Sunday, September 16, 2007
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).
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).
# posted by mexitymaestra : 4:19 PM
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