An American Abroad

Out and About in Coyoacán

June 2, 2019 by 1 Comment

My visits to the homes of Frida Kahlo and León Trotsky led me to believe me that the neighborhood of Coyoacán had much more to offer than just those two attractions. Though I hadn’t seen much of Mexico City, I impulsively decided that if I was ever to move there, Coyoacán would be the neighborhood I’d call home.

There were many blocks of well-kept but modest homes, usually set right beside each other with no alleys in between. Then there were occasional whimsical and extravagant structures that made me think, “wow, I’ve never seen anything like THAT before.”

I also found myself looking at smaller points of architectural interest, features that give otherwise-ordinary houses a certain character and charm.

Coyoacán is a real neighborhood, not merely an urban census tract. It was an independent municipality for over 300 years before it was merged into the urban sprawl of Mexico City. It’s a barrio of tree-lined streets where people raise families and walk to school. I got a lot of smiles, holas, and buen dias from the residents there.

Every other corner seemed to have a café, a bodega or a neighborhood bar.

I couldn’t quite work out what was going on with these dressers that were neatly stacked on the street behind a truck, as if on display for sale. No one seemed to be attending them. If they were part of a sidewalk furniture store, it’s pretty cool that the proprietors feel safe leaving their inventory out on the street.

In contrast to some of the other residential areas I saw on this trip, Coyoacán is very colorful.

The commercial district features a large indoor food market, a central plaza (Plaza Hidalgo) with a circular bandstand, a crafts market that caters to the thousands of tourists that visit every weekend, and a lovely park. On the day I visited, there was an art exhibition going on in the park. This dancer and the two musicians (guitarist and percussionist/singer) with her were splendid.

I didn’t see a lot of street art in the area. Maybe the people who live there don’t let their properties get run down to the point where graffiti is actually an improvement. However, I did see this nicely-done piece in the commercial district near the market.

I later learned that I’m not alone in thinking that Coyoacán would be a great place to live. In 2005, it was listed by the Project for Public Spaces as one of the best urban spaces to live in North America. I’m happy with my job and home in Puerto Rico, but if that ever changes and the right opportunity arose, I’d relocate there in an instant.

Filed Under: Mexico, Mexico City, Travel Tagged With: , ,

Museo Casa de León Trotsky

June 1, 2019 by Leave a Comment

The convoluted history of the Russian Revolution and the tumultuous early years of the Soviet Union always perplexed me. The founders of the Soviet state consistently acted contrary to the Marxist notion that the state would eventually wither away. In fact, they created the opposite, establishing a oppressively bureaucratic state that governed nearly every aspect of the people’s lives. Along the way, tens of millions of people were murdered, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled.

Trotsky was a rival and opponent of Stalin. He lost out in the power struggle that ensued after Lenin died. He was exiled by Stalin–and later murdered by Soviet agents at his home in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City.

To some leftists who were horrified by the bloodbath that marked Stalin’s regime, Trotsky was the “good” Soviet communist, the man who argued against the bureaucratization of the early Soviet Union. Color me unconvinced. The Trotskyites seemed no less fanatical than the Stalinists, no less manically intent on producing mind-numbing tracts of revolutionary theory in attempts to justify whatever policies seemed expedient at the moment. While Trotsky did push for more democracy within the Communist Party and less heavy-handed rule by the Soviet state, those positions neatly coincided with his own attempts to gain more power.

The promise of communism captivated millions. Indeed, anyone with half a heart who sees the abuses and neglects of capitalism must wonder whether there isn’t a better system of organizing our economy and society. All that longing and hopefulness had to go somewhere once the horrors of Stalinism were laid bare. A good deal of it was invested in Trotsky, the exiled Jewish Ukrainian communist with the kindly visage and the funky glasses. Since he had never held absolute power in the Soviet Union, it was easy to imagine that he would have been a benevolent ruler. The only problem with this theory is that there’s no evidence for it; the only strength of it is that it can’t be disproven.

With this history in mind, I made my way to the house where Trotsky lived and died in Mexico City just after I visited Frida and Diego’s digs. It was only three blocks away.

