MadagasCal

It was probably the distant shouting that awoke me from my uncomfortable sleep. Shifting from my tight corner seat in the back of the "taxi-brousse", Malagasy French for an over-stuffed minibus, I noticed we were not moving. This didn't seem ideal for a roughly 18 hour journey from Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, to Morondava, a west coast city on the strait of Mozambique. I drowsily followed some of the passengers out onto a random stretch of road. In the 10pm darkness, I could make out that all the cars were stopped. I heard the shouting erupt again and my fears flared to the worst. "Is there fighting?" I asked my guide Vonjy. "No," he simply replied. We walked towards a bridge in the road and saw a dirt path leading off road down to the river from where the commotion was coming. There I found myself amidst a crowd of Malagasy people shouting and cheering, and witnessed a taxi-brousse attempting to ford the river. Well the river wasn't the problem, it was the steep river bank on the other side.

The taxi-brousse charged up the river bank, reaching halfway before dejectedly sliding back down. A good portion of the crowd laughed, while the rest shouted what I guessed were a mixture of instructions and heckles. Someone procured a rope and tied it to the front bumper, and a group of people coordinated to drag the van up while another group pushed from below. Then the rope snapped, and the woman next to me laughed hysterically. 

Ok so these taxi-brousses, secondhand imports from Korea or Germany, were trying to all-terrain up a ravine in the middle of the night. Confused, I trudged back up and found a truck with its hood popped open right at the entrance to the bridge. This was a semi-truck, 18 wheeler perhaps. Suddenly I realized the gravity and unfortunateness of the situation. The road narrowed into the one-lane bridge and this truck had died in a spot where no car could possibly cross the bridge, leading to the off-road theatrics below. 

"What do we do now?" Vonjy produced another simple reply. "This is Madagascar." How often I've heard variations of that phrase - This is China. This is Africa. Pura vida, eso es Costa Rica. So often we with the privilege of the developed world, when faced with problems, instinctually want to solve them. It can be a tough transition to adopt the mindset of those in less resourced places to accept that sometimes situations are outside your control. As I stood there under the light of a full moon, in the middle of Madagascar far from cell phone coverage, watching the vehicular bottleneck slowly increase, all I could do was smile. If nothing else, I had blog material. 

Up til then, I had done little in Madagascar. This was my first ever trip to Africa, and I had chosen this island nation that had long fascinated me to explore. However, immediately after my first meal, a dessert crepe, in Antananarivo (the capital), I experienced one of the worst food poisonings of my life. I was bedridden for a full day and a half, saved by a doctor who gave me an IV injection in French. I suspect that the crepe was just the straw that broke the camel's back, for my stomach had already made its struggles to adapt to foreign bacteria in my preceding two day layover through Ethiopia. After sleeping off the doctor's visit, I was able to drag myself out to see the palace, and then inquire about a tour to the west coast. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world (183 out of 191) and not a place you can easily see the sights on your own. I had already lost too many days to do the full tour, but the tour company made a revised itinerary. After sending me four emails between 2-4am asking me to confirm that I was ok with the plan, we met early in the morning and he pressured me to leave for the tour right then and there. Realizing that I didn't have many other options for seeing the country, I reluctantly agreed to go, just a day into recovery. The original plan involved taking a "comfort luxury bus" 4 hours to Antsirabe and then 12ish hours to Morondava the next day. However, as we drove around looking for public buses, we couldn't find any supposedly due to the Independence Day three days out. It took a few hours before we found a taxi-brousse, a packed heap (four to a row) far from comfort or luxury, leaving directly for Morondava. I wasn't excited to spend 16 hours in that thing when I couldn't even pass something solid, but I also didn't want to mope around Antananarivo either.

So I had plenty to gripe about even before this indefinite delay. However, the Malagasy spirited imbued the blockade with positivity. Through more shouting of instructions, the taxi-brousses learned to reverse far down the river, then accelerate with enough of a head of steam to clear the riverbank. I saw maybe four or five do this successfully, all to thunderous cheering. A handful of other taxis also swapped out people and cargo, and then U-turned back where they came. Unfortunately our driver was not willing to make either this exchange nor the riverbank maneuver. As the night got colder and colder, folks gathered brush and created fires which dozens of us would huddle around. Someone started brewing coffee, someone else started a small dance party. The waylaid crowd, which might have exceeded two thousand, seemed genuinely upbeat overall. Somehow as so often is the case, I was the only foreigner around. 

