Adventures in Mexico

2008-10-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Mexico is a culture of apodos, or nicknames. These nicknames are not like Honey or Smiley, but more antagonistic like Chato (smooshed face, nose or stubby), Sapo (frog, for your friends with protruding eyes) or Conejo (rabbit, which is acceptable for anyone who has ever had buck teeth even if retainers and braces corrected the condition decades ago). And, of course, in every family, there is a Gordo/a a Fatty, male or female, who even after years of maintaining an acceptable body weight by passing on the tortillas has this name as his/her destiny. We from the U.S.--who skirt the truth with euphemisms like vertically challenged for short--are often appalled by this practice. I ask people repeatedly, "You just called her fat and she didn't get offended at all?" They reassure me, "We've called her Fatty for years; it's more her name than Ana is. You Americans are hypersensible (hypersensitive).

Then I will agree. Logically it makes sense. We are too sensitive and we can't handle the truth. But somehow, five minutes after this conversation, I go back to my old hypersensible way of thinking. Is it just me? Is it cultural? I wonder. I reflect on my experiences at my local tianguis (market) where I am a regular. I think about the vendors; one day they call me Linda (beautiful), another Flaca (skinny) and yet another Gorda (fat). On Linda days, I wonder, should I take the hint and wear my hair like this more often? On Flaca days, should I buy oranges to avoid looking wasted and scurvy-like? And on Gorda days, should I skip the guacamole stand entirely? I am befuddled.

I find myself equally perplexed with positive feedback. My friend and his family like to give me "compliments." I put them entre comillas, in parentheses, because these are never so straightforward and always make me take pause.

"Oh, so nice to see you!" They will say. "You look so much less tired and wrinkled than the last time." Or "Wow! Your haircut makes your body look less large and misshapen than before!" or "Wow, somehow your face looks less horse-like than the last time!" There is always a last time. You wonder what this time's last time is going to be. Yes, you think, you have resolved the hair issue, but what about the visible panty line, lipstick choice, width of your hips. What, you wonder are they noticing for next time that you will somehow resolve acceptably?

I am perplexed by this method of complimenting. Should I just take the compliment and selectively ignore the last time comparison? Should I understand that my Mexican friends are more vigilant and will always watch for the instances when I have food in my teeth, look tired or don't have moisturized lips? Or should I just accept that I will never be perfect? I guess this statement is the most true. In this way, my Mexican friends are just being honest and I, again, am just being hypersensible. That's just the honest truth and I can accept it for at least five minutes!

2008-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Further adventures with the medical community

My experience with Mexican doctors never fails to be interesting. In the last two installments, I have come across some upstanding members of the medical community: the excruciatingly honest dentist, the detailed eye man who made it so that my blind eyes can now see 20-20 with just a few uncomfortable moments of Clockwork Orange-style surgery. However, my luck wasn't so good with Smoky the Bear, my ear nose and throat doctor, in Spanish, otorrinolaringolo.

I arrived to my appointment after suffering months of the catarrh (see entry of about one year ago). The building looked like it should have been destroyed in the great quake of '85, covered in black soot, bombed out looking, very 1970s, very much an insult to buildings worldwide. I entered the office which looked like a cast off piece of scenery from the Dick van Dyke show, wood paneling, dark, sprayed popcorn ceiling, terribly ventilated. A couple who looked like they had walked out of Juan Rulfo's haunting novel Pedro Paramo (about a guy who goes to find his father in a typical Mexican pueblo only to discover that the place is haunted by somnabulating ghosts) morbidly hugged chest x-rays, a man with cauliflower ears snored loudly in his chair and a Rita Moreno looking secretary buzzed around as if this was as normal a place to work as your neighborhood Starbucks.

I was ushered into an office which again had all the fixings for a late 1960s sitcom. I sat next to an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes and the smell of tar and smoke filled the air (yes, this is an ear nose and throat doctor). After falling asleep from the weight of my catarrh, the heaviness of the surviving too many weeks of congestion in one of the most polluted cities in the world, the doctor entered. As is normal, we made the small talk. "Where are you from?" "Utah." "You are Mormon?" "No." "How is that possible?"

Usually at this point, I politely explain some of the lesser known facts of Utah population demographics (i.e. not everyone has 6-10 wives, wears pioneer clothing and worships whatever they imagine that Mormons worship), but this day I had no patience.

The doctor then abruptly states, "How did your nose get so twisted." My Spanish failed me with the "twisted" word (torcido) so he supplied an English translation: "screwed up." I told him that I had broken my nose as an eighth grader and spared him the details of adolescent pain that the broken nose, my boy haircut, acne and braces had brought me. But he had plenty to say back. "You have an asymetrical face." "You deserve to have a normal face." "You deserve to be normal." At this, he ushered me into the examination room where (and I swear to you) there were many cloudy plastic bottles of dubious substances, one of which was labeled "magic drops" (gotas magicas). After a cursory look up my nose, he told me I had a sinus infection, but didn't forget his true purpose: to convince me that I was deformed and needed rhinoplasty to secure any chances of a viable existence.

