Visiting Campeche

Instead of jetting off to Europe to hear some wonderful concerts, last year and this coming year I am focussing on visiting various places in Mexico. I was in Puebla at Easter, Oaxaca in October and I just got back from Campeche. This last is not a tourist spot, which I usually avoid, but it is a charming place and has a number of attractions. The place to stay is the Holiday Inn, though it is an hour's walk to the historic Centro. The walk is a pleasant one, though, along the Malecón or seawall. 

Along that seawall can be found a lot of pelicans:

The historic district features two large fortresses, each with a museum and well worth a visit. They were built to defend the port against pirates and the English back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Calle 59 has a lot of coffee places and souvenir shops. And the occasional pirate.

Not to be missed is a fine seafood restaurant named Marganzo where all the waitresses wear traditional dress. I had a lovely meal of shrimp risotto (accompanied by sangria)

Followed by grilled sea bass:

And flan with capuchino:

But the real highlight of the trip was the ancient Mayan city of Edzna. Only the central area of about two square kilometers of large buildings have been excavated and are open to visitors. The whole city occupies some 22 square kilometers. That central area includes some apartments, a combination amphitheater and strip mall, a ball court and a large temple sitting on a very large base. The sheer cost in terms of slave labor must have been staggering--no heavy equipment or power tools. Not even a wheelbarrow. 

This is a bedroom:

This is the amphitheater and at the top are spaces for little shops or tiendas.

This is the ball court where the ball was sometimes made of rubber and sometimes was a human head covered in rubber.

And here is the main temple pyramid:

Finally a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico:

Healthcare in Mexico

As you can tell from the paucity of postings, it has been One Hell of a Month! It rained heavily and was overcast for nearly all of the past month. This is bad for doing photoshoots and for showing houses. Then, a week ago, I came down with a nasty bug: sore throat, very bad cough, headache, body aches and difficulty sleeping. I couldn't take any days off because I had clients. Yesterday morning I got up and it was worse than ever. At 8:30 I emailed my doctor with the symptoms. Fifteen minutes later (!) she emailed back saying that we needed to test for COVID and Flu. By noon a male nurse was at my house doing the tests. The results were available in just a few minutes: negative for both. So what I had was a bacterial infection of the throat. He had with him the appropriate antibiotic and I immediately took the first one. It is now the next morning and I am about to take the second pill (one pill a day for seven days). Already there is a real improvement. I mentioned to the nurse that I wished this kind of service was available in Canada. He just looked at me quizzically: "Why not?" Ah yes, why not indeed!

The cost of this extremely prompt service including the home visit, tests and antibiotic? $1,590 MXN or $86 US.

I don't know what the psychic cost of the long waiting lists in Canada comes to--about forty weeks for an MRI, even longer to see a specialist--but I'm sure it is significant. As soon as my doctor emailed back I started to feel better.

Looking for a visual for this post, it's been so rainy that I hardly have any. Here is one taken from my terrace of a fullish moon just after dawn:

 This might be a suitable piece of music:

Mexican Culture

Even though I live in Mexico I don't post much about it, mostly because it was not one of the original themes of the blog. But occasionally... Mexican culture is very different from English Canadian culture, though not so different from Quebec culture. Men kiss women on the cheek as a typical greeting, for example in both Quebec and Mexico.

The other day I ran into an interesting example. One of the strengths of Mexico is its excellent artesanal beer.  I had one the other day, very similar to Guinness stout though labeled "dark lager."

At the bottom of the label is this slogan:

Aqui, se vive a sangre fría

In English:

Here, you live the cold blood

Yeah, that's a reflexive verb that doesn't translate very well. And on the side of the label is this:

A sangre fria, sin piedad, destápame, moja de mi tus labios, saborea las maltas de mi depravación. Déjame inundarte de mi crueldad y acabar dentro de ti.

In English:

In cold blood, without mercy, uncover me, wet your lips from me, taste the malts of my depravity. Let me flood you with my cruelty and end up inside you.

I think I could pretty well guarantee that no Canadian beer company would put that on their label! But it captures an element of Spanish/Mexican culture. We also find it in the Day of the Dead celebrations which to Anglophone sensibilities are rather macabre.

Oh, and the name of the company is "Deadly Sin."

 

Terraces of San Miguel

The focus of the blog is, of course, music, but occasionally I get the urge to wander off the plantation. One blog I enjoy from time to time is that of Ann Althouse, who has an interesting and quirky take on a lot of things. One way she livens up her blog is to put up the occasional post of photos she has taken. I think I might start doing this as well. Just for fun.

Let's kick off with some photos I have taken from various roof terraces in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I live. As you can see, there are lots of good reasons to have a roof terrace in San Miguel, not the least of which is from some of them you can see six or seven 18th century churches.

San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato, is in central Mexico at an altitude of 6400 feet. It is one of the so-called "Colonial Silver Cities", that is, one of the places founded by the Spanish and connected with silver mining. By the 18th century, Mexico was the world's leading producer of silver. The mines were not located in San Miguel itself, but in Guanajuato, the state capitol, and other towns including Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. San Miguel was just a stopping place for the caravans on their way from the silver mines to Mexico City. This was what preserved the city. As the silver mines production wound down, San Miguel came close to being a ghost town and in 1926 the federal government of Mexico declared it an historic monument. To this day, the central historic district preserves its colonial appearance. The Wikipedia article I linked above is a fairly extensive and accurate description of San Miguel.

