DRINKING TEA; FAHRT INS BLAUE; MERCADO; CATHEDRAL AND MACHADO ON SATURDAY NIGHT
Sunday, November 20, 2005

Drinking tea

I spent Saturday morning writing and drinking tea. Yes, tea. The first cup of coffee of the day, especially if it is strong and early, is one of life’s real pleasures. The day never really starts for me without it. Used to automatic coffee-filtering machines and the excellent German coffees before we moved onto Vilisar, we first experimented aboard with a percolator. I remember these from the house where I grew up; the aroma would reach upstairs and draw you down irresistibly to the breakfast table. It was years before I actually tasted coffee and, when I did, it was a terrible let-down. Like beer, dry wine and Cuban cigars and unlike sweet wines and soda pop, a taste for coffee has to be acquired. The percolator now too was a let-down. The constant boiling scorches the coffee and makes it bitter.

I researched the making of coffee. I went back to basics. What I did, actually, was to read up on coffee in the new Joy of Cooking that Kathleen’s mother Kathleen sent us. While tea has to be made piping hot, the water used for making coffee should be taken off the boil for 15 seconds before it is poured over the grounds if the best flavour is to be brought out. Of the various methods described, the one best suited to life on a simple sailing boat is the plunger pot, sometimes called a French press, a name that conjures up anything but a coffee pot. Choose dark-roasted beans and grind them coarsely. Place two teaspoons for each 6 ounces of water in the bottom of the pot. Wait the required 15 seconds before pouring the boiling water into the pot. Wrap the pot to keep the coffee warm while it steeps. Wait five minutes before pushing the plunger down. As an added note, the French-press method retains the highest amount of caffeine. Ah, delicious with cream and sugar.

We bought our first press pot at Swain’s Hardware in Port Townsend, Washington, and used it until we got to Long Beach, California. One day I was rinsing it off with at the dock with a hose when the filter element came off the top and plopped into the waters of the harbour leaving me with a stupid look on my face and holding the glass pot. Kathleen’s sister Vickere came to the rescue with a new one from the recesses of her kitchen cupboards. We have been happily using this pot since then. We offer up daily blessings for its cheering usefulness. Unfortunately - and I seem to be using that particular interjection in this log more often than I might have wanted – whilst making dawn brew at sea on the crossing from La Paz, the boat rolled and the coffee pot crashed to the cabin floor in a mass of glass shards around my bare feet. Later I was in a sense glad to have got rid of a glass: should the boat one day roll on us in a storm, broken glass would create a dangerous mess belowdecks. It caused me to wonder about other glass hazards. The only one that was obvious was the glass globes on the petroleum lamps. They would have to be removed and stowed in a storm, I guess. For the moment, not only was there a mess to clean up, we were now to be without coffee. I have been making tea since.

Fahrt ins Blaue

So, I spend most of Saturday morning writing and drinking tea. Late in the morning we decide to go into town, take the local bus – destination “Morelos” - from in front of Club Náutico to the end of the line and back into the centre of town. Then we would try to get tickets for that evening’s performance of Swan Lake at the old theatre near the Machado.

While we are getting ready, we hear an “ahoy” and look out through the hatch to see Celia and Roger on their trimaran St. Briged, Seattle. We met them first in Ensenada and saw them recently in La Paz. They were full of stories about storms on their crossing when we went by on the way ashore, agreeing to meet on Sunday to catch up.

The bus costs Pesos 0.42 and the Mercedes bus took us from our end of town on an hour’s drive through the old city centre out to big-box land, at first along broad boulevards and avenues lined with palms and other trees, later through dusty side streets.

In commercial terms it was exactly the same as most American and increasingly most European cities; endless strip developments. Most of the shops, workshops and eateries, however, are basically outdoors. The climate is neither so warm that there is need to enclose everything for air-conditioning purposes – in fact you almost never see window a/c units here the way you do in Guaymas or Chihuahua - nor so cold that heating is required to work, sell or eat. There are not many parking lots, - I guess there are not as many cars per capita as in the U.S.A. - so the shops are not set back from the street behind endless miles of asphalt. Much of it looks squalid. The city streets are heavily travelled and the dust and exhaust is bad.

