in a large old-fashioned screw press. Special papers are patted out by hand; designs are pressed into some, inclusions like mica or flowers into others.

Sheaves of finished paper are displayed for sale in a sort of showroom. I don't think the place meets its expenses through sales.

Objects made from paper are also for sale; here, kites.

The next two photos show gift boxes; the ones on top closed, the one below open.

Most intriguing is paper jewelry. Who would have thought of something like this?

Francisco Toledo is an artist. He's not interested in the business aspects of an enterprise like the paper factory, and it shows. The place survives through his patronage—a venue for artists and children learning art, and a place for the lucky few who find out about it to spend an interesting afternoon.

What will become of it when Francisco is gone?

Hmmm. More than one thing in this world is called copal. The powdery and chunky kind is sold here for use in ceremonies and in church. People burn it to make sacred smoke; a sort of incense, that is said to be trance-inducing. It is made from sap collected from trees related to the one that produces the medicinal berry, or more commonly, from the pitch pine. Sellers offer two grades: premium and economy. Looking at the pictures, can you guess which is which? The unattractive blackish substance costs more. The lovely amber colored pieces are the cheap stuff. I don't know why.

Hammocks are widely sold in the mercados. They're not frivolous decorator items. They're what people sleep in, who live in rude houses in the tropics where insects would infest mattresses.

Expensive ones are made of soft, fine yarns and are very nice. But I think the ones you can buy in Yucatan are better.

Less practical are metates and manos. The decorated ones shown below are given as traditional wedding gifts; no bride's home is complete without a set.

While some grandmothers living in thatched huts still grind corn with them, most people anymore take their corn to someone who has an electric mill. The pace of life is picking up even in the jungles of Oaxaca, and only the poor still do the backbreaking labor to grind corn that way.

Incidentally, the copal vendor also sells lime for use in soaking dried corn to make hominy. Hominy is used to make pozole, or can be ground on a metate while wet to make masa nixtamalera, which used to make tortillas or other foods. Dried, masa nixtamalera becomes the familiar corn flour called masa harina, found in U. S. supermarkets.

(Here I am, talking about food again. Hard to stay on topic when there's so much good stuff to eat in Mexico.)

Ribbons find lots of uses: braided into hair, appliqued onto blouses and dresses, but rarely used to wrap presents. It's too expensive for that.

Many vendors sell yarn and embroidery thread. Every woman's, every little girl's Sunday best includes an embroidered blouse, a beribboned skirt and pigtails braided with ribbons.

As for yarn, Mexicans rarely knit. They crochet. You can just make out a bunch of crochet hooks in the upper right corner of the photo.

Clint saw these sharpening stones and was immediately captivated, as was I. Neither of us had ever seen anything like these huge things.

The seller demonstrated their utility by sharpening Clint's pocket knife. He worked hard at it, ultimately producing a respectable edge, but I thought the stones to be too coarse to make knives razor sharp. Clint was satisfied though, and bought one of them. The biggest stones are for sharpening those ubiquitous Mexican outdoorsman's tools, machetes. For that, they're ideal.

People who work outdoors often own draft animals. They're an important source of power and transportation in the Oaxacan campo, and so there's a need for tack.

Leather is too expensive, so tack is made from cotton, hemp, sisal or plastic rope. The ropes displayed on the pavement are hand-spun.

Even furniture is on sale. I didn't see any trendy equipal chairs, but these horrid upholstered pieces apparently were manufactured in great quantity, because I saw them everywhere.

They're so awful, I was tempted to buy one as a conversation piece. Sort of like seeing Plan Nine from Outer Space, their vileness makes them almost good. Too bad I didn't manage to get a photo of the burnt orange ones. Truly ugly.

Most of rural Mexico shops in mercados, as do many city dwellers. Fierce competition keeps prices low. The selection is incredible. But sooner or later, Wal-Mart is gonna come. And ultimately it'll displace the mercados. But not for awhile yet. Even when they come, most mercado shoppers can't afford the big box stores' First-World prices. So you all have a few years left to get out and experience these markets for yourselves.

Something big was going to happen. People lined up along the main street, waiting for some sort of parade or procession. The anticipation was palpable.

Banda music erupted from the plaza in front of the church. We arrived to find costumed young women dancing.

Their outfits included ornately appliqued skirts, white embroidered blouses, and baskets containing elaborate floral arrangements carried on their heads.

Check out the spike heels worn by the girl on the left. Mexican women routinely walk over cobblestone streets in these things, whereas gringos slip and fall even when wearing trainers.

The dancers braided ribbons in their long black hair. They wore their party earrings.

They have such beautiful faces.

A couple of dancers-in-training develop their balancing skills for a future festival.