Although Trotsky’s compound was spacious and had room for his extended family, bodyguards, and servants, it was relatively austere. The walls and woodwork were plain, the rooms were relatively small, the furniture strictly utilitarian. Certainly this was nothing like living in the Kremlin. This room in the photo below was the workspace for Trotsky’s two secretaries. In the left rear of the photo is an old Edison dictating machine.

As I passed deeper into the house, the rooms became even more spare. This was Trotsky’s bedroom. Note the thick shutters, which like the interior doors were a sandwich of two thick plates of steel with a generous helping of concrete in between. The interior doors were built the same way and set into small, deep doorjambs. Those doors were equipped with heavy deadbolts that allowed people to barricade themselves inside.

Trotsky had ample reason to take defensive measures: he knew that Stalin was trying to kill him. In May 1940, a group of assassins armed with machine guns attempted to storm the compound. Trotsky’s guards fended off the attackers; bullet holes in the walls still mark this event.

Running parallel to the row of bedrooms was a long narrow bathroom/dressing room.

Trotsky finally met his fate in his study in August 1940. An NVKD agent named Ramón Mercader befriended an American communist, Sylvia Ageloff, who was one of Trotsky’s confidantes. Using this connection, Mercader gained the trust of Trotsky’s family and bodyguards and occasionally did small favors for them. While he was alone with Trotsky in his study one evening, he asked him to read a document. As Trotsky began to look it over, Mercader struck him from behind in the head with an ice ax.

The blow didn’t kill Trotsky immediately, but he died a day later from his wounds.

Stalin was delighted that his old rival had finally been dispatched and bestowed the Order of Lenin on Mercader’s mother, who had assisted with the planning of the assassination. Mercader himself was found guilty of murder by the Mexican authorities and served twenty years in prison. Upon his release, the head of the KGB named Mercader as a Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s highest honor.

Trotsky’s home in Coyoacán is supposedly very much as it was left on the day of his death. On his bookshelf are several Edison dictaphone recordings, a book by Marx, two volumes of Trotsky’s own writings, The Game by Jack London, and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.

The house now has a small museum attached to it, which was something of a disappointment to me. Most of its displays consisted of black and white photos blown up so big as to be almost unrecognizable. There were very few artifacts, personal effects, or other materials that might have illuminated Trotsky’s life. Still, for anyone interested in the history of the first half of the twentieth century, a visit to this site may make it easier to visualize how Soviet exiles lived–and died.

Filed Under: Mexico, Mexico City, Travel

With Frida Kahlo at Casa Azul

May 31, 2019 by Leave a Comment

High on my to-see list for Mexico City was visiting the Frida Kahlo Museum, otherwise known as Casa Azul. So after a very few hours of sleep following my late-night arrival in town, I took a taxi there.

The museum is located in the residential neighborhood of Coyoacán in the house where Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived. It’s not very large and at 10:00 on a Saturday morning there were already close to 400 people in line to get in. Fortunately, I had purchased tickets in advance and was able to get in after waiting only about twenty minutes.

Although the museum includes some of Kahlo’s paintings and drawings, it was more a museum of her life than a display of her life’s work. In almost every room there were reminders of both the physical suffering and disabilities she endured as well as the joy she took in life itself.

Though I knew she was badly injured in a bus accident when she was a teenager, I was unaware that she contracted polio when she was just six years old. Seeing her wheelchair in her bright, airy studio reminded me of my own childhood.

My father had polio. He walked unassisted with a heavy limp, then used a cane and eventually a wheelchair. I could well imagine what Kahlo’s home life might have been like.

There were other reminders of Kahlo’s lifelong suffering scattered through the house, including this painting she did of herself at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan following a miscarriage.

Even her paintings that weren’t obviously medical explored the hidden interstices within the body.

But Kahlo seems to have embraced love and joy as fervently as she embraced her pain. This is probably one of the factors in her popularity.

You can find Frida Kahlo’s image and images on all manner of merch all over the world today. A year ago I went to a crafts fair in San Juan where there was a vendor who ONLY sold such stuff; I bought a couple of pillowcases from her. Frida is a money-making industry. So it’s quite ironic that in her lifetime she was a through-and-through communist and had photos of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin hanging in her bedroom. She was not at all reticent in her politics.


She was a near-neighbor of Leon Trotsky, who lived about three blocks away. This photo of them together was hanging in her house.

