New Series – It’s Not What You Do, It’s Who You Meet

Thanks to _sarchi's photostream@Flickr

I have met a lot of people in this trip but there have been a special few who have changed my life, my outlook, inspired me or who have just stood head and shoulders above the rest.

I have decided to write a series about the extra special people I have met so far who have touched my life in some way. Sometimes it’s not about what you are doing, or where you are, that makes a trip special, it’s who you meet along the way, who shape your travel and by extension shape your life by leaving a special mark in your memory.

Lillia – Mexico City

On Tuesday while Katie was at summer camp I contemplated spending the morning at home doing some Spanish work that I have neglected over the past two weeks but on a whim I jumped on a passing bus when it pulled up right beside me and I went to Reforma, one of my favourite areas of Mexico City.

I was walking along without any purpose or intention and spotted a restaurant advertising breakfast specials. I noted them and kept on walking and was waiting to cross the road when I changed my mind and decided to turn back and go to the restaurant for some food as it was in a prime people watching location.

I asked to sit outside and as the waiter brought me the menu this lady sitting at the other side of the terrace by the wall of the restaurant called out in English that if I needed any help just to scream. We got talking and the conversation flowed. Rather than continue calling out across the terrace I asked her if she would like to join me.

Her name was Lillia, she was an English teacher and that restaurant was her favourite haunt to sit and drink coffee and watch the world go by.

She told me about her parents and what amazing foresight and spirit they had for their generation. They recognized English to be the international language of the future and she was taught English at home from the age of three. She spoke with the lilt of an upper class English lady that contrasted sharply with the rough, cut off consonants of my cockney accent. Her paternal grandfather had been German and at the age of seventeen her mother sent her to Germany to live so she would know some of Europe.

We sat and talked for an hour and a half and she knew most people who walked by. People stopped to talk to her, including a couple who Lillia later told me had a son in is twenties who had gone bad, very bad. Her face crinkled with sympathy but she didn’t go into detail.

She told me about her job and likened her boss to the Prince Charming character in Shrek, who couldn’t do anything without Mummys’ help. Her previous boss had handed over the business to his son who had changed all the existing working arrangements, turning the teachers into freelancers, so they had lost all the benefits of registered employment, such as social security and sick pay. She told me some of the schools in the chain had closed down and there were a lot of English teachers out of work.

We spoke about Katie and she told me she had two sons. She showed me a photograph of her youngest son who is living in Spain. He was strong and handsome looking and I told her so.

“He is almost as handsome as his mother, close but not quite’ she said.

It came up in conversation that after being promised we could live where we are for as long as we wanted things had changed and we had to move out. I vocalised my doubts about my landlady and she said “Oh darling. This is Mexico City! Anything can happen. That is why I love my city so much.” And she looked around and gazed upwards adoringly.

“You need a safe haven. Tell your mother you will be all right.” She asked me what my plans were for the day and I said I was thinking of walking to Chapultepec Park to read my book in the sunshine.

“Come.” She said. “You’re spending the morning with me. I am going to take you home to meet my son and I want you to know how to get to my apartment should you ever find yourself needing help or a place to go”

I paid the bill for my breakfast and we got ready to leave. She put on a wide brimmed hat and said ‘I don’t think she would ever have worn a hat like this, but I like to think I look like Ms. Marple when I wear it.”

It was very much her area, as we walked to the bus stop to go to her apartment she exchanged “hellos” and “good days” with the man who ran the taco stand on the corner, the man who owned the newspaper stall and other passers by who all knew her.

She painstakingly pointed out how many bus stops to stay on the bus for and where to walk to find her apartment from the bus stop so I would know how to get there on my own should I need help.

Inside her apartment I met her son who she told that if I was ever to arrive when she was not at home that he was to let me in immediately and that I and Katie were welcome at any time. She wrote down her cell and home phone numbers for me in case I ever needed to reach her. “Like I said, if you ever need help, just scream.”

There was no electricity in her apartment because she was in dispute with the electricity company and they had turned off her supply. She would hang a lamp outside her front door at night and the light would come through the front door grill so she wouldn’t be in complete darkness at night.

She showed me old photographs of her family, including one of her paternal grandmother. She said that she had hundreds of photos of her but she was only smiling in one of them as in her grandmothers era it was seen as provocative for a woman to smile.

“But my mother bucked that trend,” she said, ’she was always smiling, she was a woman who knew how to laugh. She laughed with her whole being. People still tell me now, a year after her death, how much they miss her laugh.”

Even after a hip replacement, and walking with the aid of a zimmer frame, she still went to church every week, Lillia told me. “She would take communion for herself and for those who were unable to walk and get to church themselves.

“My mother was a very religious woman but in the nicest way. She never preached, but every once in a while she would reach over and pat someone on their knee, and say ‘You know dear, it wouldn’t hurt you to go to church a bit more often.’”

Then the phone rang and she launched into a conversation in German. I could make out that she was talking about different models of Blackberries and then she started talking in English, before going back to German. When she got off the phone she said she had been talking to her cousin. I wondered why, if it was her cousin they hadn’t spoken in Spanish. I asked and she rolled her eyes.

She then showed me another photograph with more members of her family. “This was Frangita, the maid. She came from my grandmothers city. We never did find out her real age. She always looked like this. She never aged.”

We spoke about her travels in Europe and how she had never understood the term ‘rolling hills’ that were written about in classic English novels. “But when I went to Hastings in 1983 I was on a train. I had always thought that hills were large raised mounds of earth but couldn’t understand how they could roll. Yet here I was on this train and they were rolling. They really were rolling, before my very eyes! I couldn’t believe it. It was…it was…”

“A eureka moment?” I asked.

“Yes! A eureka moment. That is what it was. They were rolling before my very eyes!”

And she told me about how as a young child she would read classic European fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and they had beautiful drawings and illustrations and all the beds were rounded. She didn’t really believe that beds came in that shape, she had never seen rounded beds, but on her first night in Germany when she was shown her room in her lodgings, it had a rounded bed. “It was rounded. Can you believe it?”

She recounted another tale from her days in Germany when her mother had come to visit. They were going to walk somewhere and her Lillia asked her mother whether she wanted to go the short way or the long way.

“Which way is the short way?” asked her mother.

“Through the woods.”  Lillia said. Her mother couldn’t really believe that people took short cuts like Little Red Riding Hood. She asked Lillia about big bad wolves and Lillia told her that that part really only did take place in fairy tales.

“I’ve been to England, I liked that. I have been to Wales, Scotland and Ireland. I liked all those places. But I don’t like Gringos.” she said when the conversation turned to my travels in the U.S. “I used to live in New York City, I loved it there. But they’re all crazy!”

Much too soon it was time for me to leave to collect Katie from summer camp but this lovely, wonderful, eccentric lady with an upper crust English accent had given me some of the most unforgettable hours of my entire journey around the world.

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Tags: Experiences, Lillia, Mexico City, special people