Why it's ok to be fat.

Panic! At the Distrito

In about two days, Mexico City and the State of Mexico have gone into a mild state of panic -- a flu virus derived from genetic makeup of pigs, birds and humans has caused at least two dozen deaths and sickened at least a thousand people in the country, and all classes – from pre-school to university – were canceled in MexC and the State of Mexico today.

Last night, Mexico’s Secretary of Health José Ángel Córdova Villalobos interrupted national TV channels and warned people to take common-sense precautions against the virus – wash your hands frequently, sneeze in a tissue or on your arm, go to the doctor if you feel sick and avoid crowded places – which is just about impossible in this city. Since then, the media has been warning us nonstop to take preventive measures.

Many offices have put out more alcohol-soap dispensers and handed out thin, paper-cotton face masks (or cobrebocas) to employees, including mine. In the morning, only a few were wearing the blue doctor’s masks, but by the afternoon the office looked more like a hospital than a law firm.

I noticed it, too, on the bus. I saw only one or two people with masks when I was coming to work this morning, but when I went home for lunch, I saw dozens. I went to the market to get some stuff, and almost all of the vendors were wearing them. Coming back from lunch, just two hours later and again on the bus, I saw even more with them – clusters of oficinistas going back to work, their blue or pink or white or turquoise facemasks hanging on their necks. It's quite impressive to see how fast people can mobilize and all do the same thing -- too bad this weren't the case for other worthy causes.

I’m not sure if this virus, which first broke out in California and Texas, is going to be severe. I'm not clear whether there is a vaccine, but the strain is so new that I doubt it.

By the way, I'm wearing one of these masks. I realize how bad my breath is. I'm going to rinse my mouth out.

Happy Earth Day, World!

The Bermuda-Triangle bookstore: I found you, sucka!

Last August, wandering aimlessly around Colonia Roma, I found a cute, hole-in-the-wall bookstore. About as big as a rich person's walk-in closet, it had shelves and piles stacked with used books, some ordered by subject, some by author, and some just a complete desmadre. Books in Mexico are expensive, even used ones, but the prices in this little jewel are so low that you get the urge to hurriedly grab every book with a pretty-looking cover or by an author you vaguely remember from literature class waybackwhen. I carried only 100 pesos that day, but left with a few English books (for my English classes) and a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Soon after that serendipitous encounter, I moved out of Roma neighborhood, and into the centrally located Juarez, and the bookstore became lost into the nowheres of my mind...

...until yesterday.

Well, I didn't -forget- about the bookstore itself, I just forgot -where- it was. You can't forget something like that. With the near-coma-inducing excitement, I didn't pay attention to which street it was on. Then in December I moved back to the Condesa neighborhood (next to the Roma) and looked for the bookstore several times, with no luck. I often get lost, even in my own neighborhood, among the labyrinth of streets – some of them changing names suddenly, some curving and merging and splitting and poorly labeled.

Yesterday, as I was on the bus back from work, I got the ganas to rediscover my precious. This time I was determined to find it. So I started on Aguascalientes street, walked down a few blocks, turned down the next street, then Actopan, Piedras Negras, Manzanillo, Nautla, Champotón, Tepic, Taxco…

Nope, I thought. Either I’m looking too late (8 p.m.) or the bookstore closed up shop, or it shrunk even more and has disappeared like the new iPod shuffle.

Exasperated, I decided to give it one more shot. I headed toward the Chilpancingo metro station, right on Baja California, assured that the bookstore wasn’t beyond that point. And, surprise, there it was, on a little side street that is sucked into Baja California.

I don’t have to explain how I felt, but this time there seemed to be double the amount of books packed in – with no room left on the shelves, they were now stacked high in perilous mountains, all of the knowledge ready to crush you if you breathed on it wrong.

I left the store with no books, only with the pure excitement that I had found this sucka, that it hadn’t become lost, like so many Mexican small businesses do, in the Bermuda Triangle.

Bizarre Mexican brands, II

EDIT: Sorry for the broken link. I've posted a new photo.

I've accumulated at least 10 bizarrely named Mexican brands, and many offenders seem to be products with a lot of sugar. Chokis, a brand of chocolate-chip cookies, is pronounced "Chokies", but the cookies themselves aren't quite small enough to choke on (but perhaps after the second bite). Anyway, Latin America's Semana Santa (Holy Week) is this week, so I'm off to Veracruz tonight! Hooray for Saints!