It's true, Del; children often cannot see the value or interest of their visits at the time they make them (or are too young to remember much detail when recalling the experiences from an adult vantage point). I know I don't have very salient memories of my trip to Mexico--I remember experiences I had there, but my recollection of the place itself is very fuzzy. I did get a souvenir from my visit...my grandparents bought for me, at my urging, a smallish black-velvet painting of Jiminy Cricket!
I always say it was not exciting because we never went to any tourist-y places. We weren't going to see the Aztec ruins or the resort towns, we were there to visit family and they didn't live in those places.
Thanks for replying, and whatever your past and present thoughts of your trips south of the border may be, you clearly have seen more of the country than I have.
Thank you for this thread. You've made me recall things I haven't thought about in years - very vivid memories of my childhood vacations. We went almost every year.
Despite the irritating lack of swimming pools and a/c, my sister and I remember with great delight the big Spanish hotel in Cuidad Victoria that had no elevator or a/c, but a huge sweeping balustraded staircase that went up 4 stories to the rooms that surrounded a central garden on the 1st floor. It was wonderful to open the door to our room, walk out into the covered hallway and peer over the bannister and watch it rain on the 'inside' of the building.
One aunt had a big townhome. It was very ornate and Victorian in the front of the house, full of books and dusty tomes, old pictures and stuff I just found forever interesting. Her bathroom was huge and concrete, dark and dank, the curtain went all the way up to a 10 foot ceiling. But her kitchen was full of light, very country farmhouse-like, old wooden slat table and chairs, big bottle of drinkable water, bowls of fresh eggs as she had her own henhouse out back! We talked and visited and ate with dogs underfoot and chickens clucking around.
Another aunt lived farther south and she had a huge tropical garden in her back yard. She always had bowls of lemon and limes, fresh coconuts and mangos she grew herself, she had little houses out in the garden that were for the toilet and shower (they were not 'outhouses', they were perfectly modern toilets and tiled showers, just not added to the house, but were separate structures out in the garden). I remember my mother and I going out at night to use the bathroom, using a kerosene lantern to light our way through the garden, junebugs divebombing us. Her house was rambling, made of concrete, painted green and all day and night in the distance, you could hear and see the trolleys that went to the beach which - despite the tar splotches and floating blobs, were completely undeveloped, mostly empty and of white sand and clear, tepid green water.
I recall the fascinating smelly markets in Matamoros, lovely Mexican silver jewelry and gold crucifixes my aunts bought me and my sister, the
ferias, which were extremely exciting. Fairgrounds that we didn't even start to go visit until 10 pm! They had all kinds of wares for sale, tiny play pottery dishsets, lacquered maracas, handmade guitars, bands playing on every corner, lovely vases for my mother, marionettes, lively crowds. No one ate dinner at 6pm. You ate a late lunch, had a siesta, came home and had snacks, then about the time I was feeling sleepy, 9-10 pm, my aunts were raring to go get dinner, walk in the plaza to see and be seen or cook a huge meal! We went often to a place in the mountains where clear spring waters flowed over a wide flat wash full of huge rounded granite stones. I think it was near Veracruz and we and entire communities went to play and bathe and wash laundry there. I remember the old cathedrals we went in, we had to get something to cover our heads, the jetties along the seaside where my aunt bought really fresh fish.
Most importantly though, something that stuck in my mind most of all, the sick, drunk or mentally ill people sitting in the street. At one point, we had to step over a man laying across the sidewalk. Was he sick/drunk/dead? We didn't know and my aunts didn't stop to find out. They didn't look concerned, didn't call the police. I realized at a very tender age that there were few social services in this part of Mexico. Unless he had someone come looking for him, that man was just going to lie there until he picked himself up or died.
I remember visiting my cousin's family in a suburb of some town. They had no front door. Just a slatted thing covered with a cloth. Their front room was the bedroom with a TV. We sat on their bed and visited. I remember wondering what the heck they used to keep people from just walking in their front door. Again, the abject poverty of some of my relatives stuck in my mind. I don't recall much about my relatives who lived on the pig farm. I just remember walking out to see the pig every day.
I have waded across the Rio Grande from the US to Mexico and watched the Mexican free-tail bats fly overhead out of Santa Elena canyon at sunset, I recall sleeping on the ground of an old caldera somewhere in the Chihuahuan desert listening to the coyotes howl and trying to bury toilet paper in the rock-hard soil. I remember the trucks going to the fluorspar mine with the words
Y no lo creian written on the bumpers. I translated that for my friends I was with on that trip, but it made no sense until our guide to the mine told us that the mineworkers had been promised new trucks for years and years, but
no lo creian, they didn't believe it. But then the trucks did finally arrive.
And again, the absolute poverty of the people living near the mines, living in shacks, literally made out of scraps of metal sheeting and cardboard hammered together.
Mexico was and still is an amazing place.