But I just want to put up a few photos I have taken from various roof terraces over a number of years. San Miguel is a hilly place and, depending on where you are in town, you get completely different perspectives on the architecture. The feature that stands out wherever you are, are the colonial-era churches, of which there are seven large ones.

This is a photo I took years ago, early one morning. The city was wreathed in fog with the churches sticking out above. You can see three churches in this photo: from the left, the Inmaculada Concepcion Church, which is called "Las Monjas" (the nuns) as it is a nunnery, its bell tower, the San Francisco church and its bell tower and the neo-Gothic facade of the Parroquia church. In the middle is a hot air balloon!

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To show you what I mean about different perspectives, here is another shot of these same three churches, but this time taken from the northwest looking southeast instead of from the southwest looking northeast. From left to right are the San Francisco church, the Parroquia and Las Monjas:

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San Miguel's Parroquia, located on the central square, is one of the most-photographed churches in Mexico:

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The next photo was taken late one afternoon when the sun's rays were slanting under a layer of cloud, giving quite an interesting aura to the shot. It just shows part of the terrace, some Mediterranean cyprus and a charming cupola of a neighboring house constructed with glass bricks.

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This one was taken from my terrace and shows a jacaranda tree in full bloom:

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Here is a shot from another terrace of the moon, just becoming visible in the late afternoon/early evening:

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Taken at the same location and same time, this shot looks toward the city center where you can see those same churches again. This time the order, from left to right, is Las Monjas, the Parroquia and the San Francisco church. They always stick out, wherever you are, because they are so much higher than any of the other structures. In the immediate foreground you can see an elaborately carved limestone bench, part of the terrace.

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It's not all churches, of course, here is a shot I took last winter of los Picachos, the range of hills lying to the south of town. That white stuff you see is actual snow! Yes, because of the altitude it is, barely, possible to have snow here. It occurs about every thirty years and lasts a few hours. Just on the hills, of course!

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Let's have one last shot. This one is from my terrace again, with that jacaranda tree, but this time it is early in the morning and that hot air balloon is out again:

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I hope you have enjoyed this little photo essay from the terraces of San Miguel! Please comment if you did. Or if you didn't!

Culture and Culture

I live in Mexico, a country of many traditions. One of them, practiced annually by a church across the street from where I live, takes up an entire weekend from Friday evening through to late Sunday evening. There are troupes of Indian drummers, brass marching bands, rock bands with big sound systems and choral chanting. They alternate, 24 hours a day, for the whole weekend. The first year, I could hardly believe that this was happening. It was like trying to sleep in the middle of a disco. Last year I booked a hotel room for Saturday night, but that was not sufficient. So this year I left and spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in a hotel. Peace!

This is why you didn't get a post from me this weekend. The hotel was peaceful, but I was cut off from my library and usual sources of inspiration. However, I did get some composition work done!

I got to thinking about the differences between Canada and Mexico. This is not the kind of thing that takes place in Canada. Why? Well, if a Canadian church had a tradition of this kind of festival, many decades ago all the neighbours would have gotten together and submitted a petition to City Hall to have it stopped and that would be it. In Mexico, tradition is very, very strong and neighbours don't even bother to petition the authorities. So there are hundreds of traditions that take place and have done so for, perhaps, hundreds of years.

Canada is a rather more progressive place so it is guaranteed that any Canadian suburb will be free from this kind of noisy festival. Of course Canadian suburbs tend to be very dull places. The trouble with progressive societies is that, for the most part they have been taken over by the Gramscian "Long March", which is to say, they have been subjected to a tradition-erasing ideology. As an example, I refer you to the "learning objectives" of the US College Board which can be found on pp 20 et. seq. of this document. The first of these learning objectives is Identity:

This theme focuses on the formation of both American national identity and group identities in U.S. history. Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.

If you think there is nothing odd about this, then you are a product of recent decades of indoctrination. "Identity" here can only refer to national or group identity. The one that is omitted, intentionally, is, of course, individual identity! But perhaps the defining characteristic of the US, carefully protected in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is the importance of individual freedoms. The section on Identity over and over harps on group identity. But I think a very good argument could be made that there simply is no such thing. Your identity is who you are as an individual. But the underlying assumption behind this curriculum is that the group defines who you are: black, gay, Indian, or Presbyterian, that's who you are. Which is, frankly, nuts. As a very wise historian wrote about a similar ideology:

"The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." --Edward Gibbon

Group identity is a very useful tool for any unscrupulous politician, then and now.

Antonio Gramsci was a very important Marxist theorist who laid out a game plan for "progressive" societies. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these.

Bourgeois cultural values were exactly what had to be replaced, of course.

The interesting thing is that popular traditions tend to insulate a society from the ideology of the state:

Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the "common sense" values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

The irony here is that a lot of this is just projection. It is socialism that maintains control through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. Perhaps mainly through ideology. Socialism fundamentally views people as units in society, as groups, as collectives, NOT as individuals.

While a lot of the intellectual class in Mexico have been socialists to some extent, they have failed to transform society according to the Gramscian program because of the immense power of tradition in Mexican society. So, while I don't care for it personally, I am rather glad that the church across the street continues to have its extremely noisy annual festival.

Now I have to ask your forgiveness for wandering so far away from music qua music. I also have to offer some caveats. Of course Mexico has many things to overcome. It has, by Canadian and American standards, a low level of intellectual capital, though improving. It has low levels of education. It has high levels of corruption (though, depending on how and what you measure, so might the US). Canada and the US have powerful and long-standing traditions of freedom and justice that Mexico does not.

Now, what could I possibly find for a musical envoi to this post? How about La Noche de los Mayas, music originally written for a film by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. This is the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen: