Nos Vale Madre

Just outside the town, amongst the lush green rainforest, one can hear the chirping and cawing of birds, the cluck-cluck of roaming chickens, and if one looks through a kitchen window, one can see a bare arse is hanging out below a baggy blue t-shirt. Sprawled over a grimy oven hob, the owner of said arse is cooking - swaying and humming as she fills the air with a strong oniony smell. Meanwhile, thirsty and stressed from the sweaty ordeal of moving into my new home, I go to fill up my empty bottle from the communal water dispenser in the shared kitchen. I enter and am greeted, not quite in the way I had expected.

She seems not to have noticed me, engaged as she is with frying her onions. I glance around for the water dispenser, in what I regrettably notice is a patently grotty kitchen. Of course the water dispenser is cornered beside the hob - should I attempt to fill it up? Would I accidentally brush her arse? Should I say hello? She seems to be ‘OK’ with being bare arsed, is this how it works here? After a moment’s thought, I decide to return later, silently disappearing to my room - curious, more relaxed, dehydrated.

And although the kitchen itself is nothing to celebrate, I can finally spread out in the luxury of my en-suite double room. Inclusive of desk, TV and aircon, the plan is to finally get down to some serious work...

After a week, several seasons of Arrested Development and a few bags of tortilla chips later, I am ready to work. Although I do of course need to figure out what work it is that I am to be doing, which is, in itself, pretty hard work. There’ll be much YouTube watching (how to make money online in 2024), hours of philosophical journaling (What is work? What is money?), visits to stationery shops (notepads, pens, pencils, a sharpener), and perhaps a shamanic journey or two (spirit-animal - what should I do?). 

There are though, in addition to Netflix, certain other distractions. The lady I ‘encountered’ in the kitchen on arrival is among what seems to be a loud and joyous sisterhood gang, who have clearly taken up shop in the block I’m living in. There are frequent shoutings of names (CHEEEQUEEEITAAA, VIOLLLETTTAAAAA) that echo about the communal square that the rooms open out into. There is the constant swooning music - sang and hummed along to tunelessly, but nonetheless charmingly. Often there will be taxis to take them into town for the evening, beeping impatiently as the girls finish off their makeup. One does get to wondering what their work is.

They have a strong air of, how to put it… ‘we don’t give a f**k’ vibes. And indeed, they evidently don’t give a f**k about the kitchen hygiene situation, routinely leaving pans full of grease, piles of dirty, fly encircled plates in the sink, and additional layers of grime on the hob, and yes, evidently on occasion not giving a f**k about pants.

One evening, braving the cocina sucia to cook my huevos pericos, I discover a case of beer is squashing my spinach in the fridge. That’s it, enough is enough! And so I’ll be moving out into my own one-bed flat in a few weeks.

But you’re on a tight budget Andrew, and with no current job, you need to find some work pronto Sonny Jim, enough procrastinating…

I don’t give a f**k, I think, putting on season three and opening another bag of tortilla chips.

Strange Vibes

Already the street is a sweltering thickness of noise, heat, car exhaust and the forlorn moanings of a Mexican love song blaring from a shop speaker. With a shopping bag of yogurt, granola and bananas, I step through a coded doorway into the hostel patio. All at once the air is cool and quiet, palms and ferns filling the air with a lush mossy fragrance. I eat my breakfast alone, dreamily dipping my spoon, watching dappled morning light shifting on the solid wooden table. And so another day in tropical paradise begins.

Yet, barging into this particularly lovely breakfast quietude, a tank-faced, bear-like, bushy-eyebrowed man slaps down his own bowl of granola and yogurt opposite me. He coughs twice - annoying, strangled coughs.

He has a strange vibe.

Giving off an aura-stink, he stares vacantly into his bowl with two melancholy, bluish gunmetal eyes. I clench my spoon, my chest contracts, the air darkens.

We sit in anxious silence - just the metallic clanking of our spoons and muffled horns and engine racket seeping under the door from the road.

A very strange vibe.

Yet too urgently does the sun-drenched glory of my day beckon, that I am out of there in the beeping of a scooter horn.

