Church Bombs, Earthquakes, and Road Blocks: Week 2 in Mexico

On November 14, 1921, in the north of Mexico City, a guy named Luciano walks into a church called the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Look closely and he's probably sweaty. Under his jacket is a dynamite bomb, which he hopes won't detonate until he has time to hightail it far, far away. He squirms on up to the altar, which holds the most-visited Catholic shrine in the world. He kneels down and buries the bomb in the base of a floral arrangement. Dusts his trousers and walks out, clenching his cheeks, praying he got the timer right.

--

400 years earlier, in the same spot the church would later be built upon, a man named Juan Diego walked up to the top of the hill and was visited by the Virgin Mary. Juan Diego was an Aztec Indian and the apparition spoke to him in his native language, Nahuatyl, and told him to build a church on that spot. So he went into town and told the Archbishop and the townspeople and they all said, "Juan Diego, you're a nice guy, but we don't believe you. We're gonna need some proof before we build a whole darn church."

So Juan Diego went back on up the hill and asked the Virgin Mary if there was some proof he could bring back to the townspeople. She told him to look at the hill, and the normally barren mound was covered in red roses, not native to Mexico. He took his tilma -- a cloak-type garment -- and made a pouch out of the part hanging in front of him, and he filled it with roses and went back down the hill into town. He dumped the roses at the feet of the Archbishop. Left in his tilma was the impression of the Virgin Mary. Proof. They built the church and hung Juan Diego's tilma in the altar.

400 years later, 10:30 in the morning, November 14, the bomb goes off. The explosion is heard up to a kilometer away. The altar is destroyed. The iron cross on the altar, mangled and wrought. But the tilma, somehow, is untouched.

--

I heard this story in a different church, over in Cholula, which is a small town just outside of Puebla I took a day trip to. One of the churches in Cholula has a series of images depicting the revelation of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego. In the courtyard of that church took place another story, also detailing the relationships between the Spanish, Christianity, and the Aztec people.

Two years before the revelation and the story of the tilma, and Cholula was one of the most important cities of the Aztec empire. The city had major religious significance -- the largest pyramid ever built (but it's underground, so it doesn't look like much now) venerated one of the Aztec gods in the center. Hernán Cortés was marching his army of conquistadors westward and northward towards Tenochtitlan, and he knew that Cholula was an important stop along the way. If he could destroy one of the religious hearts of the empire, he figured, it would be easier to crush the people, convert them to Christianity, and claim the land for Spain. But how to do it?

Cortés and his army marched into the city and received a cautious welcome. Cortés laid low, and then on the third day, announced that the Spanish would be moving on. He asked all the Aztecs to gather in the courtyard in front of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl so he could present his goodbye speech. The Aztec Cholulans gathered in the courtyard, and when they were packed in, Cortés' army closed the one gate and started the slaughter. Thousands were massacred, the city was ransacked, and the temple burned for two days straight. Cortés had sent his message, and his march onwards continued. A church was erected, in Spanish fashion, on top of the temple ruins.

--

Why these two stories? I wondered that as I walked the hill to the church in Cholula, as I followed the tour guide through the courtyard, as we looked at the paintings depicting Juan Diego's revelation. I was talking to a archeologist from California on another tour who made the point that, in Mexico, it seems that people are much more connected to their indigenous roots than in the US. Not only in that the temples are more visited by the locals, but in the language customs, in the names you hear, in the streets and cafes and foods and restaurants. I thought that was a good point. The history, somehow, feels more tied to the present. Cholula felt that way. A town dominated by a church on top of a temple, hearing native non-Spanish languages on the street, a complicated mix of complicated history.

The stories also say obviously something about religion. In one, religious persecution (and land-grabbing) leads to a massacre of native people. In the next, a native man is venerated (and eventually made into a saint by the Catholic Church). To what extent does (did) Catholicism erase native culture? To what extent was it a tool used for integration?

Maybe more interesting -- how do the stories we are told create the beliefs we hold? Are these stories purposeful, created and used like weapons and food? How do they contribute to something like national identity?

