Poets and Linguists

The past few days we have had great chances to sit around the plaza of Campeche and people watch. As we write these there is a group of guys break dancing as a young boy laughs hysterically at them… for some reason. And in the true latin tradition, every other bench is full of couples making out in contorted positions. I had a delicious cappucinno and Nate had a hot chocolate (with cinnamon and spices, of course) and now I’m having a Modelo beer and Nate is having orange leaf tea. But one of the most interesting things is actually talking to people.

One day we were sitting in the sun enjoying the warmth and a very old man walked up to us. He obviously wanted to sell us something, and normally we would turn him away right away, but before we could say ¨no, gracias¨ he started reciting poetry! Apparently he was a local poet! Well, actually he was from Lerma. Lerma is a small town about 10km from here. Incidentally, we had walked there the other day because we wanted to go to the beach there. He showed us a book of his poetry and told us a bit of his story. Then the rest of the conversation he would randomly break into a poem. He knew them all by heart. Then he pointed to his arm and said to look at his goosebumps… he felt the words so deeply that he had goosebumps! He told us that the book was 40 pesos at the store, but he has bought it there and was selling it for 70 pesos, since he brought it to us (haha). We decided to support the arts in Campeche and bought a copy. The back had some details about his life… it turns out he was born in 1930. He can’t read and all his poems are in his memory. His passion is life and he enjoys moments of solitude. His biggest satisfaction in life is his family. Money means nothing to him, and its because of money that he had started to hate people. He sold vegetable, but at his age his only aspiration is to enjoy life and his poems. He doesn’t care if they are printed or not because he has them well tucked away in his mind with the details of who inspired them. He is just a passenger.

Beautiful.

One evening I was on my computer doing research for one of my courses and Nathan had just run back to the hotel room. A young guy came up to me and sat down beside me. He got out a notebook and asked me a question about English and to help him with his English homework. We then chatted back and forth as he asked me what English words he had heard on TV meant in Spanish. Nathan came back and all three of us talked and laughed. Some of the things we had to translate into Spanish were a little difficult. He asked about some song lyrics. Half the time we had no idea what they meant, even though they were in English and we knew the songs, and half the time we couldn’t translate them because they were culturally relevant phrases. Then he taught us some words in Tzotil mayan. Some of them were basic phrases, but the coolest one was a whole sentence. He said his grandfather taught it to him. It meant something about how you put a vegetable in a tree and leave it for a while and then drink it and that is good health for men. It was some cultural proverb. Very interesting, although we probably won't be using those words much. It was hard for Nate and I to get our mouths around the Mayan words... they have a lot of "tzl" sounds. He also asked us about one part of the song that went, “wake up call, caught you in the morning with another one in my bed”…. Haha first of all… try explaining “wake up call” with limited Spanish, but second of all, try explaining the complexity of the next part of the phrase when you don’t know the Spanish word for cheating. It got a little graphic. Haha. He knew A LOT of English songs… he even sang us Camp Rock and High School Musical.

How strange.