I am sitting in the Plaza de Armas using the free wi-fi kindly provided by the city of Queretaro, Mexico to write this message to you out there in Blogger Land. My dad, sitting right next to me and using a Windows based computer (an Acer, it seems) can't pick up the signal that I'm getting. Computers are mysterious.The photos on this page are from the nearby Plaza Zenea, where they have very cool displays of the Garden of Eden and Hell. I mentioned this last time, but now I've got photos to prove it! You can click on the photos to see them bigger if you want, by the way.
Also in the photos you can see a little friend I picked up at a toy stall here. I am calling him Gayzilla because he is so very festive and pink. I find pink festiveness to be very gay and happy, full of light-heartedness and merriment. Of course, as my friend Leilani pointed out, he may be a she (or perhaps trans-gendered! Don't want to leave anyone out!). But that doesn't make her (zir?) any less full of light-heartedness and merriment, so the name sticks!
What can I tell you about Mexico? I don't really have anything at all to report about the Zen scene here. I don't even know if there is one. But I didn't come here for the Zen. I came here to hang out with my dad, who is down here (see first paragraph).
The Hell display is intriguing. It gets a lot more traffic than the Eden display next to it. I've noticed that the rock scene in this city seems to be very oriented towards metal, the more satanic the better. Maybe there's a connection. The city's seemingly lone record store -- called Rockland, I believe -- seems stocked mainly with metal. Though they do have a healthy selection of punk and prog rock.I also saw some metal/punk bands playing outdoors on the town square last night. One band played Judas Priest's "Breakin' The Law" and the old Them chestnut (via The Doors, I'm guessing from the singer's Doors T-shirt) "Gloria" with lyrics in Spanish. Another band played the Pistols' version of Eddie Cochran's "Something Else," also with Spanish lyrics. Those guys had two foot tall mohawks all around. At one point I caught a whiff of something that smelled like modeling glue and realized it was coming from one of those guys' hair! My friend Mike Mohawk used to use shellac to keep his mohawk up. So maybe glue works too.
This is a very religious country. Or at least a country in which the outward displays of religious-ness are highly valued. The place we're staying is decorated with crosses everywhere you look. The taxi drivers display pictures of Jesus on their dashboard. Both the friendly guy who drove us to the local Wal Mart (ugh! not my idea!) at a normal pace and the surly guy who drove us back to town like a deranged maniac had Jesus on display.I don't really know what to make of it all. I can't speak enough Spanish to get any sense at all of what this stuff means to anyone here. The presence of so much satanic metal imagery along side all the religious stuff gives me some kind of hint. It seems like the younger people take pleasure in flaunting their irreverence for what the priests have taught them. I wonder if they ever have religious folk protesting the metal shows the way we do up North.
All right. My dad wandered off so I better go fetch him.See ya!