---

Thankfully, I don't have to answer any of that. I get to sit by the hostel pool and drink shitty coffee and ask unanswerable questions. And, now that I've written something that could pass off as smart if you don't look too close, I can be honest about all the radically dumb stuff I've been up to since leaving Mexico City. So here we go:

Mistakes:

From the capital I took a 5 hour bus to Puebla, the fourth-biggest city in Mexico. On the bus ride I did two silly things. One -- I took a first-class bus, which had a reclining seat and air conditioning and played movies the whole time, but cost an unheard of $40 USD (the movie was Mark Wahlberg playing a rough-and-tumble, amateur boxer, wanna-be actor who moves to Hollywood, joins a church in pursuit of a girl, and eventually realizes his calling is to be a priest. There's a great scene where he takes his shirt off to get baptized and the camera cuts to a churchgoing lady, swooning in the pews. Narratives, national identity, etc).

Other than the cost, I had loaded all my crap into my bag, and when I got up to the bus they said my bag had to go under the bus because it was too big, it had too much crap. I had visions of someone rifling through my intimates, rough-handling my beloved Crocs, maybe more importantly snagging my passport and spare cash and computer.

"Please," I begged, "I want to keep it with me."

The guy laughed maniacally and told me no chance, my shit was as good as gone.

I sweated through the bus ride like a 1921 church bomber walking out of the church. Of course, when we got to Puebla, my bag was untouched under the bus.

Anyway, now I put all my valuables into a separate bag and keep that one on my lap, and I take the lowest rank busses, amongst the livestock and the feed.

The Cholula Church, Juan Diego's tilma, Mark Wahlberg about to be baptized, pack with hanging intimates

___

Money Moves:

Sometimes it feels like everyone's trying to squeeze another dollar out of you, and getting nickel-and-dimed starts to add up when you're living off nickels and dimes, so in Puebla I started to make more sound financial decisions that I believe will launch me into the stratosphere of the one-percent, yacht-to-Catalina, penthouse-for-the-nephews, pillage-the-earth, uber rich. The first one: happy hour.

At the hostel in Puebla (which I shared with just a few other people), they had all you can drink beers or pulque from 6-7 for 80 pesos. 80 pesos is approximately five dollars. Pulque is this weird slimy drink that has like 3 percent alcohol. Tecate beer is not slimy and has like 4.5 percent. So, for the four nights I stayed at the hostel, I handed over 80 pesos and planted myself at the bar and drank as much Tecate beer as humanly possible for exactly 60 minutes.

"Ay, Dios," the bartender would say.

"He's gonna throw up everywhere." -- a hostel employee.

"This is incredibly unattractive," said the handful of girls at the hostel.

Between gulps I gasped out to them. "I'm" -- glug -- "making" -- gag -- "MONEY."

In actuality, Puebla was pretty quiet, pretty tame. It's a cute city and feels smaller than it should. The downtown is colorful, green, and lit up like a fairytale at night. I got a nice run in one morning in their nature park. I fell and cut up my hands and chipped my phone screen looking at a dog up on a roof. I ate great food, including some elote corn from a woman named Olivia who only referred to me as güero (which means blondie) and who told me she got mad often. I worked out in the park, I took a day trip to Cholula (from where you can see the volcano in the background). I heard some live music and got invited to sit on the guy's drumbox thing (cajón) and play along. One night I did actually get pretty rip-roaring drunk, hanging with my roommate Thomas -- an almost laughably handsome Frenchman -- and Stine and Duvna (spelling?) two friends from the Netherlands who were doing a girls trip through Mexico together, then had to split ways when Stine got scratched by a dog and needed to take an emergency flight to Mexico City to get a rabies vaccine, and who had now reunited in Puebla to continue their streak of eating guacamole every day in Mexico. We drank at the open bar at the hostel then headed into downtown Puebla and stopped at two different bars. By the end of the night all the Europeans were smoking cowboy killers, and I wanted to be just like them, so I joined in and smoked way too many cowboy killers, and when I woke up I realized I didn't want to smoke cowboy killers anymore and it was probably time to get out of Puebla. Also, I think Stine was into me, but I couldn't get over the rabies.

