fruity and loopy

before christmas, our fruit was homeless. mangos, bananas, pears and kiwis would roll around aimlessly on our counter top before wobbly settling on the drab skin-colored tile surface. fruit is supposed to brighten up a kitchen, but ours was far from looking like a still life, it was just still there.

my mom, who has always been keen on having a bounty of fruit on the kitchen counter (i think she equates a kitchen without a fruit bowl to a woman without lipstick), found this scenario a bit depressing. she also found the perfect solution just in time for the holidays: the fruit loop fruit bowl, handmade with a single piece of chromed steel wire, designed by anglo-swiss duo dan black and martin blum (http://www.black-blum.com). it was a christmas miracle for the displaced fruit!

i wonder if my mom will ever get me to wear lipstick on an regular basis.

la fonda

coco, panzón and i were recently in guadalajara, mexico, where we visited the children's museum, el trompo mágico (http://tr.im/LVN5), which means "the magic spinning top". we were surprised to see that it was not at all crowded for a saturday and coco fully enjoyed her experience at maroma (summersault), the pavilion dedicated to younger children. she filled her shopping cart with realistic mock fruit and then checked out at the market, carefully placed faux freshly laid eggs in their cartons at the farm, gave medical exams and vaccines to newborn dolls at the clinic, and cooked and served plastic food at the restaurant or fonda.

maroma is filled with the delightful drawings of cecilia rébora (http://crebora.blogspot.com/), a brilliant local children's illustrator. i especially liked the fonda's backdrop, a collage-like mural in which a turtle wearing a bow tie is enjoying his dinner. i immediately recognized the background photo as being one of my favorite restaurants in guadalajara (it's actually in the town of zapopan, which was swallowed by the city): la fonda de doña gabina escolástica.

a fonda, by definition, is a humble establishment that offers regional food at economical prices. fondas are usually managed by women (doña means lady), as opposed to street food stands, which are typically run by men. doña gabina escolástica's fonda is located near the basílica de zapopan, home of the famous virgen de zapopan, a small wooden statue whose romería is one of the most important pilgrimages in mexico. the fonda's decoration is simple, yet inviting: colorful papel picado (perforated paper), bright printed tablecloths, posters from mexico's golden age of film and lucha libre (mexican wrestling) paraphernalia.

although this fonda is famous for its pozole, which is a flavorful and very satisfying soup, the menu is full of delicious antojitos. my all-time favorite is the tostada de manitas de cerdo, which is pickled pigs feet on a refried bean-smeared tostada covered with shredded cabbage and tomato sauce. it comes in a deboned presentation upon request, but i personally prefer to gnaw on each of the tiny bones and leave them in a neat little pile on my plate.

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!

two years ago, pt. 3

i woke up to see panzón in scrubs and a funny, shower-cap-looking hat, smiling uncontrollably and taking way too many pictures. looking back at those pictures, i realize that i, too, was wearing such a cap. the power nap energized me and, once the midwives came into the room, we were ready to go. i obviously had no idea what i was doing, but after a while, i understood that contractions are waves that you have to catch and ride out by pushing steadily.

there were about two hours of pushing and pausing and pushing, all of it captured on video by panzón, who was also there to hold my hand. while i pushed with all of my might from the inside, a midwife was using her hands and arms to push from the outside. coco was probably pushing too, with her little coconut head, because i felt a tremendous and slightly painful pressure right at the time when it PLOP!ed out. and then there she was: red, with a tiny scrunched-up face and a head full of hair.

she was placed on my breast immediately, which was beautiful, but also overwhelming. now what?, i asked myself, scared, excited, exhausted. i had been concentrating so much on giving birth, that i hadn't thought much about sustaining life.

two years ago, pt. 2

morning came and i was still not dilating in the dilating room. to get things going, a nurse applied prostaglandin gel in the form of a long, white shoelace that went in in in, against the current that was steadily flowing out. pretty soon, the contractions started (panzón and my mom took turns keeping me company and timing the waves of pain that came over me) and by noon, i was ready for the epidural. i was taken to the delivery room (alone!) and was told that the anesthesiologist would be with me in fifteen minutes. ok, i thought, totally doable, just a handful of contractions.

so there i was, alone and half-naked in a room filled with medical equipment, the most daunting machine of all staring me in the face. i could hear it mocking me with its ticking and its tocking. fifteen minutes went slowly by, then another fifteen excruciating minutes, and yet another. it seemed like the clock kept getting bigger and rounder and louder, the black numbers burning into my white pain. in between contractions, i was like a frog sticking out its tongue to catch a passing fly, or nurse.

when i finally caught one, she explained that another woman needed the injection first, to which the socialist in me replied "yes, i understand". after all, i was in a public hospital, receiving free healthcare, and if someone else needed it more, i would wait calmly. and i did. kind of. i ignored the clock and squeezed my pillow until the surprisingly young anesthesiologist came in, instructed me to lie on my side and stay still, which was nearly impossible during a contraction, and applied the injection.

oh, sweet numbness! i felt like i was floating on a fluffy, white cloud and fell into a deep sleep.