Food poisoning update? I had thankfully stopped being desperate to go, but let's just say it was crucial having my own tissues, and there was plenty of remote ground to explore. 

In fact, in that exploration I had climbed to higher ground and saw the roof of my taxi-brousse where a duck was tied up in a bag and rolling around. This explains a phenomenon where earlier I had been spooked by squawking from above. Now I understood - this is Madagascar. I had to accept that I couldn't inform my girlfriend and family of my predicament.  My phone, kindle and external battery slowly drained, and losing my digital attention crutches, I stared up at a night sky teeming with more stars than I'd seen in years and made out the Southern Cross. My thoughts ranged freely from the poverty in the environs, to the plot points of scattered movies from long ago, to the still beauty of this dry remote part of this remote island to sailors from long ago on wooden ships passing the equator and seeing the Southern Cross emerge, this same set of burning gas orbs unfathomably distant as I accessed neurological linkages typically inactive during my domesticated internet-addicted routine-filled existence that now also felt unfathomably distant.

At 5am, the cows came home. Actually they were leaving home going to work. A farmer led four zebus down the road, around the dead truck, over the bridge, and presumably onto his fields. It took until 6:30am for the cavalry to arrive, one small truck to tow the head of the dead truck and a new head to take over the body. It took two frustrating hours before they figured out how to free the head, and just eight more minutes to tow away the body and decongest this rural road. 

Hurdle removed, but there was still so much road ahead. I had been warned that the roads were bad. While this entire route was paved, much of the paving had deteriorated into potholes or worse, and the taxi-brousses would slow down to a crawl when going over them. Finally 80km from Morondava the road stayed paved, and the driver would speed through, making some shocking passes on tight roads. Within sight of our destination, the taxi-brousse made pitstops, picking up firewood and chatting with the vendor. I was apoplectic, having run out of patience hours ago and desperate just to stretch my legs. Remarkably, no one else in our bus seemed perturbed and even the kids behaved well. No one else that is, except for the duck, which had made enough trouble on the roof that they packed him in the trunk with our luggage, where his excrement leaked his way onto my bag. And you didn't think it could get worse. It was night again when we finally rolled into the bus station in Morondava, 29 hours after we had set off.  While passengers alighted and engaged in joyful family reunions, I hightailed it to our hotel and was asleep within 10 minutes. 

*****

The actual tourism part of the trip proceeded and featured a more favorable highlight-to-disaster ratio. Vonjy showed up with a driver friend Nono and a Range Rover that had Korean on its mirrors and romanized Arabic on its license plate. We went north onto dirt roads that made the awful paved roads of the previous day seem like the Autobahn.

Allée des Baobabs

Though many may know Madagascar as a DreamWorks movie, this trip was actually inspired by Geoguessr, where I had once been placed in the Avenue of the Baobabs and learned about a stretch of iconic trees naturally lining the sides of a road like Stanford's Palm Drive. The baobabs arrived surprisingly quickly, popping up sporadically before reaching at the Avenue a density that you'd think might be cultivated. You'd be mistaken, as baobabs reach maturation after a thousand years, nearly as long as humans have been living in the region. Some baobabs had been planted in suitable spots along the road but they were pitiful runts next to the majestic giants whose stout trunks towered in the sky, branchless until they petered out horizontally. What had seemed so far-flung and nearly mystical in Geoguessr was now living and breathing in front of me. Baobabs in Malagasy are called Rainala, mother of forest, and 6 of the 8 species are in Madagascar (one is in mainland Africa, one in Australia, and another in Le Petit Prince). The road meandered around the baobabs and continued through tiny villages. I was surprised to learn that this Avenue was not a tourist trap like the Avenue of the Stars but actually the only way for us to go north. We bumped ahead slowly on a road that during the wet summer season would get untraversably muddy. Now in the winter, it was so uneven that my Fitbit registered 30k steps merely while sitting in the car. 