There was one didactic painting she did that tied her chronic health problems to the hope that the prospect of a communist revolution inspired. “Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick,” it said. So the personal and political combined within her.

Other photos of her show the more playful, sensual side of her personality.

The courtyard of Casa Azul is a beautiful space, full of trees, plants, and ponds. There was a sweet photo of Diego Rivera sleeping on one of the stone benches there. I declined the opportunity to do that myself and instead opted for this memory photo.

I have seen exhibitions of Frida Kahlo’s work, most notably the Detroit Institute for the Arts’ 2015 exhibition entitled “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.” I have pored over books of her art. I have imbibed her image as a pop culture icon. Seeing her home, though, gave me a more complete understanding of the woman herself. It was the high point of my visit to Mexico City.

Filed Under: Mexico, Mexico City, Travel Tagged With: , , ,

Three Names, Two Countries, One Island

March 19, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Forty five minutes out of San Juan, the turboprop began its descent over the waters of the eastern Caribbean. We dropped lower, lower, lower and all I saw out the window was water, water, water. When it seemed like we were about to ditch, a strip of sand flashed under the wings. We cleared a chain-link fence by inches and plunked down on a short runway of Princess Juliana International Airport, better know as SXM. I was on the island of Saint Martin.

This small island is unique in the Caribbean for being the territory of two European nations. The southern 40% of the island belongs to The Kingdom of the Netherlands and is called Sint Maarten. The larger northern part, known as Saint-Martin (note the hyphen), is governed by The Republic of France. The island itself is called Saint Martin (note the lack of a hyphen). The locals don’t seem to care much about those distinctions, though and just refer to “the French side” and “the Dutch side.”

I checked into one of the less-expensive hotels on the boardwalk in Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch side. This was my view as I walked to my room.

Outside, the boardwalk was lined with bars and restaurants that backed a shallow beach studded with lounge chairs. I got the impression that alcohol and coffee are popular here.

I walked out to the end of the boardwalk to get a shot of the bay and hills in the background. My hotel was the white square building on the right.

From the Blue Bitch Bar, I could look across the bay at the enormous cruise ships that were docked at a terminal large enough to handle seven ships at once. Tourism is THE industry here.

Hurricane Irma, which hit the Caribbean just two weeks before its better known sister, Maria, did significant damage to Saint Martin. A lot of the destruction was still evident one and a half years later.

That night, I had dinner at Antoine’s, a French restaurant that overlooked the beach. It was a scrumptious meal. Heaven may be a place where the government is Dutch, the food is French, and the vibe is Caribbean. The place wasn’t crowded, and when my crème brûlée was finished, one of the waiters came over to chat. We hadn’t talked for more than two minutes when he allowed that he was attracted to “older men” and invited me to go out with him. I didn’t know whether to be insulted that I was now in the geriatric division of sexual desirability or flattered that I was still decent-looking enough to inspire a come-on. Gently as I could, I let him know that I wasn’t into guys — but I enjoyed the ego boost.

The next day, I hailed a taxi and rode over to the French side. There are no immigration or customs posts at the border, just a sign that says Bienvenue à France. Easiest border crossing ever.

My destination was the southern, clothing-optional end of Orient Beach. Having gone sunbathing au naturel in Antigua last September, I was interested in doing it again. But while my experience in Antigua was largely a solitary one, Orient Beach was crowded. It was my first-ever experience with social nudity at scale.

I walked through a bar at the edge of the parking lot where I’d been dropped off and breezed past a sign that warned me I was entering the clothing-optional section of the beach. Another admonished me not to take pictures. Once I stepped out onto the sand, I stripped and walked toward the water’s edge. I headed toward the yellow beach umbrellas and passed scores of lounge chairs occupied by thoroughgoing sun worshippers until I found one that was unoccupied. I paid a few dollars to a fellow who tagged the chair as paid for and then stretched out to catch some rays. The sun and soft ocean breezes felt good on my body.

People strolled by me, most naked, a few in bathing suits. I saw white people who’d been baked to an Indian shade of deep brown. I saw people who were in fine physical shape and those who were overweight. The nudists skewed toward middle age, with folks in their forties comprising the largest age demographic. Everyone behaved in a friendly but chaste way; the only public display of affection I saw came from a couple walking along the beach together holding hands. The comings and goings of the roughly 150 naked people quickly became normalized; really, it felt very much like being at any other beach.

