All posts tagged: mexico city

Living with symbols: Frida’s things against all things Fridamania

These days Frida Kahlo’s face is on many a “things.” Her stern mien is plastered on store windows, embroidered into colorful pillows, stamped on fridge magnets. Mexico City is the epicenter of “Fridamania” that invaded museum gift shops since the artist’s revival in the 80s. Resolved to squeeze the artist’s legacy to the last peso, Mexico’s tourist industry parades her on books, mugs, sneakers, and baby bottles. From luxury stores to street markets, one can buy Frida earrings to match Frida shirts and take pictures next to an amateur copy of a Frida self-portrait. In the city reputed to house more museums than any city in the world La Casa Azul (the Blue House), boasts the longest lines. The museum is the house where she was born and where she lived with her husband Diego Rivera until her death in 1954. Even though Kahlo’s paintings were well received during her lifetime, the most she charged for a painting was $4,000 pesos (about $1,000 USD) in 1947 for The Two Fridas, one of her masterpieces. Soon after …

Who is this creature called the “backpacker”?

Yesterday a Frenchman accused me of being a fake backpacker at a Cuban bar in Lisbon. His allegation came after I revealed that I was staying at an AirBnB rather than a hostel. We had a lot to chat about–he had recently returned back to his nine to five IT job in Paris after a seven-month “backpacking” trip in Australia and Asia. “I bet you don’t even have a backpack,” he said with a smirk. “I’m not a backpacker!” I said in protest. “And I certainly don’t carry a backpack on my sensitive shoulders.” Our discussion made me realize once again why I decided not to stay in hostels and why I defied the categorical “backpacker” label. Though I indeed was once a “fake backpacker” and it was while I slept in hostels in Colombia. Thankfully my fraudulence only lasted five weeks. Before arriving in Colombia I read various blogs on traveling alone—all posts instructed staying in dorms for a fulfilling social life on the move. So who was I, a novice solo-traveler, to stray from the path? While staying …

Mexico City with Suruç in My Mind

Something about Mexico reminded me of Turkey. It wasn’t just the taco joints at every corner grilling what any Turk would recognize as döner: Mexicans call it al pastor, prepare it from pork, and serve it on corn tortillas. In Istanbul, I woke up in the middle of the night from an acappella of muezzins from different mosques using megaphones as if competing with one another; in San Miguel de Allende it was a mix of church bells and firecrackers celebrating each night a different Saint’s day that disrupted my sleep. The daily advances of my neighbor Carlos, who spends his days staring at a construction site atop a disintegrating 1960s Volkswagen beetle, reminded me of many Mehmets and their sweet, polite creepiness that make me smile rather than run screaming. A drawing of the face of a young student missing since the mass kidnapping in Iguala, Mexico (September, 2014), reminded me of Berkin Elvan, the boy who died from a can of pepper gas fired by Turkish police and became the symbol of Turkey’s …

Mexico, Francis Alys, and Brotherhood

English TürkçeI would have never imagined that Francis Alÿs’s exhibition “Relato de Una Negociacion” at Mexico City’s Tamayo Museum would have such an effect on me. I wasn’t even planning on going there. I had left my AirBnB room that Sunday morning with the intention of going to the Museum of Anthropology—one of the city’s “musts”—and that’s where I had gone. But before I purchased a ticket, some sort of a protest art in the museum’s palatial lobby caught my attention. As I stood there trying to figure out what the lines of empty chairs with photos of faces on them meant, a lady who I later learned to be a history professor named Angelica, handed me a flyer. She told me that the chairs represented the 43 students who “disappeared” almost a year ago in Iguala while protesting the government’s discriminative policies in teacher placement. The demand of the protestors, of which there were two, was simple: the disclosure of the location of these individuals, dead or alive. “Since this museum is part of the INAH …

My First Spanish Lesson in Mexico City: Difunto

Difunto. It means deceased or plainly dead. I am aware that this is not the most pleasant word to learn while traveling. Besides, my Spanish is pretty good and I already knew this literal definition. It’s the metaphorical definition as used in Mexican slang is what I learned on my first week in Mexico City that I am focusing on here. Just bear with me. My Spanish teacher during my days in La Roma and the woman who is credited with teaching me “difunto” was Eva, my AirBnB host. Eva is a woman in her early 50s and lives in the first floor apartment of an old building with neighbors she describes as “traditional.” Eva is by no means a traditional woman. She makes kambucha and kefir, composts her organic waste, and has a turtle living in the back patio. Teamed up with her neighbors she greets by saying “hola, vecina,” she created a little garden by the sidewalk. Eva spends her days doing all kinds of community projects in the neighborhood she loves. Her …

So you quit your job to travel the world?

Quitting my job to become a traveling writer was not easy. While determining my premeditated roaming as yearlong provided some sort of framework, truth be told I was freaking the hell out until I finally bought that first ticket and left Israel. At this point my neurosis didn’t necessarily subside but just looked better under a tropical sun. Looking back, I think my psychological trajectory from the day I resigned until I finally became a real-life traveling bum had various clearly defined stages. The Four Stages in the Psyche of the Unemployed Traveler The state of ecstasy. That’s the moment right after you hand in your resignation letter and sit at your office desk looking at Google images of the beaches you will be lounging at and mountains you will be climbing. That is after 1-2 months, during which you must continue coming to the office and pretend to care about the job you just quit. When that sinks in begins the second stage: impatient annoyance. Things that never bothered you before like the lady that tells you …