These girls clearly show their Asian roots: high cheekbones, hints of epicanthic folds in their eyes; more evidence of the migration across the Bering land bridge so long ago.

At the conclusion of the dancing, it was time to make a procession through town. A bugler and drummer led the way.

The horn player was able to play near-perfect diatonic scales on his valveless long bugle. He did not play the usual martial bugle calls; instead choosing dignified minor-key processionals, adding an air of solemnity to the proceedings.

A small boy trotted along wearing his papier mâché mojiganga costume.

The procession snaked along the streets for a mile or so, winding up at the Mayor's house. Snacks and candy were distributed to children (and dogs). Mescal was distributed to Clint, Marne and Chiapas the parrot, who draws a crowd wherever he goes.

Late in the afternoon, the bright smiles disappeared, replaced by tired faces. I don't know how these girls managed to keep it up; festivities were to continue all night long. We wussy gringos, drained of all energy, headed back to the city for dinner and sleep.

We were the only foreigners present for the fiesta. It's possible we were the only foreigners to observe it, ever.

The residents of San Juan were not putting on some kind of quaint folkloric show for tourists. They were dancing and parading for themselves only, for their own satisfaction. But the townspeople went out of their way to make us feel welcome, and took obvious pride that we were so interested in their event.

San Juan is by no means wealthy. The costumes and decorations, dances and music, are the culmination of a full year of preparation. I never figured out what the celebration was about: A saint's day? A political anniversary? Doesn't matter. We were very fortunate to be there, whatever the reason.

A low doorway, unmarked by any announcement or sign, leads into the market grounds.

Here, a scene similar to farmers' markets everywhere unfolds.

Fresh fruits and vegetables, honey, artisanal cheese, bakery products, lead-free pottery, and more are offered to visitors. Strict rules govern the produce and foods sold. No pesticides or chemical fertilizers are permitted. Foods must be healthy: flour tortillas may not contain lard. No plastic vessels are supposed to be used (although this requirement is difficult to meet).

The main reason for our visit was breakfast. Mine began with a glass of horchata—a sweet drink made from rice, almonds and cinnamon, here spiced up with the red juice of local berries.

She's serving my drink in a regular glass that I was permitted—encouraged—to carry away while exploring the rest of the market. When I was finished, I returned it to her, and she washed it in a (oops—plastic) tub of soapy water and dried it for use by the next customer.

Next it was time for some solid food. What do Mexicans eat for breakfast?

Well, some eat eggs: huevos revueltos, huevos rancheros, huevos divorciados, huevos mexicanos. But most don't. Instead they eat something on or in a tortilla.

Tables everywhere are laden with ingredients. Nopales (cactus), chicken, chayote, wild greens, frijoles, chiles, salsas, moles—the variety is overwhelming and making choices is almost impossible, although overeating isn't.

Tortillas complete the dishes and reduce the need for plates Like everything else here, they're cooked on charcoal braziers.

These were patted out by hand—the ancient, traditional way. I ate a tortitla de huazontle (a sort of tostada topped with stewed amaranth) and chicken mole enchiladas.

We had a long day planned, so I topped everything off with a gourd filled with tejate, the traditional Oaxacan energy drink made from ground corn, cacao seed, mamey seed, and rosita de cacao, a flower that is not from the cacao tree.

Tejate is prepared by making a paste of the ingredients and then adding enough water to make a smooth liquid vaguely similar to chocolate milk topped by curdy foam. I was initially put off by the appearance, but I have to say it's now on my A-list of Mexican foods. It's incredibly tasty and refreshing.

Of course, my sweet tooth wouldn't let me pass up the pastries. These looked as good as anything you'd find in a French patisserie.

The organic market is one of Oaxaca's living art treasures. Don't miss it if you visit the city.

Large, well-bred horses like the one above are the exception in Oaxaca. More typical are the ponies used to draw carts. This form of transport isn't some quaint throwback kept alive by hobbyists or as a show for tourists. I saw scores of these things. They're an important part of the Oaxacan transportation network.

If you can't afford a pony, you use a donkey. This is one of many in San Juan, another small town.

Horses, horse carts, and donkey carts are not used in the city of Oaxaca itself. It's too congested and drivers are fast and aggressive. But they're plentiful in the pueblas.

Internal combustion technology has made greater inroads since the last time I was in the poor, backward south of Mexico. While I saw I few tricicles being pedaled, most of these taxis have been modified so they can be drawn by motorcycles. The bikes often are tricked-out beauties that can be detached and driven with pride to the local cantina on Saturday night.

The greatest change over the last year or so is the sudden appearance of the nifty new micro-taxis.

Clint says they're of Chinese manufacture. They look like they're environmentally friendly. They have four-cycle engines (less polluting) that barely sip gasoline. Watch one struggle up a hill and you'll see what I mean. A ride costs $5 pesos—50¢.