As nonjudgmental about people’s appearance as I tried to be, I was irritated by a fellow who was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian-style shirt and nothing else. He was probably dressed that way to avoid a sunburn, but the effect was to call attention to his genitals in a way that being fully nude would not. It seemed like a deliberate display, which I interpreted as a breach of nudist decorum.

I waded into the warm, clear ocean waters. The ocean bottom was sugar-sand smooth and the waters were calm. I saw dozens of small fish swimming with me. Discreetly, so people back on the beach wouldn’t think I was taking pictures of them, I held a camera underwater and snapped some fish pix. I think this one is a Palometa, also known as a Great Pompano (Trachinotus goodei), a game fish that likes the clear waters of the Caribbean and swims close to shore. It looked almost translucent from my vantage.

I waded through a school of long skinny fish with swordlike beaks in front and Y-shaped fins in back. I was delighted to learn these are called Ballyhoo Halfbeaks (Hemiramphus brasiliensis). Whoever came up with that name had a real way with words.

After my swim, I walked down to the far end of the beach. There I found the ruins of Club Orient, a naturist resort. Before Hurricane Irma, the club featured scores of little cottages and a big clubhouse that served as the bar, restaurant, and entertainment center. But Irma showed it no mercy. Some cottages had been blown clean off their foundations. Others were missing walls and most were missing roofs, windows, and doors. The clubhouse was ripped apart. Judging from the comments I’ve read about it online, Club Orient was a much-loved place. This notion was reinforced by the many cairns that had been carefully stacked on a rocky section of the waterfront. Some were Stonehenge-elaborate, others were simple towers. They looked to have been there a while. I was a little surprised no one had knocked them down.

I walked among the ruins, venturing into the clubhouse and some of the cottages. I was barefoot and naked and had to step carefully. As I stood there amid the debris, I flashed on the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes where an almost-naked Charlton Heston finds the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on a beach and weeps in rage and sorrow at the folly of humankind. As I walked through the ruins of Club Orient, I felt like I was looking at our possible future, a world where climate change and wars have destroyed much of civilization and the remnants of humanity are left to wander naked through the rubble and build little remembrances to what was. It was a powerful and bleak vision.

To cheer myself up, I walked back to the other end of the beach, took a seat at the bar, and washed down a slab of ribs with a couple bottles of Carib beer. The place was full of naked people eating, drinking, and talking. That was the one and only time the clothing-optional scene seemed jarring to me. Not wrong, not bad, just somehow out of place. On the stool next to me was a fat Floridian fellow somewhere on the shady side of 65. Upon learning that I liked to travel, he proceeded to regale me with bawdy tales of helling it over Latin America. And I thought to myself that this is not the kind of conversation I’d normally have with a stranger sitting next to me in a bar, but the circumstances seemed to invite disinhibition.

After catching a little more sun, I packed up my few belongings, put my bathing suit on, headed back to the parking lot, and flagged a shared taxi van. The family of four in the back were there on a cruise ship port of call and had been taxiing around the island to see the sights. As the driver looped around the parking lot, we came within view of a small group of unclothed people lined up at the Porta Potties. The two kids, maybe 12 and 10 years old, howled “Oooh, gross!” and pointed and laughed and made fun of the nudists. The parents did nothing. I sat there biting my lips so as not to say something I’d regret.

Back in Philipsburg on the Dutch side, I took advantage of the remaining hours of daylight to walk around the town a little.

All too soon it was time to head home to Puerto Rico and nurse a blistering sunburn. I got only the barest taste of Saint Martin, but it was enough to leave me wanting more. For me, the three spellings of this place symbolize Dutch efficiency and tolerance, French cuisine and joie de vivre, and Caribbean mindset and beaches. No matter how you spell it, that’s a good combination.

Filed Under: Movies, Saint Martin, Travel Tagged With: , ,

From Flores to Tikal

March 1, 2019 by Leave a Comment

I flew out of San José, landed in Guatemala City in the early evening, and checked into a small hotel. In less than ten hours, I was back at GUA boarding a Transportes Aéreos Guatemaltecos Embraer ERJ 145 to Flores.

