Today, Sunday, was our last day off. Tomorrow we both return to work and my Spanish classes begin. We had a late start to the morning, lingering over tea and the news (for me) and exercise and calls home (for the GF). I was very pleased as last night, before realising that I was felled […]
Cloud forests
Early in the morning we were collected and taken up into the Sierra Norte for the first of our two days of walking. This was arranged by a community project, one of the oldest in Mexico, and very impressive. It’s a collective of several villages that runs an eco-tourism initiative with obligatory community service for […]
Boiling pots, abandoned cities
The morning brought bad news. I called home for Eid and learnt that a relative is very unwell, so that my father had to fly suddenly to Karachi. Very troubling indeed. KP had Eid yesterday, after multiple reports of a moon sighting, despite the astronomical evidence that only 0.2% of the moon would have been […]
Eid GRAR
Eid Mubarak! Fucking Whatsapp.
Second day off
Today we decided to stroll up to the aqueduct. This is outside the Centro Historico, but through a very lovely, quiet neighbourhood crisscrossed by canals, green and full of trees. We stopped for lunch at a superb little place with an outdoor garden overlooking one of the (dry) canals and ringed by old stone arches. […]
Chauri Chaura
Nearly twenty years ago, I took a course on South Asian history at a large university in the United States, as part of my undergraduate degree. It was a mid-sized lecture course and had weekly sections, smaller discussion groups. In my section I was the only one from Pakistan, the only Muslim. Most of the […]
Culture traitor
We got a ride to the Puebla outlet mall, not because we intended to shop or even step inside but because we were to be collected from here. Our hostess was waiting and we drove up to San Rafael Tenanyecac, a small village quite near Cacaxtla. Along the way we passed the black obelisk from […]
Up and up
We went up to the top of the pyramid to the yellow Spanish church. There was a good view of Cholula all around, and even the volcano’s outline appeared through the haze, startlingly tall for something that is invisible for most of the day. An open space on the San Pedro side was divided in […]
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; […]
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 […]