This is a post looking back at my travel to Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico.
Back in 2013, I met a woman in Bali who
was researching children and their learning process through cultural
rituals. She was a Mexican professor abroad doing research
recommended by her friend to come to Bali. For me, it was great to be
around somebody who was also curious in the learning processes of art
and music.
Three years later, I sent her a message
on Facebook and she gladly welcomed me to stay a bit in Tepoztlán.
Two days after I got into Mexico City, I met her at a Metrobus stop
in the south and she and her husband drove me towards Tepoztlán. Oh,
am I so glad she gave me a taste of what it was like on the
country/pueblo-side of Mexico.
Her name is Yolanda and when I saw her
in the summer of 2016, she was just as with the spirit of a child as
before. When I talk to her, I feel like she is going to tell me the
grand secrets of Mexico to me. There's something about the way she
says “Ah yes, but have you seen...”, “It IS very beautiful,
yes?” Once, she was also showing me a collaboration of her's with a
university in Colorado, USA. The children on the USA side and the
children on the Mexican side teamed up to study and give children a
chance to delve into the world of photography. By giving children a
new tool and a project to work at, they also could see how children
perceived their world. What were the places they valued and what were
the places they avoided.
I also got to meet her family including
her new dog, aptly named Bali. The dog is a xola, a breed native to
northern Mexico where Yolanda is also from. Bali would get happy all
of the time seeing us in the house... so happy, in fact, that her
tail would wag so wildly that it brought the rest of the half side of
the body with her. So if you woke up in the morning in the kitchen
and she spotted you, she would power walk to you as her hips swayed
madly from side to side and the rest of her body would be focused on
walking in a straight line. The closest equivalent I can think of is
a fashion model in fast forward down the catwalk. I was so amused
that I played catch with her and chase her around the house just to
see that mad swaying walk.
There were three main attractions for
the rest of my time in Tepoztlán:
The central market
Climbing up to the Tepozteco
Pyramid
The celebration for Dia de San
Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist's Day)
The Mercado
I'm not too avid of a shopper or
collector, though nowadays I think I'm starting to look out for gifts
I could give to my friends now. However, in the marketplace, there
were tons of trinkets but the one that stood out to me were these
beads. The mysterious thing about them is I also was attracted to the
Tibetan Buddhist mandala paintings and some of these have a similar
feel to them. Perhaps their spirituality and way of thinking is not
as far as I thought...
I came back from the mercado
with a few presents for my niece. I had some bracelets for my nieces.
One with brown and gold-colored beads and another with these smooth
but also sharp pointed black rocks.
\
Pyramid
One thing Yolanda told me to do was to
visit the Pyramid and what a trek. I had no idea what kind of hike I
was getting myself into. The entrance towards the pyramids doesn't
really declare itself except perhaps by this tree and the stone
bricks. Walking up one of Tepoztlán's streets, the road starts to
shift to dark, wet stone. In the summer is when the wet season is. At the
bottom of a hill, I was greeted by a magnificent tree trunk split in
half. Climbing up the hill, there were tons of steps upon steps with
tree roots and rocks guiding the path towards the top of a hill.
There may have been some parts of the path that are a bit treacherous
but nothing too challenging. The whole hike took me about an hour
towards the top... and once you get to the top, what a view! As I
stepped onto the pyramid, I was accompanied by some meditators who
sat facing towards the pueblo of Tepoztlán. I didn't meditate, but I
just tried to imagine how the temple was used and how the chambers
could have felt like being inside them when the pyramid still had its
complete form.
As more tourists started approaching
the pyramid, there were more of these wild raccoon-like creatures
that started to edge their way toward us. Looking for food...
Dia de San Juan Bautista
When I scheduled
my trip, I looked at the calendar to see if there was a Mexican
holiday I could overlap with. I found Dia de San Juan Bautista.
Before coming, I asked Yolanda about it and she said she could ask
when the time got closer.
What eventually
happened was our trip to San Juan. People gathered for mass at the
town church and afterwards people would go to a house to celebrate
and eat. I didn't quite get a picture of the whole church exterior
but I saw this amazing lasso made of churro. I could feel at any
moment, the churro vendors could use their churro lassos to rally up
cows and horses or any person lookin' to cause trouble in these
parts. Yolanda and I were the first to enter because the tables and
the chairs were not even set up. The ground wasn't level at all but
with a bit of wood and dirt shuffling, all of the guest furniture was
ready – about 8-9 long tables and many chairs. This is
the day to have a big feast with as many people as you can get.
The food was rice,
nopales and stewed beef. And like many Mexican places, you have an
infinite supply of tortillas and salsa to go with that. For drinks,
there was juice but the new thing for me was pulque.
This was the first
time I drank pulque. White, creamy-looking, a teeny bit viscous.
Pulque is an alcoholic drink native to Mexico. It is another drink
that comes from the almighty family of agave. The taste was a bit
sour but this pulque was sweet enough. Another surprise that came was
this whole band of merry people showed up not only to eat but to also
sing and play music. Part of the band included one man who looked and
dressed like Mark Twain. He told me he's been living like a bum for a
while. Another man looked just like a my English theatre professor
from UC Santa Cruz. In this situation, he was singing and playing the
harmonica. They had a whole book of Old Songs of Mexico or something
like that title. It also had a brown and black cover that made it
look like it was published in the 50s or 60s. I realized during the
meal these guys were from the
Milano Centro Cultural Comunitario.
It was also on
this trip to San Juan that Yolanda revealed to me an interesting
animistic ritual. A few days after I would leave Mexico City, she
said she and her family and her guide would climb up the mountain by
San Juan to give the mountain some offerings. There were three things
she was to give. One was the very decorated breads, another was
flowers and I don't remember what the third one was...