We passed by cassava and peanut fields and small villages where children would emerge to run after the car. They may have been motivated by money, as they would disappear if you handed over a bill, but likely they were also bored and curious. Frequently children would spot me and shout "Vaza! Vaza!" short for vazaha meaning foreigner.  The villages were mainly collections of thatch huts with few synthetic materials to be found. Madagascar basically doesn't have an electric grid (~25% of the population has access), and villages like these may have had at best a few portable solar panels able to charge phones. I was witnessing the type of poverty one hears of in Ted talks, comparable in my life experience only to some villages I'd trekked through in Myanmar. Some of the huts looked like they could be blown over by a huff and puff from a big bad wolf. One of the villages though did boast a full grown baobab.

We reached the Tsiribihina river, at a place that Google Maps calls "Port Bac Tsimafana" and classifies as a "marina." The marina fleet consists of one wooden raft with a loud motor that can ferry maybe three 4x4s across the river.  Rice cultivation was on the river, a wintertime necessity as the regular paddies dried up. While waiting for another 4x4 to arrive, I witnessed one man stuffing straw into the roof of the only structure around, while another man followed me around staring intensely at my face, undoubtedly wondering what ethnicity I was. The other 4x4 did arrive, and on the ferry I chatted with a gay couple who spoke German to each other, although they told me one was Croatian and the other Turkish, both moving to Munich as adults. The Croatian was shocked to learn that I had randomly spent a night at his hometown of Osijek.

Not the last straw

Belo sur Tsiribihina was a proper city on the other side of the river with its own electric generation. The tour had me getting lunch at a restaurant with an unsettlingly extravagant French menu. Vonjy and Nono didn't even sit with me, likely getting cheaper Malagasy dishes off a separate menu. While I knew this was a scheme to milk tourists with higher prices, the fancy French meal was still $10-$15 US, a huge bargain for Langue de Zebu au poivre (cow tongue). 

After a full 8 hours of jerky driving and two raft ferries, we pulled into a luxury resort. While it wouldn't merit 5 stars in Aruba (the internet trickled out from the one router), the sprawling sets of bungalows, landscaped horticulture, multiple pools and decorated bar felt jarringly opulent after all the poverty I'd just seen. As I stood under a hot shower, made possible by a farm of solar panels on-site, I wondered how many of those villagers had ever had a shower like this.

Left: Sportive Lemur
Right: Decken's Sifaka

The other guests were mostly Europeans, with one lone Japanese woman who did not want to be bothered. I befriended an older Spanish couple who'd traveled together to around 90 countries. Unsurprisingly the travelers in Madagascar were all experienced. We were all with tour guides and convened the next morning to reach the tours' main selling point, the Great Tsingy de Bemaraha. Due to potential of banditry (!), we drove as one long convoy and hiked together. The 5 hour hike started through the forest, where we were delighted to see two species of lemurs hiding or leaping through the trees. The guides also pointed out rare birds and ant holes that tricked snakes into crawling in and getting suffocated. 

Then the trail entered the famous limestone formations of the Tsingy. We alternated between crawling through caves, climbing up ladders, rock climbing through narrow formations (using harnesses) and even crossing a rope bridge. This part felt like a fun adventure course with a UNESCO view.

The Tsingy is a massive series of limestone karst formations, where water and acid rain have cut distinctive patterns. The area used to be seabed, evidenced by fossils of shells that were commonplace. While it was our main destination and certainly a top trip highlight, I don't think I can do this experience justice in writing other than saying natural is marvelous.

The older Spanish couple were able to manage the whole course with great difficulty, and while waiting for them, I shared a glass of orange juice with the German-ish couple. Lacking enough cups, their guide ripped a water bottle in half and poured the orange juice into both halves.

 

Coming back through the main town, it was clear that National Day had arrived. The entire road was crowded surrounding some sort of competitive fighting event. The hotel staff would ask me to eat dinner early for they were going into town to party. Following Cal's travel rule #1, when in doubt go for the better story, I knew I'd need to check this out. And then there I was, walking into a "bar" (read: building where lots of people had beer) with Vonjy and being immediately forced to dance. Vonjy explained to me how different regions of Madagascar had their own types of dance (more hips in the

Most awk photo since braces

north, more shoulders in the south, and in this region join the conga line). Anyone who's ever walked into a party where they didn't know anyone should relate to my awkwardness, and anyone who's a poor dancer should exponentially increase that awkwardness. But hey, when in Madagascar, do as the Malagasy do. 