The primary purpose of this Volkswagen beetle is to carry a blaring sound system around town to harangue the people into voting for PAN, one of the political parties.

This practice is sublimely irritating. The message is loud, unintelligible and unwanted. Nevertheless, they've been doing this sort of thing for over 50 years, and nobody but expatriates thinks they should stop it.

Below we have a working big rig tractor from the late '40s or early '50s. Just look at that split windshield. Usually trucks this old are quietly rusting away in a field or junkyard. But this one is still in service. You can tell because of the newish, meaty tires. There's no sign left of the model or make; that hood sheet metal has been reworked a few times. But what a beauty!

I'm accustomed to seeing the Virgen de Guadalupe airbrushed onto the backs of pickup trucks. But a dump truck?

Our local guide, Eric, told me that Guadalupe is colloquially know as "the serpent crusher." Cool. The words Reyna Mia mean My Queen. Reyna is a misspelling of reina. The juxtaposition of a sacred image with a pair of longhorn mud flaps was too good to pass up.

The last pair of photos is barely transportation related. This DC-3 is parked on the lawn of a huge buffet-style restaurant situated out in the country.

The big rotary engines are intact, as is the landing gear and other essentials. I guess it could be restored to flying status.

But it won't be. It now functions as a small movie theater; a diversion for the kiddies while the old folks idle away the afternoon at an hours-long Sunday comida.

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.

—Otto von Bismark

—§—

Mescal neither.

It starts out pretty enough, with orderly maguey fields growing away in the beautiful Oaxaca countryside.

The plants must grow for eight years before they are large enough for harvesting.

Working in a maguey field has got to be tough. The leaves have sharp serrations and a needle-like point at the tip of each.

To harvest the plants, the spiky leaves are cut away with a sharp blade at the end of a pole. Then the swollen stem can be cut off at ground level.

This core was massive. I could barely lift it.

Now it starts to get ugly. The cores are burned in an open fire to enhance the sugar content.

Next, they are mashed in a mill to separate the sugary pulp from the fibers. The traditional way is the best way: using a horse to pull the mill wheel round and round.

What results is an unappetizing mess. How the hell did anyone ever figure this out?

Looks like cow manure to me.

It can only get better from here. Or can it? The mashed, burned maguey is forked into a wooden tub with water added and the whole mess is allowed to ferment for three days.

This tank was bubbling briskly. You'd think it would smell awful, but the tank gives off a pleasant smoky molasses odor.

The fermented liquid is drawn off and placed in a charcoal-fired still. A crude still. Oh, you can get that mass-produced stuff made in gas-fired stills, but then you might as well drink screw-top wine. Or lite beer. Real mescal drinkers insist on distillation over a wood fire.

Let me explain how this works. The fire, as you can see, is over there on the left. Above it, mostly hidden by the plastic tub and the square metal can, is a copper flask that holds maybe 10-20 gallons of fermented maguey mash. The mash boils, and water vapor and alcohol vapor carrying impurities that give mescal its flavor is carried through that semi-horizontal copper pipe to a coil in the cold water tank. The various vapors condense in the coil and drip out of a spigot at the bottom of the water tank into that grimy used cooking oil container standing in the rectangular recess at the base of the tank.

And this is one of the good installations. Here's another still, currently not in operation.

Mezcal Mi Tierra. My Land Mescal brand. Be sure and look for it in your local expendio.

The mescal is aged for a couple of years in oak barrels. The last step is bottling, painstakingly done in your better fabricas.

From this point, the mescal is rushed to your nearby open-air mercado where it's placed in the traditional liquor-cum-embroidered-blouse display. There, you can sample the stuff for free. The sample cups look pretty small, but Clint tells me that after a few of them, you really need to get something to eat. Fast.

Photo: Yahoo News

We could see it coming. Protest leaders with bullhorns were stirring up crowds. Police were massing at the fair site.

The political graffiti wars that have defaced so much of the downtown heated up over the weekend. A lot of spray paint was applied to walls using stencils; here of a female guerilla with a timorous expression on her face and a rifle in her hand. Reminds me of Patty Hearst.

The red caption reads, "Hooray for the peoples' Guelaguetza. Boycott the commercial Guelaguetza;" this in reference to one group's attempt to divert attendance from the official function.

But this really isn't about the craft fair. It's about a whole lot of angry people who feel they are being exploited and abused by the power elite. Many anti-government groups maintain a presence on the zócalo, registering their protests and disseminating their views.

The banners cite grievances and assert rebellion, and power to the people. One grievance is the arrest of fifty or so who were suspected of leading protests. These were transported to a prison in the state of Nayerit where visits by friends and attorneys would be difficult. Shades of Berkeley in the '60s.

