Mexico City appears much more often in my dreams than seems merited, given I only lived there less than 2 years, and that was almost 30 years ago, now. I suppose it was such an important, formative period for me, though.
I was walking around the neighborhood around the Monumento de la Revolución (which was called “Colonia Revolución” when I lived there but had been renamed “Colonia Tabacaleros” in 2007, the last time I was there – I believe the “renaming” was a reversion to an older name, however). When I lived there in 1986, the Monumento was surrounded by rubble from the 1985 earthquake, though the monument itself had survived just fine. I was out at dawn, looking for matches. Why was I looking for matches? Something about building a campfire – I was cold. I went into several small stores but I was in a linguistic crisis – I could not remember the Spanish word for matches. People would not help me.
This was more like Korea. Or perhaps… it was a flashback to that time when I was freshly arrived in Mexico City and my Spanish was still quite weak. I stepped out of a small store and the rising sun was a vivid, bloody orange just above the peak of Popocatepetl to the east, with the Torre Latinoamericana standing in stark silhouette. But it was cold, and when I turned around, I realized it was starting to snow. I ran down the street taking pictures of the snow on the Mexican streets with my phone. I really did see a fall of snow once, in Mexico City – it is not unheard of, though it is quite rare. But this was a lot of snow, falling now.
I still wanted to buy matches. I stepped into a shop that was called, oddly, “El Museo.” It sold a random collection of things. I succeeded in explaining to the clerk, through mime, that I wanted matches, but she said she did not have any. She was being fatalistic about these things, in the Mexican way: es que no hay. She shrugged, and suddenly decided that she needed, desperately, to sell me some comic books. These were those bound collections of humorous or dramatic stories and vignettes in cartoon form that were so ubiquitous when I lived there – strangely, I have a collection of “Condorito” humor cartoons on my shelf here in Korea, which I have no idea how or why it followed me here. It may have been accidentally included in some box I mailed to myself.
Anyway, she succeeded in selling me a collection of humor vignettes wrapped in plastic. I stepped out in the snowy Mexican morning, still without matches. I unwrapped the book and opened it to find that the cartoons included were my characters – my alligators and aliens, etc. I was only fascinated, and puzzled, as to how they had gotten there. The Spanish dialogue was interspersed with Korean, and the jokes made no sense.
I went into the VIPS restaurant (a kind of Dennys clone, with a Mexican twist, and unrelated to the Korean chain also called VIPS) that is a few blocks south of the Monumento, to get out of the snow. I met my father (this makes sense, since I remember he and I went there once to eat when I took my father to visit my old haunts there in 2007 – though it was summer then). With my father was my hyperactive 4th grade student Hyeongyu, whom my father was dealing with quite well. They had ordered a plate of chilaquiles. The waitress seemed relieved to find someone who would speak Spanish at the table when I arrived, and she started complaining about Hyeongyu, who had been under the table playing.
I was showing my father the pictures I had taken on my phone of the snow on the Monumento. Then I woke up. The sun was just rising – it was before 6 am and at the summer solstice the sun rises quite early in Korea, given we are on the eastern edge of our meridional time zone.
I was unable to go back to sleep.
Unrelatedly, I found a strange video about escaping from a prison area called Writer’s Block (if the embed fails to work properly, which seems possible given how it seems non-standard in some way, here is a link). [UPDATE 2023-05-13: depressingly, the video has apparently irreplaceably disappeared – depressing internet linkrot at its best… ]
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]