We departed back the way we came, and now armed with many small bills, I was able to stop by a village and pass them out to a small throng of kids. Eventually we reached the Avenue of the Baobabs again, this time for a sunset money shot.

This Insta destination was where I met the most travelers, including a tour group of 8 old Hong Kongers, who wanted to buy me dinner, and one Brazilian wannabe-model who pushed me out of her photo op.

The tour concluded dropping me off in Morondava, and I spent the next day exploring the city. I walked to the end of the road, the same road I'd spent 29 hours on, and found a plaque commemorating the inauguration of the road in 2012, unexpectedly financed partially by the Import-Export Bank of Korea. I had always pictured infrastructure investments as rail or ports, but now I couldn't have even imagined this trip had that road not been paved, even if sections were in poor condition only 12 years later. Past the road lay an enormous stretch of white sandy beach which was largely devoid of sun bathers despite the 85 degree heat. Many ramshackle dwellings lined the edge of the sand. Several people sold me on a dinghy ride to a nearby island fishing village, where I witnessed several damaged boats beached waiting for the funds to repair, open air markets held in shallow water on boats, a mission led by an Italian priest, and a man climb a coconut tree, knock off two coconuts, then open them with a machete and hand them to me. I found Morondava pretty fascinating - it was much safer than Antananarivo and clearly helped by tourism but demonstrating a vibrant, diversified economy.

I flew back because I wasn't going through that bus experience again. I took a tuk-tuk to a one room airport without x-ray machines, boarded a twin-engine turbo prop ATR72, a plane so old it was made by the company that later became Airbus, and despite preparing for untold delays, arrived on time in Antananarivo. Ironically I would suffer through three separate airline inconveniences on this trip, but none in Madagascar. 

I rounded out my remaining nights in Antananarivo with some visits to smoky pubs where I used more French than I had ever had in my entire life, conversing with people from Madagascar, Réunion, France and Seychelles. I met some people who'd lived all over the world exclusively in French-speaking places and barely spoke English and realized just how parallel the Francophone and Anglophone spheres could be. On a Sunday, I found the normally cantankerous city almost devoid of life, and asked my hotel for help visiting a lemur reserve an hour outside of town. The hotel owner, a Mauritian of Indian descent, showed up and over the car ride told me about his business exploits in the country, how he was divesting from tourism after Covid (Madagascar's tourism still hasn't recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels) and into agriculture. He spoke Mauritian Creole, French, English, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Malagasy and for some reason, Malay. 

Food wise, I was forced to eat a lot of French cuisine as the restaurants on our tour served nothing else - which wasn't the worst. Though I stayed away from the most unprotected street food (even the hotel owner said his stomach couldn't handle it), I did manage to sample the heavily rice-based Malagasy cuisine. Just like in Chinese, the verb "to eat" in Malagasy miniham-bary means "eat rice." I had the national dish Romazava, a thick stew of greens, zebu meat, tomatoes and onions that I poured over red rice, and Ravitoto, a cassava leaves and coconut milk based curry that I ate with shrimp and rice. Occasionally I ate plates with excellent spaghetti thrown in. In Antananarivo I briefly met two Chinese owners of restaurants. One of them had roots in Madagascar dating to 1910 when his Shanghainese grandparents immigrated. He spoke rough Cantonese, and in a first for me in my interactions with the diaspora, we switched back and forth with French to ease intelligibility. Overall I tasted in the cuisine the island's uniqueness as well as its ties to French colonialism and Indian and Arabic trade links.

This was a monumental trip for me bringing me further away from my comfort zone than ever before. I saw a beautiful country with unique biology and a simpler way of life. I was reminded that we sometimes have to accept what we cannot control but that we are also tougher than we think. 

