el mar de barra y el fuego de san jose (con harmonica)

in flight from existential crises and other types of ennui, melissa and i went to Barra de Navidad (aka La Playa) this Saturday. we left immediately after work on Saturday afternoon, and despite the fact that Barra is a 2 hour car ride away, took 6 hours to get there via Manzanillo. our trip was pretty pleasant - got to see a lot of little villages and agriculture along the way, and we were serenaded by an old campesino who hailed everyone we drove by out the window as though they were his long lost buddies. about a half hour into our trip, he began to whistle ranchero tunes, which i thought was pretty annoying until he proceeded to play the same tunes on a harmonica for the rest of the way to manzanillo. by the time we rolled in - sticky, hot and in desperate need of "doblefibres" (a sort of granola bar that melissa and i are obsessed with due to its exquisite texture and taste - the "linaza" kind are the best) - i realized that i actually kind of enjoyed his playing. (this from a person who is prone to reminding people on the subway who play music from their accursed cell phones for the benefit of the entire car that that's what headphones were invented for.)

we finally got into Barra at 9ish (after being treated to David Carson's 2004 masterpiece, "Unstoppable," o en español "Inparable" - and, yes, I'm being sarcastic) and i felt twinges of guilt at violating Katey Grey's traveling maxim numero uno: "Never arrive in a new place after dark" and was duly penalized with several minutes of wandering around on unfamiliar streets looking for our bungalow. but by 12 we had deposited our stuff at the Mar Vida (with Marcia, its reticent owner who tried to compensate for her frosty welcome by standing in our room fiddling with the TV we never used for a good 15 minutes), eaten delicious sopa azteca at Los Arcos and were sleeping the sleep of ESL teachers who spend their Friday nights salsa dancing and their (early) Saturday mornings teaching verb collocations. the next morning we found the beach (YES, MOM, EVERYTHING IS EASIER IN DAYLIGHT), took some sun, had leftovers from our feast at Los Arcos and i had a gorgeous two hour-nap, then went back to the beach, then ate some more (HEAVENLY fish tacos and cold Indio while watching the Chivas v. America game - Melissa has latched onto America for some reason despite the fact that 99% of Jalisco are Chivas fans... shades of being a Red Sox fan in New York, especially when they won on Sunday night and everyone in the restaurant was glaring at her as she applauded) and went back to sleep. the next morning, we had a lovely breakfast next to the sea at Bananas (i had tropical whole wheat pancakes and a ton of coffee), caught a bit more sun and did some shopping. barra isn't nearly as touristy as, say, vallarta, but i must say i contributed to the gringo factor in town by walking around in flip-flops and a sarong ogling silver earrings and rattan handbags. (and isn't it interesting how tourists in pairs always seem to be two parts of a whole, whether they're married or related or just friends?)

we had one more meal at Los Arcos - enchiladas mole this time, unfortunately con pollo - and boarded the bus for another six hour sojourn back to Guzman. luckily, there was some sort of Merchant-Ivory period thing on the tube and a gorgeous sunset replete with volcanic exhalations and, of course, another nap. jous graciously picked us up at the bus station and i slipped right back into the swing of things with the Guz Cru and finished off a wonderfully relaxing weekend with fried bananas and a castillo is honor of San Jose. (a castillo is a sort of castle made of fireworks. they warm up the crowd - no pun intended - by running around with a kind of bull effigy stuck full of fireworks and threatening to burn people with them. then, when the light the castillo itself, you can see groups of children darting underneath with coats over their heads as if the shower of sparks was actually an april cloudburst. this is all terribly amusing but the piece de resistance was definitely when they lighted the very top of the castillo, which was a little helicopter that took off and flew about 30 feet into the air and then landed, still burning on top of the church. we gringos got a little flustered when the helicopter seemed ready to land on the crowd below but everyone else seemed pretty unphased. jous says that they have a castillo every night in october.)

so, all in all, a wonderful weekend. i danced, napped, got muy bronzeada, and remembered that life exists outside the boundaries of guzman - y, por cierto, afuera de mi cabezita.