After landing at Mundo Maya International Airport, I met up with the outfitter that was to take me on a day trip to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. I was in the northern Guatemala lowlands, about 60 kilometers west of the Belize border. We set off on an easterly road that tracked the shore of Lake Petén Itzá and then turned north.

As can be seen from this map, Tikal is in the boonies. Flores looked to be a very nice lakeside vacation spot with an airport that calls itself “international” only because there’s Tropic Air puddle-jumper that flies out of it to neighboring Belize. (Do click that link to get the full flavor of aviation in rural Central America!) But once we were three kilometers out of the airport, there were scarcely any towns, just handfuls of buildings here and there clinging questionably to the side of the road.

I say “we” because this was a group tour. I’m innately leery of that kind of thing. Maybe this is my travel twist on Groucho Marx’s disinclination to join clubs that would have people like him as members. But this group was excellent, people I would be happy to travel with almost anywhere. We were collectively heavy on lawyers and teachers, but with a congressional staffer and a photojournalist on assignment for TripAdvisor thrown in for variety’s sake. We all synched politically, which isn’t that surprising. I don’t know whether liberal people travel more or travel makes people more liberal, but there’s definitely correlation, especially in unsung places like Guatemala where the cruise ships don’t dock.

Not long into our journey, we stopped by the side of the road to admire the lake. The landmass off to the right in this picture is called The Crocodile for obvious reasons. It’s said that sometimes, if you picnic by the side of the lake and drink enough beer, you can actually see it move.

Midway to Tikal, we stopped at a roadside café/souvenir stand. I’m not a fan of the genre. I groaned as we pulled up, but I had to pee so I climbed out of our Toyota van and went inside. There were craftsmen working on the souvenirs that would be sold. There was a large diorama of Tikal, which helped orient me to the place we were heading. And there was a cheesy plastic skeleton surrounded by equally cheesy plastic limes inside a plexiglass case. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen something like that?

The premises backed right up to the jungle and a riot of flowering plants.

Across the road was a much more homely refreshment stand. The proprietor looked like she needed the business more than the big café, so I bought a glass of powerfully sweet fruit juice from her.

After we got back on the road and drove north for a while, the scenery began to change. Soon we entered the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected tropical forest in North America. As if the lush vegetation on both sides of the two-lane road wasn’t enough to announce that we were in the forest, the road signs clearly conveyed that we were’t in Kansas anymore.

Finally, a little more than two hours after touching down in Flores, I entered the Parque Nacional Tikal, a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s powerfully deserving of the designation. More on this to come…

Filed Under: Guatemala, Tikal, Travel Tagged With: , , ,

San José After Dark

February 26, 2019 by 1 Comment

There are cities in Central America where you’re advised not venture out after dark, but San José is not one of them. Sure, there’s an area known as the Zona Roja that’s supposed to be dangerous, but every city has districts like that. I walked around San José from dusk til midnight and never once felt ill at ease.

I started in Chinatown, where I had a fine dinner at Restaurante Holiday Hot Pot. I was drawn in less because I wanted to eat and more because the way the place looked drew me in.

The decor was a mix of whimsical and industrial, Chinese and international. Whoever decorated the place knew what they were doing. Everything felt purposeful, fun, and harmonious. I felt so comfortable there that after I finished my meal, I stayed and read a chapter or two in Shantaram, the book I was carrying. One of the joys of travel is having an open schedule that allows for a lot of reading time.

By the time I was ready to press on, it was dark out. I walked without any particular destination through Chinatown and into a light industrial area.

I saw evidence that unions are alive and well in Costa Rica. This one, the CCTD, was founded in 1943 with the support of the Catholic church. Today it represents workers in the banking, agricultural, railroad, insurance, and public utilities industries.

Soon I found myself in an area where you could drink, dance, vape, and get your hair cut.

I wound up back in the skate park where I’d had an earlier encounter with John Lennon. I was unable to decipher the iconography of the nearby church. I’m guessing that this is supposed to be a representation of Mary, but what does the propeller signify? Is she the patron saint of aviation?

Even late at night there were lots of people on the main streets. This fruit vendor was doing a good business.

I found my way back to my quarters in Barrio Amón. It was still early by Costa Rican standards, but I was operating on very little sleep after a late flight out of San Juan caused me to miss my connection in Bogota. A more thorough exploration San José’s nightlife will have to wait until next time.

