What would Jesus pirate?

Wow, I've been incredibly lazy about posting since my return to Mexico. Here's a photo I snapped of the odd phenomena of street stands that specialize in illegally pirated religious music and videos.

Helicopter blades correctly installed and vehicle is ready for takeoff.

I love museums in general, but they can´t all be winners. When I was a kid I was very attached to a "Pirates & Buccaneers" coloring book, which I think is what led me to think going to the Veracruz Naval Museum would be a good idea. After all, a venerable museum in this historic port should be filled with Spanish cannons, old maps, cutlasses, blunderbusses, pirate flags, and so on. Unfortunately, this tourist attraction would be more aptly named "The Veracruz Museum of Falling Apart Dioramas and Blurry Photocopies."

The building is a former naval academy and it is staffed by uniformed women of the Mexican Navy. They operate it as they would any other military bureaucracy, with a curious attention to the minutia of regulations. The attendant watched like a hawk as I filled in each blank of the guest registry, and shook her head "no" when I left one space empty. I didn't understand what the question was asking, so I just wrote my name again. Next, she marched me to the big board to explain the layout of the museum, which rooms I was to visit in what order, and a brief recap of their contents. In some Mexican museums the guards get freaked out if you don´t go through the exhibition halls in the prescribed order. This was definately one of those museums. Naval officers patrolled the halls to shepherd visitors to the rooms they were supposed to go to next. Often they would make curious announcements such as "When this building was a naval academy, the chemistry classroom was here."

The actual contents of the museum were quite dismal. Probably 1 in 30 displays contained an original artifact. Many of them didn't actually say "reproduction", but they clearly were. For example the statue of the Aztec flower god that A) Is actually in The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City B) HAS NOTHING TO DO WHATSOEVER WITH NAVAL HISTORY. Other highlights included photocopies of portraits of Cortes, photocopies of letters to and from the King of Spain, and photocopies of maps. There were, humorously, pirated pirate flags though--the museum staff had clearly made them with black cloth and house paint.

The oddest gallery in the museum may have been the "modern navy" section. The hall used photographs of training exercises and dioramas to try to construct a kind of GI Joe fantasy world where the Mexican Navy was storming beachheads, launching succesful amphibious assaults, and exploring underwater sea caves with spear guns.

The single most interesting thing in the museum was a stained glass window on the staircase that some cadets were covering over with plywood. Probably they wanted to put a giant color photocopy on top of it.

As dull and miserable as the museum was, I felt some anxiety about leaving because I knew that the attendant would force me to write a comment in the guestbook. Sure enough, when I tried to walk past and ask for my bag back, she looked down at the registry, back up at me, and issued a crisp "Sus comentarios, POR FAVOR." I considered "bien lleno de fotocopias" or "este no es un museo," but I couldn´t with her eyes bearing down on me. I knew I had to write something postive and my contempt would have to lie hidden in the brevity of my praise, so I settled on "bueno." It was a little pathetic, this is what Mexicans say when they answer the phone. She was not satisfied; previous guests had composed whole paragraphs of praiseful commentary. Finally I added "gracias," which was enough to coax her into handing my bag back, if grudgingly.

La vida pirata

Whatever exists in Mexico, it seems there is also a pirated version of it. Movies, CD's, video games, shoes, clothing brands, designer handbags, and more are sold openly on the streets. I even saw a newspaper headline about the continuing problem with "pirata" buses in Guadalajara. I didn't read the article carefully, but I would imagine that anyone who can get their hands on a bus-like vehicle could simply hand paint some numbers on the front and then drive around picking up passengers and collecting money (no insurance or license needed!)

While the police could care less, a series of highly ineffective anti-pirata advertisements are screened before most films. In the latest, a young job seeker has just purchased a pirated DVD before going to an interview, and when his prospective employer sees it poking out from under his resumé, the manager decides not to hire him. A dour narrator then warns the audience that "buying pirated DVD's says a lot about who you are." Well, I suppose it says you're someone who is in Mexico at any rate.

We resisted buying pirated DVD's for some time, but eventually we were pushed into it. By swarthy, mustachioed banditos? Dishonest street scum? No, by the very giant companies that are so worried that unauthorized viewing activity will eat into their profits. Firstly, if you live abroad, many videos & movies that Americans can watch online (such as through Amazon or Netflix) are blocked. Sadly, some time last year, we were also cut-off from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website. Bloke-boost-air (aka Blockbuster) sucks as much as it does in the U.S., so we got an account with a local competitor. They have a slightly better selection but...most of the movies for rent are encoded for region 4, while the laptop we watch them on is region 1, so our options were cut by about 60%. Over a number of months we quickly depleted the number of watchable movies, and soon found ourselves at a booth selling piratas.

Our pirata man has no eyepatch. He does have a larger selection of cheaper, better movies, all multi-region. They all come with a money back guarantee, and if he doesn't have something you're looking for he can often get it for you within a week. He's also about twice as friendly as the video store clerks. Genuinely friendly, not Bloke-boost-air fake friendly.