Miercoles 19 Diciembre
Hacienda Malinche, Tlaxcala
“The riot of flowers is incessant”
Start on a high note to cheer myself up. Left the Mexico City hotel to find last night’s empty, smelly, messy streets now reborn as a full-chat mid-morning market. It’s all on display and all swarming over itself and me, cooking smells, street-corner hollering, every imaginable form of knock-off tat, mopeds nipping between the crowds, plenty of police. Best sight was the guy wheeling his trolley heaped 7-feet-plus with bulky cardboard boxes, with his perrito sat observing on top. Got a little lost but got some croissants (3 times the size of their UK cousins) and a clem for M$1. Found a quiet plaza on a side street to eat them shirtless in the roasting sun, on a bench beside an old church. The doors look thick, and the frame’s clearly high enough to ride a horse through. I put the day’s plans together…
1. get un-lost and back to the Zocalo
2. buy a local SIM card
3. contact Mariana and Javier via internet cafe
4. Get to bus station and ticket to Huamantla
…and including getting eggs on toast with side salad & lemonade, took until 6pm. Would love to do Mexico City again, but without the backpack. One strangely fitting musical moment, hearing the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony blaring out of a passing car stereo.
“It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong”
After seeing the motorway turn-off sign saying Huamantla, I got off the bus two towns too soon, which had Javier roaming Huamantla and Tlaxcala searching for me, all the while giving them updates on which part of Huamantla I believed I was in. Felt like a right useless shit for not checking with the bus driver when I got off it so eagerly. Still, they’re a friendly and welcoming couple, and even reaching Casa Malinche in the dark, it’s something special. An elegant bed & breakfast hewn from the same base material as Sergio Leone movies, crowned by an ornate belltower, in dusty scrubland. The dormant volcano la Malinche broods in the distance.
http://www.casamalinche.com/
Plenty of adorable animals to be introduced to this morning. 1 gato (Che), 2 perros, 2 perritos, and the most entertaining sight: over a dozen chickens, all far smaller and friendlier than the ones I know. They chirp instead of cluck too. Best part of today was having Emiliano (7) and Carolina (5) balance 7 of them on my outstretched arms and head, at least while not chucking them at me, each other, the other pollos or anything going. There’s also 2 other wwoofers in the room next to mine, Li and Chang, a young couple from Taiwan. Dead nice folk, helped me loads in feeding around the meat, and a welcome contrast to locals. I talk with them in English, but moderate it to keep it in the present tense for their benefit.
Spent over half the day on my first job, fitting a pneumatic arm to one hacienda door. Arduous work, and I doubt the end result will work for long, given how flimsy the door frame is, but I fire on with it because Mariana’s sure it needs done and I don´t want to kick up a fuss about my first job here. Still, after two sulks and much careful screwing, it seems to be working and I fit it to the point of easing pressure in the mechanism so the top of the arm won’t rip off the door frame. And then the arm’s pneumatic valve bursts, pissing stinky oil over the door frame, window and floor every time it’s moved. I fought back tears long enough to remove the top half of the arm, explained it to Mariana (who was understanding about it), made a cup of tea and retired, to write my way out of feeling like a right useless shit once again.
Good day tomorrow please! More chickens!
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