Quickly catching up on Mexico

Hello! I promised I'd write more, so here it is. So far the trip has been fantastic, to the point that I wanted to spend more time in every town I visited. Swimming and hiking were great in and around Puerto Vallarta (especially around El Tuito), and I then spent time in Guadalajara where there was an international book fair and lots of fun college students who had come to listen to the speakers (I got to hear Arturo Pérez-Reverte talk about La Reina del Sur, that I had read, and saw Elena Poniatowska, whose book La Piel del Cielo I was reading at the time). Here is Arturo Pérez-Reverte singing an old narco-corrida with the Tigres del Norte:


I then went to Zacatecas, which is always fun and was even better this time since there was a very interesting movie festival (theme: borders and migrations). I saw about five feature-length movies and heard some actors and directors comment on two of them.

Otherwise, get ready for landscapes and birds!

Cacti of all shapes and sizes:


A tiny cactus camouflaged in the rocks:


Fascinating masks in Zacatecas:


La hasteca, near Monterrey, where I have to go back and spend more time:


The Cerro de las Mitras, behind which my friend Ricardo and his family live in Monterrey:


La Huasteca, again:


A gadwall, Anas strepera:


A male Great-tailed grackle Quiscalus mexicanus:


And a female:


And an eastern fox squirrel Scirus niger:


I am now in Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

November doldrums

It’s just hard to write anything right now. Of course, I have fallen very far behind on this blog stuff, and I am now trying to catch up on all my virtual world activity, from the academic to the inane (I was even talked into joining a social networking website - after years of saying I never would do it). I know, I have fallen woefully far behind on this blog stuff, and I’ll try to be better about while I travel (I am leaving Monday).

I am not the only one who's been having a hard time writing anything lately, though. I noticed that most of the other students in my creative writing class have also started writing dreary stuff. The professor noticed it too, and she pronounced us “stuck in the November doldrums.” At least we got last week’s homework load lightened up a bit on account of that. In retrospect, perhaps Alison Bechdel had more going on than inner conflict when she wrote that: “By the end of November, my earnest daily entries had given way to the implicit lie of the blank page, and weeks at a time are left unrecorded.”

By the way, some people tried to ban her book “Fun Home.” Banned Books Week was over a month ago, but it’s never too late to read one. If you read Spanish, I highly recommend the weblog Generación Y, by the Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez. It is (rather obviously) banned in Cuba.

Here in the US, we have designated holidays for social causes, such as Hispanic Heritage Month (that was also over a month ago, but if you’re trying to catch up I recommend Sandra Cisneros), and right now it’s Native American heritage month – how about Two Old Women, by the Athabascan author Velma Wallis, from here in Alaska? At the very least, it’ll demonstrate that not all women here are neurotic populist politicians. This cultural holiday stuff gets a little ridiculous, but it’s a good excuse to visit some of the library’s dustier shelves.

So, since the last time I wrote in this blog I did a few hikes, some more unsuccessful deer hunting, some kayaking, and I went to Anchorage for a week and a half or so (for fun this time). Anchorage was great, with ice-skating, hiking, and doing some big city things as well. This is from a hike in Whittier, where some nasty winds prevented us from going kayaking:

The ice skating was great, and went on for miles and miles. We did broke through the ice a couple of times, but it wasn’t deep at all where we went in.

I even did a traditional Halloween with Cathy, which included carving and displaying four pumpkins so that neighborhood kids could come by for candy. This is my first pumpkin:

Of course, who am I to try and compete with artists?:

Since then I’ve been getting ahead on homework so that I don’t have to travel with a backpack full of university books (That way I can make room for the bird books). Other than creative writing, university homework has been OK lately, and I did enough homework ahead of time that I am already completely done with two of my four classes: advanced Spanish grammar, and geography of Alaska.