On Friday, a party was held at the daily organic market where those arrested, now freed, were treated to lunch and music.

The unifying factor in the dissent is intense hatred for the Governor of the State of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz. Protesters accuse him of strong-arm tactics against political opponents and gross corruption. They hold him responsible for the shooting deaths last year of some demonstrators by masked gunmen. I talked with many people in Oaxaca, and all despised him.

Some of the protest messages are ugly. This one urges people to "kill the dog," referring to Ruiz.

The unrest has provided a toehold for communists. Largely discredited in almost the entire world, they maintain a highly visible presence here.

These are ignorant adherents to communist principles; witness the banner with the likeness of Joseph Stalin.

They're obviously unaware or uncaring that Stalin was not a communist, but a dictator who was responsible for killing more people than anyone else excepting Mao Tse-tung.

Governor Ruiz has lost the confidence of the people he governs, to put it mildly. He should resign. The State of Oaxaca needs a Governor who can heal some wounds and redress some of the grievances. But he clings to power. People say the governorship is a road to wealth, and there's far too much money flying around the Governor's mansion to walk away from. Maybe so.

These troubles are terrible for the residents of Oaxaca, but they shouldn't be a deterrent to travelers. Outside of the zócalo and the stadium where the Guelaguetza is held, there's little sign of unrest. The city's churches, historical buildings and restaurants offer fascinating opportunities to explore and enjoy an intriguing destination. And the small villages nearby are inhabited by skilled artisans and some of the warmest, friendliest people you'll find anywhere.

Oh, they all hate the Governor—make no mistake about it. But that having been said, they are far more interested in enjoying life and raising their families than in the affairs of politicians and zealots.

Then I saw this plow, and I began to realize that these were not yard decorations; they were tools, tools that someone would actually use.

It isn't pretty, this plow. But it looks functional and sturdy. That draw bar is a scraped small tree trunk and is attached to the foot with a wedged short plank. A handle reaches up for the farmer's guiding hand. A pointed plate of 1/4" mild steel (not visible in the photo) is bolted to the foot for durability and sharpness.

We saw one of these in action, cultivating a cornfield. The farmer has reached the end of a row, and placing his left arm under the control handle, lifts the plowshare out of the soil.

You can see that this plow will not turn the earth like the common American moldboard plow. It's capable only of scraping a furrow. Since there's no need to cut sod, that's probably enough for this farmer's needs.

Here we see it all put together. A pair of oxen, bearing one of those wonderful wooden yokes, draws the plow down a row of corn plants. When one of the oxen pauses, the farmer pokes it with his pole.

Apparently, left to their own devices, oxen will eat young corn plants. Why not? That's what they're fed back in the stable—last year's cornstalks. Your local mercado offers a solution to this problem as well.

Ox muzzles. Here, a properly attired ox models one. (Also note the leather straps holding the yoke to his forehead and horns.)

This is not Zapotec or Mixtec technology. Oxen and the plows they draw were brought to the New World by the Spaniards. Prior to their arrival, Indians planted corn by poking a hole in the ground with a pointed stick.

But plowing with a team of oxen is very old, very primitive. That plow, yoke and team of oxen are probably this farmer's largest investment. It's all he can afford in this state of Oaxaca, one of the poorest in Mexico.

It's way typical, right down to the embroidered blouses for sale, hanging on the left.

Clothing in a liquor store? Well, that's how they do it here. Many mescal outlets also sell embroidered blouses. Pictured below is a display from an outdoor market.

My theory: Mescal store owners noticed that Dad comes into their store wagging his tail like a puppy and heads for the sample bar while Mom stands in the doorway tapping her foot, getting more hacked off with every shot he takes. Solution? Add clothes shopping to the mix. Mom sees that embroidery, she doesn't even notice what Dad's doing until it's too late.

Mezcal stores abound in these parts. Competition is fierce.

Hundreds of artesanal brands vie for your attention. Kind of like the Napa Valley wine country, without the sophistication.

Some makers are very small, which makes their products rare and therefore desireable. Here we have I Like It brand.

Non much cachet in that name, is there?

A great deal of ingenuity goes into product differentiation. You can find herbal mezcal, good for medicinal purposes. (Yeah. Right.)

Or you can buy flavored varieties: mocha, almond...

... orange, nanche (see previous post), with or without a worm in the bottle.

Some is packaged in the old traditional gourd-shaped bottles wrapped in netting so it can be tied to your belt or saddle.

Mezcal is offered in barrels with wooden spigots. One use of these is in wedding processions that include a mezcal burro. Guests visit the burro, glass in hand, whenever they feel the need for more refreshment. I've noticed at these events that the younger men especially need to be refreshed.

The host at the celebration hands out small glasses on strings that guests hang around guests' necks, facilitating conveyance of booze to bloodstream.

