A frightening amount of the buildings here lean. Seriously lean. The city is built on Tenochtitlan, the city of lakes. It makes towers and churches cut angles. They really love the Minions from despicable me in the city too, they are everywhere. After pancakes, we began the day with Holly's seminar in the CCEMX http://ccemx.org/2013/10/07/poesia-sonora/. A bit of a cautious experiment, as we didn't know who to expect, how many, what their knowledge was of avant garde poetry and indeed whether they spoke English. Turned out, they didn't speak English. Holly did an amazing job considering the seminar was to last four hours. I put my fat palm to my face a bit. She was calm and clear and covered her practise in gentle depth. Miscommunication - technology - error - song - body - code. She played some Mondegreens, some BBC radio (which immediately started talking about Jimmy Saville) from which she's usurped for poems and we finished up with a interactive exercise in symbol led sound poetry. All considered, she was doing a poem, talking to a room of people who for the most part couldnt understand her. But there is creative potential in not understanding, and the final feeling was perhaps more warm and intimate and genuine than it couldve been. Her skill, my seminar is thursday. Haha. Though I did find one of the best childrens books Ive ever seen.

We then were accompanied again by the lovely Ari, el pandarhia, and walked a fair swathe of the city, from the historical centre down the Alameda central and onto the reforma (a massive avenue de avenue), through the Zona Rosa (which is full of gay people and prostitutes apparently but seemed to me like a quaint, upmarket shopping district) and then into the Condesa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condesa very much famed for its trendy ways. We visited the American legion and their English language bookshop http://underthevolcanobooks.com/, which had loads of amazing writers and then doubled a mochacino in a trendy cafe. I left Holly as she was meeting a mate of a mate and walked back to the hotel in the dusk / darkness on the massive glowing streets of the city, music in my ears.

I ate alone in a restaurant, getting by on a day's worth of Spanish and going back to the hotel I bumped into the concierge who had helped on our arrival. Clocking off, we started talking, him with his thick American accent and I bought him coffee while he told me how he was deported from the US even though he was born and raised there, leaving behind his (caucasian - he kept saying this, I didnt ask) wife, while she was pregnant. He has spent a year in Mexico city, never having been there before, working as a busboy essentially, and a month ago his wife gave birth. He hasnt seen his kid. He is going to Juarez tomorrow for a physical (?) to finalise his papers to return, hopefully. I wished him luck. He asked about me, thought Holly was my wife, though said it was weird we stayed in different rooms and insisted he was going to buy some of my books. I told him not to waste his money.