Halloween tonight.
I went to go and buy crepe paper for Ara. She's going as an angel, but I suspect that she's going to look more like a meringue with wings, given that she's wrapping her eight months of pregnancy in crepe paper.
They still have proper shops here, not chains. Separate shops for paper, bread, electrical items, meat, fruit.
After buying three rolls from 'Claudia' at the papeleria we got talking and she took me to her brother's garage to show me their Day of the Dead shrine. Probleme is she left me out the front so she could run back to the shop, which she had left unattended. I stumbled in to the office and explained to three stunned men that I was there to see their offerings. They had no problem with that.
There's fruit in baskets and little sugar skulls and the whole wall is covered in pictures of smiling skeletons and Jesus on the Cross with another man photoshopped in beside him, and angels.
I found it kind of comical until I went back to chat to her about it.
The shrine is to their other brother. Three years ago, at 9.30am he was taking cash from the business across the road to buy something, and someone shot him in the chest for it.
They all dream about him on the Day of the Dead.
The thing I like about Mexicans is that they know how to tell their stories, and cry ... and feel. Australians never tell visitors to their shop how their brother died in the street one day.
Then I came home and the neighbours fixed my fuse box, which blew this morning. Looked kind of harrowing to me, none of the cut and dried flicking of switches. There were battery-type things and wires and levers and little things that spin around.
Anyway, I'm going to the fiesta as the witch in Snow White.. whoever the hell she was.
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