Where Is Annie?

We eat a lot of Mexican food in California.  Whether just a snack of tortilla chips and salsa or our Christmas Eve meal of tamales this cuisine is an important part of our lives.  It was hard living without it.  We tried Mexican food in Rishikesh, India.  Twenty-four hours later we all got violently ill.  We went to a Mexican restaurant in Buenos Aires.  Overpriced and mediocre with incredibly weird beans.  We ate tacos in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  A Canadian owned the restaurant.  It was the best of the year.  Until we got to Mexico.

Some of the best eating in Mexico was on the streets.  We had been so careful in other countries with street food, and despite being careful we had been sick in almost every country.  But there was no way we were going to miss out of the flavors of Mexico.  And the flavors live in the street.  At taco stands or puestas, at fruit stalls and chip stands, at stands selling fruit drinks or agua frescas, at ice cream carts and pots full of tamales.  We found our joy so easily.  Of course, we each got sick in Mexico.  We never knew which food had made us sick.  It was usually too hard to figure out.  And it didn’t matter.  We just wanted to taste the essence of Mexico.  And we found it on the street.

The most important flavor in Mexico is corn.  The ancient Mexicans figured out how to process it.  Once the corn is ground it’s mixed with water and sometimes lard to make a dough or masa. There are so many shapes into which masa is formed.  These shapes then hold all sorts of good tasting foods.  In Mexico City, in the Zocalo, the original plaza of the Aztecs, we tried a tlayuda.  It started with a large thin crisp of blue corn, rendering a crisp yet slightly chewy base.  It was then smeared with refried beans and sprinkled with roasted cactus leaves, hot sauce, and cheese. In Guanajuato we discovered the chalupa or “canoe”.  The yellow corn masa is formed into the shape of a small boat and then deep fried.  It is the crispy, slightly greasy vehicle for beans, cabbage, cheese, and, of course, the red or green salsa of your choice.  The mix of textures were perfect: the chalupa was so crisp it would crackle as I bit it, the beans were a soft interlude, and the cabbage provided a crunch.  The salsa invariably ran down my arm as the chalupa fell apart on the first bite.

In Guanajuato we headed to El Jardín de Embajadoras, a plaza known for its tlacoyos.  The masa is shaped into a pointed oval as it’s folded around a filling of meat or beans or cheese.  Then the package is cooked on the skillet or comal. Of course, there is a variety of spicy salsas waiting on the counter to pour over the tlacoyo and to enhance the combination of bean and corn.  We would often choose a salsa verde as it seemed to compliment the pork we kept ordering.

In the Plaza Baratillo there were a score of puestas selling food over the course of the day.  During the day most sold tacos and/or gorditos.  Often the tortilla was handmade, a ball of soft masa is pressed flat in a tortilla press then thrown on the comal to cook.  There are a dozen or so tins of guisados or stews.  My favorite always involved pork often in a red chili sauce.  I never tried the tripe.  Cat, our vegetarian, would break with her strict diet accepting the lard that enriched the beans.  In contrast to the tacos gorditas were made by not pressing the ball of masa quite so thin.  The dough would puff like pita bread.  The women running the puesta would slice open the pocket and fill it with the guisado of our choice.  The gordita had a heftier masa bite than the tortilla.  I preferred the gordita, Bill and Hank the tacos.

Our favorite stand of Plaza Baratillo was one that didn’t start its operation until after 6pm.  They didn’t serve beans.  Only tacos with meat.  During our last week in Guanajuato (and of our year) Cat got the flu.  Bill, Hank, and I left her at home and headed to the stand for dinner, three nights in a row.  The men who ran the stand didn’t make their own tortillas.  They made their tacos with two tiny tortillas like the ones at taco trucks in Oakland.  They had chopped the meat before grilling it on the skillet.  As the meat cooked lard was rendered into a groove around the comal.  They dipped the tortillas in the lard before heating them.  Then filled the tortillas with meat of our choice (carnitas, chorizo, chicken, or al pastor) and added grilled onions, cilantro, and fresh onions.  We chose from the salsa bar either salsa roja, salsa verde, or avocado salsa.  If I forced it I could eat three tacos.  Hank, one evening, ate seven.

In the Mercado Hildago the vendors sell food.  There stalls selling fresh fruits like strawberries, mangos, and rambutan, vegetables like cactus leaves and chayote, milk, cheese, and meat.  And then there are the restaurant stalls.  We walked past the tostados with seafood, I drooling, the rest of my family not at all interested.  Then we found the carnitas stand.   Cat still was not interested, but the rest of us paused.  The vendors stood with large chunks of pork in their hands, ready to hand out their samples.  I took one and bit in.  The intensity of the flavor and the tenderness of the bite was wonderful.  We watched Hank as he ordered a taco, doused it with salsa and headed toward gustatory bliss.  Bill and I had just eaten lunch and could only dream of how wonderful the taco would be if we were hungry.

