Adventures in Mexico

This is my third year in Mexico and, while I feel like I have mastered the language fairly well and been able to pick up on some of the more subtle aspects of the culture, some things still leave me perplexed.

Labels: Oye Gorda

Further adventures with the medical community 

Labels: medical community

This year I have taken on an adult education “diploma” in Latin American Literature. In August, I completed a small interview to make sure that I was ready for the course and wrote a cute essay about what I would do (good conditional tense testing) if I found an abandoned puppy. My other gringa friend and I both passed the literature ready litmus test and we felt exhilarated, like we had passed an enormous step in the hazing that is second language learning. We were assured that UNAM (the national university with a stellar reputation for research and very difficult to get into) would provide us with support and the highest level of interactive educational technology when we attended the class by videoconference in a neighborhood near our houses called Polanco

 (you see, we live and work about an hour a way and after a long day in the Mexity pressure cooker and the last thing you want to do is put yourself in a hot sardine can of a metro, only to be stink-eyed by fellow passengers and shouted out by visually impaired people selling CD’s of musica romantica! I mean, my friend and I felt that we could handle this gritty soup of humanity only once a week.)

 

With the resolve to get cultured, to meet a goal, to improve our academic skills in Spanish, my friend and I arrived at our class to find two screens, one with our mugs staring disconcertedly right back at us and on the other we saw our professor and an occasional panoramic view of an entirely Mexican audience (we thought that as the class was offered through the center for foreigners, we would not be alone, but it turns out we were very, very outnumbered). We acted like Jane Goodall’s chimps would after being given a mirror, alternating from pointing at the screen and laughing to adjusting our hair to discover what part really suited us. Meanwhile, a voice with as about as clear of resolution as the teacher on Charlie Brown (bwa, bwa, bwwaaaaa,bwwaww but with some rolled r’s) lectured at us, taking us by surprise with occasional questions that we only knew to be questions because they ended with the following tag ¿Ustedes en Polanco? (You all in Polanco).

We bumbled through the first five weeks, sometimes attending the class live to avoid the screen, often times stuttering, very often answering the wrong question or making comments where the window had closed for appropriate timing. The whole thing was a scene from David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, except for that our blathering “Me thinks there symbolism at the part of the watch because time are should go forward”was televised in front of an almost permanently scowling group of native speakers, our television audience. 

Unfortunately, with the arrival of a new professor, our class dwindled in numbers and  disintegrated from whatever educational quality it had before.  You see, the arrival of the sunken-looking, hyper talking Geney who seems to have a penchant for talking two hours with the speed and endurance of a Kenyan marathoner, and usually not about the author being or reading material assigned for the day.  His idea of participation is to make us read an occasional power point slide aloud in front of our studio audience, which now includes another team of stranded learners from the southern state of Oaxaca.

As all students do when they feel like they can’t participate or they are failing or that their attendance is completely inconsequential, my friend and I have been behaving like disinterested teenagers and at times full-on delinquents. We have taken to calling our screen room the espantalla, a, to us, witty mixture of the words for screen (pantalla) and utterly frightening (espantoso). We often do our grading, look at recipes or write imaginary personal narratives written from the perspective of the people we seen on screen, the consumptive instructor whose thin fingers cut through the air when he speaks; the father-son duo: the son has an oral fixation and is always sucking on pens or discarded water bottles and the father is very clearly the teachers’ pet;  the young woman who has been, at age 17 or 18, seduced into the cult of post-modern thinking and is constantly fingering her infected-looking lip ring. Yes, we are full on delinquents.

However, we do take our papers seriously as we know that it is the one circumstance where we can show our professor, that even though we may be stuttering and Tarzan-like in speaking, that our heads aren’t filled with Cheese Whiz.

This worked well at first. Our first professor, Horacio, would return our papers promptly with a "very good,"  "good" or " that just plain sucked" three-tier grading system. I was crushed when my first paper came back with no comment except for “Ojo (careful) with the accentos.” But then I got smart and began to ask three to eight native speakers- who are often as helpless with accents as I am- with the editing. When we got the consumptive, hand talking, post-modern professor, we stopped receiving any feedback. We still listened for our assignments and did them loyally, but as we knew less and felt that our work was less of a consequence to anything or anyone, we lost interest.

We just submitted our final essays this Wednesday. With a feeling of exhilaration of ticking something odious-- like an in-grown toenail removal session --off a to do list, we felt that we had done our work, completed the arbitrary and inconsequential requirements for our 3^rd out of 5^th class.  On Friday, I went to the espantalla, armed with coffee, plenty of recipes and paper to scribble letters to my friend who was not attending that day.

The class started as normal with the Charlie Brown voice squawking from the screen. I stared at the same power point slide (lately we can’t even see the teacher, just can hear his voice).

Suddenly I heard the professor address “Ustedes en Polanco”  and surmised a sound that turned out to be a rustling of papers coming from the screen. The professor explained that he had some gifts for some of us. This simple sentence was disconcerting and oddly exciting. It also was quite a departure from his normal, two-hour run-on sentence pontifications on the role of literary criticism in his life. 

The power point slide was off the screen and I saw the professor in his bright red sweatshirt that said ARMY on the front. He looked more tubercular in the face, but there was a certain fire in his eyes, like he had just planned an invigorating learning experience for this otherwise dull class that would motivate and excite us to drink the Koolaid of post-modernism. Well, it seems, that he had created his own essay competition for our class (of 12) using our homework.  He announced various places of winners and the grand prize that predictably went to Francisco the father of the bottle-sucking son, the only guy who talks, seems to hold a sycophantic admiration for the professor and offers him rides home. This seemed kind of exciting, a change from the dullness which is two and half hours of listening to a muddled voice speak from a black screen, but then the professor proceeded to read the names of the people in order of how much he fancied our essays. My friend was comfortably third from the bottom, sandwiched between two native speakers. I came in dead last, that’s right, the peor, the worst.

I sat in my screen room and heard the echoes of my name as the last-ess, the worst-ness of it resonated in silence of the air. I thought instantly of my own students and how everything I do in my own teaching is to recognize the good and keep discreet, the bad.  I thought about how completely de-motivating this kind of technique is to a non-native speaker, who after a year and a half in the country is attempting to write academic papers. I felt indignation, utter frustration, rage, and humiliation. It was hard to go back to reading my recipe for chicken with poblano chiles, so I left. An hour early. 

I write this now still feeling a little choked at the idea of returning (am more than half done) to sit in front of my television audience who know all about my special needs and my inability to express myself in Spanish. Some of my editors (yes, I still have my paper read by between 2-5 people) insist that the paper was good and that possibly this was a move on the professor’s part to show the gringa imperialist that she is not welcome to write about Jose Martí at his university. I don’t think it’s that, although I appreciate the protective attitude of my friends, and think that if I did something similar with a class of all native speaking U.S. students and two Latinos, I would get a pretty strong finger wagging, as well as be called a racist. I think that, rather, this kind of move, reflects the utter lack of knowledge that this professor has about pedagogy and working with non-native speaking learners and, worse a paucity of empathy and inability to imagine what it’s like to try to express yourself in writing in a language that is not your own.

I guess that this experience, as humbling, humiliating and enraging as it has been, will be over. I don’t look forward to returning to my studio audience. I wonder if they saw my budding tears of embarrassment from their screen or  if they wonder whether the gringa has the cojones to come back.  I think that I will return, but next time with more recipes, my taxes and maybe a few crossword puzzles.

Colonel Mustard in the street with a napkin...

