Week 2 (Day 10)

DAY TEN

The city is gripped with election fever, as voting for a city president gets underway. Politics in Mexico is not the lukewarm activity it is in the UK, it inspires violent passions and the city takes action accordingly.

The shops do not sell alcohol on election weekend, because of the fear of violence, and tourists are told to stay away from the villages, where supporting one political party or another can lead to fights. We struggle to buy cider for a meal we are cooking, but in the end find a small shop willing to break the law to sell it to us,

If the winner of the election was dictated by who has managed to put up the most posters, then a man called Enoc would definitely win. He’s a recent president, and has clearly spent a lot of money on his election campaign. One evening in the Zocalo he has a big party, complete with the ubiquitous loud fireworks, that goes on late into the night.


My favourite candidate is the man whose poster proudly declares “all the women are with me”. He doesn’t explain why, and I don’t like to speculate.

Over dinner with Eneas and Mari (we bring banoffee pie, they serve stuffed chillies and tostadas with cow’s blood topping – not really my cup of tea), they try and explain what will happen in the election. It’s difficult to sort out the different parties, whose names all seem to have three initials beginning with ‘P’. People in the south, they say, do not generally support the president of Mexico (Calderon, whose name means stewpot), and they say people reckon the general election was rigged.


Even if that seems unlikely, it’s easy to see why the family might believe in electoral shenanigans. We read in the local paper after the event that a woman was arrested in San Cristobal for giving out bags of beans and rice as electoral inducements. There were only 14 electoral crimes in nearby Palenque, which is apparently very good. Most seemed to involve blockading the roads so that people could not get through.

Week 2 (Day 9)

DAY NINE


After the day out, comes the guilt trip, in the form of Augustina and her two daughters. They knock on our door while Paul is out, throwing me into paroxysms of panic.

Augustina is married to Manuel, who worked as Paul’s translator when he was first out here. They are purely indigenous, as opposed to other friends like Enrique and Mariet, who are mestizo (mixed Spanish and indigenous). In this still racist society that makes a huge difference to a family.

At home, Augustina speaks Tzotzil, and her Spanish is lacking in linguistic subtlety, for which I am grateful since I can’t do the conditional tense. I sit the three of them down, offer them coffee, and pass a hugely uncomfortable fifteen minutes that seem like an hour.

In my halting Spanish, I introduce Daisy, and Augustina says she has a cough and won’t kiss her. We talk about our trip here, how long we are staying, and about Manuel’s work and the girls’ study. Last time we were here, Lucia was hoping to become a doctor, but she has had to drop out because they don’t have enough money for her to stay at school and she has become a secretary.

Cecy was unwell with some stomach trouble last time we visited, and we saw her in the capital city, where she was being treated and was staying with her father. She’s grown into a beautiful (and healthy) young woman, but she has dropped back two years in school because of her illness, which must be tricky for her.

The family has a hard life. Manuel owns a hamburger cart from which her works from nine to nine six days a week, and Augustina works as a washerwoman, washing clothes by hand, while the girls help. For them, Sunday really is the only rest they get, and they spend it going to two church services.


The family are ‘expulsados’, from one of the villages surrounding San Cristobal, thrown out of their village for straying from the traditional animist/catholic faith (a weird polyglot mixture of Catholicism and old Mayan religion that sees shamans sacrificing chickens in front of images of St John the Baptist).

They are now evangelical Christians (and Communist/Socialist in their outlook), attending a charismatic church, and Augustina’s talk is peppered with “Gracias a Dios”, “Thanks to God”. Hard as her life seems now, the family would tell you it is better than it was in the village.

Manuel, like some other men in the village, used to drink a sugarcane alcohol called posh, and he used to beat his wife and children. The healthcare up there is rudimentary, and the family lost two children. Augustina really is thankful to God for a life that sees her constantly washing clothes despite her bad back and lungs.

With typical Mexican directness, she asks me how much we are paying for the apartment, and when I tell her, she is horrified. Our monthly rent might be as much as Manuel earns in a year, and a meal out in Mayambe is as unlikely as me flying to the moon.

I’m glad when Paul comes back, as my Spanish seems to have run out, and we arrange to see them again later in the week.

Week 2

DAY EIGHT

After a long day of Spanish classes and shopping, we decide to go out for a meal to somewhere recommended in the Lonely Planet Guide.


Mayambe wasn’t there the last time we were in San Cristobal, and serves an interesting selection of curry and Lebanese food. We walk down there with Daisy in the sling, and enter another world – the world of the hippy hanging out traveller.
The only Mexicans in Mayambe are waiting on tables, and the clientele are American, English and German. I had forgotten, in a week, how much more reserved tourists are. After being used to being stopped every five seconds with Daisy, so she can be kissed and cooed over, I enter the restaurant with her in the sling confidently smiling. Not a flicker of a response from anyone in the restaurant. I don’t know whether it put her pretty little nose out of joint, but it didn’t do much for mine.