Merchandising reaches new extremes: This place offers little bags of salt flavored with ground-up agave worms. Yum.

You can put together the equivalent of a Sonoma Valley wine tour in the maguey-growing region of Oaxaca. You have to be very careful in your tasting, though. Mezcal is potent, and you could easily get blitzed at your first stop, ending your tour prematurely.

I bought a $5 peso bag of the fruit, which he called nanches. They're the size of raspberries, but berries they're not, because they contain just one stone. I think they're drupes; like cherries or plums. The seeds even look like a cherry stones.

Marne, here holding my baggie for the camera, says they taste like a cross between an orange and a banana, and I have to agree.

A benefit of traveling in less-developed countries is the opportunity to taste fruits and vegetables I never run into in big chain supermarkets. Even adventurous stores like Austin's Central Market aren't going to carry nanches. Can't move enough of them. Gotta train all the checkers: "Now these here are your nanches—$1.29 a pound this week. Produce code #7873."

Even if Safeway's buyers knew about them, they're just too much trouble for a big corporation. No commercial growers. Not enough volume. But they're just right for a guy selling out of a wheelbarrow in Oaxaca.

Photo credit: Marne Rizika

Unlike Chichén Itza, this pre-hispanic site is manageable in scope. You can take in the whole archeological zone from a single viewpoint.

A friend suggested we look for Rolando to serve as our guide. Perhaps descended from the builders of Monte Albán, he was born on the next mountain over from the site, where his mother was a practitioner of folk medicine. Self-taught in many fields, he held forth on astronomy, mineralogy, medicine, philosophy and religion as these subjects relate to the Zapotecs and Monte Albán.

While informative, he has the annoying trait of many guides of talking to us instead of showing us stuff. Here he lectures on geographical considerations in temple site selection. This wouldn't have bothered me so much except that often, his facts were just plain wrong.

(Yes, that's Chiapas the parrot sitting on Clint's hat. He likes it there.)

Rolando told us that Monte Albán got its name from large white flowers that grew on a type of tree he identified as a morning glory. Hmmm. Morning glories are not trees. Moreover, the trees in question had only a few blossoms; hardly enough to turn the mountaintop white, although this might be different in another season. However, another type of tree common to the site was covered in white berries (shown on the left, below). Perhaps they were the inspiration for the Spanish name of the place.

As we walked along, viewing the massive stone structures, Rolando would frequently stoop down and pull up some plant or other, telling us its name and medicinal use. I was familiar with some of them; for example, epazote, a plant related to mint, is used in cooking beans in Mexico. What I didn't know is that it's an anti-flatulence herb. Cool. Rosario routinely uses it in our kitchen. You all should.

Pictured on the right, above, is a shrub he identified as copal. Juice from the berries is used to clear up acne.

A large number of steles and other carved stones were found at Monte Albán and set up for viewing. A row of them featuring depictions of human figures is shown here.

Some of the images dealt with human reproduction. On the left, below, is a male figure with an erection.

The figure on the right, according to our guide, is of a woman in the throes of a breech birth. The baby's feet have emerged, its head and torso are shown still in the mother's body.

Then again, Rolando's interpretation seems somewhat fanciful to me. The so-called baby, for example, appears to be wearing a hat.

Several vaguely pyramidal temples occupy the site.

None of them are in the original condition they were found in. Structures are continuously undergoing reconstruction here, as they are in most major archeological zones in Mexico.

So who shows these workers how to restore this temple correctly? Well, archeologists tell them how. They actually number the rocks. Workers read a map to know where to put each one.

Do you buy that? Not me. I bet archeologists have no more idea where each of these rocks go than your grandma. No ancient Zapotec stone mason decided to put stone #412 to the left of stone #411. Stone #414 would have been a much better fit there. Come on.

Note also how thick they slather on the mortar. This is to compensate for the poor fit of the stones in the pattern specified by the archeologists. They're using so much concrete here that they have an abañil dedicated to going back for more.

What did the ancient Zapotecs use to cut the grass? Flint-edged sickles, maybe? Their great-great-great-great... grandson uses a riding mower. He's got the best job on the site. Nothing beats riding around all day on a lawn tractor.

Looks like life has become much easier for these people, when you consider that his ancestors made their livings hauling stones up the mountain using muscle power alone.

Then there's the matter of guys selling genuine pre-columbian artifacts. They assault you in all of the frequently-visited places. They do their jobs in the same zombie-like manner as the straw hat sellers in San Miguel's Jardín. They approach you and make a half-hearted pitch. Then fifteen minutes later they hit you again, with no realization they ever saw you before. Can you imagine the US government allowing souvenir vendors into Williamsburg?