This picture is really blurry, but I don’t have any other of a female Barrow’s goldeneye Bucephala islandica with the nice yellow beak like this:

I also took this picture of our regular crow, the northwestern crow Corvus caurina:

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to watch a big flock of passerines outside my window: there was a Townsend’s warbler, a female slate-colored junco, a few tree creepers, and a couple gallons of chickadees and Oregon junco.

Illegal migrants turn themselves in to border police!

The birds are still suffering out here. Quails, in particular, have been willing to go anywhere for some shade. I had a quail fly into my Humvee and land right next to me, almost on top of the seat belt clip. Of course, it was trying to get some shade. The quail looked up at me, and I was absolutely stunned. I tried to catch the quail, but the bird looked really fragile so that when I had my hand on it I hesitated to grasp firmly, and it flew back out of the Humvee. Other quails flew under concrete blocks and in the shadow of building, and I could not catch or photograph them either. But I ended up getting a quail that flew into a Kuwaiti Police building and was caught by a Bangladeshi servant. I released it just before sunset, and got this picture before it flew off. Back in France, I don’t even remember ever seeing a quail although they are not rare, because they are usually well hidden in vegetation.

Since I was talking about vegetation, there is an interesting picture I thought I’d post. The natural habitat here is made up of very hard sand with a few perennials and many annuals that mostly dry up around May. However, most of Kuwait is heavily browsed by camels, goats and sheep, and driven over by all sorts of vehicles. By the time summer comes around, these parts of the desert will have been obliterated, and the sand gradually becomes soft at the surface. The fence in this picture was closed only a few months ago for tactical reasons, and already we can see a drastic difference between exposed and protected areas.



And here is another migrating bird that flew into the same Kuwaiti Police building. This one is a hoopoe, the bird I just cannot get tired of seeing and photographing. It is being held by a Kuwaiti Raqib, which is roughly equivalent to a staff sergeant in the US army. It takes about nine years to attain that rank from Shurtti - the lowest rank.



I have been reading a lot, and for variety I went back to reading in English. My most memorable reads of the last two or three weeks were:

Mala Onda, by Alberto Fuguet
If you lived here I’d know our name, by Heather Lende
The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx
El Tunel, by Ernesto Sabato

I really enjoyed The Shipping News, from which I had already read a few chapter in anthologies. The language is simply amazing, as in this passage:

“The sea. Heard a big one. She’s building a swell.” They stood below the amber sky, listening. The tuckamore all black tangle, the cliff a funeral stele.
“There. See that!” Yark gripped Quoyle’s wrist, drew his arm out to follow his own, pointing northeast into the bay. Out on the darkling water a ball of blue fire glimmered. The lighthouse flash cut across the bay, revealed nothing, and in the stunned darkness behind it the strange glow rolled, rolled and faded.
“That’s a weather light. Seen them many times. Bad weather coming.” Although the trickster sky was clear.

Although my main focus lately has been on improving my Spanish, I am looking to improve my English. For example:

- A “factoid” is not a fact. It would be a factoid to say that the Iranian government is a Sunni Muslim state.

- A name for duct tape is “Mississippi chrome”.

- I am going to standardize my quote marks, which I used to always put at the outside of punctuation.

The things I did do during the past week

I have been trying to post something once a week at least, which makes me look back on what I did, what I read, what animals I saw, and so on… Even if I don’t write it all down because it is boring, classified, or too similar to something I did the previous week, it makes me feel better about myself. All right, I did do something after all!

The highlight of the previous week was reading Delirio, by Laura Restrepo. The book’s style is rather challenging, but I read it and enjoyed it. And I am really proud of my progress in Spanish. The story is divided between three (four, if we count the aunt) alternating narrations, but each one of them is mostly linear so that helps. The real challenge is this: what would normally be a paragraph is made into a sentence; what would normally be a chapter is made into a paragraph, and the whole novel is treated as if it were one chapter. Sounds weird? It is, but it is also surprisingly easy to get used to, and then I wondered why we insist so much on setting out dialogue, etc…

Here’s a random example:

Aguilar a duras penas logra pegar el frenazo para no atropellar al mendigo que
de buenas a primeras sale de la lluvia y se le atraviesa a su camioneta, Pero
qué mierda hace este loco suicida, por poco lo mato y el corazón me patea del
sobresalto pero según parece a él toda la escena le importa un bledo, simplement
hace parte de su rutina y de los gajes de su oficio, y sin que yo sepa a qué
hora ya está metiendo una mano por mi ventanilla mendicante, Dame para un
cafecito, hermano, que el frío está berriondo, me tutea como si … [sentence goes
on for another half page].

