Wonderful things from the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology part 4: Yay, you're dead!

These inanely smiling ceramic heads are thought to somehow be associated with death, as they're frequently found in graves.

Wonderful things from the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology part 3: a reconstructed pyramid

They dug up a pyramid "Las Higueras" with original frescoes depicting mythological scenes, ceremonies and ball games. In ancient Mesoamerica it was thought that there was a chance the world might end once every 52 years. So whenever it did not, they would add a new level onto their pyramids to make them more grandiose. The result is that the layers of murals show 3 centuries of changing beliefs and artistic styles.

Wonderful things from the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology part 2: were jaguars

Wonderful things from the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology part 1: Colossal Olmec Heads

Note that it is likely not that distorted, they were really into head shaping.

On the road

I´ve left Guadalajara and I´m travelling a bit with my extra time. Yesterday I took a bus to Mexico City, and then made a random decision to go to Papantla, Veracruz (being the next bus leaving that looked interesting). The big thing to see there are the ruins of El Tajin. I hadn´t yet visited any ruins of the Gulf Coast cultures. On a whim I hired a guide, which I almost never do. You always have to take what they say with a bit of salt, but he was pretty good. He was a Totonaco, a civilization native to Veracruz that way back in the day was suffering under Aztec opression when Cortez came along with a deal to make everything better...He grew up sort of around the ruins, only when he was a kid it was just hilly farmland--the pyramids were still buried underneath.

Because El Tajin had been abandoned so long, they escaped both the Spanish military/religious zeal, as well as the clumsiness of early archeaologists who have tended to reconstruct Mexico´s ancient cities haphazardly. There are some pretty well preserved reliefs along the ballcourts and even sections of original paint on some pyramids. The one pictured was bright red and blue at one time. A lot of the pyramids have shallow niches built into them, which is apparantely unique to this site, and no one is 100% sure what they were for. This Pyramid has (well, had) 365 niches, giving it some kind of calendar function. Also, a lot of the buildings also have ¨greco¨ zig zag patterns that are typical of the Zapotecs, showing an interchange of ideas with Oaxaca. You can see them in this picture on either side of the central staircase.

It´s interesting--for a national INAH site--that Totonacos live kind of in and around unexcavated sections of the ruins. I could see people´s plots of corn in the surrounding hills (well, probably pyramids underneath). Also a short commute if your job is selling knick knacks to tourists. There is a statue of Tajin (aka the rain god Tlaloc) on one of the pyramids, which according to the guide is still focal point of ritual activity. I realize that this completely sounds like the kind of thing that is made up for gullible tourists, but from the strange offhand way he was talking about it I actually think it might be true.

All of this has been, by the way, just to register that there is no change whatsoever in my employment status.

Another day, another damnable trip to the immigration office. Yesterday I arrived 40 minutes before the office opened, and there were 27 people ahead of me. (Luckily only about half of them were there to go to the pick up documents window though). So I only had to wait about an hour and a half before getting the bad news: I'd put an extra "2" in my passport number on ONE of the official documents, meaning the whole application had been rejected and I would have to start over from scratch. (Actually I hadn't done this. The woman I paid to do it correctly for me had).

My classes are finished, so luckily (?) I had the whole day to re-gather, re-fill out, re-photocopy, and re-submit everything. Oddly enough, the woman once again typed up my letter with the exact same mistake, but this time I caught it. Perhaps I'm back so frequently that she just has the thing on file, who knows. I had some more lovely photos taken. This one is extra because the immigration office demands six, while the photographer across the street has a special camera that only takes groups of four pictures. I always wonder whether things like this are just part of the day-to-day randomness of Mexicoor intricate plots to squeeze a few more pesos out of gringos. Then it was back to the immigration office to wait in the line to drop off documents, which I was miraculously able to do in the same day. Everything appeared to go fine except for a brief episode where I had to convince the lady at the window that I was not in fact "Eva Evalin" from the Russian Federation, despite having grown up in Moscow, Idaho.

Return to the Dark Tower

Yesterday I arrived at the immigration office early before it opened and got a relatively good spot in line-#30. I also bit my tongue and let the Lake Chapala Society members stand in the wrong queue (see my earlier post on the immigration offices for why I would stoop to such knavery). I have actually been back to INM a number of times since that visit. Each wretched occasion has involved a long boring conversation with the retired followed by a personal meltdown. I now know each INM official on either side of the hall as well as the security guards, and I hold a personal grudge against each of them.

My goal for yesterday was not to lose my shit. It was going pretty well: I had a book to read and some Louis Armstrong cued on my MP3 player. It's a little harder to be angry at the world when listening to Louis Armstrong. But then, as the time dragged on, I became nervous about making it to my 1 pm class (factoring in the commute). It was the day of the final exam, so it would be a pretty big deal to show up late or miss it. Finally, the number on the counter changed to 28. Clutching my ficha #30, I went to hover by the windows lest they skip past me. Then, I waited and waited. And waited. At a certain point I realized that no one was being helped at any of the windows. It was about that time that a terrible rumor began to circulate throughout the waiting area: "se cae el sistema." Indeed, about 10 minutes later a smiling man came out to tell everyone in the front row where I was seated that the system had crashed. We were welcome to wait as long as we liked, but there was no telling when Mexico City would resolve the problem. I calmly got up and left without doing a Basil Fawlty impression. Mission accomplished.