At one point we come across a cluster of big boxes: Wal Mart; Sorianas; Leys, Coppel del Mar; Elektra. It’s always the same ones. Around the retailers are the fast food joints: McDonald’s; Kentucky Fried Chicken; Burger King; Dominoes Pizza. It’s always the same ones. These are seriously big shopping malls, the biggest appears to be Sorianas. We are keeping an eye out for cinemas from the bus as it careens down the avenues, each traffic light a Le Mans start of city busses; we are determined to get to the flicks a few times before sailing on south from Mazatlán.

Farther out, the busses spread out into the residential suburbs. While all the main roads are paved, nearly all the side streets are not. Only a few even have proper gravel though rock for crushing must be the most common Mexican natural resource. The dust is penetrating and I shove the windows closed in a vain attempt to breathe clear air. All the parked cars, all the trees and shrubs, all the houses are coated in dust.

The houses are small, often no more than the width of a garage, and all joined together. It is rare to the point of non-existing to see a free-standing house of any size. Nearly all are one-storey but clearly everyone is planning one day to build up and some have already begun. Self-help is the method and concrete and thin brick are the materials. Sinaloans seem to like bright colours and the houses are painted, often luridly. There is very little street parking of cars; if you own a vehicle, you have a parking spot as part of our house. Unless you are very poor, your entrance way, your windows and your car-park are invariably contained within iron bars.

The bus winds up and down back streets until it finally comes to a huge coffee-roasting plant. Here it turns around and the driver points us to the “Morelos Express” bus parked ahead of him. We make a dash for it.

The bus driver is a young man who has his wife and three or four-year-old boy with him at the front of the bus, and whose driving area is plastered with votive decals of Jesus, the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary, to name but a few. Clearly he was taking no chances but St. Christopher was noticeably absent. He greets us with a toothy smile. “Tres minutos!” he tells us. Off we go, slowly back through the dusty streets and much more rapidly through the rushing traffic on the bigger streets. Our driver carries on a conversation with his wife and child while he shifts through the gears, opens the doors, takes money, issues tickets and makes change all the way back to town. The trip back definitely feels faster.

The Mexican people are not only friendly and courteous they are also go-getting and hard-working. Their shops and houses are always well-organised and clean. It’s the public places that seem so squalid and dirty. This indicates to my mind a great failure of public administration. If anyone wants to see what a lack of good government can do, come to Mexico. I say lack of government because, although there is plenty of bureaucracy, plenty of laws, it is not aimed in the right direction. The tax system is unjust and skewered to the rich and the administration and courts are corrupt. Galbraith wrote about America compared to Europe that Americans had private opulence and public squalor. In Mexico this is writ large. How much effort would it take to start laying the dust in suburban streets and cleaning the boulevards and avenues? How much effort would it require to put up a few readable street signs?

With a farewell “Gracias!” we leap off in a rush of indecision at the public market downtown. We need some groceries and, more importantly, it is now about 1600 and we are both hungry. There are always inexpensive snack bars at the mercado. In no time we are parked on high wooden stools in front of a stand where three ladies grill tacos, quesadillas and hamburgesas and sell cheeses, eggs and various other items. It is late in the day and the market is actually shutting down. But there are still lots of greengrocers, butchers, and other merchants around. I wonder around looking while my meal is being prepared. The Mercado here is large and generously proportioned. Everything is clean and the produce looks great.

Satiated, we head for an internet café to spend a few hours catching up with our emails, checking our bank accounts, and dealing with nasty letters from my ex-wife. Things never change.

