Mexico, City of Museums

Mexico City is a great museum town. As the seat of the Spanish Viceregency and, briefly, a Francophone Empire, Mexico City has a long tradition of royal patronage that assembled treasures from its rich, multicultural heritage. The Museo Nacional de AntropologÍa, inaugurated in 1964, began what is now a half-century of cultural enterprise sponsored by public and private means. The latest addition to this assemblage opened the last week in March. Museo Soumaya, built, furnished and endowed by Mexico’s premiere entrepreneur, Carlos Slim, is marvelous in its architecture and its collections, and, as Slim has repeatedly insisted, Mexican from design to execution.

I’m staying in the historic center, a ten-minute walk from some of the city’s marvels: the Palacio Cultural Banamex, which opened in 2002 and exhibits colonial painting; the Museo del Estanquillo, home to the Mexican writer, Carlos Monsivais’, whimsical collection of objects; and my favorite, the Museo Franz Mayer, which houses the decorative arts assembled by the German-Mexican financier in the 20th century. With so much at arm’s length, why bother to visit a museum beyond Polanco and far from the nearest Metro? I can only say that it’s well worth the effort.

The first challenge is getting there. I touched off a spat between the bell captain and the concierge at the hotel when I asked for routing. Turns out that there are two Soumaya museums which complicates matters, but even having the address —Plaza Carzo, Colonia Ampliaciones Granada—gave them little to go on. As the hotel staff parsed its maps, I went out on the street for some real expertise. Locating the nearest taxi stand and waving a newspaper account of the museum’s opening, I asked for volunteers. After a few blank stares, one driver offered that he’d never heard of the museum, but he knew how to find Plaza Carso—and he did. The museum is located on the west side of Delegación Hidalgo, on an appropriately neoliberal site between Saks Fifth Avenue and Costco.

The exterior is nothing short of stunning. Clad in a reticulated, shiny skin and situated on a sculpted hillock, the Soumaya stands at a dignified distance from its commercial surroundings. Its silhouette forms a crescent, from foundation to waist to roof—bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the Fukushima reactor. Taking in the full perimeter is currently impossible, as heavy equipment applies finishing touches to the landscape, but the juxtaposition of cranes with the building, one solidly straight, the other delicately curved, provided a striking consolation.

One rectangular door provides the only public entrance. Another rectangle, this a metal detector, stands just inside. Security yields to an enormous vestibule, currently decorated with couches, floor-standing metal sculpture and a multi-media exhibition done by Mexican school children. Looking (way) up reveals a curvilinear, dropped ceiling shaped like the hull of the Starship Enterprise—surely the resemblance occurred to the architect—and looking left reveals a ramp raked gently upward.

Yes, the Soumaya is a serpentine. It’s a museum, after all, and comparisons with Bilbao punctuate descriptions of the opening. The incline feels gentler than Wright’s Guggenheim – I haven’t been to Bilbao—and its surrounding spaces are bare, white, and lowly illuminated. Each of the five floor levels breaks out of the dim monotony in its own way.

The first floor begins with a tribute to gold and silver, and why not? Money built the place and assembled its collections. However, given the telecommunications source of the Carlos Slim fortune, silicon might have been displayed, as well. Precious metal transitions smoothly to their early extraction in the Indies, particularly Mexico and Peru, and to illustrate the South American mines, two floating partitions exhibit a set of paintings from Potosi, Sucre and the north of Argentina done by an anonymous artist in the 18th century. These paintings establish a tone that subsequent floors would maintain—an expansive range of tastes from sculpture and easel-painted high art to the objects of everyday (if elite, every day) life. They also demonstrate the capacity of modern capitalists to search the world for treasures. The Peruvian paintings are known to scholars as the “Crombie Collection,” after their former British owners. I do not know if the current owner will now attach his name to them; the Slim Collection doesn’t sound quite right.

Even with their striking chronological and geographical sweep (El Bosco to Botero; El Greco/ Van Gogh) collections of fine art are strikingly French -oriented. The fifth floor has what must be the largest collection of Rodin sculptures ever assembled. Major impressionist painters, Degas, Pisarro and Renoir (11 paintings and 3 bronzes from the last by my count), all have representatives of their ouvre on the third floor. The fourth floor is dedicated to Mexican artists of the 20th century, with a Diego Rivera painted head at the entrance and canvases by Orozco, Toledo, Tamayo, Dr. Atl and Soriano scattered about. An enormous mural, Siqueiros’ La Tierra como el agua y la industria nos pertencen, strikes a prescient tone. Along with these contemporary Mexican giants, curators have arranged three dozen cases of masterworks by anonymous precolombian ceramicists.

