Senses of Coyoacan

The Five Senses of Our Village

Touch
     Metro and bus handles are the worst! We touch them every day. if you read my previous post about the metro system then you know sometimes you hold on really tight. You don't often see anything dirty or feel a foreign stickiness but the germs you can't see are the grossest ones right!? We have been sick on and off for the last three weeks but I think it's more from the hogar that I visit. The little people there are full of snot and coughs. As I write this MY little person is coughing up a lung. We are feeling that the colds have left me and Doug, but it's holding onto poor Sally.
     Our feet feel quite a bit as we walk. We walk everywhere. They feel the unevenness of the sidewalks as we climb over the giant tree roots that have lifted the sidewalk concrete right off of their foundations and left a sea of sharp ups and downs in our path. We hop over animal droppings and instruct sally to watch out! Some harder things to pass; we step around sleeping homeless people or walk past the poor who beg for money as they hold their tiny dirty children.
     We cross traffic as if we are having a psychopathic manic moment, "stop, go, walk, RUN here comes a taxi!" they have little care for pedestrians. We feel the cheeks of the people we are introduced to as we air kiss their right side. I get to hug the 2 year old girls that I teach English phrases to at the hogar that I visit three times a week. They are in the in-between baby chubs and skinny toddler stage so they are beautifully squishable. They also often wear layered clothing as the breeze is chilly and the sun is hot, and like I said before they are still all sick (and have been, now that I think about it, since I started to volunteer in the first week in October) so they dress a little heavier. I have been trying to teach hand hygiene to them so they get better. Speaking of a germ fest the hogar is so dirty! I've asked if I could scrub the counters or toilets but they say "no, we have someone who does that." As I think to myself, what do they actually clean? Ok, now that you're thinking about germs...lets talk about taste. Sorry.

Taste
     One of our guilty pleasures here are mini gorditas that are sold under an orange tarp on the side of the busy street near us. They are stuffed with a crumbly cheese, cilantro, green or red salsa, onions and the ingredient of your choice between black bean, potatoes or chicharone. Chicharone is shredded pork, salty and full of flavor. We usually get the pork. The cost $6 pesos each. We stand in front of their little portable fry kitchen and watch them roll the dough by taking a small amount from a bucket and flattening into a two inch pancake and they throw it into the oil. Once it's fried they cut it open from the top to make a pocket and fill it to your liking. Typing that sentence took longer than it takes them to stuff it. They are so so fast. They have salsa you can put on top or an onion mixture too. It's such a nice little snack, or if we stayed long enough we could keep eating and make a meal out of it. Once they see your plate is empty they ask you, "what else?". They also serve bottled drinks with a straw. I don't like to use the straw because it looks like they reuse them after washing them. Blukkk.
     There is a taste that I will never understand or get accustomed to...hotdogs. These people love salchichas (hotdogs). At the deli section instead of an array of cheeses or cold salads they have 50 different brands of pale pink floppy hotdogs. It's so disgusting. We have however, bought Johnson's all beef hotdogs, which are a nice taste of home.
     There are a lot of kiosks ranging from fried pig skins to sweet churros (a doughnut tasting tube that they fill with different flavors ie: Nutella, jelly, or sweet cream). One of the more interesting carts is the fresh fruit ones, but it's not just yummy fruit, oh no, they will saturate your big clear cup of sweetness with chili powder. Chili powder. Or hot sauce and lime. Strange. We did try the jicama with sugar and chili yesterday in Puebla but it was too weird for metro get it. We just bought the mixed fruit. Delicious by the way. Cantaloupe, papaya, watermelon and pineapple. So sweet.
We have an abundance of tortillas in Mexico. We choose to buy ours from the grocery store and the flour ones taste so much better than the healthy corn counterpart. And the corn fall apart so you have to use more for your taco. They do make yummy chips though. Which takes us to sound.

Sound
     We live on a one way street and if we walk up the street we pass a small tortilla maker that squeaks so loud. I'm not sure if it's a business scheme in addition to their very small sign or if they just can't afford some WD40. Lol. She puts the corn tortillas in a ball on the turning belt and the squeaker machine flattens the dough and lightly cooks it. We didn't particularly like her recipe but we did buy half a kilo once, for like .50 cents. Cheapola.
Just two houses down on the corner there is the unmistaken sound of roosters. Very verbal roosters. They never got the memo about cock-a-doodle-doing at sunrise. These guys are like chihuahuas that freak out every time they hear someone walk by. Problem is they are on a very busy foot traffic road. So they make noise a lot.
     A few times a week we also have the pleasure of listening to two very loud recordings as they pass through our neighborhood. One is a tamale guy who rides his bike around with a huge metal pot on a trailer. He sets his handheld cd player on repeat attached to a megaphone. It is so annoying and monotone, yet recognizable for his repeat customers I suppose. "Rico tamales! Calientito tamales!" (Delicious tamales, warm tamales!) Most of the time he rides down our street at 10:00pm and we just can't muster up the courage to try or we are just not hungry. The other recording is a young girl's voice, also set on repeat and played from a megaphone strapped to the top of a rusty old Chevy truck. I can't repeat the recording because I absolutely cannot understand the recording. But it is loud! They are apparently asking to buy your old mattresses, radios, tvs or other appliances.
Another sound is our door bell, or buzzer. We have a small white button, like most houses in our city, that visitors can buzz for us to come open the door. The water company uses it and when Doug doesn't have keys he buzzes it. It is not a nice sound when I'm still sound asleep at noon. What?! I don't have a job, can't a girl just rest whilst living in Mexico? Ahhh. What a life I have.