Condensed and roughly translated version:

Aguilar almost runs over the beggar, But what the hell is he thinking, I almost
killed him, and my heart is pounding but he doesn’t seem to care, it’s just part
of his routine, and now he’s sticking a begging hand in my window, Give me money
for coffee, brother, it’s cold, he tells me familiarly as if…

She does capitalize the would-be sentences, but the language still flows right past the comma simply because we’re used to moving on. Obviously, the biggest challenge is that there are three distinct voices crammed in there: the narrator, the beggar, and Aguilar. So it works, but I only think her technique is effective so long as it is unique.

I saw two gulls! The first one was a young slender-billed gull Larus genei in flight, and the second a summer plumage adult white-winged tern Chlidonias leucopterus. They both surprised me, since I am not really expecting any interesting birds for another month at least. I finally got some pictures of the desert foxes, but they aren’t so good so I’ll try again. I did, however, catch this neat pipistrelle-type bat (I know nothing about bats):

Then I solved the problem of the blue-less Trapeles persicus lizards. It is indeed the female that has no blue on the underside, and the male that does. Even on the male, though, the blue becomes hard to see when they are on the lookout for big predators like me, because they start to hug the ground and fold their throat pouch. I caught a female and a male, but I couldn’t take pictures of the male’s underside in my hand because he bit me really hard (he drew blood, actually). So here is the male after he bit me and I involuntarily gave him his freedom back:

And here is another cute Stenodactylus gecko. This one is called Stenodactylus doriae. He looks somewhat like Stenodactylus arabicus (which I also photographed in my hat), but yellowish and spotted, and more aggressive-looking.

Kuwaiti foods, a few books, and the newspapers

Life has been rather eventless lately. I made several unsuccessful attempts at photographing the desert foxes that come out at night, and I caught another long-eared hedgehog a couple of nights ago. I’ve been reading books and newspapers to pass the time, and I’ve been getting more time to talk to the Kuwaiti border police personnel. I’m not even trying to improve my Arabic, since any progress I might make wouldn’t really be significant enough to make this mission much more enjoyable. Spanish is much more important to me at this point. I still have a long way to go until I am fluent in it, but not nearly as long as Arabic.


One of the advantages of spending time with the Kuwaitis is that their food is far better than ours. This is a light meals, in comparison to others that I have had. I still know a lot of food names, but I just make the Kuwaitis laugh with the Iraqi dialect I am used to. Some of the sergeants on the border now call me Abu Timmin, because I didn’t know that the Kuwaiti word for rice is ’Aysh, and I used the Iraqi equivalent: Timmin. From the American point of view they look like a bunch of uncivilized picnickers, but in fact there is a whole set of unwritten rules on how to handle each kind of food. I guess my table manners are bad by Kuwaiti standards. Oh well…

I just got done reading Mi País Inventado, by Isabel Allende. It was not a great book (informal, and too short), but it made me re-evaluate the other books by her that I read this year (Cuentos de Eva Luna, Hija de la Fortuna, Zorro, La Casa de los Espíritus, and Retrato en Sepia). What surprised me most is just how much of what she writes as “fiction” is actually straight from memory. I still get impatient when she has female characters act and think like upper-class, modern American women (such as a nineteenth century Chilean woman who opens a microcredit bank for poor women). However, I had to completely re-evaluate La Casa de los Espíritus and Retrato en Sepia, in light of the fact that they turn out to be almost all family lore.