Filed Under: Costa Rica, San José, Travel Tagged With: , ,

Confucius, John Lennon, and Anne Frank in San José

February 25, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Confucius stood prominently in the middle of the major pedestrian thoroughfare in San José’s Chinatown. An instructional finger pointed skyward, no doubt to emphasize some profound point.

The script at the base of the statue read “the teacher for all ages.” Since I was in the presence of one of the wisest men ever to live, I asked him how I could become as wise as he was. He looked at me sternly at first, then gave me a rueful smile and said:

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

In the last eight years, I’ve had my share of all three learning experiences. And Confucius was right about them. From there, I didn’t have very far to walk to find John Lennon waiting for me on a bench beside a skate park.

I asked him what happened to his glasses. He replied that people kept taking them, so he figured perhaps he was better off without them. I asked what he was doing in San José of all places, right across from the church where, in 1966, a crowd had burned Beatles records in response to his observation that the Fab Four were more popular than Jesus. He just laughed and said:

Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you off your feet
Better recognize your brothers
Ev’ryone you meet
Why in the world are we here
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on earth are you there
When you’re ev’rywhere
Come and get your share…

I thanked him for the time we spent together and for so many of my musical memories. Then I took my leave; I had to keep an appointment with a fifteen year old Jewish girl. I found her, oddly enough, on the sidewalk next to a Catholic cathedral.

Anne Frank was smaller than she had been in life, maybe to emphasize that she was, after all, only a girl when her life was snuffed out by the Nazi regime. She stood on a plain pedestal, perhaps to emphasize her elevated consciousness. Her thin, smooth wrists were bound with thick, coarse ropes, but her face was canted beatifically toward the sky.

I asked her about the smile on her lips and whether it was difficult for her to maintain year after year. She just said to me,

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

As I walked away pondering her message, I realized that you can tell a lot about a city or a country by the foreigners it chooses to honor. Monuments to local heroes, leaders, generals, writers, kings, and presidents are a given wherever you go. They document the area’s history. They instill civic and national pride. But erecting monuments to people from far, far away is a matter of choice and a declaration of values. The people of San José choose to honor Confucius, John Lennon, and Anne Frank. That says a lot about them.

I don’t often go around talking to statues in foreign countries. It sounds like good way to have your tourist visa involuntarily cancelled. But on this trip, I was in such good company that I couldn’t resist.

Thanks, Xu Lu 馮敏 for your help with the Chinese translation.

Filed Under: Costa Rica, San José, Travel Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Contrarian Visit to Costa Rica

February 24, 2019 by 1 Comment

Travel writers love Costa Rica. They rave about the biodiversity, the beaches and the surfing, the jungle and the animals, the ecolodges and the pura vida mindset. But the capital city, San José, doesn’t get a lot of attention from them. When this town of 340,000 is mentioned at all, it’s usually described as a place to pass through on the way to and from more interesting places.

I wanted to see if that dismissive attitude was justified, so I paid a short visit there. I left convinced that San José doesn’t deserve its meh reputation. It’s true that it’s not a glitzy town. It doesn’t have the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City or the socko Spanish colonial architecture of San Juan. Instead, it’s got the comfortable appeal of a city that feels lived-in and liveable.

I was here:

As Latin American cities go, San José isn’t especially old. It was founded in 1736, but didn’t have a charter or a government until 1812. Compare that to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, which was founded in 1496. Perhaps conscious of its relative youth, San José goes out of its way to remind residents and visitors that it has a past, albeit one that doesn’t stretch back as far as some of its neighbors. It does this chiefly through sculpture. I’ve never been in a town that has as many sculptures per square mile. The statues are generally of Costa Rican men who are unfamiliar to me, but were the leading lights of this small country in their day.

Some of the statues have been, shall we say, edited: “In 1502, the pirate Columbus arrived.”

I stayed in Barrio Amón, one of the older parts of the city. The place is named for Amon Fasileau-Duplantier, a French coffee and real estate developer who lived there in the late 19th century. Unsurprisingly, some parts of the neighborhood have a distinctly Belle Époque feel.

