the violin

on my eighth birthday i was extremely disappointed to find, amidst an ocean of wrapping paper, a violin. the good thing is that my parents, who gave me the instrument, were not disappointed to later find that i was a complete failure at playing it. at least i tried. three times.

i come from a somewhat musical family (i say somewhat because there is no confirmed evidence of musicality on my father's side). my maternal great-grandfather was an accomplished trumpet player, who taught herb alpert (who i always thought was herp albert, until i recently *five seconds ago* googled him) and played on gone with the wind and woody woodpecker. my mom has a beautiful voice and actually recorded a boleros tape as a gift to my dad back in the nineties. my sister and i were bored out of our minds in the studio, although it was cool watching our mother sing her heart out with a trío from tijuana. as a result, those six songs were imbedded in my brain forever. my sister also sings very well and will do so at any given moment, if there is musical accompaniment present, be it a complete mariachi or a karaoke machine. her most memorable performance, for me, was at panzón and my wedding in oaxaca, when she sang a couple of rancheras with the mariachi at two a.m. oh, and she also plays the piano.

so, with that musical background, i should have been a semi-talented violin player at the very least. what happened? it is a known fact that you must begin playing the violin before the age of seven, if you are to master this extremely difficult instrument. even if i had been excited about getting a violin instead of, say, a toy for my eighth birthday, it would have probably been too late anyway. still, i tried. i can only recall two things about my first batch of violin lessons, which began immediately after receiving it: 1. how the instrument painfully dug into my skinny collarbone; 2. how enjoyable it was to apply rosin to the horsehair of the bow.

after that, there was a three year long cease-play period, which ended when i was about thirteen. i really made an effort during the second bundle of lessons, which culminated in a retirement home recital with my fellow students, most of whom were seven years old and/or asian. i practiced my solo for weeks, a simple yet dignified piece from the pages of suzuki violin school, volume 2 or 3. my big moment came and i stepped on stage. it was actually going well when, all of a sudden, right in the middle of my performance, my mind went completely blank. i looked out into the audience and saw a room full of old people shaking their heads in disapproval. i truthfully cannot remember exactly what i did next, but i probably butchered the rest of the piece after a long, humiliating pause, and, with an either very red or very pale face, walked off the stage.

we moved back to guadalajara soon after that, where i attempted to play the violin for the third time. my mom drove me to class a couple of days a week after my daily nap (yes, i napped through high school and still do when the chance presents itself), dry-eyed and dazed. my teacher was an aged austrian man who had a fascist teaching technique, due to the fact that most of his students were young men training to be mariachis. i think he was fond of me because he would occasionally tell me an unrecognizable joke, revealed as such only by a fleeting, stiff smile. the lessons tapered off as my mom realized that the chemistry between teacher and student and violin was simply non existent.

maybe i'll take up the violin again when i'm eighty. i'm pretty sure vibrato won't be an issue then.

the cockroach and the tick (a love story)

panzón and i went to peru for our honeymoon because we did not want to relax on a beach somewhere. that's just not us. we wanted to do something adventurous like staying in the amazon rainforest and going to machu picchu, which we did by train because we thought the three day hike from cuzco was too much. and that's not us, either.

we spent the first two days in lima, where we visited the historic center of the city, went to a great museum (http://www.museolarco.org), ate unbelievable ceviche(http://www.larosanautica.com), enjoyed a delicious meal in an archeological site, (http://www.resthuacapucllana.com) and drank inca kola, the national soft drink, which is as yellow as the colonial buildings in the plaza de armas. the view of the sunset over the pacific ocean was breathtaking from the rooftop pool of our hotel (http://www.miraflorespark.com), but even more astonishing was the blinding milky substance with which the building was enveloped every morning, a dense fog called garúa.

from lima we took a plane to puerto maldonado and then a windowless bus to the madre de dios river and then a small boat to our eco-lodge (http://www.inkaterra.com/en/reserva-amazonica), located in the tambopata natural reserve, which is in the amazon basin. we spent four days there, amidst all kinds of wonderful wildlife (like an over-sized snail, swinging spider monkeys, the occasional toucan and the capybara, a.k.a. the largest rodent in the world), wearing black rubber boots that got stuck in the mud during our excursions. we were lulled to sleep by the sounds of the rainforest, but were awakened on our last night by an offbeat sound, the sound of a leak in the roof of our cabaña, of giant drops of water splashing into an open duffle bag filled with dirty laundry. although the smell of the rainforest is fresh after rainfall, our soggy, muddy clothes had a more rancid scent.