Curators have successfully toned down the glitterati with themes from the Mexican earth. Near the gold and silver tribute hang remarkable sets of Mexican family portraits, including a dozen from the Cumplido Rodriguez clan, completed in the 18th and 19th centuries. A large part of the third floor features travelers’ paintings of the Mexican landscape. An eighteenth-century depiction of the Iglesia de Itzacalco by Pedro Villegas gives way to more familiar scenes of the Valley of Mexico done by English and French visitors in the 1860s. Nearby is a collection of resplendent Guadalupe images done by Mexican artists in the 18thcentury. And would any Mexican art collection be complete without the set of casta paintings displayed on the first floor?

At closing time, the staff was gentle but firm, I noticed a small convoy of black Tahoes pulling up to a side entrance. Apparently, I just missed a private showing that Mr. Slim gave to the Colombian pop star, Shakira, who is in town for a concert. I hope she enjoyed the museum as much as I did.

The Valdivia Market

Despite intermittent earthquakes and a conflagration that consumed most of its traditional, wooden structures a century ago, Valdivia stands right where it was founded in 1554. The city owes its longevity to a resilient economy based on timbering, agriculture, and ranching in the uplands to the east and the rich, marine resources of the Pacific Ocean to the west. This mix of land and sea colors the local palate and the daily produce market that is the subject of this post.

The opening of the Chilean economy, a hallmark of two decades of military dictatorship, brought a plague of supermarkets to the country. Mass merchandizing, prepackaging, and long distance hauling have undermined some sectors of food retailing. But in a way that locovores have recently adopted in the United States, Valdivia offers an alternative to the supermarket. At the foot of the Paseo de la Libertad and beneath a crazy quilt of plastic tarps, farmers and fishermen offer their wares from 8 AM to sunset.

An aisle divides the market into a realm of vegetables and another of fish. I found the green groceries familiar. Mounds of potatoes rose beside flats of strawberries, green and red peppers, baskets of peas and pints of the locally-abundant bing cherries. Across the aisle, many of the offerings lay outside my vocabulary.

Torpedo-shaped pescada stared up from pallets with eyes so shiny that they appeared ready to slip back into the water and swim away. (Since “pescada” differs by only one letter from “pescado,” the generic name for fish, I asked several times for clarification.) A large, pink-skinned fish whose body tapers to a finless tail carries the name congrio. It’s delicious, by the way. There were also some familiar species: salmon (wild, I was assured on more than one occasion), flounder (merlusa), and pejerrey, a brakish-water fish introduced to Lake Titicaca fifty years ago with disastrous consequences for its ecosystem. I did not see octopus (calamar) in the market, but I found some later in the day in a soup.

Shoppers chose both their fish and its processing: au natural, beheaded, scaled, filleted (or any combination). Butchers followed individual orders and tossed fish heads, entrails, and scales toward the river. Most of the discards never touched the water, though, as flocks of gulls and white pelicans hovered in the air hoping for some easy pickings. And patrolling the water’s surface, huge sea lions (lobos marineros) silently feasted on the largest bits and noisily received the leftovers at maket’s end—nothing wasted here.

Whales in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia is duly famous for its lobsters and lighthouses, and they're plentiful, all right. But the highlight of our July 2010 vacation to the island was a whale watch in the Bay of Fundy.

The humpback whale's life cycle brings pods of females with their calves in tow to the north Atlantic as they swim to summer feeding grounds off Newfoundland. Nova Scotia seems to be something of a stopover on the way further north. So whale activity there is somnolent; it's as if they were catching their breath before the last push to Newfoundland.

Pacific Life Insurance’s use of the whale as its logo, and their superimposition of breaching and tail slapping to try to convince viewers to use their products trivializes the attraction of whale watching. First of all, nothing is guaranteed. Certain areas of the coast, certain times of the day make sightings more likely, but much depends on luck. Many outfitters guarantee that they will take you out until you see whales, but that is a hollow promise given most vacation schedules. And second, the dramatic breaching occurs so unexpectedly that it is almost impossible to observe and even more difficult to capture on film or digits. Talking to the crew after our own successful cruise, we learned that the day before, they had seen nothing. But I get ahead of myself.