Kathleen makes a dash to the theatre a few blocks away to see about tickets for Swan Lake. She returns to say that there are indeed a few tickets left but only the most expensive ones. These are only the equivalent of about $ 30 each but we don’t have that kind of money if we expect to eat this month and she takes a pass. We decide to walk around to hear Jock playing at Pedro y Lola and then walk home later.

Cathedral and Machado on Saturday night

Walking past the cathedral we hear loud trumpets and mariachi guitars. The courtyard in front of the church is in tumult, full of people in party clothes. One bridal pair has just come out of the church, another is just about to march down the aisle. We make a beeline for the side door and see the bride coming down the aisle flanked by her mother and father; the bridegroom waits at the front with his parents. There is a handover and the couple move to the steps of the altar where there are several white-draped prie-dieu and a white clad priest await them. The procession has been accompanied by Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from Midsummernight’s Dream in a rendition made for second-year piano students and badly played at that. If the playing isn’t good, at least the organ is terrible, weak of lungs and boring in tone.

We go back outside to watch the first couple being serenaded by the mariachis until they get in their car and drive off leaving family and friends behind them to chat and laugh. We move off on foot through the palm-tree lined plaza, heading for the Machado only a few blocks away.

The place is packed. It is basically old Mazatlán living room, or perhaps better, Mazatlán dining room for the two long sides of the square are cheek by jowl with outdoor restaurants. Every second one has a singer or an instrumentalist outside and at the one nearest the Municipal Academy of the Arts is Pedro y Lola and there we spot Jock playing sax or flute along with a lady playing drums and a man playing the guitar. They sound really cool together doing American jazz favourites in a very sophisticated style. There is no need to take a seat; we just stand on a curb nearby after waving to Jock and listen for twenty minutes or so. Then, when it appears he is winding down, we move off to look at other places. It is after nine at night and the square is full of adults and children. Nearly every outside table is occupied. I see no children at the dining tables but there are two long tables near the Arts Academy where there must be twenty or thirty children painting in oils using small palettes and brushes. There are a couple of adults to supervise. Great idea.

Tired from our day of land travel, we decide to walk home through the darkened streets. For some reason, although there might actually be lamp posts, many streets have no lighting at all. There are plenty of people about though, kids kicking a football, for example. As we walk along one street we can hear what sounds like two blaring trumpets and a snare drum being played around the next corner. Looking down into the darkened street we see five boys of about 12 years of age trying to make a parade. One trumpeter can actually play a few notes but the other is the quintessential Johnny One-Note. The snare drummer produces irregular but good ruffles. The group are in a rough formation and are parading towards our corner. They keep breaking up either from lack of discipline, disagreement about what to play or how to play it, or from a general chaotic disposition. It is like a side scene from the staging of a romantic opera. We move on but we hear them behind us. I suspect that this is a form of play organised by one boy, a future conductor no doubt.

We cross a busy traffic street and plunge into another darkened side-street. Although also all joined together, from the look of these houses this is obviously a more affluent neighbourhood. The houses here are larger and there is more wrought iron and more marble, two things the well-to-do in Mexico apply liberally as a form of conspicuous consumption. Suddenly we hear the sound of a boys choir coming from the upstairs of one of the houses. They are singing “Tochter Zion”, the Advent carol based on a melody from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus. This takes us completely by surprise. Of all the things we might have expected this was not one of them.

We stand on the boulevard for a while, listening and singing softly along, trying to reckon who might be playing this on their CD player at this time and in this place. As we walk on we talk about the various choirs where Kathleen has sung, conducted or played the organ over the years, especially Christ the King in Frankfurt, St. James in Los Angeles and St Luke in Evanston. At one time, Kathleen says, hearing music like that would have made her very homesick. Now, however, as much as she enjoys music, she has a much better idea of who she is, what she can do, and what she wants to be doing. As much as she loves the music and sometimes thinks she ought to get back to it, she is content, as she says, to be bumming around on a sailboat seeing the world for a while longer.