La Double Vie de Mexity Maestra

At this point, my life in Mexico is one of contrasts. From attempting to partake of the student life to continuing to battle ever more suffocating bureaucratic tasks at work, I am burning the candle at both ends. I have been adopted by a Mexican family and have spent evenings at their house, drinking tequila and learning "doble sentidos" (Basically this means double entendres and basically this means that every sentence I have ever uttered in Spanish has some sexual or scatological second meaning) and then go out later to with my ex-pat teacher friends to feel the comfort of understanding everything I hear and say. Life in this city is fast and frenetic, sweaty, cold and wet. The tragic impact of having kids tug on your coat to ask for food or walking by a beggar with a large open wound is levied somehow by the experience of buying pomegranates and flowers at the outdoor market or developing a relationship with the woman who does your laundry and shares her dessert with you. This year has been and will be about deepening my relationship with this place and figuring out what this whole experience means. There are times when I feel myself weaving subtly into the fabric of my foreign community and other times I feel as conspicuous and awkward as a loose thread.


dodgeball, linguistically speaking

I am embarking on my second year in Mexico and I came back from a summer of eating snacks and turning thirty, replete with resolutions on how to improve my life, from swearing away the ubiquitous "carbs" (goodbye tortillas and nachos) to focusing on my Spanish in a really serious way.
Well, the carbs resolution has gone out the door. Just last night I ate a deep fried potato and chorizo sandwich (it was, after all, a Dia de la independencia, special) and my new favorite treats are ear-shaped, sugar coated puff pastry delicacies called, well, "ears."

However, my Spanish resolution has all but gone out the door. From going on dates just to experiment with the past subjunctive tense to taking on the massive Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel Cien Anos de Soledad this summer, I have made learning Spanish a big goal. In this vein, in an act of great courage or foolhardy hubris, I took a test to enter into a "diploma" program (like a one year degree/certificate) in Latin American literature. The test made me sweat. I had to use the not-oft practiced past subjunctive and write a story about finding an abandoned animal. When I passed and was admitted into the program, I cleared the sweat from my brow and victoriously resolved that I would indeed become an expert in the literature of the Latin world. Because I was taking the class at the "Center for Foreigners" I was assured by the program coordinator that my friend and I would be surrounded by other non-native speakers. I also was assured that taking the class via video-teleconference was easy and done all the time.
When my friend and I showed up for class the first day, one half an hour late, we found ourselves in a small room, our haggard, school-tired images, staring right back at us on a screen and on another screen our professor and an entire class of native speakers. We lamely introduced ourselves and sat down for two hours of poorly transmitted, garbled sounding lecture about a short story we had just been given a copy of. My friend and I sweated, our tears alternated with moments of pure panic-induced laughing fits. The only breaks our professor took from his talk were to ask whether we, the gringas on the screen, had anything to add to the discussion. A few times we attempted to comment on what we guessed was being discussed, but each time we commented we could hear the muffled laughter of the audience.
After two and a half hours of televised torture we ran from the building, resolving to attend the class live on Friday at the actual university rather than via television. We feared the reaction of our classmates who had only seen us stammer and appear on a screen making clown faces. Our day to go the university arrived and we faced an endless subway commute, followed by a half an hour wait for a taxi in a torrential rain shower, followed by our taxi driver getting us lost in the unfamiliar streets near the university. We walked into our class one hour late, drenched and defeated. However, by magic, something changed and after a few minutes we felt like we actually understood what was going on. Both of us bravely raised our hands and added comments to the discussion that were met with nods of comprehension rather than muffled laughs and blank reactions on the screen. My friend and I resolved to brave the hellish commute on Fridays, but still go to our television cell on Wednesdays. The Wednesdays have become no less ridiculous and right now I am trying to write a paper written in antiquated Guatemalan dialect. Needless to say I haven't truly read the book and what I have read I haven't understood.

I am amazed at how incredibly inappropriate distance learning is for a second language learner who depends so much on expressions, gestures, tone and context. These conversational elements stripped, I feel like I am being subjected to some kind of torture where I can only see myself and after substantial delay some reaction of my interlocutors...depending on the resolution of the screen. As my friend, who now is like my war buddy, commented, the teleconference experience has the same traumatic effect of playing dodge ball as a child, where instead of having a ball thrown at you repeatedly you are being slammed by a string of decontextualized words.

