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Entering the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro has the taste of touching the heaven. In the archaeological site Las Ranas in the heights of 2400 m you walk the ruins inside a cloud forest and sometimes it feels like the spirits touch you with their cold and wet breath. 

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Nightfall at the riverside

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One of many incredible places in Queretaro Angel took us. A river with hot thermal water and natural pools. 

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After the coffeelands of Veracruz we headed for Queretaro, a state northwest of Estado de Mexcio. There we met among other members of Xacintas family her uncle Angel. A real cool guy that i liked from the first moment we met. Here we are together with one of his sons Daniel on a piece of land Angel bought recently. Here they want to cultivate Maiz, Nopal and other veggies and build a house on the structure of an ancient aqueduct which once transported thermal waters from the mountains down to the valley. 

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In the coffee lands above Veracruz you still find a lot of tropical forest and plenty of clean water. That nature was preserved here that well is strongly related to the cultivation of coffee. 90 % of the remaining tropical forest in Mexico is still standing due to coffee cultivation.The coffee plants need the shadow of the trees to grow and thanks heaven there is still no way to grow it in large plantations. The coffee of Coatepec is one of the best coffees in the world and it taste delicious.

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Visiting Biófilo Planclasta after many years of not seeing him was one of the best things we did in our trip. When you don´t see people for many years you often find a different person. With him it was like listening again after many years to a real good disc or tasting one of your favorite dishes. He is just him. Lovely honest, that in my experience opens anybody´s heart when you are ready for that. 

He sells his work, mainly jewelry at a market in Coatepec. In his  Facebook profile (Biófilo Panclasta) one can always enjoy also his photos, he definitely has an eye for “things”, some are everyday things but precisely because of that most of them escape to everybody´s eyes. 

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Mexico City is always worth a visit. Every time we go there we have different adventures and explore new worlds. The city is a bit like Berlin, only 20 times bigger. But every barrio has is own charm and many have still preserved their past as pueblo (village). You can find just about everything in this town and we can tell that DF is far better than its reputation.  

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No one described daily life in Mexico City better than Gabriel Vargas, the creator and author of “la familia burrón”, the best known comic strip of Mexico, which was published over decades in little booklets. In those the life of the “chilangos”, the inhabitants of the capital with all their habits, sufferings, adventures and daily anarchy comes to life. The slang which is used in the stories contains many words which were created by Vargas and which were adopted by the population and are still in use in daily life. The scenes above are part of an exhibition about life and oeuvre of Vargas in the museo de arte popular in Coyacan, DF.

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Some other corners of the house.

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And this is Frida’s home in Mexico City in the barrio Coyacan. The famous Casa Azul where she lived together with Diego Rivera and where she taught her students. Although this place has many visitors, you can still feel the presence, spirit and love of this two great artists. We felt so well and blissful, it is hard to describe. 

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After a nice little siesta we explored the second site close to Cacaxtla which is called Xochitécatl. From the top of the main structure you can see within a clear days 5 Volcanos. Together with Xacinta’s stepfather Roberto I plan to walk up one of them which is close to this place.. Its called the Malinche, named after Malintzin, the woman who helped Cortez to conquer Mexico.   

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This place looks from the outside like the departure hall of an airport and in fact it is one. The flight from here takes you 1500 years in the past at a time where this place was a ceremonial center of the Olmec-Culture covered with lime mortar and mindfully decorated. Situated near Tlaxcala which is the capital of the so named smallest state of Mexico at the border of Puebla, Cacaxtla is one of the archaeological sites with the best preserved mural paintings of all Mesoamerica. Very famous is the “mural de la batalla”, the battle wall, in which you can see the unlucky invasion of some eagle warriors who are defeated by the local olmec-jaguar warriors. The scenes are quite explicit. The poor eagle warriors are dismembered in large scale and the amounts of spilled blood and guts can easily cope with a Tarantino´s movie. Unfortunately these traditions were preserved very well and are still in use in the mexican daily life...sometimes I really wonder if conservation is really a good thing...

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Some more impressions...

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Impressions of the exhibition - 6 decades of constant painting and writing and teaching.

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May I introduce you to Guillermo “Memo” Monroy which I had the great honor and pleasure to get to know personally and become friends with. Memo is Xacinta’s abuelo (grandfather) and is a charismatic artist in the tenth decade of his life. Born in the early 1920′s in a working class barrio (neighborhood) of Mexico City with many brothers and sisters he became at the age of 16 a student of Frida Kahlo, one of the most famous mexican artists of the 20th century. Frida accepted due to her health problems only very few students, in fact 4 in total known as the “Fridos”, Memo is one of them.  Although Memo suffers due to his age a lot of maladies and has lost a major part of his eyesight, his spirit is still high and its such a gift and delight to listen to what he has to tell and to watch what he gave and still has to give to this world. 

He has been a wonderful “speech giver” his entire life, but after experiencing real excitement at a party almost two years ago, his brain cells couldn´t really take that happiness and gave him some kind of stroke, in fact he had to learn to speak again and to everybody´s surprised he did it. Now, he complains that he says “one thing for another” or forgets words but at the inaugural speech of his art exhibition he gave us some words, so full of love and strength that we all felt like having been struck by a thunder. 

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This is the traditional weekend dance amusement that takes place at the “Zocalos”, the central town or village place with a small kiosk at the center where a banda plays danzon, rumba, merengue or salsa and the people of the town-barrio or the village meet here and have fun together.  Later in the evening it gets really crowded. Although this tradition is fading away slowly there are still many places where you can find it and you just step in and join the rhythm and the chat - if you can. I’m still working on that. 

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Cuernavaca is the capital of the state of Morelos and was called in “nahuatl”, the prehispanic language of the region,   Cuauhnáhuac which means “nearby the trees”. It is also called the city of eternal spring because of its perfect climate throughout the year. Despite of the city suffers the same problems like most of the mexican cities which is a horrific traffic situation connected with high air pollution, uncontrolled city expansion, unfiltered waste water and highly corruptible administration to mention only a few, its still a place with beautiful flowering trees, gardens and old mansions and one can imagine the richness and beauty it once had. Even so this is now the arid period it looks and smells like spring and I wonder how it will look in the rainy season.