Guanajuato wasn’t hot while we were there, but we had a lot walking to do there.  Much of the city was closed to cars; the automobile traffic was in tunnels made from old riverbeds.  Many of the roads were really just footpaths heading up the ridges to get to another part of town.  We were often thirsty.  We drank agua fresca.  We decided to trust the ice.  The family’s favorite flavor was orchata, a cold drink of rice, cinnamon, and sugar. We tried the strawberry, but it often tasted artificial.  The watermelon was real and devine.  Cut fruit was also available, the classic way to eat it is with a shake of salt, a sprinkle of chili, and a squeeze of lime.  We usually ate the mango, but also liked cucumber and jicama (not a fruit).  We didn’t try the pears sold on the street, jagged cut and covered in chili.

Along with the aguas frescas we quenched our thirst with paletas or popsicles.  As we headed to the vendor I was sure I was going to make a big leap in adventure.  There were so many flavors: lime, coconut, strawberry, strawberry with cream, pistachio, mango, mango with chili.  But I always chose tamarindo.  It always had the right sweet-sour balance to make my mouth pucker as it melted and left my tongue with a sweet after taste.  My kids were more adventuresome.  They are still working on which is their favorites.

Ice cream was also a cold treat we favored on the streets.  We were told Dolores Hidalgo was a small city  most famous for its ice cream.  The ice cream was made in tubs and sold from the tubs.  Push carts filled with ice and tubs of ice cream fended for a spot at street corners, as many as five on one corner.  The flavors were numerous.  There were the classic flavors: strawberry, vanilla, chocolate.  There were the slightly more daring flavors: mango, caramel, and coconut.  And then there are those we had never seen before: tequila, cheese, avocado, and corn.  I never found it, but apparently some vendors were pushing octopus ice cream through the streets.

We weren’t able to sample many of the snacks on the streets.  We were never hungry enough to try everything we saw.  I did try the roasted corn on the cob slathered in lime-flavored mayo, cheese, and chili sauce.  I took three bites and threw it away.  It was rich, chewy, and just plain awful.  I wanted to try the potato chips with chili sauce poured over them or the Doritos, the bag slit open down the side, with chili and chewy chicharrones poured inside.  There were fruits blended whole and poured into cups.  Pastries in huge baskets tended by old women tempted me, but I had already indulged in the tacos before I could get to the others.  The choices on the streets of Mexico were endless, and we couldn’t sample them all.  I guess we’ll have to go back.

We spent our last month in Guanajuato, Mexico, up in the mountains north of Mexico City.  The city is built in the 1500’s within the ravines of a few connecting dry riverbeds.  We lived toward the top of a ridge above most of the town.  Sounds were carried up into our home bouncing off the walls of ravines.  And we heard the music of Mexico, music which didn’t stop.  Truly, it didn’t stop.

In the central garden, El Jardín de la Unión, by four o’clock in the afternoon there were three or four groups of mariachis waiting to serenade a table.  In the evening there were sometimes as many as nine groups.  Mariachis are an important part of celebrations in Mexico.  Tables of people celebrating often a birthday, but sometimes a reunion, or a football match victory would hire a band to sing six or seven songs.  Often there would be two or three bands singing around different tables at the same time.  They would sometimes wait for each other to finish a song, but sometimes they’d play at the same time just like stereo wars in a college dorm.

Some mariachis were dressed in jeans and cowboy shirts, sporting Stetsons on their head.  But the look I liked was the classic mariachi suit: a short waisted jacket above high waisted pants.  Cowboy boots are de rigueur.  The pants were trimmed with metal links up the outside of the legs.  One mariachi’s pants were trimmed with tiny spurs running up his legs.   For another the links held small skulls together from his cuff to his waist.  One band had several different suits, different colors on different days of the weeks with cowboy boots to match.  The most striking was the orange suit with bright orange boots.

The music of the mariachi is classic Mexican.  Some bands had a number of violins, some added one or two trumpets, and some had a drum set.  They all had a couple of guitars and, of course, that big bass guitar with the curved back so needed for the bass line of the Mexican songs.  They sang in baritone and tenor, somtimes in harmony and often off-key.  The mariachis played every night usually until 5 in the morning, their songs drifting up the ravines into our bedroom window.

Late in the evenings estudiatinas join in the music making.  This tradition began in the early 60’s when some students discovered the music and traditions of medivel Spain.  Groups of student musicians dressed in medivel European outfits play songs and lead tourists through the narrow alleys of Guanajuato.  The experience is called a callejoneada, translated as something like alley-ing.  The songs were mostly well known Mexican songs.  Everyone around us was singing along.  The estudiatinas would stop and tell a story in various plazas throughout the route.  In one plaza we were taught to drink from a porrón, a Spanish wine decantor.  We had learned from our friends in Spain a couple of years ago.  I thought I knew how to do it but ended up spilling apple juice down my front.  Hank didn’t spill a drop.  The estudiantes then led us to yet another plaza and pulled Cat out of the crowd to dance along with several other women.  They played a song about a rooster, and my daughter had to flap her elbows like a chicken.  We didn’t understand the words of the song, but we laughed out loud.  The tour ended at the Callejón del Beso, or the Alley of the Kiss.  Bill and I kissed in the alley, guaranteeing us years more of wedded bliss.