Whale watching boats come in two flavors. The “traditional” rigging is a flat decked, diesel powered craft carrying a couple of dozen people and a crew of four. These are often refitted from other uses for the tourist season—ours is a lobster boat eight months of the year. The second type is the Zodiac, a large, inflatable craft with an outboard motor and a crew of two. The appeal of the Zodiac is that it takes its six passengers right up to the whale. But because they are so close to the water, Zodiacs require a wetsuit-like garment to shield whale watchers from chop and spray. We chose the traditional rigging.

Most outfitters run two daily cruises, morning and evening. In making reservations in the spring, I had quizzed the owners on which was more likely to see whales, but never succeeded in getting a straight answer. For some reason, I chose the 9AM departure. This seemed reasonable until we got driving times from our B&B at Annapolis Royal to the dock at East Ferry, an hour and a half. What was I thinking on a vacation? As it turned out we arrived with ten minutes to spare only to learn that the cruise had been cancelled. Turns out we were the only takers; “people just don’t want to get up early,” the owner observed as my wife gave me a withering stare. Rather than get back in the car, we reserved seats on the 2PM boat and took in some Nova Scotian lobster and lighthouses as we whiled away five hours.

The afternoon boat was filled, but not beyond capacity. I believe that we were the only people from the States aboard. Most of our companions were Canadian, but from all across the country, one couple hailed from Vancouver. There was one Englishman (more on him later) and an Australian couple. After its crew provided a brief overview of the trip and safety instructions, the Passage Provider, chugged off from the pier and out into Digby Neck before turning north into the Bay of Fundy. The first half hour passed uneventfully. We excitedly sighted a pair of dolphins rolling off our starboard and laughed as a seal (of some sort) poked its head above the water and watched us pass. To this point we had dutifully seated ourselves along the boat railing and on both sides of bench positioned in center of the deck. This would soon change.

Perhaps a half hour out of port, one of the crew who was sitting on the roof of the cockpit spotted a whale breaching. He didn’t say “thar' she blows,” but that anachronism would have been appropriate as spray propelled from the breathing hole is the surest sign of a whale when viewed from a distance. As we approached our quarry, the passengers moved, tentatively at first and then in a rush to the side of the boat that would have the best view. Our Englishman, brandishing a video camera, was particularly aggressive in his movements. After a while, we learned to give him a wide berth. But everyone managed to get a good look.

For an hour and a half, moving between four pods, we saw whales breach with loud hisses as they expelled carbon dioxide and water vapor above their blowholes. Sometimes they just logged as we went by. They rolled and dove—the pattern was three rolls and dive. We even got several signature tail raises on the dive. Everyone was thrilled, especially the crew.

Since we had done so well, they felt free to admit that things are not always so good. The day before, the single whale that was sighted became the quarry of five boats. But not today. Today was wonderful.

Marketing in Solola

Sololá is a town of 35,000 perched 2,000 feet above the shore of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán. It has a long history, appearing in the Anales de los Cakchiquels as Tecpán-Atitlán and dating its Spanish foundation to 1547. But that’s all in the past. Today, a sunny Friday, Sololá welcomes shoppers to its twice weekly market, and we’ve come along for a look.

Sololá sits at the nexus of a commercial network that includes fish and water plants taken from the lake below and garden vegetables harvested on the plains above. Wholesalers visit the market on Thursday night and make purchases destined for tables in Guatemala City, El Salvador and the United States. The retail action begins (very) early on Friday, and we found that some items, especially flowers, were sold out by 9:00, the time we pulled into town.

While the market spills across the whole town, its main concentrations are the Parque Central and three commercial blocks to the west. Grain and vegetable sellers sit around the park’s perimeter, breaking down large lots into small quantities weighed out on hand-held balance scales. Commerce at this location seemed pretty bland—order, weigh out, pay. But walk a little further west, and hold on to your wallet.

Three narrow streets are closed to motor traffic on market days, making way for one of the most interesting brokerages on earth, a wave of crowd and color. The products are as varied as they are copious, a pot potpourri of the familiar and exotic. “BAÑO hay BAÑO,” droned a man with plastic basins at his feet. A shoe salesman hawked his wares with “ZAPATOS MEXICANOS, BARATOS.” We stepped over chickens, ducks and turkeys and learned that they are priced at 60, 50 and 100 Quetzales, respectively. In another area, we sniffed medicinal plants, some of which have yet to emerge from their Maya nomenclature.

