mexico: the sequel

MAZATLAN, MEXICO
Wed, 25 Feb 2004

Okay...

First of all, to everyone who replied to my last email by calling me a bitch, or a brat, or telling me to go fuck myself:

Ha ha suckers!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm still here and you're still not!

To everyone else: I love you dearly.

Carnaval just ended, and things are getting back to normal. Where do I begin? It was basically an entire week of noise. Oh the noise noise noise NOISE! (They banged their gardinkers, they tinked their who-tinkers....) Seriously, I was starting to feel a bit grinchy towards the end, truth be told - but you'll understand when I tell you about the music...more on that later.

The whole town was swarmed with people - tourists come from all over Mexico for this thing. (Not to mention all the Americans and goddamned pesky Canadians.) Stages were built all over the place, though apparently less than last year, when there were so many stages that nobody could distinguish the band they were trying to listen to from all the other stuff going on. People complained, so they scaled it back a bit. The Malecon was packed with people all the time, and huge groups of military police were everywhere, which was disconcerting at first, but I got used to it. Plazuela Machado, the plaza a block away from where I'm staying, was nuts a lot of the time too. Workers spent the week previous to Carnaval building up the four streets surrounding the square plaza in the centre with planks of wood, to make everything the same height and the plaza that much bigger, so that all of the restaurants on the square could put out huge patio cafés, taquerias, bars, etc. The bandstand in the centre always had somebody playing. Things wouldn't die down until six every morning, and by then the daytime people would be up and going about their noisy days.

Day one was the "burning of bad humour", which I had mistakenly thought was going to be a ritual in which everyone burned some personal token of negativity in a big bonfire. But, as it turns out, the town chooses (I don't know who votes on this) one big representative of "mal humor", and burns it. So this year, burned in effigy, was....Arnold Shwarzenegger. I AM NOT JOKING. Unfortunately, I didn't know about this until it was too late, so I didn't get a picture of the burning Ahnold. Damn. By the way, what the hell is "bad humour" anyway? Somebody?

That night, also, was the fireworks battle. This is a reenactment of a battle in which the French tried to take Mazatlán, in the mid-nineteenth century, and were defeated. A ship representing the French comes within view of all the spectators lining the sea wall, shooting off fireworks from its deck, and another ship closer to shore, represents Mazatlán, and fires back. More fireworks join in from the beach, everybody goes nuts, you get the picture. I was watching all this from the roof of a house on the corner of the Malecón, so had a great view. Sam, an old expat American guy, had invited a whole bunch of people to watch from his roof. I went along with my innkeeper, Tony, and soon realized that I was one of about six people present who were under sixty. I shouldn't have been surprised, as the expat community is by and large made up of retirees, and I didn't expect to meet a lot of young travellers here.

Anyway, I was happy to meet the other five, two guys in their forties and their kids, and quickly latched onto them for the evening. (The Under Sixty Six, taking the town by storm!) We took off from the party for awhile and made our way down into the crowds. Entering the Malecón, we had to buy tickets and then go through a crowd of military police, as usual. But we couldn´t figure out at first why I alone was getting pulled out of line and waved to the other side of the street. Did I look that suspicious? The cops then explained that it was women on one side, men on the other. I breezed through, a female officer looking through my bag, and then noticed that, on the other side of the street, the guys were getting frisked on their way in by a long line of tough-looking male cops. (That's right, Kelli, they frisk-ed them.) They wouldn't let me in that line, though I begged and begged...

After fighting the crowds with these folks for an hour or two, taking pictures, the kids buying everything that lit up or made noise or was edible (or all three - woo hoo!) that they could get their hands on, we went back up to the roof in time for the fireworks. Which were great. The ones on the beach were really close to the spectators, and now and again one would go off a little too low, and people would scatter, screaming, trying to avoid being set on fire. There's no such thing as civil liability here, either. ("You lost your eye to a firecracker? Sucker. Now pay your taxes.")

The kids wanted to know what exactly the battle was about, and when one of the dads came up with some vague information about the French, the kids wanted to know what exactly the French wanted Mazatlán for. Nobody knew, exactly, so we started making jokes about it actually being the French Canadians, who had run out of beer and were on a cerveza raid. The kids started saying things like "I think the French Canadians are winning!" and I would shout "vive la Québec!" when the French side put on an impressive display. It only ocurred to me afterwards that the kids may not have been fully aware that it was a joke. There may be a couple of kids, now back at school in San Fran, sharing their knowledge about Quebec's invasion of Mexico. Oops. Remind me never to have children.

On the way home, I was commenting to Tony how strange it was that nobody here seems to smoke weed. (Anyone from Toronto, try to imagine Caribana without the smell of it in the air.) He said that it's very private here, but that a lot of people do, sometimes the people you'd least expect...and then he brought me a joint before I went to bed that night!

After that, parades, parades, parades. It's basically, I'm told, the same parade (i.e. the same floats), making their way back and forth every day. They take their beauty queens very seriously here...there are posters of the contestants all over town, as if they're running for office. I happened to be up at the baseball stadium a few days ago, looking for info on the baseball season ( I just missed it) when the big Carnaval Queen Pageant was about to happen inside. There was a huge line-up to buy tickets. I know I'm here to take in the local life, and briefly considered going in, but then I thought, do I really have to sit through a beauty pageant to make my trip complete? I went to the aquarium instead.

Anyway, the parade was full of beauty queens, including visiting ones from Texas and creepy little child ones. (There's a child carnival queen pageant, too, also very serious.) One float in the parade I went to was covered in these creepy little queens, all tarted up, and waving and blowing kisses...in...slooowww.... mmmotionnn. I was terrified. Felt a bit better when, on a float a bit later, there were similarly tarted up kids, but they were throwing rolls of streamers at the crowd as if they were trying to kill us. Right on, girls! Get angry! Work those pitching arms!

The music here is so horrible. so horrible. Okay, Irv, remember I told you about Banda music? (Shudder.) Whoever wrote that it was like country music was on crack. It's actually based in polka, a remnant of a time of german occupation here. Layered on top of the oom-pa-pah-ing tuba and accordion are a few drums and AS MANY BRASS INSTRUMENTS AS CAN BE FOUND, playing a bad version of a more typically Mexican sound.

It's just awful. Nobody listens to each other, they all just play as loudly as they possibly can...

I had the misfortune of having a huge banda Sinaloaense (so called because this is the official regional music of Sinaloa state, and Mazatlan in particular) stall in front of me for a long time in the parade. I wanted to kill myself. All the little kids around me started to cry. Nobody could hear them because the music was so loud. One little girl was covering her ears and had tears streaming down her face. Nobody seemed to enjoy it, except for the guys in the band. (It did look like fun to play.) There was some applause at the end, either because people were glad that they were moving on, or, I suspect, out of some civic duty to appreciate their hometown's musical claim to fame. Lonely Planet says "be sure to catch a rousing banda Sinaloaense while in Mazatlan". I say, Lonely Planet, be sure to KISS MY ASS. Other popular music includes stupid latin pop ( the big song right now is called La Gorilla, features lots of grunting and has an accompanying stupid dance in which the participants pretend to be apes), and techno. Thank god carnaval is over.

Well, I'm off. Barbecue back at the ranch tonight. Thanks to those who have written me (bitter or not). Keep it up. It's great to hear from you.

Leese