Rolando says the Zapotecs chose this place because of a bunch of complex astronomical, geographical and mystical reasons. I think they picked it because the climate is perfect, and the views are drop-dead gorgeous.

The Zapotecs knew prime real estate when they saw it. Tmpl. w/vw. EZ terms.

You got it. A bagpiper. He was pacing in that slow, solemn manner bagpipers use at memorials or wakes.

I felt mightily disoriented. Why was a bagpiper playing in front of a 17th-century Mexican church door?

He wasn't looking for donations. No tin cup, no hat, no open bagpipe case salted with a few coins and a half-dozen self-produced cds. No playing to the audience—he ignored us all. He was just playing for the hell of it.

He's a Scot, through and through. The shaggy beard, rumpled hair, gray woolen shirt, gloomy expression—this guy is straight off the moors. He's a quintessential piper: long thin fingers held straight, cheeks reddened from blowing, bag firmly pressed with his left arm, the noter gripped in the corner of his mouth. He's bringing a little bit of Scotland to Mexico: two places that couldn't be more different.

What was that tune he was playing? Ceilito Lindo.

Photo credit: Marne Rizika

The building is in a state of near-collapse. But it is still used by nearby residents, who come to the cemetery to honor their deceased.

The roof is gone, plants grow atop the walls, people have pried stones out of it to use for newer buildings. Mexican recycling.

You can't come here to baptize your babies anymore. No Masses, no quinciañeras. The building is crumbling, following in the footsteps of the nameless Zapotec ruin behind it, sleeping under its unexcavated mound.

But people were interred here as recently as 50 years ago. Modern crypts and grave markers testify that this place is not yet forgotten.

A small glass house protects a burning votive candle. It looks big enough to burn for a month, but the flowers are fresh, placed there this morning or yesterday.

Judging from the condition of the flowers below, Florentino Miguel Vasquez López was remembered sometime last week. Mexicans know that their offerings of flowers will be respected by passers-by, but perhaps not so, vases. But probably nobody is gonna take the Comex bucket.

A small yellow-breasted bird uses the cruciform grave marker for a perch. Droppings indicate he does this often. I imagine Miguel Vasquez appreciates his companionship.

It's a warm, sunny day. A warm breeze blows. Cumulus clouds scud overhead. In the churchyard, a mare and her foal graze peacefully.

It's a peaceful place to rest for a pleasant half hour. Or for some, a little longer.

... or this large dolphin. The cost of shipping one north would far exceed the cost of the carving itself.

People decorating Mexican homes are much closer to the source: shipping costs are pretty much not an issue. Marble columns, onyx furniture, travertine floor tiles are frequently found in expensive houses.

All this stuff gets made in factories. We visited one such in the state of Oaxaca. I'd name it and tell you what town it was in, but a man who retails marble sinks told Clint about the place on the condition that he not make the location public, probably to keep demand, and therefore prices down. Or maybe to deprive competitors of a good source.

One way you can tell you're approaching a marble factory is when you see houses with lots of over-the-top stonework. This is the home of a member of the family that owns the factory. The spiral patio is made of small pieces of onyx. Elaborate, but perhaps not particularly esthetic.

It's the front door, though, that drew my eye.

It's a mosaic of patterned onyx. Makes quite a statement, doesn't it? I could not have imagined that anyone could use stone in that way. But the door suffers from the same kind of over-elaborate design that sometimes crops up in fine woodworking, where garish patterns of contrasting woods serve only to showcase the maker's joinery skills, not his design ability.

And if that's not enough, there's an onyx sconce above the door, selected to produce yet another color contrast. Can't have too many, I guess.

—§—

A delightful aspect of traveling in Mexico is the freedom to enter and wander through workshops. At the stoneworking factory we walked unmolested past all the machines and workers, getting a good look at how the work is done.

Here, a worker uses a large crowbar to adjust the position of a large piece of rough marble prior to sawing it. The stone is so heavy that it doesn't need to be clamped during sawing. It's gonna stay right where the guy put it.

A huge saw blade is set to spinning. The operator cranks a handwheel to slide the stone through the cut. My teeth start to ache.

Copious amounts of water cool and lubricate the blade. The saw slices through stone like it was pot roast.

Here an artisan works a marble basin with a hand-held circular saw. He's shaping the piece freehand.

Sure doesn't look very safe. Below, another worker guides a saw through a bevel cut. He's pushing the blade toward his fingers.

I'm guessing these saw blades are not sharp. At one point I saw an operator clean slurry off the edges of a spinning blade with his wet fingers.

Actually, for a small-time Mexican artisanal factory, this one seems oddly safety-conscious. Well, a little bit, anyway. People who work close to cutters wear safety goggles and dust masks. And unlike the woodworkers in Adjuntos del Rio, the workers here seem to have all of their fingers. Still, compared with factories in the U. S., this place is an OSHA nightmare.