Dancing is part of the music.  Salsa music reigns in a couple of bars in Guanajuato.  There the atmosphere is mellow.  Many of the people in Guanajuato really know what they’re doing.  Their feet follow the rhythm: 1-2-3…5-6-7 with smooth, subtle steps.  Their hips follow the rhythm as well but in a much wider path.  The women dance better in heels, but no one is dressed to the nines.  Bill and I tried to learn, taking a couple of lessons.  It didn’t work.  We did enjoy sitting at the tables, watching the dancers, swaying with the music, and drinking our palomas.

The salsa music wasn’t just for the bars.  On Fridays a group of seniors gathered to dance at the Jardin Reforma.  The music was recorded but the DJ was live.  We watched as maybe 10 couples all over 70 years graced the plaza with their dance steps.  Some of the men still had it, leading their ladies, hopping, skipping, and sliding.  At the end of the songs the DJ encouraged us onlookers to applaud for the dancers.  I clapped enthusiastically.

We also got to see two symphony concerts.  The university symphony plays every Friday night.  The kids and I went to see a group of musicians playing music from the renaissance.  A street musician moved in down the road from us and played the same Beatles songs on the street every day with his guitar case begging for pesos.  Cat and I had drinks (only mine had tequila) at a bar just to listen to the band.  Bill and I even visited the disco recommended by our flaming, round, works-at-night-as-a-lawyer Spanish teacher.  But there was no music there.  Just a bass line with 20-somethings dressed to kill and barely tapping their toes.  The songs that were blaring were just noise as a backdrop to the pickup scene.

And noise is part of the Guanajuato experience.  In the mornings the roosters crow and dogs bark.  Strong men who carry water jugs or gas tanks yell out their wares, “Agua” or “Gas”, throughout the day.  But it’s the music that is the noise that makes the town special.  There was music day and night, though mostly at night, all night.  The music would sometimes wake me up.  And I would smile as I drifted back to sleep, serenaded by the music of Mexico.  Thank God I couldn’t hear the disco.

In our travels this year we’ve been to three museums with mummies.  In Istanbul, there is a classic Egyptian mummy, King Tabnit, on display.  He’s displayed next to Alexander the Great’s sarcophagus.  In Arequipa, Peru, we saw a frozen mummy named Juanita, who was sacrificed on top of a 6300 meter mountain, Mt Ampato.   She was basically freeze-dried and is now displayed in a glass-walled freezer.  In Guanajuato, Mexico, we visited the Museo de las Momias.  Here instead of one mummy, there are scores of mummies, literally halls of dead bodies, mummified not by intent but by a natural phenomenon.

Warning: Below is a picture of one of the mummies.  If you’re squeamish, don’t continue.

I’ve read of two theories of how the mummies came to be.  In the first theory , some of the bodies of the dead were placed in crypts above ground since the 1700’s.  The worms couldn’t get into the crypts to crawl in and crawl out, and there was no moisture in the air.  So the bodies just dried out, completely.  On the other hand some of the locals say that the soil is of a special composition of minerals and that some those bodies which were buried were mummified through a chemical reaction with those minerals.  The mummies were first discovered when in the mid-1800’s a tax was placed on families for the upkeep of the cemetery.  If the family couldn’t afford the tax, or if there was no family, the body was exhumed.  To the surprise of the officials they exhumed mummies.

Most of the mummies are in amazing condition with their dry, papery skin still intact.  Many are wearing their shoes and socks.  Some still have on some article of clothing.  One man is wearing a pair of polyester pants which look as good as new.  Most are, however, naked, many fully intact though shrunken.  There are people from all walks of life.  The first mummy exhumed was a foreign doctor.  One mummy has a huge wound over his liver where he was stabbed.  Another mummy has her arms over her face as if she struggled within her tomb.  It is believed she was buried alive while in a state of catalepsy.  Babies are buried in their christening gowns.  A mother was buried holding her premature infant.  A tiny embryo was discovered mummified within a crypt, the mother’s body having disintegrated around it.  For a really ghoulish display, a side museum keeps the mummified body of a “vampire”, a body with two very long pointed canine teeth in its mouth and a wooden stake through its heart.

Somehow it fits that these mummies were discovered and are displayed in Mexico.  This is the land of the Aztec.  The people who sacrificed their own by pulling out the still beating heart of their victims.  Artifacts from the days of the Aztecs and other more ancient peoples often have images of death or murder painted or sculpted on the side.  Small clay skulls line the edge of a vessel kept in a museum here in Guanajuato.  It was the Aztec rituals which became the current celebration of the Dia de los Muertos.  Throughout Guanajuato we’ve found sculptures of skeletons performing every day tasks: the doctor skeleton, the bride skeleton, the mariachi skeleton.  Paper mâché skulls painted in bright colors are decked with butterflies.  The symbols of death are beautified and even glorified.  Here it’s not so creepy to display these mummies.  It fits in with so much else we’ve seen here.  Maybe unlike the US, death is accepted here.  After all, it is part of everyone’s life.   We got to see it at the Museo de las Momias.

The picture above is gross.  Sorry to those for whom it was too disturbing.  But if you’re one of the ones who’d like to see more go here.