OK, after a few days of vacation in Mexico City, it's time to get down to work!

I arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas yesterday morning after a 13-hour bus ride, on which I was able to sleep very little. Travel is just too exciting for my poor nervous system... Anyway I was traveling over some of the most novel terrain in my experience (the tropical mountains surrounding the altiplano of Mexico City and the transition to tropical rain forest), and I missed it all in the darkness! But I awoke this morning as a misty dawn broke over the lowlands of Chiapas as we rolled into Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capitol. The sun was very bright and the air moist. But nothing prepared me for the ride up the rim of the plateau to San Cristóbal — we went up and up and up until we could see an enormous green valley below, filled with cropland and lumpy, scrubby hills, and jagged green mountains looming dimly in the hazy distance. I felt like Indiana Jones just before the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly, just as I notice that we're above the level of the few clouds hanging in the valley, the soil goes from beige to rusty red, and we are surrounded by pine trees and junipers! San Cristóbal lies at 2300 meters above sea level (7200 feet?) and the vegetation is very much like the foothills outside of Denver! Later on there was a small afternoon rainstorm and I could swear, by the smell, that I was in the Front Range... ah, mountains!

San Cristóbal itself is nothing like Denver, of course... a small colonial city that is very picturesque and much more "Mexican" in feel and aesthetic than Mexico City, which is more cosmopolitan and pan-Latin, or even European (similar to Recife.) Rudy picked me up at the bus station and we had a little breakfast and caught a cab up to his house, which is well outside the city, up in the hills at maybe 8000 feet. He has built a small house up here in a neighborhood that is rapidly growing, but still feels like just a bunch of houses on the side of a mountain. His house is a fantasy, a little getaway he designed himself that looks like a jewel on the hilltop. From the front porch one can see beyond the ring of mountains surrounding the high plateau, and to the mountains beyond the verdant valley beyond...easily a distance of 50 miles. Amazing and beautiful!

I had brought a bottle of Mezcal for Rudy from Mexico City, and we sat down and discussed his plans for our little tour. Tomorrow and Wednesday he's teaching some workshops in San Cristóbal at some kind of literacy agency--more on that later, I guess. Then on Friday we'll do our first performance here in San Cristóbal before leaving to tour the northern reaches of Chiapas. It's very exciting to me. Clowns Without Borders has loomed in my imagination for years now, and it's amazing to finally be out doing it. I still don't know much about what we'll be performing, but I got a tiny taste today: a street urchin of maybe 6 years approached us at the internet cafe and tried to sell us gum and peanuts; Rudy engaged him in conversation, bought some peanuts, and took his questions, whereupon he informed the boy that we were clowns. So he asked us to do something! Rudy did a little trick with his baseball cap, balanced on his nose, then removed and restored his thumb. He pulled a sugar packet of f the kid's ear, and the kid asked him what I could do! So I juggled three sugar packets, and I think the kid thought we were pretty cool.

I have to struggle with my senses of compassion and propriety when I see kids like that, selling out of what I presume is desperation. My first trip abroad, in Russia, I gave a few rubles to a miserable-looking gypsy kid once and was instantly surrounded by 20 more, cynically pretending to cry.... And the street vendors here can be incredibly aggressive--we didn't get through breakfast without being hassled by three of them who had to be repeatedly ignored before they would go away. Rudy said he liked this kid — he was still soft. And Rudy genuinely wanted some peanuts. So he engaged the kid. It was beautiful. How can I open myself to people without cynicism? How can I simultaneously avoid the cynical and the genuinely annoying?