The Great Man Fallacy

There's a famous approach to the study of history called the Great Man Theory of history. I'm not sure when I started believing so strongly in the erroneousness of this ideology, but I very much do now. I'm motivated to write this because counter to my convictions, the Great Man Theory (GMT) holds much sway in how people think, consciously or subconsciously, because of how it simplifies history. This is often particularly true when thinking about nations and their leaders. However, I think this historical lens is flawed and dangerous, appealing to our base instincts but leading to a misunderstanding of the true scope of social movements. Doing the hard work of understanding social forces at play is a better way to understand nations as well as how to tackle massive problems like climate change.

The gist of the GMT is that super smart people, men invariably, have shaped our nations, advanced our science, and single-handedly helped our understanding of the world. We know their names - Einstein, Jobs, Hitler, Stalin, Kennedy, Napoleon, Gandhi. Through their forces of personality and perhaps lucky timing, they have had outsized individual impact on our societies. 

Like all compelling theories, GMT has elements of truth. Most companies, organizations and countries assign controlling power to an individual, as many real world decisions need to be made with a speed and efficiency that's enabled by a single executor. When debating the formation of the office of President of the United States, Alexander Hamilton dedicated an entire Federalist paper (#70) examining the flaws of a dual executive in Ancient Rome. As a result, when an individual does ascend to a position like CEO or President, they have the power to apply their personal worldviews and ideas to great effect.

But even when a chief makes an executive decision, they are often responsive to larger forces rather than shaping them. CEOs feel the pressure from shareholders to buyback stock, or face revolt from employees unless they focus more on diversity, or they order a reorganization based on a Harvard Business Review article. Understanding those drivers is often more important than understanding an individual leader's personalities or opinions.

Those drivers, or forces, are abstract and nebulous. It's much easier to study an individual person, wherein lies the attractiveness of GMT. The individual is the smallest unit of society, the propellant behind any action. And we are all individuals. We can understand others like us, with their own unique stories and motivations. 

Nevertheless, we can and should still examine the forces behind notable individuals. Take Barack Obama’s rise. He’s often described as a generational political talent, with his charisma and oratory skills particularly exclaimed. Indeed I have high praise for his intelligence, work ethic and values. One could read US history and Obama's election focused on his singular abilities. Or they could focus on the appetite of the country (or half the country) for the values Obama embodied. He was a product of a white/black pre-marital coupling that was received better in 1959 Hawaii than it would have been in many other places and times. Economic growth and social programs helped him to gain an elite education. His presidential candidacy came in an era where the tide of racial prejudice had turned with a whole generation born and grown post Civil Rights movement.  Had he been raised earlier in the Jim Crow south, even with his prodigious talents, it's hard to imagine him becoming president. But one could argue that by 2008, the liberal-leaning American public wanted someone to break the streak of white male presidents, and that were it not Obama, the Democratic establishment may have coalesced around a man like Deval Patrick or Cory Booker.  Once in office, Obama was as subject to larger political forces as any before him. Despite his reputation as a liberal stalwart, Obama did not support gay marriage until 2012. He did not let up on the war on terror, did not close Guantanamo, and could not accomplish many of his objectives in immigration reform, taxation reform, etc.  

Many Americans understand the Russian government and major decisions such as the invasion of Ukraine through the framework of Vladimir Putin. Indeed his worldview has been the obvious driver of a hardline change in Russia's international standing.  But if his worldview were singular and not shared by Russians, it is likely he would not be able to exact his agenda or even remain in power. While there is certainly plenty of quashed dissent within Russia, there is also a groundswell of animosity against Western nations and historical grievances. When Putin launches accusations of hypocrisy, it lands with the populace, enhanced but not created by his tight grip on the media.  Putin is easy to vilify, but he is not a video game boss whose demise means the game is won. The populist resentment against the west, the structure of natural resources wealth controlled by oligarchs and evolving capabilities of cyberwarfare are some of the other forces that shape Russia today and would likely contribute to a post-Putin Russia.