I also got some interesting comments on Chilean society from this book. Some anecdotes are really funny, like one about a powerful landlord who used to say the following rhymed prayer after having raped the women on his property:

Señor, no fornico por gusto o por vicio, sino por dar hijos a tu servicio.
(Lord, I do not fornicate for pleasure or for vice, but to provide children who
will serve you)

I really wish she would just go ahead and write a people’s history of Chile. Her description of the late 1800’s expansionist war against Peru and Bolivia is extraordinary, and Zorro is unexpectedly full of neat descriptions of California, Spain and New Orleans in the early 1800’s.

According to the crown prince of Kuwait, the Amir is Father to all Kuwaitis, and he has “inherited from his honorable ancestors deep insight into the present with all its reality and, in tandem, exploring the future with all its dimensions and potential either on domestic or foreign policy at all levels.” I know, this is grammatically dubious, but this is exactly how it was reported in the Kuwait Times a few days ago. The original Arabic. probably sounded even more like a badly translated Hindu scroll. His deep insight decided that Kuwait needed a new weekend. Starting in September, Kuwaitis will get to rest Friday and Saturday, instead of the current Thursday and Friday.

Hey, if I had his abilities, I’d adopt a new weekend too: Tuesday through Sunday.

Nobody seems to mind the coming of the new weekend, since unlike the US where the weekend tries to encompass the Sabbaths of Jewish, Catholic, and Adventist traditions, here everyone that matters is Muslim, and there is only one sacred day of prayer – Friday. So the day of rest is just a recent addition, a western import. As for the imported labor that does 99% of the work in Kuwait, most of them never get a day off so they aren’t impacted.

I also learned about a really neat office in the Kuwaiti government: the “Supreme committee for the ideal mother.” Its chairperson is Sheikha Fareeha Al-Ahmed. She thinks Kuwaiti youths are corrupt because of insufficient satellite TV censorship.

10.000.000.000 dollars for education in the Middle East!

The stultifyingly boring mission for which our group of motivated volunteers was pulled back out of Iraq has one upside: more time for reading. In this photo, my friend Jad is reading a book on WWII. He has been devouring magazines, and prowling my shelves for books that aren't in French or Spanish, or about birds. In just a few days I finished Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, read half of a book on prehistory which turned out to be of little interest to me, and I am working on Mario Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los Perros, which is a very difficult read for me because it is filled with Peruvian slang. All the while, I have been reading the newspaper every day, The Economist every week, and various online newspapers and blogs. I haven't read that much since I worked for a polling company on suburban buses in France almost ten years ago.

I came across an interesting article on the BBC's Spanish news website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_6673000/6673535.stm). Apparently, the Sheikh of Dubai announced at the World Economic Forum that he is giving 10 billion dollars for education in the Middle East. I was expecting to find this news on the New York Times' website, but even after searching UAE news within the Middle East section all I got was a depressing scoreboard of suicide bombings and deaths in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. The deed was not even mentioned in an article on the World Economic Forum in the Kuwait Times!

Apparently, only 40% of Arab women can read and write, Turkey publishes more books than the entire Arab world combined (thanks to Ataturk), and fewer patents and research papers come out of all Arab universities each year than out of a single company like Hewlett-Packard for example. As for the books that are published in this part of the world, the majority of them are mostly religious books that extoll stasis over progress. In my admittedly limited experience in the Middle East, I have come across many things that are simply wrong - pervasive racism, religious intolerance, illegitimate leaders, etc... Most of them are better addressed by schoolteachers and books than paratroopers and bombs. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al Makhtoum of the Emirate of Dubai is doing the right thing here, and he should be praised far and wide for it. At the very least, he should get more press coverage than suicide bombers.

I made only one really good bird observation lately: a very tame flock of black-crowned finch larks Eremopterix nigriceps landed right next to me when my camera was packed away for the move. I think they are fairly unusual around here.