On the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, the Jardin, becomes a world of colorful flowers and confetti eggs... Vendors surround the town's central plaza with bags of cascaras for children and adults, to smash on one another's heads. And there is a feast of lovely paper flowers, planted in the gardens...and if you shop early you can bring some home with you.
Carnaval Egg Bonking from Deborah Ehrens on Vimeo.
And the morning after:
All the sidewalks in San Miguel are narrow and often share the space with telephone poles and other necessities of modern life. Often one has to walk in the road because there simply isn't room for a person to pass on either side of the pole. And when the street is hilly there is all kinds of non standard stone work for driveways and steps. Up the block from our house, is one of the most unique accomodations I have seen.
I came to San Miguel with lots of projects to work on. While most of them are still on the list, it has been a very productive time studying the work of photographers and artists who inspire me to try new things. The other day, while working on some abstract images I realized I needed a better understanding of color theory. That got me looking at the color wheel. The next time I went out with my camera, all I saw was color wheel opposites....
Shadows, plaids and adobe walls create a moment of artful randomness, as this elderly couple makes their way across the street in the early morning light.
In two day it will be Candelaria and Parque Juarez will be transformed into a grand open air flower market. In the early morning hours the transformation begins with endless wheelbarrels of stones, flowers and eathern pots being moved from every trucks parked along the perifery to inner paths along the now dry river bed. It is slow and hard work that ends in beauty....
Every morning in the Juan de Dios market, the strawberry vendor transforms an empty table top into
una pirámide de fresas, a pyramid of strawberries.
There is a rule of thumb when shopping for "gringo" products in San Miguel - buy it when you see it, because it probably will not be there the next time. When I found this ready made graham cracker crust in a little grocery I snagged it for the dessert I was supposed to bring to dinner the next night.
Since my Spanish is still not terrific and google translate often makes bad translations, I decided to snap a photo of it so I could show it to a clerk in the future. Through the lens, it suddenly became apparent that I had an O BAMA pie....
The corollary to you never know what is behind the closed doors of San Miguel is that what was there yesterday, could be very different tomorrow. With great regularity businnesses change locations, restaurants move and yesterday's clothing shop is today's yogurt store. I don't remember what was in the new upscale wine shop I passed yesterday, but I will not forget the truly Mexican kind of merchandising.
I never would have figured on the Norwegian language being part of my daily life in Mexico, but recently it has. Under the best of circumstances, remembering Spanish verb conjugations is a challenge. Since I much prefer couches to hard classroom seats, one of the least painful Spanish refreshers for me is watching American TV shows with subtitles. However, it doesn’t take long before Law and Order dialog begins to sound the same from show to show. Happily we found all of the episodes of Medium available on Netflix with Spanish subtitles. Although the story line is totally unreal, the family life is absolutely real and the sentences far more complex. After one season, I was getting pretty good at recognizing those past and imperative forms.
The next challenge was Lilihammer, a series staring Steve Van Zandt, one of Tony Soprano’s capos. Van Zandt plays a New York mafioso who testifies against his bosses in exchange for witness protection in Lilihammer, Norway. He figures nobody who wants him dead will be looking in lily white Lilihammer. When the story shifts to Norway, Van Zandt continues to speak in English, with an occasional word of Norwegian, but 90% of the Norwegian actors speak Norwegian and they have alot to say. Unfortuately neither of us understands a word of Norwegian. Finally, duh, it occurred to us to turn on subtitles, but on Mexican Netflix there are no English subtitles, only Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese. So night school sessions now involve listening to Norwegian, reading Spanish, and watching this Mafioso guy build a new cosa nostra in Lillyhammer. A global education…..
These beautiful stone pavers are an iconic part of the San Miguel charm. The volcanic rock of many colors makes for a narrow, often colorful variegated sidewalks. However, when it rains, they become slick and lethal. After every rain, I find myself walking ever so carefully - constantly reminding myself to attend to every footfall, lest I spend the remainder of my time here in an epic orthopedic adventure.
Students at universities in Mexico City deposit their soda can tabs in special bins on campus and these metal bits are woven into purses and sparkly evening wear.
When I realized how many of our old family images were fading and getting stuck in plastic albums I decided that creating books the next generatrion from digitized image needed to move up on my priority list. So I brought a large number of scanned images to work on here in Mexico. I figured if I did some photoshop retouching every day it wouldn't be too overwhelming.
However, within a few days of arriving in San Miguel when, off I went to a class on photo transfer where I learned how to make a perfectly good reproduction look textured and worn. My head is spinning with new ideas, but I do feel a bit like a cat chasing her tail.
Nannette on a tyvek envelop