Clint buys some onyx sinks from one of the owners. Note that he is wearing huaraches, this in a place where people handle large stones with wet fingers.

A hand-lettered cardboard sign above the compressor behind Clint warns people not to lean on it. That's an exposed drivewheel behind the cylinder heads. Since it's in the nature of compressors to start automatically without warning, anyone leaning on it could lose fingers or worse. So much for safety. I mean, why not cage the damn thing?

Mexican businesses are run with pleasant informality. They don' need no steenkin' procedures. No regulations. Machines are jerry-rigged. Prices are negotiable. The pace is relaxed. The products, though, are art.

This is not a country that cranks out a million perfect iPhones. Instead, it makes a few dozen onyx vases, each one unique. Nobody else will ever have one exactly the same as yours. Nice, huh?

Must have weighed five pounds. You could have served all three of us with it and had leftovers. Very un-Mexican.

Puebla demonstrates that life is becoming economically better for many Mexicans. Sparkling restaurants, squeaky-clean hotels with all the amenities proves the point. A mercedes dealership gleamed smugly, sitting there across the highway from our hotel.

Of course, from a gringo tourist's point of view, prosperity makes Puebla look as interesting as Cleveland. But this generation of Mexicans has known poverty. What looks like suburban sprawl, like franchise ennui to us, looks like paradise to them. The great industrial cities—Querétaro, Monterrey, Puebla—are growing and producing an educated middle class that will ultimately break down the caste system and reduce corruption and inefficiency even as they're building shopping malls and freeways. I think I'll just shut up and congratulate them on their progress when appropriate.

Tomorrow we'll be in Oaxaca. It'll be full of charm—and full of poverty. Do the two have to go hand in hand?

Outside the conservatory are beds of plants adapted to the poor soils and dry climate of the Bahio. Inside, a variety of protected microclimates have been established, from dry and warm to riparian.

Hundreds of species inhabit the conservatory and its surrounds. It would be impossible to photograph and describe even a tiny fraction of them. This is a place you simply have to see for yourself.

Here we have one of the yuccas, a type we called Bottle Palms in California, beside an agave in bloom, it's 20' flower spike framed in the doorway. OK. That's two plants. Only 498 to go.

Through the door, the view leads to a natural landscape; chollas outlined against the sky and huizaches in the background.

Cacti are the most represented group; a seemingly endless progression of variations in colors and shapes .

I haven't been able to figure out how to photograph some of the most interesting forms: sinuous cacti that run along the ground ten feet or more, arboreal cacti that hang from branches like vines.

Almost any time you visit, you'll find cacti in bloom.

To me, it seems almost impossible that these tough, thick, spiky plants produce such beautiful, delicate flowers. Most blooms last only a day.

Succulents store water in their leaves, giving them a fleshy, turgid look. There are almost as many of them here as there are cacti.

A stream runs through the conservatory, providing habitat for water plants.

The water is recirculated through filters by a solar-powered pump. El Charco as a whole produces a negative carbon footprint. (Try to get your head around that concept,)

Outside the conservatory, hardier plants grow in attractive groupings. Flagstones invite strolling, benches allow visitors resting places.

The conservatory compresses a broad ecosystem into a tiny space. In the image above, those are cattails to the right of the cacti. Not many places in the world where you can see that.

I'll return often to photograph the plants. Many photographers do.

Here we have El Guapo with a huge pile of gear looming over an innocent blooming cactus. He is cursing his 4X5 view camera, hoping it'll become intimidated and start cooperating with him.

Ah, Paul. "'Tis a poor workman, who blames his tools."

It informs me that the value of my property has increased, on account of the work placing the power lines under the street. The increase in the assessment is such that my taxes will increase by 20%.

Below you can view the appearance of my street now that the work has been completed. I'd show you a "before" picture so you could judge the amount of improvement for yourselves, but alas, it would look the same.

Yes, conduit has been buried under the street and wires for the electrical supply have been snaked through. But they are connected neither to the transformer nor to any of the houses along the street. Nor is there any sign this is going to happen soon.

This is typical of Mexican construction: part of the job gets done, then everything screeches to a halt.

Compounding the problem, it seems no plans appear exist for placing TV cable and telephone lines underground. Rumor has it that Telmex isn't cooperating with the city, casting doubt over whether telephone lines will in fact ever be buried.

I really have little cause for complaint. My new tax bill will still be less than $300 per year. I'm impressed that the city is able to supply as many services as they do for that amount.

But I still get a sense of deja vu. Once again, I'm paying money for which I'm not receiving anything in return: a common experience for anyone who lives in Mexico, whether citizen or transplanted gringo.

