anika in mexico

written on 08.13.2007

I had an really wonderful weekend. Friday zoomed by. Class, then home to meet up with the family for a nice lunch of sopa de flor de calabaza (squash flower soup), chicken enchiladas with salsa verde, frijoles refritos, and a meringue with cream and grapes. On most fridays the whole family gets together to eat and catch up with everyone. I had to eat quickly and then get ready for the weekend away.

Luckily the laundry lady finished washing and drying the clothes I’d started the day before, so I just had to throw a few things in a bag and Karin took me to meet up with Pollo, Pancho and the german girls. We drove together (we three girls squished in the back of Pancho’s Honda Civic Coupe) for an hour to meet up with Siggy and Walter and Saskia in Toluca, where I jumped over to their car for a more spacious comfortable ride.

We arrived at the rancho after dark, but even the outlines of the buildings and trees and walls were familiar to me from the brief afternoon I spent there 8 years ago. Not too much had changed from the last time. The dogs were different colors, there was perhaps a bit more furniture and more colorful decorations, and maybe the electricity was a new feature, but otherwise it was the same cement structures, the same plants, the same rustic getway in the middle of the Mexican countryside.

I helped Siggy get all the beds in order. There were 15 of us the first night, so things were tight to say the least. I slept in a room with 4 other girls: Siggy, the germans, and a girl from Boston who knows Charlie aka Doc. Siggy and the germans in one bed, me on a mattress on the floor, and the boston chick in the bed next to me.

Three guys slept in the entrance room. One on the couch and two shared an airmatress. The two couples on the trip slept in one room–one got the bed, the other the second airmatress. And the rest were upstairs in the last room in some sort of arrangement on cushy things like couch pillows and extra blankets.

Beds made, places assigned, food stowed in the fridge, everyone of course started drinking–Victoria and Corona beer. We congregated upstairs on the open air, covered patio, and watched a storm in the distance. The lightning was quite intense, providing a great show for us. Charlie was trying to snap a shot of the lightning, so I thoguht I’d give it a try too. I had much better luck than he (I do have an SLR and he was working with a purely digital camera), and actually managed to snap a few impressive shots.

Soon the light and the wind and the rain got closer and closer until the storm was right on top of us. I’ve never experienced a storm quite like this one; sure we have strong storms, but this one lasted, in full strength, for hours. Standing on the patio, even about 20 feet back from the edge of the open side, I was still getting pretty damp from the sideways rain. Lightning cracked overhead and the lights in the house went dark. One of the valiant young men on the trip ushered me quickly inside the glass walled room on the same floor.

The lightning and the thunder and the rain just wouldn’t let up. After about 10 minutes Siggy burst in the glass room, exclaiming that the downstairs was flooding! At first we thought she was just being dramatic, but she said she was serious, so I went to see what was happening, and see what I could do. An actual waterfall was falling from upstairs to down through the hole for the stairway that went from the open upper patio down to the enclosed house. The lake was growing. It wasn’t quite totally flooded yet, but it was getting there.

We got all the important stuff out of the way, strategically placed buckets, and started bailing water, but still the water was spreading. The real trouble we realized was that 2 of the guys were going to sleep on the airmatress in the room that the water was trying to take over. While we reasoned that at least they could float on the water, we also agreed it would be better to halt the onslaught, so we grabbed cushions from all the chairs, and someone arranged them around the stairway hole upstairs, in hopes to dam up the river. It worked! But by then the lake had managed to grow from a puddle in the dining room to a minor flood that stretched about halfway into the main entrance where the guys were sleeping, getting their mattress a bit wet. We pushed it over to the dry side, where it was safe for the rest of the weekend.

After stemming the flow, everyone hopped up the stairs, dodged the raindrops and met in the glass room. It was dark except for a few candles, but the conversation was lively and the beer was plentiful. I lasted until 2am talking politics and culture with Chucho before I headed to bed. We were getting an early start in the morning afterall.

I woke up today and still felt awful. The dogs were yowling all night and it really made it difficult to sleep, plus the fact that I also can’t breathe through my nose doesn’t help matters. Luckily it seems the neighbors have returned from their month-long vacation, so hopefully the dogs will be inside and quiet tonight.

I guess Reyna’s day off is Sunday. I fiddled with Sigrid in the kitchen to make breakfast. I told her I just wanted to go upstairs and read or do something quiet. I just ended up sitting in a chair and basically staring at the walls, thinking a bit. The thought occurred to me that being deep in ones thoughts can be a terrible place to be. Not sure why; my thoughts weren’t particularly terrible at the time, it was just something that I thought of.

Karin came to pick us up around 1 to get to Erwin’s birthday party around 1:30. I seriously considered bowing out gracefully, but in the end I’m glad I went. We were there before almost everyone else, which gave me a good opportunity to check out the house, the garden and the view. Apparently in the past all you could see from the back yard was mostly just trees and rolling hills and maybe a few other houses, but now there are buildings, tall, short, fat, skinny, attractive, and ugly, covering the hillsides.

I met lots of new family, including the baby Annika. She’s cute. She has a very round face/head. But she’s only 6 months old so there’s not much to tell really.

I noticed that all the little girls have pierced ears. Even Annika, the youngest. Sabrina who was almost 3 and Daniella who is around 6 also had pierced ears. Personally I think it’s a little barbaric to pierce the ears of such a young child. First of all, the hole will grow out considerably as the ear lobe gets bigger. Secondly, it just looks a little over-done to see an infant with gold studs. And thirdly, how do you know that the girl would want to have her ears pierced if given the choice? Certainly I wanted to have it done, but I was 12, and mum threatened to make me wait until I was 18. When she let me go ahead and do it, it was a really special and memorable event, and it’s not like it really hurts. To each his own I suppose.

The party was great fun. I didn’t participate too much since I wasn’t feeling well, but it was really nice to see such a large family having such a good time together. They had tamale pie which I didn’t try since I thought it would be too much for my stomach to handle, but I had a nice big salad, and also tried several of the different cakes, my favorite was the “Impossible Cake”: Chocolate cake with a flan topping and caheta and nuts over all of it. Truly impossible to resist. The pflaumen kuchen was so-so since the plums were really sour, but the cake part was really well done. There was this other cake which looked good but didn’t taste like much.

After the party we went to see a movie which seems like the thing to do on Sundays and Wednesdays. We saw “Sin Reservas” with Catherine Zeta Jones and some dude and that little girl from Little Miss Sunshine. It was really rather ho-hum. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but nothing ever did. Even when you expected the some interesting conflict that and makes the relationship confused and rocky, it was mostly just lame. I suppose it was a good Sunday movie though.

I start school tomorrow and Teocrito is going to pick me up at 8:30 which means I’ll probably have to wait for about a half an hour, but I’d rather do that than take a taxi there, though I’ll likely have to take a taxi back home.