Daisy slumbers peacefully through most of our meal, after twenty minutes of craning her neck to look at everything, and the food is very fine. I also get my gin and tonic, though when we try and ask where they bought the tonic, the shop they mention doesn’t seem to stock it.

We feel very privileged to be travelling with such a portable baby. Daisy has not cramped our style in any way on our trip, but she has massively enhanced it. We can still go out for a meal, see friends and do all the things we would have done, but we also meet more people and have interesting conversations. She provides a talking point for people who we would otherwise not have met, and we’ve been met with smiles almost everywhere.

Thanks to the peso being so low against the pound, eating out is very affordable, even for those of us living on our maternity benefit. The two-course meal with drinks comes to twelve pounds fifty.

It’s not until we return that I realise I have been wandering around with my bra undone all evening (thankfully covered up by the sling). Oh, the joys of breastfeeding, or ‘chichi’, as they call it in the market.

Day Seven

DAY SEVEN



OUR first trip to the new giant hypermarket on the edge of town is enough to make us feel guilty. We’ve been buying our produce in the market, and also other things that we weren’t able to bring with us. But it is sometimes hard to find what you want in the confusion of all the little lanes and people shouting, and we have to keep stopping so the stallholders can kiss Daisy. So we embrace modernity and take a taxi out.

The hypermarket is remarkable in having so few things that we actually want and so very many things that we don’t. I can’t find tonic water (sob), or a changing mat for Daisy, but I can find fourteen different varieties of Tang (a bit like squash, I think) and a bewildering variety of tins of refried beans. Looks like it will be a long time before I have a gin and tonic again.

The supermarket is sufficiently Mexican that you have to leave your bag at the door in a locker and collect it later from a toothless old man who takes his time. It’s also big enough that I keep losing Pabs in it.

I’m terribly tempted to buy a violent pink deodorant called Teen Spirit, just in honour of the Nirvana song, but restrain myself after a quick sniff. Smelling like Teen Spirit for the next month is really not worth the cheap joke.

No one we know who lives here seems particularly sure whether to welcome the march of progress that has brought them the new hypermarket. Mariet remarks that some things are cheaper but other things aren’t, while our friend Mari says it is cold, and it smells. Given that almost nowhere I have been smells more than the local market, that really is an insult.

The supermarket is surprisingly empty, apart from some giggling teenage girls who have clearly come to hang out and flirt with the male shop attendants, but they only have two checkouts open so the queues are still long. I wonder whether it will be a great success in the long run, or whether people will stick to the market.

After my Spanish lesson (the subjunctive, past participles and just about everything else), we go for lunch with Mariet and end up watching Shrek in Spanish with her daughter Itamar. Itamar wants to head butt Daisy, and isn’t keen on taking no for an answer. Meanwhile Paul’s namesake, Pablo (4 months) seems to do little but eat or sleep – though Daisy seems rather interested in him!


Mariet and Enrique are coming for lunch on Sunday, and I’ve promised to cook them something traditionally English. They are strangely desperate for shepherd’s pie, which I think Paul has cooked for them before. However, I know that if I cook it they will just shake salsa all over it, remarking that it “falta chile’. The palate here is not subtle, but after a while it seems wrong not to have chiles with everything.

In the evening we walk through the Zocalo (main square), where a marimba band is playing. People are dancing, and children are selling brightly coloured candyfloss on sticks. The Zocalo is a place for people to hang out and chat, and it is not yet cold enough in the evening to drive them indoors. With Daisy gently walked off to sleep we return to our ‘home’ for a relatively peaceful meal together – well OK you can always hear the marimba in the far distance, but we’re gradually getting used to it.

Day Six

DAY SIX

Daisy attends her first birthday party today – a real Mexican fiesta for Thomas Elliot, the son of the man who owns the apartment we’re renting. He’s one year old, so doesn’t pay much attention to the huge party held in his honour, but the rest of us have fun.



Thomas’ Dad (also called Thomas) is Swiss German, and his Mum is Mexican. They have a huge house not far from our apartments, with a long garden, and hold a barbecue, with obligatory piñata.

Piñatas are a big thing out here, and you can buy them in all shapes and sizes. Shrek seems particularly popular at the moment. They may be traditional, but they are a health and safety nightmare, as children are blindfolded and hit the piñata with sticks until it breaks and sweets fall down.

We eat popcorn with the Dutch couple who are living next door to us at the moment. He is oddly frightened of eating butter, because of some survey that shows that it does terrible things to the insides of Italians (presumably not just Italians, but that is where the study was done).

We leave the party early to look at a house we could rent, owned by the somewhat hippy-like owner of Madre Tierra, a local restaurant. The house used to be the women’s prison. It’s gorgeous, and has that much-prized treat almost unknown in Mexico, a bath.