A modest palapa serves as the entry to the gardens, where you pay a $30 peso day pass fee unless, like me, you are awarded an annual membership. My privileges allow me to secure entry for guests like El Guapo here. This is the only way he can get in, having been denied full membership. (Apparently someone blackballed him—a not entirely unfamiliar experience, I'm sure.)

Just beyond the entrance, plantings of cactus and other xeriscape plants greet visitors. It's immediately obvious that these gardens are designed, planted and maintained by experts. Mexico has some beautiful gardens, but few so manicured as these.

A clue to where the skillful gardening comes from appears in the form of that rarest of all Mexican gardeners: one with pruning shears. Usually you see guys with machetes whacking away at the shrubbery. Used for shearing, pruning, lopping and felling trees, they perform none of these tasks well. At el Charco, someone has gone to the expense of providing gardeners with proper tools, and training them how to use them.

El Charco is more than a bunch of formal plantings. The preserve covers 100 hectares (250 acres) of canyon, hills, streams, reservoirs and structures. Directional signs on a dead tree point out visitors' options.

Unfortunately, an additional sign prohibits dogs. The management was unwilling to waive this rule, even for a well-mannered purebred Boston Terrier. Rosie was disappointed.

The fanciful Plaza de los Cuatro Vientos (Plaza of the Four Winds) is used for a number of public activities, some involving indigenous traditions, music and dance.

On the south side of the plaza, a stone pavilion with an altar houses smaller functions.

In the summer, a súchil appears. A form of religious offering, it's made by local indigenous people from the leaves of the Green Desert Spoon (one of the agaves). Raising of the súchil is a part of the festival of the holy Cross—a blending of European and Indian religious traditions that underscores the futility of the efforts of the conquistadors to eradicate indigenous beliefs and culture.

El Charco packs a lot into 100 hectares. Hiking trails take you through a steep-walled canyon containing ponds, wildlife, and plants.

That's an abandoned aqueduct running along the canyon wall.

A silted-up reservoir provides habitat for egrets and other waterfowl.

The structure on the horizon is the crown jewel of el Charco: the Conservatory of Mexican Plants. It contains a wonderful collection of desert plants, mostly cactus, some of them rare. I'll cover the conservatory in a future post.

If you come to San Miguel, el Charco is a "don't miss." If you live here, you should become a member and visit it frequently. Projects like this need and deserve your support. You have no business complaining about litter or polluting buses if you're not supporting efforts to restore and improve the environment.

And you need el Charco. You need a few quiet hours, sitting beside still water, breathing in all the natural beauty, healing yourselves. The Indians who have lived here for millennia know this. Time for us gringos to learn it too.

It was fitting then that Porfirio Díaz used a special train to make his escape to Veracruz where he sailed for Paris and exile. He had his very own train, you know. Sort of a rolling Air Force One.

His personal railroad car sits today beside a restaurant on the Querétaro Highway.

You can tell it's not an ordinary passenger car from the uneven placement of the windows. This one was built specially for someone who could afford it.

The lettering at the top of the car originally read "Nacionales de Mexico," the short form of the name of the national railway. Below the windows, the lettering tells us it was reserved for "management special services"—probably adopted for use by railroad executives after Porfirio Díaz was deposed.

This is a big car. Because of its size, and the need to not jostle its important passenger, top-of-the-line triple axle trucks smooth the ride. All the windows are operable and have screens (things you'll never find on an ordinary passenger car), so that when standing on a siding in mosquito country, they can be opened for cross-ventilation.

After all, this car was used for housing as well as for transportation. Here's a part of the galley.

The explanation for the liquor bottles is that the current owner uses the car as a party venue. Check out the old brass General Electric fan.

Paul Latours, seated here in the parlor, would have worn his wing collar and tails had he known we'd be invited inside.

Red velvet upholstery, marble-topped tables, etched glass mirrors—this conveyance was not for the common people.

There are two bedrooms, each with its en-suite bathroom. (A single shower is down the corridor.)

Those sinks are made from Monel, a nickel-copper alloy that I last saw used in the Horn & Hardart Automat Restaurant on 38th Street in Manhattan when I was thirteen years old.

An office for a secretary contains its own toilet and an ingenious fold-out vanity, also made of Monel.

A utility closet contains what we today would call a load center, manufactured by the Safety Car Heating and Lighting Company of New Haven, Connecticut. I don't think Mexico had the capability of manufacturing its own passenger cars at the time.

Those copper strips are knife switches, not used much anymore because it's easy to get a shock from one. You saw them in Dr. Frankenstein's electrical apparatus and, more dramatically, in the Titanic's generator room in the 1958 movie A Night to Remember.

In any other country, a railroad car of this historical significance would be in a museum. Queen Victoria's train is in the Railway Museum in York. This one sits alongside the Querétaro Highway, quietly deteriorating. I was lucky to find it.