The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

The Zen state of mind (or: I will no longer shed tears over Telmex and water)

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The beach in Progreso, Yucatan

I’m back from the Yucatan and I feel calmer already. The beach and the poolside views at our hacienda hotel helped. And so did (I’m semi-embarrassed to admit) certain chapters of Eat Pray Love, which I swore I would never read (over 7 million copies are now in print!), but now I’m so glad I did, because if a formerly divorced and depressed woman can find inner peace, then dammit, so can I.

Telmex says we’re not going to have a phone line for at least 15 more days. That’s fine, if that’s what the universe wants….

We still don’t have water, but pipa truck guys arrived this morning at 6 a.m. and rang our buzzer. (We had no idea they were coming and no one else did either.) The water is supposed to come back soon. The fact that we can even afford a pipa is a blessing.

And I am living in Mexico City, which is a blessing, too. Oh, and I met a really cool cab driver yesterday afternoon who said he’s known in Tepito as “Bruce Lee’s Cousin,” because he puts the smackdown on any dudes who try to mess with him. (Tepito is known as the toughest neighborhood in the city.) I got his number and he’s taking me to the airport next week.

Your faithful Zen Princess,
Lesley

What it’s like to swim in a cenote

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Cuzama cenote

For some reason, I pictured cenotes to be kind of like sinkholes on the side of the road. I don’t know where I got this from, but I had this whole image of a highway worker picking up trash, seeing a cenote, stepping around it, and calling over his shoulder to the next guy, “Hey! Don’t step in that!”

Actually, cenotes — from what I’ve gathered anyway — are way too large for someone to accidentally dunk his foot. They’re natural, fresh-water pools, and some are in caves. The ones I visited on a hacienda outside Cuzama in the Yucatan were dark, serene, eerie, mystical things. Swimming in them was a brain trip. How does one swim in a cave? Aren’t caves for walking and peering at gnarly, witch-fingery rock formations?

We traveled to these cenotes by horse-drawn buggy, because there’s no other way to reach them unless you want to walk for 8 kilometers in the blistering sun. At the first cenote, we climbed down a set of rickety wooden stairs and found a calm, blue sheet of glass. It didn’t even look like water. I was kind of scared. Maybe Nessie at Loch Ness had a Yucatecan cousin?

Our guide was amused. “They’re completely safe,” he said.

So we started swimming, which is really the only way to see everything. Tree roots hung down from the ceiling like Rapunzel hair. It was amazingly quiet, as if the mouth of the cave had suddenly inhaled and was now waiting while we finished our frolicking. Before the loud American teenagers got there, the only sounds were of Joy and I pushing and pulling the water, and the occasional bat making a weird, high-pitched noise. (And then me saying, “Oh god, are there bats here?”)

The Yucatan has more than 5,000 cenotes, about 3,000 of which are “registered,” meaning the state knows generally where they are. Our guide laughed when I asked if they had healing powers.

I really can’t wait to swim in them again. It was among the weirdest, coolest experiences ever. Next time I’m bringing proper shoes and a towel though. My cute little Privo flats were pretty much ruined after this trip.

The journey to Uxmal

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Uxmal temple

We got to Campeche on Saturday night, and for a few minutes there, we didn’t know how we were going to get to Uxmal, the next leg of our journey. A tourist official told us no buses went from Campeche to Uxmal. Employees at the Best Western concurred. I thought: Should we hire a driver? Attempt to bus it to Merida first? Uxmal was only an hour-and-a-half away by car, for gosh’s sakes. There had to be a public transportation route somewhere.

Luckily Joy ducked into a hostel in Campeche’s Centro Historico, and a nice worker told her that a second-class bus left for Uxmal the next morning at 9 a.m. So, bright and early the next day, we found the bus terminal and off we went, through rural Campeche and rural Yucatán, Michael Jackson and early 90s grunge blasting on the bus’s speakers. (Yay for drivers with good taste.)

Women with babies and old ladies in bright, embroidered huipiles got on and off; so did men with loose, unbuttoned shirts and backpacks. People rode bikes on the side of the road. Quaint, chubby little Mayan homes with thatched roofs lay here and there.