At some point, I realized that my friend, Leigh, was in the grasp of a woman selling textiles. Turns out that “Maria” had made first contact as we crossed the Parque Central and was now addressing Leigh by her first name. Leigh doesn’t speak Spanish, but Maria had crossed the language barrier for her. “Give me another price,” she kept repeating. For what seemed like an hour, but was probably no more than fifteen minutes, Maria followed us through the crowd. She would sometimes disappear from view, but only to get a better angle for the next round of bargaining. And when we entered the park again, the two adversaries reached a dignified agreement.

We left soon after, but I still have my memories and my sunburn.

Alacitas

January 24, 2010
Today La Paz, Bolivia, begins a month-long observance of Alacitas, the annual festival of hope for a bountiful future. A mix of indigenous and European traditions – what in Bolivia isn’t?— Alacitas encourages the purchase of miniatures in anticipation that with enough faith and effort from the devotee, they will grow into the real thing before the next January 24th rolls around.

The miniatures have morphed over the years with advances in technology and expectations. Trucks, cars and houses along with dollars and Bolivian currency used to dominate. Now currencies are world-wide with Euros, Yen, and yuan entering the market basket. I did not see many trucks this year, but busses abound and Hummers have supplanted sedans. Another interesting twist for 2010 is a miniature house construction, with reinforced concrete pillars erected and sacks of cement, corrugated roofing panels and floor tiles laid nearby.

To add to their prospects, shoppers can also purchase a blessing. The blessers, most looking like curanderos brought in for the day, burn offerings of coca, honey and flower petals over tiny braziers and pass the miniatures through the smoke. Another technique employs intinction, using a flower dipped in solutions whose compositions I could not discern.

The icon of Alacitas is the Eke’ko, a jolly, little man offering an expansive gesture with his arms and sometimes accessorized with a cigarette thrust between his parted lips. “Eke’ko” means “buy me” in the Aymara language. Thus named, he is the pitch man for Alacitas’ miniatures, some of which he carries on his arms and back. The Eke’ko also references Pachamama, the Andean earth mother, and is appropriately venerated as the sustainer of life.

Another item associated with Alacitas is the “periodiquito,” a miniature edition of Bolivia’s major news dailies. These mini-jounals, which began at the end of the 19th century, combine an approach reminiscent of The Onion— one headline reads “For Tiger Woods, Eighteen Holes are Not Enough,” with biting political satire. This year president Evo Morales appears as a super hero called Egoman, the futuristic Evotar and a bumbling detective, looking for corruption in his administration. Evo’s unsuccessful rival in the last election is held up to particular ridicule. Manfred Reyes, who surreptitiously fled Bolivia last year, has his escape ascribed variously to: disguises, a tourist with pot belly and shorts or a tall chola with exceptionally long skirts, but more likely reverting to his true nature as vampire who winged it out of the country in search of new prey.

Just Read the Signs

“Just read the signs; we have very good signs.” These were the last words we heard from our Budget Rent A Car agent in Frankfurt as we set out on a three week spin through Germany and France. High speed motor highways are as emblematic of the EU as the Euro, and despite the high cost of gasoline, western Europeans are almost as car happy as we are. But driving there, by the English-speaking, has its perils, as we found out.

Peril number one, the chameleon Autobahn.
Autobahn 5 begins at the Swiss border and tracks the Rhine to Frankfurt before turning northeast to cross the Hessen plains. Seventy kilometers along the route, I was finding my stride behind the wheel of our leased BMW sedan and congratulating myself on my astute navigation. Just then I noticed that the route sign read “4.” Had I missed a turn?

It turns out that there was no turn. Unlike North American Interstates, where route numbers are persistent, European highways act like chameleons. Autobahn 5 simply disappears, maybe like a river in the desert, and number 4 nonchalantly replaces it. If you don’t believe me, look at the map.

Peril number two, the roundabout access ramp.
European highway engineers eschew the cloverleaf to reroute freeway traffic. They use the traffic circle, instead, directing vehicles into a gyre that spins them toward a new direction. Theoretically this approach is an elegant one; a single exit offers the driver multiple alternatives connected to the circle. But as a practical matter, the traffic circle forces a driver unfamiliar with the routes to simultaneously manage where to exit, traffic already in the circle, and traffic entering the circle from multiple points. I often made two or three complete revolutions before managing to escape what amounted to gravitational forces emanating from the circles’ centers.

