About my neighbors

When I return from class, the bus stops on the wrong side of the street. At the stop closest to our apartment, pedestrians cross the street at their own risk, since there is no “walk” sign or predictably safe moment to cross. Not only out of laziness, but also owing to a heightened distaste for “efficiency,” I chose to cross this way rather than waste time and steps by taking the other, longer path across the pedestrian bridge.

There are many pedestrian bridges here: there are more pedestrians, fewer highways, more dangerous, vast boulevards. What I don’t like about them is, again, the inefficiency, the looping back and forth, up and down, just to cross a street! But I am, deep down, risk-averse. So I’ve started to take the high, long road (also because my parents’ disapproval rings in my head, even though they are a thousand miles away and I am purportedly grown up).

All this was just so that I could tell you about the view from the pedestrian bridge: oh, the view! The cars, the polluted sunset, the high rises in the distance, all mediated by the chain-link barrier between me and falling. Sometimes I forget to look out, but I feel masterful when I remember, as though in the six months we’ve lived here this place has become a little bit my own.

On the other side of the bridge is a 7-Eleven, which miraculously smells just like every other convenience store I’ve ever visited: junk food potpourri, a little bit sweet, comforting, makes me want a Snickers bar. They sells donuts (donas) and everything every other little store sells, but at a higher price.

Our neighborhood boasts at least three schools, and we live directly in front of a junior high school. In Mexico, most schools have two shifts: turno matutino y turno vespertino (morning and afternoon shifts). The first group attends class from 7 am to 1 pm, the second group from 1 pm to 7 pm. So at regular intervals, the sidewalks swarm with teenagers, and also with little kids from the nearby kindergarten. Some of our enterprising neighbors set up stands in their front yards at these peak hours, selling candy and fried snacks called chicharrines that are doused with chile and lime.

Though these schools are public, they require students to wear uniforms. It’s been only 10 years since I finished junior high myself, but I already feel so removed from their reality in a way, scandalized at the girls’ short skirts and the boys’ shoving each other around.

The school brings along with it so many sounds: the bells, which ring all day long, and sometimes in the middle of the night if the power went out earlier in the day. At the end of the school day, they play the Mexican national anthem over the loudspeaker, and someone important gives an unintelligible discourse over the PA. At night groups of teenagers congregate in the sort of scuzzy park across the street, and they scream, cackle, and make me feel old.

In fact, we are almost constantly accosted with sensory invasions perpetrated by our neighbors: the boy next door who listens to pop hits from the year 2000 at unbelievable volume, the  other next door neighbor who smokes marijuana several times a day in his backyard, which is directly connected to our backyard, the trucks that pass by loudly selling hot tortillas, tamales,  a new canister of natural gas. Sometimes, these things bother us (loud, bad music especially). But it also seems normal to me–I did live in front of a bar last year.

The truth is, we don’t really know our neighbors, and even in the stores we frequent almost daily, the owners show no sign of knowing us. This has seemed true in all the urban settings I’ve lived in (ok, we’re talking about from 2007 onward). But the familiar faces, though anonymous, do make us feel more natural, more settled where we are.

I didn’t realize how great this tree was until I took a picture of it! (If you’d like to see more photos of the neighborhood, click on the bird to the right).

Riding the bus

I didn’t ride the bus very much before moving to Mexico. Since Paco and I don’t have a car and we live in a very large urban area, learning how to use the bus system has been an essential part of becoming mobile here in Guadalajara. In general, public transportation in Mexico is very extensive and well-used, probably because a smaller proportion of the population owns cars. That said, there is always a lot of traffic!

A bus ride here costs 5 pesos, or about 38 cents. When you pay the driver, he hands you a tiny ticket printed on tissue paper. In fact, signs on the buses exhort passengers to demand their tickets. After amassing an enormous collection of these little slips that invariably ended up in dusty corners of the apartment, I finally asked Paco why the bus drivers insisted on giving the passengers their tickets. He explained that it’s insurance: if the bus has an accident, you will be covered, as long as you have that slip of paper. I’ve been trying to figure out a clever craft project to make use of my tiny insurance policies, but so far they’ve just been one more prey for our kitten, Canelo.

With my ticket in hand, my next objective is to find a seat. I’ve noticed a certain set of bus etiquette here that I’ve tried to adapt to. Most of the time, when people have open seats next to them, they stay in the aisle, even when another person wants to sit down. To me, it seems logical to scoot over, but apparently people are not expected to make that concession. Instead, they shift their knees to the side to let you walk past. I think aisle seats are desirable because they allow you to move toward the exit with less hassle.

But there is a code of gentility despite territoriality over the aisle side. When an older man or woman boards a crowded bus, someone always stands up to allow the señor or señora to sit down. Women with small children also get this treatment. In general, women will be invited to take an open seat before men (Paco is physically incapable of sitting down unless I am already seated).  People are considerate, and I’ve had men offer their seats to me when I was carrying heavy bags. Of course, with my good old U.S. training to reject all offers of help, I said “no” without thinking about it, dooming myself to spend the next half hour trying not to fall down or wound other passengers with the unwieldy bulletin board I was struggling to manage as the bus careened through the streets.

Public transportation here has a lot of character. Drivers decorate their buses as they see fit, and it isn’t uncommon to see a bus go by with the route number and main stops printed in a Halloween-type font on the windshield, or even hand-written with a fluorescent grease pencil. On the fiberglass divider between the driver’s seat and the rest of the bus, I’ve seen images of the Virgin Mary, and prayers to the patron saint of drivers asking for steady hands, good judgment, and protection from unsafe motorists. Other ways to personalize a bus are decorative fuzzy dice or fuzzy mirror covers, lighting details on the windshield, and changing the sound played when someone requests a stop. The “buzzer” can be anything from a piercing screech to a videogame-like electronic blip to a honking horn. It’s fun to wonder what strange noise I’ll hear when I request my stop.

There’s also a certain amount of humor in the stickers and decals drivers affix to their bus. “Soy más cabrón que bonito,” said one, “I’m more of a bastard than a pretty guy.” Today, I saw a sticker that said, “Niñas mayores que 34B pagan pasaje aun sentadas en las piernas.” Basically, it’s a play on the “Children over 4 must pay fare even when sitting in lap,” except it’s not about children.

When a bus driver’s friends get on for a free ride, you can bet there will be some intrigue. This morning, these enterprising friends insisted the driver make a few stops to allow them to run out into the middle of the road where a few plastic bottles of soda had just fallen from an overloaded truck ahead of us. All the passengers watched as they darted between traffic to grab some very bubbly generic cola rolling over the asphalt.

The driving itself is pretty aggressive, and when I’m standing up, less-than-stellar Guadalajara roads can make a bus ride feel like a roller coaster. I’m still learning how to keep my balance standing up. But when I have a seat, and it’s not too hot or humid in the bus, I’m usually a little disappointed when it’s my stop. There’s almost always something interesting going on. People get on the bus with guitars and play rancheras, Christian music, whatever, hoping for a few pesos in tips. Other vendors sell chocolates, CDs, books, and my least favorite, children’s videos with songs to learn multiplication tables. They preview audio and video with portable players. They don’t pay the bus fare, and they are always extremely polite and formal in the little speeches they make to sell their products. Once, a man addressed all of us simply asking for money, since he didn’t have anything to sell. He was more successful than the CD vendors with his appeal to charity.

I’ve taken the wrong bus, or the right bus in the wrong direction, I’ve missed my stop, and I’ve gotten off too early. But in the past two months riding the bus, I have learned a lot about the geography–urban and human–in this city.