the grand godparents

this weekend is ov's baptism and panzón and i are going to be his godparents, or as panzón announced proudly at the baptismal crash course we had to take in order to accept this honor, his grandparents. instead of elbowing him frantically like i did, the elderly lady giving the course was kind enough to agree with him, saying that both roles had a similar effect on a child's life, with one important difference: religion. after that, i sat very still through the rest of the course and kept drawing blanks when she asked simple questions about the sacraments, baptism and being a godparent.

i've gone to a couple of catholic schools in my life and have been submerged in baptismal waters three times, each in a different country. i didn't realize that this was considered sacrilege (i had always thought that i had been extra-blessed) until i tried to get my papers in order to get permission to get married in the church. the mexican priest who interviewed my parents and i was skeptical when i told him that i had been baptized in l.a., had my first communion in san diego and my confirmation in bogotá, colombia. my confirmation papers said i had been baptized in colombia, too. very sketchy indeed.

needless to say, i am not very religious, although i do find much spiritual value in certain symbolic traditions, like marriage (i felt illuminated inside santo domingo church in oaxaca, bursting with beethoven's ode to joy) and baptism (we haven't baptized coco yet, but that's another story). as for being ov's godmother, i can honestly say that mother will be the active ingredient with a touch of god here and there. i think panzón is going to stick with being grand.

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.

elephant in the room/car/boat

the stone on my engagement ring is lime green, which happens to be my favorite color. it's a peridot, probably from afghanistan, on a vintage setting, probably from the sixties. panzón and i bought it online and it came one november morning on a big brown truck, as we were leaving for disneyland with my parents. my dad, who has a sixth sense for delivery trucks, caught a glimpse of it and tracked it down, first by car, then by foot. we watched as he persuaded the man in the brown uniform, with matching socks, to give him the parcel by showing him the address on his drivers license. my dad got back in the car and triumphantly handed the cardboard box over to panzón, who opened it and, after rummaging through the packaging popcorn, extracted a small ring box. i covered my eyes as the three of them oohed and aahed.

once the ring was safely in its box in panzón's pocket, we stopped talking about it and it became the elephant in the room, or rather, the car. panzón smuggled the lime green elephant into disneyland, where it almost made its debut on the dumbo ride, which would have been so fitting, except that i made the mistake of saying that i thought that movie was sad. as the day went on, my initial excitement turned into anxiousness, then irritation, and finally into indifference.

later that afternoon, when i had already forgotten about the whole thing, i felt a nervous hand searching for my finger in the quiet, pitch dark of the pirates of the caribbean ride, between the blue bayou restaurant and the first drop, before all of the yo-ho-ho-ing. the ring felt heavy on my finger, but heavier still was the frustration of not being able to see it. i was so preoccupied with this that i completely forgot about the drop and suddenly felt the rush of weightlessness. the elephant fell off the boat and was replaced by laughing and hugging and kissing.

here's a lime green elephant that you can actually ride from danish company, bObles: http://tr.im/DmrH

three-and-a-half years old/ago

panzón and i met when we were three-and-a-half years old. i can't say that i remember the exact moment when we met. after all, a lot was going on in my life.
we had just moved to guadalajara (in mexico, not spain) and were living in a hotel, a tall mirror-paned hotel, mind you. my sister and i had red lunch boxes that were packed every morning by the restaurant staff. we went to a cute little french school, for which we wore cute little uniforms that looked somewhat alpine, kind of like gretl von trapp's outfit. coincidentally, the sound of music was very much a part of my life then, as we owned the videocassette and my sister insisted on playing it repeatedly during this time. years later, when i watched the movie again, i was shocked to learn that it was a story about the holocaust, not just about some singing kids wearing funny clothes.
i would have never admitted this at the time, although i probably did by turning bright red every time someone asked, but i secretly liked two of my classmates. one had freckles, the other was skinny. one was very outgoing, the other was shy. i was skinny and shy, too. we had something else in common: older sisters who liked magic, dress-up and feeding the neighboring cows at school. such was this fascination with dress-up, that they once dressed us up as bride and groom, except that i was the groom. three-and-a-half years ago, we found ourselves dressed up as bride and groom again, except that this time, panzón was the groom.