Adrian! my Rocky style gym
I joined the local gym, a place where transvestite-looking, sinewy bodied ballerinas take classes while their boyfriends pump iron and, in distinctly Mexican style, drink Nescafe and eat sandwiches (rather than pounding the typical power shake). I went to my gym for the first (and only...so far) time last week and bravely fought my way through the all male crowd to inaugurate my Body for Life inspired weight routine. The routine involves working the upper and lower body on alternate days, doing many repetitions of the same exercise but adding weight each time. As I tried to fit in and confidently find some weights I could lift without plunging into a crowd of mirror gawking muscled he-men, I was approached by one of the muscle-hombres and asked where I got my routine. I showed him my piece of paper with my routine scribbled on it and with disgust he said that if I followed a routine like that I would soon be as bulky as a "fireman." I had never heard that expression but I assumed that looking like a fireman, especially for a woman, is not a desirable result. He set me up with a routine, as muscly men gawked on. I asked him if he would charge me, thinking that me, the innocent gringa, was getting sold into a scam where I would be asked to pay for ten years of personal training and fitness shakes, but apparently he is just part of the gym, there to help, ignoramuses like me.
I did his routine obediently and he brooded over me, chomping a sandwich the whole time and occasionally correcting me, in my moments of muscle memory amnesia...why couldn't I for the life of me remember the biceps routine even though it just involved sitting and bending my arms toward my body?

I love my Rocky style seventies gym and hope that the trainer and the muscle posse somehow take me under their wings and that after extensive work outs I do not turn into the dreaded "fireman!"


Things I love:
1. Ears, Orejas
2. Cubanas, beer with salsa, lime juice and salt
3. the pyramidis of Teotihuacan
4. Condesa Gym
5. Tuesday Tianguis (street market near my house)
6. El Gato Macho (my student bar where I eat cheetos and drink Cubanas)
7. Coyoacan
8. El Farolito's chicharron de queso (a deep fried cheese funnel shaped thing served with salsa)

Things I love to hate
1. Rainy season
2. Pata which is raw pork "cooked" in lemon juice
3. Sabritas, Casera style jalapeno chips
4. sushi from Superama (false!)
5. Lime flavored soy sauce (gross)
6. scented toilet paper
7. my stairs (all five flights of them, especially when I am carrying cat litter and have to pee).

No Fingers! Encounters with the medical community

A few weeks ago, fed up with living with permanently clogged pores and adolescent pimples, I ventured into the world of Mexican dermatology. I was given a list of three professionals at the hospital and tried in vain to visit their offices between the expansive hours of 3-7 when business stops and people relax over multi-course meals. Finally, I was able to secure an appointment with Dr. V-, a French dermatologist. The next day I appeared for my appointment.

Dr. V- welcomed me into his office with great gusto. Entering his office was like going into a time warp. I began my journey in a typical 1970s D.F. office building, largely grey and non-descript, but Dr. V's office was a capsule of early 1900s France. His shelves were lined with ancient apothecary jars, his walls adorned with medals of honors from wars past and sepia ed photos, and his office furnished with finely oiled, lovingly-cared for antiques. The only way I knew that I was still in Mexico City was a large window that faced out to the endless, smoggy expanse of the city.

Dr. V- began our session by looking over his thick, yellowed glasses and asking me to spell my full name. As I complied, he pulled out a quill pen and dipped it in his ink wel and wrote my name on a lush piece of card stock stationery. He proceeded to ask me a series of other questions that had little to do with my skin problems, if I was Mormon (hailing from Utah), if I needed a French boyfriend, what I thought of the upcoming elections in France. After our question and answer session, he summoned me into a dimly lit examination room.

He took a 5-second look at my skin and proclaimed loudly, with great zeal, in the Pepe le Peu accent for which the French are renowned, "Yeu ave ac-neeeeee!!" which he shouted not once, but at least three or four times. This was followed by "Yeu ave ac-neee but yeu ahr tu auld!!!"
The novelty of the declarations eclipsed my own frustration with the current state of my derma and when Dr. V- asked me to weigh myself on his ancient bathroom scale, I again did so willingly. When I told him my weight, another round of expletives issued forth, "Yeu ahr sooo eavy!!! Good ting yeu ahr soooo toll!" and "But rrreally, yeu ahr tu auld for ac-neeeee and yeu ahr seu eavy!"

