Blur of color in motion

This pretty much sums up my time in elegant Mexico City, unless you want to get into the the other senses (which I'll hold off on for now).

I've been here in DF for almost a week, and just wrapped up two days of exchange (ideas, energy, experience) with the other 50-some Fulbright scholars who are here in Mexico for the year. It's been hugely enriching to learn what everyone is doing. I plan to share some of my colleages' stories here in KATravels in the weeks and months ahead, so keep checking in.

Anyway, the Fulbright cat herders, knowing how to kick things off right, treated us to a night at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where we got to see Mexico's famous Balet Folklorico in action. After changing seats twice in the nose-bleed section, I got the shot above from a lovely box seat.

This, however, may well be the sexiest thing I've ever seen on stage-- a man walks out alone, holding a rope. He slips it into a lasso, and for the next 5 minutes, he dances alone with his lasso, which jumps overhead, underfoot, to the side, always in tact, spinning.

The woman enters, and she's as transfixed as the rest of us. She flirts with him and he flirts back, but the lasso never stops. He's got it whirling around himself like a hurricane; the rope rises and falls, creating a funnel around the man. He is the calm eye, and she is being blown... away... until... she... jumps into the eye. She wraps her arms around the man, he grabs her waist with his free hand, and for the next 10 minutes, they kiss and dance and embrace. The other dancers join them, the music in crecendo, until the whole stage is whirling around the lasso, the man and the woman.

And that's Mexico City, too, in some sense: it's the center of a wheel, with each road running along its own spoke. Our conference now concluded, we're all heading back out to our respective sites, many of us by bus, some by plane, to places like Hermosillo, Oaxaca, Puebla, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Morelia. Twirling and spinning out into Mexico beyond DF.

Me, I'm enjoying two more nights here with friends before I twirl myself back over to Merida. If we manage to drag ourselves out of bed early tomorrow morning, we'll drive to Michoacan, where millions of monarch butterflies are hibernating for a few more weeks before they stretch their wings and head north.