Cowboy killers -- not a money move. Categorized as "mistake."

Colorful Puebla, dog before the fall, night lights, corn on stick

___

OAXACA

So off I went to Oaxaca, this time on a second-class bus and with my valuables and laptop and intimates (Crocs) in a separate bag at my lap. And Oaxaca is fricken' cool. Like Mexico City and like Puebla, it's up in the mountains, sitting at 5,000 feet (about the same as Denver). From the hilly downtown you can see the Sierra Madre mountain range looming big and blue in the background. The town is covered in beautiful street murals, has a bustling arts scene, supports a healthy dose of expats, and is one of the street food capitals of the world. And it was here that I discovered the second money move:

All you can eat buffets. Don't get me wrong -- the street food is great. I did a street food tour and ate tacos and grasshoppers and different colors of corn and spicy things and corn-cocoa drinks and strange fruits, all of it worth the food poisoning risk. But the culinary highlight for me was dragging my sweaty ass into a restaurant, plopping down alone at a table, taking my glasses off, and strapping on the feed bag.

The first time I discovered a buffet it was two doors down from the hostel, and I thought I read the sign wrong. It said, "70 pesos, buffet."

70 pesos for a buffet? I thought. That can't be right. 70 pesos is 4 USD. Buffet must translate to something different. My French is no good. So I walked in the door and saw a huge line of food options under one of those classic glass buffet things and I said to the guy, "How's this work? I can eat as much as I want?"

"Si," he said.

"And you won't charge me more for eating more?"

"No."

"And if I finish one plate I can get up and get more?"

"Si."

"Hermano, you've got a deal."

That first buffet I went nutso. I ate a bowl of pozole -- this Mexican stew thing -- and then a bowl of what I believe were pig's feet in onion broth. Then I ate chicken with green beans and rice and regular beans. Then I ate barbecue ribs. Then I had pork in some sauce with steamed vegetables and made little tacos since every meal comes with tortillas. There was a group of high schoolers sitting at the table in front of me and every time I got up to get another plate I could feel all their judgmental little eyeballs tracking me. I stuck my chest out and returned with more food. Judge away, rascals. Poppa's feeding. I ate rice pudding for dessert and then a plate of watermelon and mango and papaya. I don't even like papaya. Then I had more rice pudding and more watermelon. By the end I think all the waitstaff had huddled behind the window, watching. Someone opened up a betting line to see if I would die or keep eating. I don't know who of them made money, but I know on thing for damn sure: I did.

So, money move number 2: all-you-can-eat buffets. I went back every day while I was in Oaxaca. One time, I ate five dinner plates of food and then dessert, all just to feel something. Full, I argue, is close to an emotion.

Oaxaca, what else?

When I checked into the hostel, a cool little place with a pool and a bar and an open-air kitchen, I was happy to see my friend Cas from Mexico City. It was great to get a warm welcome after traveling, and, even though he was heading out to Puerto Escondido on the coast that night, it was fun to trade horrendous travel stories and plan to meet up again later.

That first night was Wednesday, which the hostel person told me was a "big night" at the hostel because it was "karaoke night." The girl behind the bar asked me if I was going to sing and I laughed and said no, and then she said, "Take a shot of mezcal with me," and I said, "No thanks -- last night I drank 10,000 beers in one hour and smoked thirty cowboy killers right after," and she said, "C'mon," and I said, "okay." Then she said for every song I sang at karaoke I got another free shot, and so I signed up to perform Morgan Wallen's 36-song 2023 album "One Thing at a Time." They told me no albums.