it's quite a change to go from the warm and humid lowlands of the amazon basin to the chilly heights of andean cuzco, so we arrived at our 16th-century-monastery-converted-into-hotel (http://www.monasterio.orient-express.com) in a daze. while sipping a welcoming coca leaf tea in the lobby, we were quite embarrassed about the foul odor emanating from our luggage.

the next day, we boarded the machu picchu-bound train before dawn and watched the sun come up as we zigzagged our way out of the valley (this sounds faster than it actually is, which is painfully

s l o w). the spectacular trip through the sacred valley, passing the colorful villages tucked in the foothills of the andes, following the urubamba river ended at the aguas calientes train station, where we took an exhilaratingly bumpy bus ride on a narrow road to the ancient citadel of the inca empire.

machu picchu is an awe-inspiring place to say the least. the heavy rocks that make up the architecture (temples, housing and terraces alike) are shaped and placed with utmost precision and uncanny delicacy. the energy there is unbelievable and it made me feel very big and very small at the same time.

we had been walking around for hours and i was getting kind of tired, so i decided to sit down for a bit. it was during this short resting period that a nearby llama got irritated at a tourist for taking its picture and charged towards me, the innocent bystander with partially sunburnt calves (namely, the part between my cropped pants' legs and socks). i had heard that llamas spit when annoyed, so i quickly left the scene, just like the perpetrator had seconds before.

a romantic inca bath awaited us back at the hotel that evening, complete with rose petals, bubbles, chocolates and champagne. as i undressed, i noticed a respectably sized mole on my left side and thought, huh, wasn't that on the other side? had one of my moles shifted from my right side to my left? i asked panzón to help solve the mystery, which he did with a pair of tweezers by extracting a tick. it was in fact a mole, a tiny parasitical mole burrowing through my skin to feed on my blood. the little sucker probably attached itself to me during the short break i took in machu picchu, right before the llama incident, probably right at the moment when that insensitive tourist's camera's flash went off.

we weren't going to let this spoil our evening, so we slipped into the no-longer-so-warm, yet fragrant waters of our honeymoon bath. we were clinking our champagne glasses together and popping a truffle in each others' mouths, when out of the corner of my eye i saw something, slightly more elongated than the chocolate melting in my mouth, but pretty much of the same size and color, move across the open doorway. we got out of the tub to investigate. there it was, a huge cockroach scurrying underneath our hotel room door towards the hallway. it had apparently hitched a ride with us all the way from the rainforest in our reeking duffel bag and was now on its way to mortify us, by making a public appearance. panzón, shoe in hand and wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, valiantly stepped out of the room and returned with the SMACK!ed and CRUNCH!ed cockroach corpse.

and so it was that the andean tick and the amazonian cockroach went on their final journey together, individually wrapped in shrouds of tissue paper, flushed down the toilet of a high-end hotel.

three toddler toys

so, christmas is near, and i just wanted to share these three awesome toys that coco loves. who knows? maybe santa reads this blog!

1. sirch sibis max (http://www.sirch.de) ride-on vehicle: german engineering for toddlers. coco got this as a gift from our friends/co-workers from the architecture studio where panzón and i worked in barcelona (http://www.tonetsunyer.com) when she was born. we put it inside of a suitcase and stuffed it with clothes when we moved here three months later. it's been parked in our living room, making a great decoration piece, for two years and coco's finally playing with it, giving ofe the frog a well-deserved rest and taking her for an occasional ride in the bottom compartment, of course.

2. plan toys balancing cactus (http://www.plantoys.com): this colorful and non-prickly cactus reminds us of mexico, which is why we affectionately call it "el nopal". it helps coco develop different skills, while being eco-friendly and looking beautiful in its many configurations. it also sits proudly on a shelf in our living room.

3. bilibo (http://www.bilibo.com): "what is it?", everyone asked at coco's birthday party, as she unwrapped it. actually, the only downfall to this toy is wrapping it, which i did clumsily with paper and an oversized bow. anyway, no one really knows what it is, except probably for its swiss designer, but kids know what it's for - anything, really. like stacking, spinning, storing, siting, sliding... oh, and it looks sculptural, too!