Xi Jinping is probably the only person an average American knows of in the Chinese government. He's been called a dictator who managed to remove term limits. His rise to leadership has coincided with a dramatic shift in China's relations to the international world, particularly the US. One could certainly attribute this turn to his ideology. But an equally valid and much less common approach would require examining the inefficiencies of his predecessor Hu Jintao, the appetite amongst the CCP leadership for a stronger central authority, and deep anti-western resentment stemming from events during the Qing Dynasty. Xi Jinping would not be able to orthogonally change China's course were he not propelled by larger forces.

Perhaps the single best examination of the GMT is its manifestation in Donald Trump. Here we have a man who seems to defy the conventional wisdom, who appears to be singular in many ways. In addition, here is a man who thrives off the simplicity of GMT, who convinces his base that problems are caused by bad individuals. He simplifies the entire legal system to the prosecutor and the judge and he personifies the Covid-19 restrictions enforced by the government as Anthony Fauci. He knows there are a myriad of reasons behind America's Covid-19 response and rules, and that Anthony Fauci was more a figurehead than anything. But it is easy to galvanize supporters to denigrate Anthony Fauci. The Trump campaign feeds off the GMT, both in promoting their man and in demonizing the enemy. The true issues in this country are the forces, from demographic change, wealth redistribution, technological changes in media to name a few, that have enabled Trump's rise and polarize American society. 

These forces are not easy to understand, let alone combat. Digging into how American society became more polarized, from our geography, consumer choices, media diet to political and religious beliefs, is a book unto itself. But if we truly want to understand the world, we can't just understand a handful of people. 

Mexico redux

I didn't publish a single post in 2023. It was largely a year where I was not in a great mental space for sharing, exerting energy on the hardest job search in my life, a life that's had its fair share of hard job searches. Fortunately, I was able to end the year visiting Mexico with my girlfriend Jenny. Our trip created new stories and rekindled my interest in Mexico, where I'd spent 2 months bumming around in 2021 but never got to writing about. Though those 2021 travels were noteworthy, at that time I couldn't summon the energy to execute with the effort Mexico deserved. I can try to make amends for that here. 

On that 2021 stretch, I had worked remotely for two weeks in Roma Norte, Mexico City. Two weeks is a decent amount of time in one place but between work, Covid restrictions and the sheer size of Ciudad de Mexico (CDMX), there was plenty I hadn't gotten to see. Jenny and I found an Airbnb on the edge of Condesa overlooking Bosque de Chapultepec park, a large forested park that contains several museums. Chapultepec means "grasshopper hill" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and chapulines means grasshopper in Mexican Spanish today. I had wanted to see the Castillo de Chapultepec, a castle museum prominently on the top of the hill, but it turns out the National Anthropology Museum was by far the more worthwhile visit. Documenting the many pre-Hispanic peoples and civilizations of these lands, from the Olmec to the Maya and Aztecs, the museum contains priceless artifacts including the massive Aztec Piedra del Sol. Despite the Museum being the #1 attraction on TripAdvisor, it had somehow slipped past my radar last time.

I had started to get a sense of Mexico's massive scale and diversity. The Mexican culture that bleeds into America doesn't quite reflect this. Mexican food in America largely derives from northern Mexico including the parts of Mexico that the US conquered, and has additionally been heavily Americanized. Burritos and quesadillas are rare in the parts of Mexico I've visited.

Historically, diverse civilizations and language families influenced the areas comprising modern day Mexico. The Mayans, who built Chichen Itza and Tikal (Guatemala), and the Aztecs, whose capital Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, are the most notable, but they did not even overlap temporally or linguistically. The Mayan Empire, based in the Yucatan peninsula and extending into modern day Belize and Guatemala, mysteriously collapsed in the 9th century AD, while the Aztecs arose from well north of Tenochtitlan and expanded southward in the 13th century. From the Baja California peninsula in the west, the northern border between Chihuahua and Texas, Oaxaca in the south and the Yucatan peninsula in the east, Mexico is full of different climates and indigenous cultures. Like India or the United States, once you get familiar, Mexico doesn't really feel like a single country.

Enough history. I have three short modern stories from this trip. 