We returned to the consulting room and Dr. V- penned prescriptions for me: a revolutionary alcohol solution which he simply called his "formule" and an antibiotic which makes me spin with dizziness and nausea every morning when I take it. He also laid some ground rules. Most importantly, he said was "Rrrrrruuuule numberrrr one: No fingerrrrs!!!" meaning that I could no longer pick or touch my face.

I have concluded that in addition to suffering the smog in my lungs, the pollution, stress and fumes from streetside deepfrying have all taken a toll on my skin. I will see Dr. V- in a few weeks to check my progress minding "rrrulle numberrr one!"

QUITTA HUEVOS

This week Desi went under the knife to be neutered. He has been sentenced to wear an e-collar, which he finds humiliating and disconcerting. He skulks around, runs into things and sometimes simply collapses in pure resignation.
I can't wait to have my lively kitty back. que le mejore!

GIGANTE HUEVOS

Today while shopping in mega supah-mercado Gigante, I noticed an inordinate number of my fellow shoppers were octogenarians. While contemplating which apples to buy in the produce, an older man approached me and summoned me over to him, I thought to ask for help. In a raspy, barely audible voice he asked "Are you from Russia." To which I replied with all earnestness, "No, I am from the United States." He then told me that someone as tall and beautiful had to be Russian, to which I responded by trying to make a quick exit. But I wasn't quick enough. His next question "Are you an athlete?" "No, but I am swimmer and to run," I said in my mangled, embarrassed Spanish. As I again tried to "despedirme" or get away, he grabbed my hand and kissed me squarely on the neck.

I ran off, my face the color of a red delicious apple, wondering if the other octogenarians shoppers thought I was the harlot of produce or that they could approach me similarly. I finished the rest of my shopping, both slightly shamed and highly amused. I have to give it to the guy, he had some huevos!

Ahh, what a life of adventures! I can’t pick just one story to tell. So I will sum it up with a bulleted list of the highs and lows since my last blogentry. Here’s what’s happened. Excuse the sentence fragments and use of second person.

1.Not having running water for 15 days since the end of January (yes, you’re right that’s nearly everyday!). Putting up with the teasing experience of having a trickle of cold water, trying to shower in it, and having the water heartbreakingly turn into drops and then nothing just as you have soaped your hair OR thinking erroneously you have enough water to rinse off your pore cleansing mask (because living in this city has not only congested your lungs with mysterious humors, but also every pore on your body) and having to go to school the next morning wearing the clown make-up looking substance so that you can wash it off in the reliably plumbed facilities.

2.Having your Spanish tutor stand on the top of your stairs to your apartment building, announce the she “feels dizzy” and then began projectile vomiting down the open staircase. Just as you realize that the odiferous river keeps a-flowing down the many flights of stairs and you think that mopping it up will be a not so fun task, you reach in your pocket to realize that you don’t have your apartment keys and that you and your pale, sick friend and you are locked out. You run down the street, dodging a cacophonous street market and find the one locksmith open. He arrives only to pick fruitlessly at your lock with everything available including his belt buckle. You have to make the choice to scale the ledge from the neighbor’s to your balcony (yes, you live six stories above the hard cement) with this young locksmith only to break the window to your apartment, which you reason that you could have done yourself. Once safely in, the locksmith swears you to secrecy about his cat burglar ways. You grab your mop and gingerly take on the task of cleaning six stories of vomit-coated stairs. Thank god you had water that day.

3.Going on a class trip to see Monarch butterflies in Michoacan (which involves relaxing long hours on a tour bus as leagues of counselors and paramedics attend to your students). Getting offered a horse pill of Dramamine at the beginning of the journey (Ahh, the words “Dramamine Ladies?!” had quite a compelling ring). Taking it and then feeling like a comatose boneless chicken within moments. Sleeping the whole day while the students take pictures of you, in your slack-headed and mouth agape stupor.

4.Being awakened at night as your kitten (who has mysterious double canine teeth, probably some Aztec legacy) relentlessly and mercilessly attacks your face, bites your nose and chin, turns your hands into hamburger. Look at his picture...doesn't he look innocent?

Labels: deliriously d.effey