Smell
     The roosters also give off an aroma of a small chicken farm. Sometimes I think they butcher them right in their driveway and let them poop all over their courtyard from the way their home smells. I'm happy we don't live next door. . We close our doors and windows at night for safety and sometimes when we open the door to take Sally to school in the mornings we have a whiff of a Cow pasture. I have to investigate this more. I don't know why it's like this. Maybe it corresponds with garbage days or something. Oh, now garbage trucks and garbagemen that is a sight.
     On a more pleasant note, as you can imagine living in Mexico with all of the tacos and the cilantro and salsas it smells amazing as you stroll down the street. The aroma of fresh baked bread and doughnuts in the morning overflowing out of the many bakeries. When we walk to town or to get sally from school we pass a tortas (a warm sandwich) restaurant. They cook near the the front door behind a large window so as we walk by we not only smell the grilled vegetables and meats fills the air but we can see the juiciness of the cheese covered, avocado filled sandwiches. Yum, now I want to walk down and get one.

Sight
     When you walk the streets of Coyoacan you can see a guy pushing a barrel on wheels and it is full of garbage. At first I thought he was homeless but I've now seen many of these guys around. This guy near our house in particular collects the small plastic bags from outside of the houses one by one. If they look promising he opens them and sorts them according to plastic, glass, true 'garbage', or keep-able items. There are many large black garbage bags hanging from the barrel on wheels and this is where the items are sorted and thrown. Then after it's full he has to PUSH this heavy barrel of trash to the respectable trash dump sights. It is a messy and heavy job. There are real garbage trucks that stop by once a week and there are guys hanging off of the back or sitting in the back of the truck. They are dirty and wet. They hoot and holler at women as they drive or walk by. When they are collecting the trash they also sift through the trash and will collect things like recyclables or stuffed animals in one case. The whole front of this one truck had a sea of stuffed toys attached to the top, similar to the truck in Toy Story 3 only it's on top and not the grill. Lol. We pay $10 pesos for each trash pick up whether it's the independent guys or the city truck. So maybe all that pushing is worth it for those who collect alone because they get to keep most of the payment for themselves.
     Another thing that I've loved to see are small business everywhere. Houses and entry ways are transformed into beauty salons, jello stores, bird house sales, convenient stores, public restrooms, restaurants, dry cleaners, croche shops etc. the list is endless. They really take pride in their work and their location. They keep their stations clean, their entry ways pleasing and their food stations spick and span. I love seeing them work so hard for small businesses. Like the ladies who came up to us selling sparkly gemmed hair clips yesterday in Puebla. Their basket of shiny beautiful clips was their job. They, unlike some vendors, weren't going to sit in a stationary store and wait for the customers to come to them, they were going to interrupt our cookies and iced tea at the park side cafe to see if it would be something we'd buy. Which we did. A little pink peacock clip for Sally. I don't mind the interruptions if it's something pretty. There is only so many times you can say a polite 'no' to the painted wooden fruit picks or the lady with the fried lime flavored grasshoppers or the little toys or pens or gum. Oh my goodness, everyone tries to sell you gum. Lol.
     As you've probably seen is the aray of colors that the city is. The houses and the flower pots and the restaurants all have a way of expressing themselves through color. Bright blues and pinks, colors that Americans would cringe at, I remember we tried to paint the base of our house in Cambrige this electric blue and when we got it on the house it was like WHOA! But our honest neighbor politely said, 'you aren't going to keep that color are you?'. Haha. Aparently it was even brighter from across the street. But here, it is completely exceptable to paint your house three electric colors or just one and have beautiful bright colored flowers climbing up your wall to accent your home. I love it. It's one of the things that I love to photograph.

We live in a colorful, lively city. There are always surprises and plenty of reasons to be happy with the life I have. And occasionally I am blessed with extra money to give to these sweet people on the side of the cracked sidewalk with their sleeping babies laying in their laps. We will never be short of stories or experiences here.