One - in CDMX, at a market trying to buy some craft backpacks. I handed the vendor a 500 peso bill and she immediately started muttering, crumbling the bill over and over and walking around. After enough pacing and muttering she pointed to the rip in the bill and said she wouldn't accept it. Similarly, a taxi driver had earlier had balked at our ripped currency. We just said sorry and moved on without the purchase. I ended up nursing a beer at a cafe inside the market while Jenny shopped around. Again that server rejected my 500 peso bill, but unlike the backpack woman, accepted my credit card.

As we exited the market, a cop came running and yelling at us. She said some of the vendors had told her that we had bad money or something, and seeing my limited comprehension, asked if I spoke Spanish. I said a little yeah, but slow down. She waved a colleague over and a male cop came and tried to explain in English, but quickly ran out of words and ended up asking again if I spoke Spanish. "Sí, qué está pasando aquí?" He tried to explain and I caught words like "moneda" or "billete" and "pesos." The first cop radioed for more backup. Suddenly I remembered the 500 peso note, and fished it out of my wallet. Light bulbs went on for both cops, and they took the bill and rubbed it with their fingers.  They took out another 500 peso bill and pointed out subtle differences and asked me to feel them. I recall feeling and seeing slight differences, maybe the real one felt more plastic-like, but it was quite abstruse and I had no confidence I could repeat the differentiation later on.

Two more cops arrived, in more military-looking outfits with big guns, and suddenly my confusion gives way to alarm. Could this be an imprisonable offense? These military cops try English as well, before quickly resorting to Spanish. Clearly this system was not designed for linguistic backup. This cop says essentially the exact same things the previous guy said, telling me to feel the difference as well. It seems the rip had nothing to do with anything. Finally I asked "necesito ir al estadio de la policia?" and all four cops vehemently shook their heads and went no, no, no. "Podemos salir ahora? Can we leave now?" Si si si. It ended up being much ado about nothing.

Two days later Jenny and I made a quick trip to Puebla, about two hours east of CDMX. One of Mexico's oldest colonial settlements, Puebla has a historic cathedral plaza and I figured we could have a good time just walking around, but I also had Jenny scan through Puebla highlights to make sure we didn't miss anything. She spotted a geodesic dome à la Buckminster Fuller in a park southeast from city center. I don't quite understand Jenny's architectural affiliation with domes, but it seemed like a reasonable site to visit. After checking out an old battle fort (the site of the Cinco de Mayo battle) and dropping our bags off at our hotel, we rushed to the Parque Ecológico, the site of an aviary in the geodesic dome. 

Our first signs that something was off was the price of the tickets. I can't remember exact numbers but they felt higher than I would a dome to cost. Then after acquiring the tickets, we were directed to wait outside the park entrance. We stood there for five minutes as a young man fiddled in the back. Finally I asked can we just walk in already? We just wanted to poke our heads in the dome and move on. The young man then assented and announced the tour would begin after providing some instructions. He continued at length about not petting the animals and other rules that didn't seem important enough for me to keep up with translating. Finally he led us onto a walkway through a garden with flamingos and tortoises, leading into a massive plastic tree. The guide kept providing scientific descriptions for animals, and I kindly said something to the effect of, "hey, we're good, can we just check out this dome in peace?" And he left, and we had peace.

Until a large shirtless man in green body paint stepped out from the dome entrance. "HOLA CHICOS!" Jenny and I took a step back, frightened of an ambushed by a malevolent ogre. But Mexican Shrek was friendly, inviting us into the tree, pointing out some of the animals within, and explaining that he had lost a "talismán de aguamarina" - an aquamarine talisman. He mimed searching high and low. Suddenly it dawned on us - we had signed up for a children's quest.  Buckminster Fuller may have envisioned his domes as inexpensive housing, but in Puebla it contained a Disney-esque kids experience in a plastic treehouse. Mexican Shrek continued guiding us, speaking to us as if we were children, which was convenient given my level of Spanish. He mostly stuck to his script, but occasionally threw in English words when he knew them, and broke the 4th wall to ask where we were from. The talisman was nowhere to be found. 

