Day Two in Beautiful Cuernavaca
Our second day in Cuernavaca began very quietly…literally. When we woke up there was not a sound to be heard throughout the entire house. We went downstairs to find that breakfast had been left for us and was still warm, so we must have just missed the others. Melinda and I ate wondering if our mama would be back in time to take us to church. Just as we were finishing up, La Señora walked in and said something about Amanda and Quinta that I didn´t catch at the time. We followed her out to the car and we were on our way.
Yesterday Melinda showed our mama the address of the LDS church that was near La Palacio de Cortes, but we never clarified which church we actually belonged to so she dropped us off in front of a beautiful Catholic church with lots of people going in and out for Mass. Well neither Dee nor I wanted to tell her that this was the wrong place nor could I think of how so we thanked her and hoped out of the car. Waving goodbye we set out. I think it is funny (interesting not wrong because I do it too) how everyone views others in terms of their own norms. It makes perfect sense for our mama to think that we are Catholic given our lack of clarification because that is what she knows.
We figured that with the twelve minutes we had before the service was going to start that we could walk the rest of the way to the church. Unfortunately we managed to get ourselves turned around and couldn´t figure out where Hidalgo Calzada (Street), the one with the LDS church on it, went. We went back and forth and finally had to stop and ask for directions again. As before, the lady we asked was very nice (she was an elderly vendor near the Cathedral), but I doubt that she could read the address and didn´t seem to know where it was when we read it to her. She asked a young man for us, but he didn´t know, and so she suggested asking around some more. Dee decided to hail a taxi and see if they knew where it was and, since we were now late, decided to give the driver 20 pesos ($2) to take us there. Turns out that we had gone the right way initially, but hadn´t walked far enough.
We were a little worried about finding the right place because both Dee and I expected that we would know what the ward house looked like. I think we both thought that it would be in a building or that it would be very small, but we were so wrong. All of a sudden we see this beautiful full sized American-LDS style church and were like “Aquí, aquí!” This shows what you get when you generalize even innocently. We hadn´t thought that the wards would be very big here and didn´t think that the church would have a large church like this. I would still like to see the other LDS churches in Cuernavaca to see if they are like this also.
Needless to say Dee and I were both impressed. Unfortunately we were also late! The sacrament was just being passed and so we had to wait out on the front lawn, but a couple of gals from our group arrived just then and so we chatted as we waited. We were all very impressed with the design and maintenance of the lawn area and so we took some pictures of everything. It really was a very nice church that felt very much like home.
When the doors were opened after the sacrament, we all went in and sat in a rear pew on the far side from the entrance. The rest of our group was already there already seated in the middle pews. When we sat down, Melinda let out with an “Oh, it is a Fast and Testimony meeting today” with a disappointed air. But as we sat and listened, it was really quite beautiful. Honestly, it felt just like a meeting at home, but I could only understand about a fourth of what was being said. This was my first time of really listening to Spanish spoken at a natural pace since we came here and I don´t know a lot of church related words beyond “iglasia”. But I soon picked up “padre celestial” and “testimonio” and it was really wonderful listening to the members here talking about the Church and their own lives and experiences.
I was happy to see our two return missionaries go up and talk about who we were and their own feelings being in this ward today. April is always well spoken and I bet she was a great missionary. Valerie also helped translate for one of our non-Spanish speaking gals and her words left most of us crying. It was just a really great spiritual experience.
To switch gears a little bit, it was very enlightening to listen to these testimonios because it helped me understand the situation of my ESL students more. Even though I was very interested to hear what the members of the Church and our RMs had to say, I found myself fighting to keep trying to understand what they were saying. It is so tiring to pay attention to what people are saying every moment of even a short 10-15 minute oration. I found myself tuning out and thinking about other things then suddenly being brought back into focus by a word that I actually knew without trying hard to translate it. So even with my background knowledge of the LDS church and its services and terminology in general, it was still very hard to keep trying to translate what was being said. Students in school who still learning the language, figuring out the culture, and learning the academics really have an uphill battle to just stay focused and their teachers need to understand that and try to be patient with them, even when they ask the same question ten times.
