I was underwater for a few days. I had a big deadline last night and was plugging away at it (after having taken Monday off to visit the pyramid) but, more to the point, it was that sort time so I was very weak and occasionally wracked with pain. Plus two days of headachey-ness – […]
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Good and bad
Until I married the Gentleman Friend, and eventually became eligible for a British passport, I travelled on my Pakistani passport. Even today, years later, my heart beats faster in fear as I approach immigration at any country, including the UK. And I am the most privileged of people. I have a UK passport now, and […]
Painted pyramid
The Gentleman Friend had taken Monday off so we went off to Cacaxtla, where there is a pyramid with its murals still in situ. It was very empty: a single small contingent of school children ahead of us and a small family behind us. The air was very hazy; one could barely tell the land […]
Welcome
A baby was born this morning. I won’t see him for several months at the earliest and am not much of a baby or child person anyway, but my family has grown by one. He’s born at a difficult moment for his country and for the world at large. Pakistan teeters on several verges at […]
Cinco de Mayo
First, a clarification. In yesterday’s blog post I wrote about the tunnels of the pyramid in Cholula, imagining they were built for some sort of ritual purpose, but some reading on Wikipedia today tells me that in fact they were excavated by archaeologists. I am joined, I’m sure, by the archaeologists of the future, post […]
Walls closing in
In the morning, after breakfast, we finally went to the great pyramid of Cholula, reputed to be the largest in the world. Indeed, most of it just looks like a massy hill, but there have been excavations on one side revealing a crazy mix of walls and rooms from different eras. Very hard to understand; […]
Cholula in parts
With work and so on we haven’t really had an opportunity to explore Cholula fully, however I can report that it is a town in parts. We are in San Andre Cholula, the less touristed, more residential bit compared to San Pedro Cholula. Our neighbourhood within San Andre Cholula is quiet and residential (aside from […]
Another world
Yesterday we were up and about relatively early. We packed, put our luggage at reception and cleared our flat. Then we walked over the immense motorway outside the building and the park to the Museum of Anthropology. The park was covered in dew and filled with people doing a rather martial form of yoga around […]
The coolest city in the western hemisphere
We arrived in Mexico City last night and it feels like the Bangkok of the Americas. Huge, cultured, vibrant, ugly, beautiful, all together. We arrived after a fairly long journey: a two hour bus ride to Merida (before which I had a morning dash to the DHL office to send off a gift that was […]
Hot silent days
A couple of quiet days as we are both busy at work now and life in Valladolid has settled into a routine. I wake early in the mornings and make myself a cup of tea and scrape together a bit of early breakfast. We work steadily through the morning. There is a hammock slung at […]