jim and carol hit the road together!! #1 !!

so dear friends, this blog is being reactivated again, as jim and i are hitting the road, or the airwaves as it were, together into mexico!
we left home wednesday very early am, with the dawn,into the air, with jacob clucking at us over our weird water bottles and silver jewelry, and not to keep worrying about the hat business we were then leaving in his hands.... fret fret.....well, he can do it....have not thought much on that one for a few days.

here is mexico city. i think a lot of the people must conduct their lives on the streets. all the blanket vendors, the others under tarps along the sidewalks in many areas. and then the little old ladies, and other people, selling prepared food out of buckets and baskets off curbs and bicycles. oy! the us health departments would have seizures! people grilling corn over braziers on the sidewalk. or selling tacos and blue corn tortillas, or cooking on a griddle under a tiny duct tape covered umbrella.
roze and ani rose said to avoid the street food for about a week, but i cannot contain myself. it is too wild. so far so good on the ole estomago. we are keeping grapefruit seed extract in our waterbottles.
and actually, last nite we ate in a real restaurant and it was not very good.

we are staying in a hostel near the zocalo, which is a huge plaza by the cathedral and the excavation of the ancient templo mayor of the aztecs. most of the sidewalks
in that area are rather populated by blanket vendors with all sorts of souvenirs from mexico, guatemala, india, china, etc. much is commercial crap, but mixed with things actually handmade in mexico. jim and roze got into shopping for stuff. i got jaded quickly. there were aztec dancers with huge feather headdresses and seed bells on their ankles, dancing with drums amid huge clouds of copal. some of them were also selling stuff, but the most interesting were the native looking fellows offering aura cleanses. they had small altars on the ground with lemons, skulls, herbs. roze had it done and they blew copal smoke all over her and brushed her with a bouquet of basil. it all looked very, well interesting and primitive.

earlier in the day we were also there, and went thru the templo mayor museum and excavations. they built seven layers of temples on the same spot, one over the other.
the artifacts were inside the museum, wonderfully carved volcanic rock, gold,pottery.
we also saw a lot of that sort of thing yesterday at the anthropology museum. it is such an amazing cosmologyj, that is the aztec and mayan view of the world and how it all works. and the art created to support and explain it....all i can say is wow.
it is all hard to grasp, but i am getting snippets. some people today helped me learn to pronounce some of these names! whoa! it just does not seem so unusual when i am here. like almost normal or something. you see all these people who came from these ancient cultures, and they still seem to have some part of it going on.

roze wanted to see more modern art than the older stuff. also we did not want to travel anywhere on buses or trains today, just on foot. we went to the museum of jose luis cuevas, who is a well known living mexican artist. somehow he has his own museum; he must be wealthy. his little drawings were very weird and cool. jim and i got influenced right away by him. he did all these little pix because he was laid up in bed for a long time in the past couple of years. mostly he like to make big things, like drawing that are about 10 feet tall. this museum has a large central courtyard, and in the middle is a bronze giantess he designed who is 8 meters tall, that is 24 feet tall!! she is totally awesome! it was quite wonderful to hang out with her. there was also a show up stairs by alfred zalce, who had done these huge tapestry loom things, or maybe designed them and someone else did them, plus he had these copper bas relief pictures which were stunning depictions of mexican market vendors. i liked the fish and flower vendors a lot. unfortunately the bookshop was closed and the gal would not sell me any postcards.

tomorrow morn we will take off and do some more art sightseeing, but meet up w- roze later on and get the bus for guanajuato in the evening.

i am on the ´computer at the hostel and someone is again in line behind me, so i better get this thing sent out to the cosmous! somebody write to me !! ya sou!!