When the service was over, about half of us went to change our clothes in the restrooms while the others talked with the missionaries who are serving in the area about how things are going down here. It is a very different experience from Melinda´s, Russ´, or even from further south in Latin America, and yet some problems are the same. Even though the church was quite large, it was only about a third full on the day that we attended and the missionaries said that even though there are quite a number of members here, it is hard to get them to church. Nor does it seem like they do a lot of tracting like other missionaries, but maybe it was that way for just those that we talked to. Although the ward members wanted us to stay for all the meetings, we were already late in meeting Lisa and the others so we said we would try to come again and went on our way.
We walked back up the road to El Palacio de Cortes in El Centro where we met up with our other companions, but not before Valerie helped a lady vendor with a baby strapped to her back push her heavy cart up the steep hill. There were lots of people in the street including us, but she was the only one who helped her. Valerie is such a good person!
After getting some background on the history of the things that we would see today from Lisa, we went into the Palacio. Needless to say we took a lot of pictures. I was very excited to be there and was just all around playing the tourist. There were a lot of cool artifacts from the area including a ball court ring that got me doing a dance. To see one in person after reading about them for so long was really neat. I think I will probably be bawling by the time we get to Teotihuacan and everyone will think that I am crazy. But anyway, I loved being there in a place that was built by Cortes himself and held artifacts from different eras of Cuernavaca´s history.
Of all the things we saw that day, however, my favorite was the mural by Diego Rivera. I was annoying Melinda all through the second floor because we had taken so long on the first level that I was afraid people would want to leave before we saw it. Just me being me. But we found it just as we were finishing the last exhibits and, let me say, it did not disappoint. It really is a beautiful and fascinating mural to look at. Basically it tells the history of Mexico from its conquest (subjugation) by the Spanish and it independence (liberation) from foreign rulers (or sellouts in the case of Porfirio Diaz). We made a little miny documentary of me in my best historical expert persona telling about the different parts of the mural while Mindy filmed it with my camera. Its depictions are really interesting, particularly the events that Rivera chose to emphasize. The mural starts with Cortes, not before, and ends with Zapata and Morelos. In the center arch above the mural is painted two pairs Mexican men and women with the year 1810. Well, this was very cool to me because basically the mural is saying that before Cortes, the people (the workers in the mural with socialist overtones) were free, but that changed with Cortes who destroyed the past to create the future.
There are depictions of Cortes meeting with Moctezuma with Malinche translating, the last Aztec emperor Cuatemoc (now a national hero) being tortured before he was killed by Cortes, codices being burned while the people are instructed by priests, the destruction of the old temples to build the Palacio itself, and there was even a picture that suggested the birth of mestisos with Aztec women on their knees apparently being married by priests to Spanish conquistadors. I could go on and on about the symbolism of the mural, but I will spare all of you. I just thought it was cool that Rivera didn´t show Mexico becoming free until Zapata and Morelos came. Mexico had been independent of Spain for many years, but Rivera is saying that Diaz was the last of the old regime. Even choosing to put the 1810 in the middle has significance in that that was the year that the Hidalgo Revolt began, which deplored foreign/Spanish things and elevated what was native/Mexica. Needless to say, I loved it and I need to find a print of it somewhere. It tells a very interesting perspective of that history.
After our miny documentary, which seemed to amuse the lady guard who was making sure no one touched the mural, we found the rest of our group and enjoyed a few minutes of looking out at the city from the Palacio. I think even Cortes would be impressed with the changes, though not altogether pleased. The city, like Mexico City, is a mix of rich and poor, clean and dirty, new and old. Mexico is a very interesting place.
