I usually wear my shirts for two days when I’m away, to cut
down on washing (unless it’s been a particularly hot and sweaty day). So this
morning, after my shower, I put on yesterday’s shirt, and it still stank of
rodeo. It went straight into dirty laundry. Incidentally, you can find out all about the Mesquite Rodeo at
www.mesquiterodeo.com.
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Mesquite Rodeo |
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Tim asked me this morning if it was all for real, or staged
(like the wrestling). Looked pretty real to me. Certainly quite a few of the
riders finished up hobbling off, and the bulls and broncos look pretty mean – I
don’t think you can train them to fake it. One of the sections was simply
called “Jack Daniels Cowboy Poker” – I had no idea what to expect. They put a
table and four chairs in the middle of the arena. Four cowboys sat in the
chairs, and the rules are simply that the last one to leave his chair is the
winner. Sounds easy enough, until they let a very large, and very mean, bull
into the arena. The bull was not at all amused, and was definitely in attack
mode. Its horns were “rounded off”, so that it could do no permanent damage,
but it had no problem tossing the cowboys, complete with furniture, into the
air. So, yes, I think it’s real. But, if I were to go again, and I would, it
would be outdoors, where the unmistakable smell has a chance to dissipate.
Today I thought I’d stay a little closer to the hotel, since
I didn’t get back until after 11 last night. I went to “Traders Village” – a
large local flea market. Most of the stuff was fairly uninteresting: cheap
socks, t-shirts, knock-off perfumes, lots of eateries. But I found a bookstall
(of course), and on the periphery were more of the kind of stalls that we
associate with car-boot sales. I didn’t buy anything (well, ok … just one book
– but it’s not for me!), but I did find a couple of interesting stalls.
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Graffiti Artist |
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One was fairly makeshift, and featured a (presumably)
reformed graffiti artist. A large crowd had gathered around
to watch him layer spray paint onto a cardboard canvas, and then use a variety
of tools, from carefully shaped pieces of cardboard to plastic knives to
scrunched up pages from a glossy magazine to coax amazing textures from what
looked initially like a plain-colored surface. The secret, I suppose, is in
the layering of color and the etching technique.
The other stall was selling fresh fruit and vegetables –
always interesting in different parts of the world, because you realize just
how diverse (and often unknown) is the plethora of edible stuff. This one had
cactus leaves, so, of course, I had to ask. They’re common in Mexico, where
they’re called “nopalito”. You clean off the spiky bits, boil them as you would
potatoes, and slice them thinly, after which you can incorporate them into
salads, or rice, or whatever. They taste, apparently, a little like okra or
green beans.
And this brings me to a final bit of social
commentary, which you can ignore if you wish – it is, after all, personal opinion.
We always hear so much about the black culture, both in the US and England, but
if you look at the statistics (which are very different in the two countries),
Hispanics slightly outnumber blacks in the US (and are gaining ground). Yet
there is very much less “noise” from the Hispanic culture. At the market today
(where most of the signs were either in Spanish only, or in Spanish and
English), I sat under a shade tree, and “people-watched” for a while. The
Hispanics are very family-oriented, despite the “gang-culture” that the media
exploits. The people that I spoke to were friendly; the children, for the most
part, obedient and outgoing. My personal feeling is that Hispanics (or Latinos,
as they seem to prefer currently) may very well eventually dominate. And this
may be no bad thing.
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