At 12:30, the bus pulled over and opened its doors.

“Is this the Uxmal stop?” I asked the bus driver. He nodded and looked bored.

There wasn’t much to see; just the road and a few buildings. Also, I really had to go to the bathroom. I had been dreaming of using the restroom at our very nice hacienda hotel for the past hour. And now this music dude was dropping us off on dirt — it was almost too much to bear. I tried calm myself using my yoga breathing.

Joy went to ask where the hell we were, and thankfully we happened to be at the hotel itself, in the back. I’d never been so happy to see a bathroom. Next time I’m not drinking two cups of coffee and half a bottle of water before getting on a three-hour bus.

The view at our hotel:

Hacienda Uxmal

When cheddar cheese is AWOL

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The Newcomer’s Club gives all its members a free guide of tips on how to get by as an English-speaker. When I got mine a few months ago, a paragraph in the introduction caught my eye: “What do you do when you’re having your husband’s boss over for dinner, only to discover ricotta cheese — the star ingredient in your lasagna — can’t be found at your local supermarket?”

I remember scoffing at this. Lasagna? You’re really making lasagna for your husband’s boss when you live in Mexico City? Dude, sacar the Rick Bayless and hook up some chicken thighs bathed in tomatillo sauce!

Of course, I totally ate my hat during Crayton’s birthday. I tried to make mac n’ cheese — his favorite — only to discover that my local supermarket (nay, two supermarkets) didn’t have sharp cheddar. I fretted in the grocery store for a few minutes, feeling like a pampered expat wife, before realizing that any type of melted cheese would do just fine, especially when smothered in heavy cream. I picked gouda and gruyere. Everyone loved it.

It’s interesting how difficult it’s been to tweak my American eating habits. I thought: I’ll arrive in Mexico and only cook with fresh, local ingredients! But I’ve done it in baby steps. Buying nopal tortillas. Crumbling panela cheese on salads.

Some days I just want a turkey burger. (Ground turkey doesn’t exist here.) I want diced apple on my cereal, even though it comes from Washington and is way more expensive than papaya. (Which, IMO, kind of smells like vomit.)

Maybe a cooking class would inspire me. Or unearthing my two Diana Kennedy cookbooks and actually reading them, instead of skimming them until my eyes glaze over.

Telmex made me cry

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A few days ago I had my hopes up. Sergio, the Telmex guy, suggested that a line in Apt. 5.1 appeared to be available. I could use it, if I had sufficient evidence that it wasn’t being used. I spoke to the doorman, who said the apartment was actually an office. Then I spoke to the office secretary, who said sorry, they were definitely using their phone lines.

I felt like I was living in 1962. (The outdated, frustrating 1962, not the glamorous Doris-Day-PIllow-Talk 1962.) Why do I have to ask these people if they’re using their phone line? Why does an office get to have three phones lines, while I have none? As soon as I got back to my apartment, I started crying. But only because I’m emotional right now.

Sergio called me several minutes later. “Well,” he said, “I think we’re going to have to make the network larger.”

“But what does that mean?” I asked. “When will they start?”

“To be honest, I don’t know. But here’s a number for my supervisor…”

I’ve already tried to call said supervisor. He never answers his phone.

UPDATE: After 20 phone calls, Crayton finally got ahold of the supervisor. They are supposedly installing our line “next Thursday or Friday.”

I finally thought it: “I want to go home.”

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This morning, my arms full of dirty clothes, I opened the door to our tiny washer/dryer combo and discovered the sheets I’d placed there last night were still wet. I’d already tried to dry these sheets twice. Did this mean our dryer was broken, too? I screamed in my head, and I think it reached Mars.

The past few days have tested my patience. First we didn’t have water. Then we didn’t have hot water. Then I got a haircut from an aggressive Mexican stylist who gave me spiky bangs. Then the telephone installation guy broke Crayton’s nightstand. Then he said, Oh señorita, actually you can’t get a phone line in your building, the “network is saturated.” Then I woke up to find the wet sheets. Meanwhile three other loads waited, staring at me with their dirty eyes.