The neighborhood is home to three lovely urban parks, Parque Morazán, Parque España, and Parque Nacional. These well-designed spaces display Costa Rica’s rich ecological endowments and attract both travelers and locals. They’re situated so that pedestrians getting from place to place can’t help but walk through them — a subtle effort by the urban planners of old to force city dwellers to have contact with nature every day.

One of the reasons I chose to stay in Barrio Amón was that I’d hoped to visit The Hemingway Inn. As I look back on my travels, I see I’m developing a habit of scoping out the digs of famous authors: Franz Kafka’s house in Prague, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mansion and favorite watering holes in Cartagena, and Arthur C. Clarke’s place in Colombo, Sri Lanka. So naturally I wanted to see the place where Papa stayed while he was in San José. Also, the inn’s proprietor, Dennis Hambright, wrote a fine guidebook about the city and I wanted to meet him. Unfortunately, while the building still stands, the inn itself is no longer in business. I contented myself with wandering around the outside of it and imagining Hemingway coming and going.

Barrio Amón is a graceful, gentle place. Even the neighborhood stripjoint and massage parlor are nice-looking, as such establishments go.

The downtown area of the city is dominated by streets like Calle 4 that are closed to motor vehicles. This makes San José a pleasure to walk. I’d like to see more cities adopt this policy; it changes the pace, the mood, and the texture of the streetscape all for the better. The downtown streets that were closed to traffic seemed more prosperous than the areas that weren’t. Perhaps this is just coincidence, but I don’t think so.

The further away I got from Barrio Amón, the more the architecture looked more Spanish than French.

I had only about 48 hours in San José, and almost a third of that was spent sleeping. I told myself that this was just a survey mission designed to assess whether I should spend more time in the city next time I return to Costa Rica. I’ve answered that question in the affirmative.

Filed Under: Costa Rica, San José, Travel Tagged With: , ,

Christmastime at Greenfield Village

December 28, 2018 by Leave a Comment

On December 23, 2018, Lori and I drove from Toledo to Dearborn, Michigan for a wintery evening of Christmas cheer. Our destination was Greenfield Village, a part of The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a sprawling institution that includes museums and historical buildings.

It was a special night: two days before Christmas and the village was suitably decorated for the holidays. Actors, musicians, and storytellers, all in vintage American attire, strolled the grounds entertaining the visitors.

Greenfield Village is a large collection of historical American buildings that emphasize industry and innovation. The building housing Thomas Edison’s laboratory is there. So is the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. There are vintage machine shops and mills, all in running condition. All of these buildings were purchased by Henry Ford and transported to the 80-acre site in Dearborn. There are antique steam locomotives and Model T Fords.

I took a lot of photos in the machine shop. It’s a place where form follows function.

It was hard not to be impressed by Henry Ford’s vision, his historical imagination, and the huge financial commitment he made to preserving artifacts of American history. He thought that factories, labs, and humble shops where inventors tinkered were a vital part of America and were worth preserving. And he was right.

Still, it was hard for me to keep Ford’s legacy of racism and antisemitism completely out of my mind. This article from the Washington Post lays it out:

In 1919, Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, then an obscure newspaper published in the Michigan city that was the headquarters of his automobile company. For the next eight years, the weekly publication reflected his bigoted views.

One of the paper’s chief targets was the so-called “International Jew,” a sinister figure cited as the root cause of World War I. In 1921, The Independent printed the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” even though the book had by then been exposed as a forgery created by the Russian czar’s secret police in 1905 to foment virulent anti-Semitism.

The fraudulent document described an alleged secret cabal of Jewish leaders who plotted to control the world. Nevertheless, the Independent published the discredited document, giving it both wide distribution and global credibility. Ford’s newspaper merged racism with anti-Semitism by calling Prohibition-era whiskey “n_-r gin” and labeling jazz “Yiddish moron music.”

Ford and his publication attracted attention throughout the world, including from Adolf Hitler. In fact, Ford is the only American mentioned by name in Hitler’s notorious “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925. Anti-Semitic Independent articles translated into German and other languages during the 1920s were used to “prove” Nazis were not alone in their pathological hatred of Jews and Judaism.

The ethical quandary I was in mirrors the debate we have today about how to view historical figures — and present-day artists and politicians — who have contributed much to our culture but whose behavior seems abhorrent by today’s standards. Feeling some discomfort around these issues is the sign of a healthy mind. Those who freely grant impunity to bad actors because they also did great things are just as single-minded as those who attempt to reduce artists to monsters and politicians to perverts.