Actually, I truly didn't want to sing karaoke in a room full of strangers. I didn't really want to drink. Karaoke is the kind of thing that whack-a-moles all the social anxiety buttons in my brain. But then I remembered how the summer after senior year I went to visit my then-girlfriend in New York City and she wanted to go to a karaoke bar with her friends and so I tagged along, but I didn't want to sing anything then, either, because of all the social anxiety buttons, and that was the start of the end of the relationship. And then I remembered the other time I did karaoke with my roommate T at Beacon Hill Pub in Boston before they closed for good, and we performed a version of "Our Song" by Taylor Swift that was so perfectly executed it prompted tears and laughter and, I assume, the conception of many children, 9 months later probably all named Taylor. So I walked up to the bar and took my free mezcal shot and I wrote "David" and "Our Song -- Taylor Swift" on their little paper and I sang that song with a Dutch guy who just wanted to hop around on the mike, and then I sang some punk song with a 40-year-old very short bald English man who was working at the hostel named Kevin, and then the whole hostel jumped in a circle and shouted the words to Mr. Brightside, and all-in-all it was a great old night in which I put all my guts into karaoke.

(Ex-girlfriend, if you're reading this: I've changed, I'll sing, take me back!!!)

The next day I woke up early since it was 10,000 degrees in the hostel, and I laced up my Altras and went for a little runsie-onesie. There's a hill overlooking the city of Oaxaca and the hill has great dirt trails that wind up and around, and I had a blast shuffling all up and around them. Later I signed up for a walking tour with the hostel and Kevin the Englishman was the tour guide, and after the walking tour was the food tour, and then I went and collapsed on the couch next to the hostel cat for a while. In spite of all the prior activity, the most important was yet to come.

Imagine the stage: an open-air bar at a hostel in Oaxaca, reggaeton music blasting from a speaker. The couches and barstools frame the site of the action. Center, directly under the spinning disco ball, a beer pong table, six cups per side. The situation: a tournament, winner drinks for free. Kevin announced that he'd won the tournament every Thursday for the past two months.

Thankfully, I found another American on the earlier tours -- Vito, a New Yorker through and through, except for the fact that he hated New York and never wanted to go back (a decidedly un-New Yorker trait). He's a good guy, a short, stocky ex-wrestler, and, most importantly, from the USA. It was breath of fresh Uncle Sam air to talk to another sane person for once (there's not many Americans out traveling), and, beer pong being our national pastime, we figured we were chosen by God himself to win the tournament and drink free beer. Money moves, but also, Manifest Destiny, national pride, narratives.

"Vito," I said, the two of us at the bar waiting for our match, "Let me tell you a story about beer pong. This was back in my younger days, back as a 20-year-old college lad full of hope, back when I was king of the world. One time, I beat Waka Flocka Flame at beer pong."

And I told him the (true) story, how we had a buddy in charge of organizing the school concert and Mr. Flame was performing and our buddy invited him to a party at our house after, and there were probably 300 people packed into the house when four black Chevy Escalades pulled into the driveway and out stepped Mr. Flame himself, along with his manager and his bestest friends in the whole wide world. They proceeded to smoke so much weed you couldn't see the ceiling, and he said he wanted to play beer pong, and (in my memory) with 300 people watching, me and my buddy beat him. It was a good night.

"Dude," Vito said. "The exact same thing happened to me."

Turns out, Mr. Flame did this fairly regularly, and when he went to U Chicago, Vito's house was the party house, and me and Vito dug into our phones and retrieved the exact same photo -- us and our pong partners, standing next to Waka and his manager, pong table in the background. Small world.

Anyway, America rules, so we talked a lot of shit and squeaked out two wins and screamed and hollered like we'd just won the Ultimate Frisbee World championship. Or NFL championship. Doesn't matter.

What matters is that in the semi final game, we faced up against two hostel employees. We turned to each other, newfound brothers, by way of being American the most intelligent and strongest and deserving-est people in the room. And we said, "uh oh." The thing about hostel employees, and the reason Kevin had won the tournament every time for the past 2 months, is that they aren't exactly people in the way that you (reader) and I are people. You and I have ethics, a moral code, a sense that we should generally strive to be good and do right by ourselves and our health and the people around us. Hostel workers aren't like that. They live by one rule: Drink beer. They wake up and drink beer. They "work" at the hostel and drink beer. They go to bed in a bed made of beer boxes and shower in a beer-filled shower and make love in a hostel pool filled, primarily, with beer. So you and I may play an occasional game of beer pong. As Americans, probably more than other nationalities. But nobody, nobody, plays more beer pong than hostel workers.