At that moment, the United States suddenly seemed like paradise. Hot water gushes from the faucets without anyone worrying where it comes from. A person can call up AT&T — or a carrier of their choice — and receive a phone line without much fuss. Few people worry about whether they’ll have water or gas tomorrow. And they don’t get scratch paper shoved in their faces during business transactions. GOD. What is it with Mexicans and scratch paper? Is it leftovers from the dearth of fliers people give out on the street? I got a Dianetics one today (headlines: “Depresion? Estres?”) and was seriously considering purchasing it.

So yeah. I thought it.

I wanna go home.

Eventually, after banishing myself to my room and playing with my new iPhone, I calmed down. I took some clothes to the cleaners and passed a quiet street that reminded me of what I like about this country. An old, osteoporotic woman walking ahead of me called “Buenos dias!” into a cafe. The man behind the counter yelled back, “Buenos dias!” His voice sounded raspy, like he’d smoked too much.

When I got home, the maintenance man in our building showed me how to light our water heater’s pilot light, and I read the instruction manual to learn how to keep the thing going. (The whole while feeling like a dumb American for not knowing a shred about water heaters.) About an hour later, our hot water had been restored.

The sheets went into the dryer a third time. At the end of their three-hour cycle, they were dry too. (I have now purchased a clothesline.)

One beer and a few Hershey kisses later, life is really not so bad. And I’m coming around to seeing the other side all this, which is that as an American, I’ve been spoiled to believe that natural resources like gas and water are in endless supply. Obviously they’re not. Readjusting my world view is part of the reason we moved down here in the first place. Just wish it was more “lazy conversations with Mexicans over coffee” rather than “wake up, surprise!, there’s no water.”

Remember all my talk about hailing cabs off the street?

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I’m not doing it anymore. This article from El Universal scared the wits out of me. The reporters combed through a bunch of the city’s crime data to show that taxi crime victims are overwhelmingly (90 percent) women. They’re beaten, robbed, raped. Most of the perpetrators aren’t caught.

A particularly telling quote from the story, from a female official who works with crime victims: “To ride in a street taxi is to play Russian Roulette — you might be fine, but in one of those chances, it might change your life.”

Next time we go to our local sitio, I’ll try not to grumble when they charge us an extra 40 pesos.

Things I’m thankful for today, when we don’t have water, again

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1. The Artesanos del Dulce cafe only a few blocks from my house, and their wireless internet, cafe Americano and dark-chocolate cookies

2. The hot showers at my new gym. And, for that matter, my new gym. It’s at the Sheraton Hotel a few blocks from my house. It’s super nice and EMPTY. No guys in mesh tank tops doing tricep curls and kissing their guns. (Talking to YOU, Gold’s Gym Polanco.)

4. The fact that my husband and I are happy and healthy, and so are our parents and loved ones.

5. The “display case” outside this dentist’s office, which I always pass on my way to Artesanos del Dulce.

Teeth, anyone?

6. My new iPhone. It took two visits to the Telcel store and a personal reference, but I got it. Now I know why Americans don’t get Mexican cell phone plans.

El amor de pineapple pie

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Pineapple pie

Pineapple pie is kind of like my culinary secret weapon. Most people are like, “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” And then they try it and make pleasurable moaning noises. Or at least, pineapple-lovers do.

I made it for Crayton when were first dating. He loved it so much, he ran out and bought another pineapple, so I could make it again. The pineapple ended up rotting on his counter. And that’s how we figured out that overripe pineapple actually makes a pretty good air freshener.

Yesterday was Crayton’s birthday, so I decided to make it for dessert. Plus, since I’m a pie nerd, I was super excited to try Smitten Kitchen’s all-butter crust. It’s the best I’ve ever had — flaky and shatteringly crisp. Mmm. My stomach’s rumbling just thinking about it.

The recipe’s after the jump for folks who want to try it. In the meantime, another photo for you. (I ended up eating that already-cut slice as soon as I was done writing this post.)

Pineapple pie on the kitchen table
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