Having warmed up in the cozy sawdust-and-oil smelling machine shop. Lori and I walked over the the village’s mail street. There were a lot of Christmas festivities going on there. This fellow is a mummer and he was having a fine time walking around saying rude things to people.

Lori got the idea of taking home a Christmas tree in one of these Model A trucks. It didn’t quite work out, though we did score some nice wreaths on the cheap. It was the last night of operations before the holiday; everything must go.

The indoor carousel seemed magical that night.

The heavily wrapped-up guy on the left was telling stories and had his audience right where he wanted them.

The night ended with a fireworks display. A little more Fourth of July than Christmas, but it looked pretty all the same.

Filed Under: Michigan, Travel, USA Tagged With: , ,

Hiking Charco El Café

November 12, 2018 by Leave a Comment

I met up with the hiking club at a supermarket in Santurce on a beautiful Sunday morning. We were a far-flung group of eight mainland Americans, two Puerto Ricans, a Mexican, a German, and a Panamanian. I climbed in the back of a truck and we caravanned southwest to a stretch of mountainous wilderness near the town of Juana Díaz. Our destination was Charco El Café — Coffee Pond — where a river runs down a mountainside and forms pools at different levels.

I’d never done anything with this group before and didn’t quite know what to expect. I conceived of “hiking” as an overland walk on a trail. Silly me. This experience was more like ascending through a rushing mountain stream and occasionally doing some technical on-land climbing. The trip required skills I just don’t have, but even so, I had a blast.

We stopped at a bridge where a small country road crossed over a stream. As we waited for everyone to assemble, I took a few steps into the woods and found this almost perfect spider web.

Then the hike began.

I looked to the left and right for a path that we could walk, but there wasn’t one. It was then I realized what a hike in a charco really meant. With no alternative, I waded in and carefully made my way upstream.

I was wearing a pair of water resistant Merrell hiking shoes. Of course, the water resistance only keeps water from seeping in the bottom or the sides. When I first put my foot down into two feet of water, I got soaked. Even then the shoes remained comfortable–but they weren’t great on uneven slippery rocks. They didn’t have enough grip. As I hopped from rock to rock, I considered that if I slipped, I’d go down fast the hit my head on the rocks. And that would be unpleasant.

I finally made it up to the first swimming hole. A couple guys from our group went for a dip. I rested on the rocks. The scrambling upward over wet uneven rocks was kicking my soft ass.

Some of the more daring members jumped into the pool from a rocks ledge. Others contemplated it and thought the better of it.

For some, figuring out how to get out of the swimming hole was tougher than going bombs-away and jumping in. There weren’t any obvious handholds or footholds.

We began to ascend again. There were rumors of an even bigger swimming hole further up. And the rumors turned out to be true.

The more experienced technical climbers continued on in search of a third pool. I went up partway with them, but decided that I’d enjoy things a lot more just resting on the rocks, looking at the dense forest and the rushing water, and listing to the nature sounds. A few others joined me.

After we’d waited a little over an hour, the technical crew returned, saying they’d made it, but with difficulty. And so we began to climb down. Though the ascent was more strenuous, the descent was more perilous. I made it unscathed, but I sure took my time about it.

We’d all worked up a big appetite, so we got back into our vehicles and set out in search of food. We were so far into the woods that there was no cell service, but one of the guys knew the way to Villalba, so we followed him on faith. It turned out to be a great decision, because we found ourselves at one of the best, most fun restaurants I’ve been to in Puerto Rico. We were here:

Papá Luis is a roadside eating and drinking compound with dress-alike waitresses and a real sense of place. And there really is a Papá Luis; in the above and below photos, he’s the guy with the hat and the purple shirt.

This was our group, with yours truly in the orange.

One of the group brought a bottle of homemade “Colon Cleanser” hot sauce. I passed up that opportunity for some reason.

This experience reminded me that I do enjoy being outside and doing physically strenuous things — I’m just not very good at them. I’m either going to have to decide that that’s OK or decide to do something about my shortcomings.

Filed Under: Puerto Rico, Travel Tagged With: , , ,
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