I could talk through the dramatics of the game, but doing so would feel somewhat like watching a tape of your last dental extraction. Hurts. Suffice to say, we lost to the hostel workers, and we slunk back to the bar, our beautiful American heads hung in shame.

And then -- a siren. A loud, undulating pitch, blaring from some unseen speaker. We kept drinking, but someone there from Mexico told us in a loud voice, "Earthquake. That's the earthquake siren."

Cue 30 people who don't have experience with earthquakes running around in general earthquake panic. The bar had this sheet metal awning constructed, in general terms, pretty poorly, and we were standing under it. The one guy there who knew what was going on shepherded us towards the pool, out from under the awning, all of us bleating and bucking like cows before the cowgun.

Before we could kneel down, it hit. The ground shook and the awning shook. Glasses rattled off the bar and shattered. We screamed. And then it was over.

"Vito," I said. "That's a sign. We were supposed to win that goddamn game of beer pong."

"Amen, brother," he told me. And then we went to the club to dance as poorly as only Americans could and to spend most our money, and then went to a taco stand at 2:00 am and spent the rest.

____

I had four more days in Oaxaca and they were all great. One day I was hungover and it took everything in my power to get a haircut and make it to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Another day I went for a 10-mile run up this old abandoned highway north of the city, which has now become the Oaxacan hotspot for endurance sports (Oaxaca as a state and a city has a pretty big running culture). I read and hung by the pool, and the last two days I went to an Airbnb to have some time to myself and called my sister and read at a coffee shop and went to a bar to listen to live music.

And that was my 10ish days in Puebla, Cholula, and Oaxaca.

Hostel pool, buffet food, taco stand, cat nap, Oaxaca hills, street art, trail run

____

What I'm kicking around:

Maybe you (reader) have gotten to this point and you're thinking, okay, you've been eating and drinking and generally being an ugly American for the past 10ish days, but is there anything redeeming, any good thoughts or reflections that remind us you are basically decent?

Well, ummm...

I've been thinking more about friends, short term friends and long term friends, but I don't have any epiphany to report.

I've been thinking about routines, because I catch myself writing things in my notebook like "Run 3x/week exercise 2x/week," and wondering why I feel the need to track, measure, regulate, etc. But also I'm thinking about health, vegetable intake, and the like.

I've been thinking about safety, too, because Guatemalans are protesting since the government has refused to certify the election results (in which the anti-corruption candidate won), and so travelers are trying to get around the million roadblocks to the airport to get out. Vito wrote me that he changed his trip and went to Columbia instead. Safety also because of little things like the hostel pool -- my travel doctor begged me to avoid getting in still water. Safety because I was told there's been a spike in phone robberies in Oaxaca, in which someone will pull up to you on a motorbike and point a gun at you and politely ask if they could borrow your phone forever. And because of what's going on in Israel; my friend Yaron who I met in Mexico City posted to his Instagram that he got called to the Israeli Defense Force as soon as he returned from his travels. The world is all around us, all the time.

I've been thinking about money, of course, but also not feeling like I have to do everything but still making sure I do something. There's a balance, I guess, of saying no to doing things you really aren't interested in, but also not saying no to everything. To put it poetically, sometimes I think I should do stuff? Kinda lost, here. To quote singer/songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff, "I don't know a goddamn thing."

But maybe that's it, the one good thought. There are things that sometimes I really don't want to do -- shell out money for a tour that doesn't interest me, spend an afternoon in a museum, whatever. But then there's things that I think I don't want to do, but not because they don't interest me. We say we don't want to do things because we're scared of looking like an idiot or being bad at it or not knowing how it's going to go. Like running on a trail you can't find much info about online. Like karaoke. But that's not the same as not being interested. Part of doing the solo travel thing is taking all the weird rules I've told myself about myself ("I do this but never this") and being in a room where you realize no one there will ever see you again and might die from an earthquake in a minute anyway, and doing the strange, uncomfortable things anyway.

That's redeeming, right?

Hasta luego, amigos. Next stop, Puerto Escondido.

-Davidcito