After leaving the palacio, we walked to the cathedral, which was built around the same time by Fransicans who also used building materials from old temples to construct it. Lisa talked about everyone being respectful of the people who were going to mass and not to take pictures or disrupting the ceremony. Although I could see her point, I didn´t really understand it until we got to the cathedral. My experiences with Catholic mass has been limited to a childhood visit and our visit to the Dom in Germany. Well, here things were very different and it was cool to see that difference. In Logan and Germany, Catholics are in the minority and so I was used to a small congregation and few people attending mass on Sunday. Needless to say that was not the case here.
There were crowds of people attending and mass was being said every hour until something like 7PM at night. And there were tons of people doing all sorts of things. There were priests and maybe even bishops out with the people or going to other nearby churches to say mass, people selling flowers and all types of souvenirs (with the persistence of the people at the Palacio), there were also elderly women begging from money, and then us tourists trying to take it all in. Although I would like to have been able to go around and explore like we have done in other cathedrals, it was very interesting to be in one that was so obviously used and was a center of the community. Mindy and I did peek our heads in as another mass began and saw the mural of the catholic martyrs in Japan that had been discovered when they renovated the cathedral twenty years ago and agreed that we needed to find a picture of it somewhere. It looked very interesting although I will leave it to Dee to give an explanation of it.
After that things calmed down a bit when we visited the Jardin Bordas, which is a beautiful garden near the cathedral. It was nice to just take it easy and enjoy the cool shade of the jardin and we just milled about, talking to different members of our party (who had split up at this point and were going to leave when they felt ready). We bought some cool stuff from the vendor, who were in the garden (very nice hand made stuff for like cheap!) and then we decided to head home so that we would be on time once for Comida.
Happily getting a taxi to take us home was uneventful today because we had finally learned what to watch for so we could tell the driver where to turn for our calle and we were home in no time. We even got the key to work so all was well.
Only our mama when we arrived although Brittany soon arrived for lunch as well. We had another fun conversation in which we talked about Melinda learning Japanese. Dee now can say the name of her second language in Spanish so she can go up to people on the street and tell them that. She is still working on the difference between “hablo Japonese” and “habla Japonese”. They will get very different responces. ^_^ Our mama said that she thought that Mindy had a Japanese boyfriend and that was how she learned, which got me laughing. Surprisingly (or not if you think about affective filters, not that most people do) I very easily at that moment told our mama that she didn´t have one then but she did have a Japonese boyfriend in the past. “No wonder she wants to live in Japan!” was the response. Poor Mindy knew something was up and I translated for her, and she quickly added that was in the past and that they were friends now, which made us all laugh more.
From there we talked about the different jobs that we were interested in pursuing. Brittany is thinking of foreign relations or something like that and our mama said that she should be a US diplomat to Mexico. They we went on to teaching and the differences in pay. Brittany is living in or from Houston area and even she was surprised by how much the starting salaries for teachers are there. She knew how heavily they recruited from different states, but not the pay scale.
I felt like we were leaving our mama out of the conversation there and I was glad to switch back to more familiar territory. (Now I can think of several ways to translate the teaching stuff, but then I couldn´t. Annoying!!) Basically she told us that we don´t eat enough and we said we didn´t know why. She suggested the climate or the altitude, which lead into us talking about Salt Lake versus Cuernavaca. It is hotter down here than it is back home at the moment, but really it isn´t any hotter than it is in July or August in Utah. True I wouldn´t want to be here in July or August to find out how hot it is then, but honestly I think we are still just getting used to the schedule and haven´t adjusted from traveling yet.
Poor Brittany still doesn´t like the food and so we are probably going to take a trip to Wal-Mart at some point (yes there is a Wal-Mart down here - I wonder what their prices are like). After some more planning we all decided that it was time for a siesta and, other than studying and chatting, we didn´t get much else done. Tomorrow is our first day of school so we need to get ready for that. I hope things go well and that the classes here are good.
Laters ya´ll,
Nan