Uncategorized
No self-respecting tree in Mexico City is allowed to grow wild. The cubist models pictured here are a testament to the tonsorial obsessions of the people who attend to nature around here.
The flying saucer look, aka the mushroom, is in this year.
So is the marshmallow line-dance. The photo above is actually in Celaya, Guanajuato, but you get the idea.
Mexico City may not be as international as London or New York, but it gets more multi-culti all the time. I recently went to a Korean bar and restaurant called A Cu Yung, on Calle Río Panuco, almost at the corner of Río Ebro, in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc. I had brought a friend along for her birthday dinner. We were the only non-Koreans in attendance.
The waitress handed us menus in Korean, and apologized for not having any in Spanish. So we asked her what they served, and in a quite halting version of her second language, she more or less explained some of the highlights on the menu (seafood soup, fried chicken, the Korean seafood pancake known as haemool pajeon). The dishes are quite large, so if you want to try more than one thing it is best to go with three or four people.
I realize how much I have adapted to Mexico City – even though I am a gringo, I no longer think of myself as a “foreigner” around here. Yet at A Cu Yung anyone who isn’t Korean is the “gringo.” Being there felt inordinately cosmopolitan, even like a cheap trip to a foreign country. Many Koreans are heavy smokers, but recently a law was passed banning smoking in bars and restaurants in Mexico City. Above is the restaurant's shrine to smoke, complete with Mr. Marley in the act and various brands of imported cigarettes, real and chocolate.
I recently passed through Los Angeles and one afternoon was driving around Hollywood with D.T., a chum from my school days. Happy hour was upon us, so we decided to repair to the Formosa Cafe, my favorite bar in the city, and one of the few that still looks more or less the same way as it did in the 1940s. (It is in fact such a museum piece that it has been used as scenery in various period films, including L.A. Confidential.)
At a certain stretch of Formosa Street, D.T. saw a sign warning that he wasn't allowed to make a right turn. There was no visible reason why not, he groused, and he didn't feel like driving around in circles, so he decided to make the turn anyway. I mentioned that this sort of logic and his subsequent unlawful action would make him not only a typical but an exemplary driver in Mexico City.
However, unlike in my home town, on Formosa Street there was a patrol car lying in wait for just the sort of miscreant who would dare to make an illegal turn. No problema: D.T., showing that he is at heart a chilango, simply stepped on the gas and tried to lose the cop in traffic. My heart leapt at the idea of getting into an actual Hollywood-style car chase in actual Hollywood.
Unfortunately the patrolman caught up to D.T. on Santa Monica Boulevard. He wrote him up a ticket for a stiff fine. D.T. will have the opportunity to take an on-line traffic course which, if he passes, will result in his getting the infraction stricken from his driving record.
Had D.T. actually been caught making an illegal turn by a Mexico City traffic cop, profuse apologizes and a 100-peso note (worth about $10 US) - "para el refresco" (so the cop could "buy himself a soft drink") - would have been sufficient to settle the matter on the spot. Here D.T. enjoys a martini at the Formosa after the fireworks were over.
When I came to Mexico City in 1990, with limited knowledge of Spanish, I knew that I wanted to learn to the language well, and to be able to read anything from Don Quijote to One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original. But I never dreamed I would one day write in Spanish, let alone that a prestigious publishing house like Sexto Piso would consider my work worthy of a book. But here it is. Las llaves de la ciudad is a collection of pieces I wrote about Mexico City in the last few years, published in various magazines and newspapers here. The great majority of them are portraits of people: the proprietor of the first and only boutique in the world that sells nothing but bulletproof clothing; Alín, a deaf-mute transvestite who has invented her own sign language and sells her company in a beer joint; Viviana Corcuera, who was Miss Argentina in 1964, and for close to 40 years has been Mexico City's most notorious socialite. Each of these people is a stone in what, in the book's totality, becomes a mosaic of Mexico City.
For the moment it is only available in Mexico, at most major bookstores or if you click here. It will shortly be obtainable on Amazon; please watch the books page for its progress.
There are about 400,000 Mexicans of Lebanese descent, and most of them are in Mexico City. My favorite is Achmed, pictured above, the manager of the Al-Andalus restaurant on calle Nueva York in the Colonia Nápoles, in walking distance from my apartment. The original, and more splendid, branch of the restaurant is in the centro histórico. They have everything there, except Achmed.
No matter how infrequently I go to Al-Andalus, Achmed always greets me as if I ate there every day, indeed as if I were part of the family.
When Jabbar Yassin Husin, an Iraqi writer who lives in France, visited Mexico, we made a date to have coffee together at the apartment where he was staying. He asked me to bring him some kind of cake or cookie, so I went to Al-Andalus and got an assortment of Lebanese pastries. When I told Achmed that I was bringing them to an Iraqi, he had me take him a particular cookie. He professed that at Al-Andalus the cooks prepared more delectably than they do in Baghdad.
The last thing Jabbar expected was traditional Middle-Eastern pastry in Mexico City. He fell into a Proustian swoon and insisted we go to visit Achmed. The two of them, and a couple of other men, sat for hours speaking Arabic, as if they were all old friends, shooting the breeze around the corner from the souk.