However gorgeous it may be, it would be very cold once winter comes in earnest, and even the most mendacious estate agent would struggle to use the word ‘cosy’ about it. Certainly it is not suitable for Daisy. We decide to leave it and stay where we are for the next few months.

The apartment we’re renting is rare in Mexican terms, because it is so very comfortable. The builders here prepare only for warm weather, despite the fact San Cristobal gets very cold, and most buildings have lots of windows and no heating at all.

Our apartment has a fire in the living room, a chimenea in the bedroom and a lovely kitchen with lots of space to eat. It already feels like home, so I am glad we’ve decided to stay. For much less than half what it would cost to rent a place in a suburb of London, we are right in the city centre with a cleaner who comes in every day, as well as all bills paid.


We also have lovely comfy sofas and cable television, though we haven’t watched it much yet, and the owner is promising to get wireless, which will make communication with the outside world much easier. Now we’ve made the decision to stay, we can begin to unpack!

Day Five

DAY FIVE

Once again I go to my Spanish lesson, and Paul takes Daisy to the market, where she gets kissed and fussed over. I struggle with the past tense, masculine and feminine, and just about everything else as well, and have to go to sleep when I get back to the house after my lesson.

We manage to buy real bread, which is a total treat, though I’m sure everyone thinks I am a real cop-out for not loving tortillas. However, Mexican food is not the riot of burritos and fajitas that everyone expects when they arrive here. Mexicans in the south eat corn tortillas (slimey unless toasted), with refried beans, eggs, avocados and huge bits of fried pigskin called chicharron (like huge pork scratchings).

What meat there is is usually pork, which is fine as long as it is properly cooked, but could give you worms in the brain if it isn’t. Any beef is likely to be of low quality, and the chicken is good, but can lose its appeal once you have seen the Tzotzil women dangling their live chickens by their legs in the market, while the children on their hips play idly with the chicken’s feet by way of amusement.

Incidentally, fried chicken’s feet are a great hit at parties over here – kids just love to chew the tough skin round the edges. We shall, of course, be serving them for Daisy’s first birthday when we are back in London, and will expect everyone to be thrilled.


Mexican food, then, can quickly become tiresome, so I am glad we are mostly cooking for ourselves. The fruit and veg is wonderful. Right now it seems to be lychee season, and men are selling them off carts all over the city, along with corn on the cob steamed over braziers. It is heartening that the woman selling empanadas (little cheese patties) on the main street, seems to be doing better business than the brand new Burger King which sits opposite her pitch.

Day Four

DAY FOUR

My first day of Spanish lessons, and I scarcely cover myself in glory. In my test beforehand I can scarcely remember the present tense, no matter anything else, and when my teacher asks me things I can barely remember my own name.



I’m having two hours of classes a day on my own, and during those hours I don’t speak or hear a word of English, which I’m sure is the best way to learn. However, it’s knackering and I’m distressed by how much my brain has degenerated since I did languages at school. I don’t remember being this bad at things.

In fact, my mind seems to have gone completely blank, even on things that don’t involve language. My teacher asks me to describe a typical English myth, and all of our rich legendary history, from King Arthur to the Druids, flies out the window.

Instead, I find myself irresistibly drawn to the “Folk of the Faraway Tree”, a terrible book by Enid Blyton that I was very fond of as a kid. I haltingly explain to my teacher that in England we believe that trees can talk. I’m sure she’s been dining out on that one for the rest of the week.

Daisy is loving Mexico (well, loving being with us all the time, which to her is the same thing). She gets her first bath today, in an orange plastic basin we bought from the local supermarket, and thoroughly enjoys it.



A local woman seems terribly concerned that someone might put the Evil Eye on Daisy, because she is so perfect. She (the woman, not Daisy) is wearing bits of thread in order to counter the bad luck that would ensue if someone looked at Daisy and was jealous.

Someone also suggested that we went to an indigenous healer who would put oil on Daisy’s nose to protect her from the dew that comes down from the mountains. We have done neither of these things, which probably makes us terribly neglectful parents.

It doesn’t matter where you go, someone always has an opinion on your child rearing strategy and how you are doing it wrong. In England we were variously told that we should put Daisy down in the garden to scream, and shouldn’t allow her to sleep in our bed (she doesn’t anymore, actually, since she has got used to her nifty Samsonite travel cot). We were also told that we should be feeding her formula milk, putting her in a pram instead of a sling, and getting her into a routine at six weeks.

I’ve been told to feed her hourly, four hourly, three hourly, and whenever she cried. If I listened to everyone’s advice and tried to take it I would be a nervous wreck. I guess the Evil Eye stuff isn’t really any more bonkers than some of the things I heard at home, and it is certainly easier to ignore.