And paradise proves itself - too pure the Pacific air, too joyful the being tossed and washed by surfing waves, that strange vibes are the faintest of nothings. Swept away, not even swept, dissolved, forgotten, nada. And so I thought nothing of him throughout the golden radiance of that weightless day until I saw him again that evening.

The evening, when street lamps shine in monsoon washed pavements and the moist, calm air is filled with smoky cooking aromas - tacos al pastor, tortas de chorizo, quesadillas de pollo. In the shelter of the hostel, I am walking by the lush, green patio to my room to sleep, and I see him sat there, in the same place, at the wooden table - what a weirdo, I think. He makes one think of a bulky freighter lost in a black ocean. I manage a smile and enter my dorm room, climbing up the empty bunk and thrusting aside my daily debris to drift blissfully into sleep. I hear the door slide open. Of course. Of course it’s him…

He has immediately followed me to bed, proceeding to clamber loudly into the bed directly below me, clumsily shaking the frame, giving off three of those strangled coughs again. As if a trapped part of his soul was crying out to be heard or seen.

What a f**king weirdo. 

Over an hour later, I am far from blissful sleep. Rattling fans, demonical coughs, menacing house music from the roof bar, rising noxious odours, my own extrapolative, expletive thoughts;

What the f**k is this weirdo doing - coughing, farting, where is he from, I bet he’s from… 

Heavenly day and hellish night.

I eventually fall asleep.

During breakfast the next day, we have our first and last conversation. Details of his past pass heavily across the table, entering my heart, weighing it down into a deeper place, where a strange compassion arises.

Prismatic Time

Distant clouds swoon upon slender mountains, a cathedral dome glitters, and in the midst of a small, sunlit square, a dazzling tang of fruit flesh explodes on my tongue. I am skewering fresh lime-soaked, chilli-sprinkled watermelon and cucumber into my rejoicing mouth - Hail to Mexican street cuisine!

Hail also to the deep black eyes of thunderstorm and rainbow that sparkled joy from a wizened landscape of wrinkles - the beautiful old lady who served me the fruit.

Yet already Oaxaca city is a dream, I am light passing through prism days, where polychromatic refractions of experience stream onto the palette of my mind.

And words, paint brushes though they are, give only a faint illusion of colour.

Chicos, mate!

Madrid, chica! Whose streets beat my drum, rang my bell, accessorised my eyes - golly gosh what dreamy shops. Life is a marvellous deep orange. An empanada melted in my mouth. A sunny park stroll with the lake’s cheeks aglitter. Warm air, blue rowing boats bobbed as boy brothers munched ice-cream. Podgy fellows, the younger greedily stuffing great gobfuls of chocolate goodness into his mouth while watching the older crumbling his cone into the lake, feeding the unusually massive fish.

Later, massive emotions unusually spilled out of a fair-haired Texan man I had been eavesdropping on in a cafe. To the patient caring ears of a young lady, he opened up about his flailing relationship. She reached a deft and gentle hand to rest on his leg as his tears began. That’s so good you can cry like that she says. 

Oh I’ve been practising for two years. My big Texan dad… and on he went with the usual ‘man discovering emotions’ story. And why not - let us discover emotions!

When a waiter so gently poured water into my glass this morning I certainly discovered gratitude. Yes I do feel that emotion spilling over. The deep and bright orange with perhaps sourer notes of do I deserve this. Yes damn it! The doldrum decades are faded, mind-chains flushed into the gutter by supernatural rainstorms. Life is in flight, winged. Wing-ED, as they say.

And now, Oaxaca, chico! So blessed, bless-ED to hear the great gargling rumble of car and burly bus engines, to have my mouth and innards tingled, nay expertly assaulted, with spice, and taste, and colour. To have my Englishness exposed, nay dissolved. They say: you can take the English out of England, but you can’t take the England out of the English. I say, take the English out of England so you can have the England taken out of them. Fussiness, social awkwardness, milk with tea?

England, mate.
Madrid, chica.
Oaxaca, chico.