Peril number three, when dead reckoning fails.
Not always understanding the nuances of signage, I sometimes depended on a general knowledge of European geography. In Germany I reckon that Munich is “south,” and Hamburg is “north.” Those “very good signs” we heard about usually keep this kind of orientation in play. But what happens if the signs offer a choice between a known and an unknown, as they did once on the beltway that surrounds Berlin. I knew that the Munich choice would lead south, and since we were headed north, it had to be the other, unknown, choice. Well, it turned out that the unknown choice also led south, down a road that eventually narrowed to a lane.

We finally righted ourselves through a comic exchange with a garage mechanic. After determining that we would not be able to converse in symbolic language, he grabbed our map and using two jabs of his finger showed why a picture is worth a thousand words. With one gesture he located where we intended to go, with another where we were. I turned the car around, drove north, reentered the Berlin beltway, and found the proper exit. This time I had made the right turn.

Peril number four, when you can’t get there from here.
Often the case in medieval cities and for us in Strasbourg. We arrived from the north, crossed the River Ill and entered a maze that the Queen of Hearts would be proud to govern. At one point my wife saw a taxi and suggested that we hire it to lead us to our hotel. Too late, the cab sped away. Finally, we decided to ask directions and took our city map into a bar across the street from our parking place. Since the bartender had no customers, he spent several minutes explaining scenarios. Seeing us satisfied, he walked us to the door, but on watching me unlock the car exclaimed “you drive?” “My directions no good.” Finally, he advised us to recross the Ill, follow an expressway that circles the city to a point nearly 180 degrees north of where we stood, and try it all again. It worked, but we left our car in the hotel garage until we left Strasbourg three days later.

Peril number five, interpreting the signs (a.k.a., linguistic nuance).
I have already introduced our linguistic ineptitude. It came into play in France as we drove along rural roads in Alsace. Here the traffic circles present drivers with some cryptic choices. For example, the exits of one read “Colmar;” the next “Strasbourg;” the third “autres directions.” Apparently for French signers, if you weren’t going to Strasbourg or Colmar, you must be going somewhere else. We were also bemused by the use of the “/” symbol painted across a city name to signify the end of a municipal jurisdiction.

The Land of Shined Shoes

Shined shoes are the stuff of literature and political legend. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman rode on a smile and a shoeshine, and Alejandro Toledo famously rose from shoeshine boy in the 1960s to President of Peru thirty years later. In the United States shoeshining has largely vanished from public space, retreating to airports and luxury office buildings. But the trade remains very much alive in Latin America.

Latin Americans like a luster on their footwear. It connotes self-respect and a sense of style, and it employs a small army of service workers. Some ply their trade at fixed stands, located in areas of high pedestrian traffic. For a small gratuity, their patrons enjoy the comfort of a padded seat as they supervise the shine or read a courtesy newspaper. Far more numerous are the roving shoe shine boys who leave no corner of the city unvisited and no one wearing shoes unsolicited. You can’t miss them, and they certainly don’t miss you.

I have sworn off smooth leather shoes for my Latin American travels. Shoe shiners are likely to accept a gruff “no son lustrables” (“they’re unshinable”) from someone shod in running wear or rough suede. But shinable shoes and a sweet disposition, both worn by my good friend, Paula, attract shoeshine boys like pheromones.

In March Paula and I visited Peru and Bolivia where we scoured bookshops in Lima, Cuzco, La Paz and Cochabamba for our university libraries. We escaped Lima without a single shoeshine; I don’t know how. But in Cuzco our luck ran out. As we waited for the Centro Bartolome de las Casas to open, an eleven-year-old by the name of Christian called attention to the condition of Paula’s clogs. He described, in unflattering detail, how dirty they were and how he could help restore their luster, and their owner’s dignity. No amount of protest on our part would shake Christian’s resolve, and, finally, Paula caved.

For the next half hour, as we sat on a step, Christian demonstrated his skills, pulling bottle after bottle from his kit. “This one cleans the soles,” he assured us, “and this one makes the leather like a mirror,” he said, applying one final coat of polish. In the course of his work, he told us that he was in the fifth grade and that he lived in a neighborhood north of the city, a twenty-minute walk from our location. We were taking it all in and enjoying ourselves until Christian finished his work and named his price. “25 soles,” he said, without a hint of mirth. That’s about $8 US, an outrageous charge for the streets of Cuzco where a good meal can be had for less. I assumed that this was a purposeful joke, intended to take in tourists who might be arithmetically challenged. But no, Christian insisted that 25 was a fair price for such a great shine. I believe that we ultimately settled on 15, and I am sure that Christian is still telling his friends about how easy it is to outsmart gringos.

Paula’s clogs have never been the same.