Green man left us and for a moment we could hear the birds chirping, a large blue man reminded us that we were still in a theme park. This blue man explained that he represented the earth, and that the green man was actually an evil force trying to destroy nature.  Then he broke character and chatted with us. I told him we were looking for an aquamarine talisman. Gone was our desire to poke our heads in, I had firmly embarked on this quest. The blue man laughed with self-awareness and we eventually found the talisman in a box of sand. We made our way to the park exit where a thick ceremonial door awaited. The blue man asked if we knew any magic words. "Ooh, open sesame!" I shouted. The blue man pushed, but the door wouldn't budge. "Quizas la puerta solo habla espanol," he chuckled. I cracked up and said "Abre seseame!" and the door opened.

Story #3 is set in our CDMX neighborhood of Condesa. I glimpsed a thin pizza bar a block from our apartment and convinced Jenny to swing by. We were the only patrons there, and I ordered a mezcal and coke. This bar clearly expected mezcal to be drank straight up and didn't have coke, but the owner asked me what type of coke I wanted. Then he left the bar completely unattended, and walked several blocks to a supermarket, returning with a bottle of coke. This fairly extraordinary act of service merited a conversation, and after thanking him profusely, I asked him about a flag hanging inside.

I know my national flags pretty decently, but what on earth is that? The bar owner, Fabricio, introduced us to the nation of the Yaqui. "Qué es Yaqui?" The Yaqui are an indigenous people mostly based in the Mexican state of Sonora, but also in Arizona. Fabricio explained that they had an autonomous government, and could even issue papers for their tribal members to cross the border. My mind imagined an ICE officer examining Yaqui documentation and having no clue what to do. Fabricio continued with a history lesson, of how the Yaqui were the last indigenous group to resist Spanish colonization, how the Spanish tried to enslave them and split up their men and women, resulting in many Yaqui women taking Chinese immigrant husbands, and that he himself had Chinese ancestry. He was quite extraordinary, pursuing a PhD in Dance Anthropology while running this bar, and actively writing poetry. He shared a small book with his poems in Yaqui and Spanish, and bizarrely, one that was translated into Japanese. I asked to purchase his book and he agreed, but said it was his only copy with the Japanese. I didn't want to take his only copy. He said he would get more, and in fact he could have them on Monday when he'd be hosting a birthday party / poetry slam at the bar. Would we like to come?

And so on Monday we found ourselves squeezing past a tiny room full of Mexicans we didn't know to say hi to Fabricio. We then did that awkward thing you do when you arrive at parties, staring at people in conversations hoping they'd stop and say hi. Slowly we ingratiated ourselves in with our story of being visitors from Seattle who had just met Fabricio. Fabricio introduced us to Taiga, an artist / filmmaker / playwright from Sapporo, in Mexico on an advanced scholarship program, who had been the one translating the poem into Japanese. We switched from our rudimentary Spanish when we realized we were both better in English, making me wonder how he had done the translation. 

Then the poetry began, and four poets read long original passages. Following poetry is an ultimate test of language acquisition, and I'd have to say my Spanish level wasn't even close enough to make an attempt. However I was able to use Google Translate's voice feature to transcribe the speaker and discovered that one of the poems was about narwals. At least two of the poets were indigenous and spoke partially in indigenous languages (Zapotec, Nahuatl), culminating with Fabricio himself sharing poetry in Yaqui.

After the poetry, Fabricio let the mezcal loose and we started to break into the crowd more. One of the guests was a gynecologist who spoke excellent English and helped us into the conversation. Most everyone assumed we were friends with Taiga and were shocked to discover we had only met that night. A lot of confusion was apparent in the differences between China, Korea and Japan, not to mention Hong Kong and Taiwan. Fabricio was very interested in our Asian-ness, and for better or worse, I'd describe our interaction as having an air of mutual exoticism. Noting the international representation in the room, I stated, "necisitamos hablar en el mismo idioma - Yaqui." Fabricio whistled and said, "Ojalá! I wish." He proceeded to show his intoxication by delivering a monologue about how the Yaqui see nature and the world and our interconnectedness, but not fully landing it. Despite the mezcal-induced chaos in that cramped pizza bar, I felt a true elation from happening onto a Mexico City experience that one simply cannot buy, a spontaneous night of human connection that could never show up on TripAdvisor. Fabricio then forgot that I had already paid and charged me a second time. I wished him "feliz cumpleanos" and happily paid again.