notes and reflections

The sprawling public market close to my apartment offers a bewildering array of unfamiliar foods.  In addditon to stall after stall of fresh flowers, vegetables and fruit (some completely unidentifiable), there are venders selling fish whose shapes and sizes I fail to recognize, small stands serving food, bins of unnamed grains, stacks of things bundled in dried corn stalks that I suspect are some sort of tamale, tubs of dried peppers of all variety and beans, beans and more beans, the uses and preparation of which I think you have to born understanding.  I'm sure I could eat like a king if I had only the slightest idea of how to cook this stuff.

There is something about automobiles and traffic that is capable of frustrating even the politest of people.  To alleviate this frustration, there is the horn and in any situation here in Morelia where traffic is stacked hopelessly behind some temporarily immovable obstruction, there will inevitably be one or more motorists who honk.  Since it is usually apparent to all those similarly blocked that movement is impossible, this seems not to be an act with any other purpose than to vent one's feelings.  Thus expressing yourself can have consequences however, some of them amusing  The other day I observed one of them: a man, possibly in his 40s, who had just honked at a line of stalled traffic was being beaten with a purse  on the shoulders by a frail, very elderly woman in the back seat who I took to be his mother.  "Your license to drive," she seemed to be rather effectively saying, "doesn't give you license to ignore the good manners I taught you."