"You see, your nose sits like this on your face," he said gesturing as if my nose looked like it belonged on a Picasso painting. "Our faces should be symmetrical. You have lived a long time like this. You really deserve to look more normal."

I could have felt like some harelipped, deformed, or injured child you see on Sally Struthers commercials, living in a decrepid, waterless Sub-Saharan village. "For only 75 cents a day, this child could have critical surgery that would make a normal life possible." I could have felt anxiety that when my nose was broken in eighth grade that I ended up looking like a boxer and no one had the heart to tell me. But instead, I saw through this guy's smoke...literally. I thought of the masses of Mexican people I had seen with their noses bandaged. They probably had been sold in to this surgery too because their noses were too fat, too native, too whatever. I took my prescription for my own magic drops and ran down the stairs faster than you can say "otorrinolaringologia."

2008-02-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-12-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

Colonel Mustard in the street with a napkin...

Argentina, land of condiments

Last week I was in Argentina with my family. It was the second time for me and I quickly fell in love with the clean air, the easy access to processed meats (hmmm...picadas anyone?), cheap red wine, leather, shoes, amazing tango groups playing their hearts out right on the street, and well groomed and exercised dogs. Argentina seems like a first world country but lives with a third world reality with untrustworthy leaders, capricious currency, a sad legacy of oppression and Dirty War. It also seems incidentally Latin American. As I walked about and felt swarthy in comparison (okay, this is an exaggeration, but I didn't feel as much of the pigment-less giantess as I feel to be here in Mexico) to the very European masses of people, I thought, the only way I know that I am in Latin America is that Spanish is being spoken and with an emphatic Italian sounding accent at that.

Because Argentina looks so comparatively pristine next to Mexico City, whose extremes of utter poverty and excessive wealth are on display on nearly every street corner, it's hard to remember that like any country with great poverty and a lot of tourism, that there's a lot of petty street crime. As my parents were walking a bit off course on our way to San Telmo (very touristy, antiques galore and those annoying people who paint themselves and pretend that they are statues), we discovered that my dad's back had been splattered with mustard.

We stopped to assess the stain and scrambled for something to clean him off. In that moment, we were approached by a couple, conveniently carrying a wad of napkins. I digress to say that Argentine napkins have all the absorbency of waxed paper. In that moment we discovered that my back as well as my step mom's were covered in mustard and the "nice couple" conveniently picked up a bottle of water and a new wad of napkins came out. Their hands were suddenly all over us. My step mom smartly guessed "This is a perfect set up for a robbery." No sooner had she said that when a man began to insistently urge us to come to his cafe down the street to get cleaned up. I quickly sprung into action and my family followed suit.

We managed to escape our growing group of helpers/thieves. The couple took off quickly in a get-away taxi and we sped off by foot. Later, my dad discovered that about 20 USD were missing from his pocket, but we were relieved that we weren't hurt or more wasn't taken.

As we debriefed the incident in a nearby coffee shop, again employing the inadequate napkins to try to make ourselves look, well, less like mustard had been splattered at us, we all felt a collective relief that the crime was not one of "throw mustard at the ugly American," but instead "let's take these ignorant tourists for all they've got." I am so grateful that they didn't. And like with any averted disaster-great or small- I am reminded to be more cautious and mindful.

2007-09-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

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).

2007-05-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-02-18T18:27:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-01-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

Cat Fuzz

Angelina has Cambodia and Ethiopia. Madge has Namibia and I have Mexico City. Yes, I have become a mommy to a raggedy kitten of the mean streets of Mexico City (actually a crowded souvenir shoppette in the Ciudadela craft market). After one week, Desmond Jose and I have have shared good times (sleeping, playing with string for hours) and bad (flea baths, eye medication, other medication, and blood tests taken from the neck). I have learned an expansive list of veterinary terms and had to come up with sentences like "I am the owner of Desmond. Last week I left his sample of feces here. Have you analyzed it?" or "I am preoccupied that the powder anti-flea you recommended is toxic. Is it safe to put on the back of Desmond?" So, while I don't have a large crowd of Spanish speaking friends, my kitten is teaching me how to speak! que bueno!

My Fuzz

In December, I resolved that "hairless would be heaven in 2007" and promptly signed up for a nearly full body laser hair removal package for a fraction of the price as such a comprehensive shearing would be in the U.S. I went to Neoskin, feeling like a boneless chicken breast due to the muscle relaxer I had taken to assuage the pain. I donned my paper thong (a ridiculous piece of not-clothing) and was zapped from arm pit to toe, even in places where no hair grows on me(e.g. top of feet). I have figured out that they always do a little free zap with purchase. For me, it was the top of the feet, for another friend a mustache and for another an offer to remove nose hair (thankfully, this friend declined knowing that the stuff acts as a very important germ filter).

"The Fuzz"

On Friday, on the way to a belated holiday party at Mexico's equivalent of the O.G. (Olive Garden) minus the bottomless salad bowl, my coworker was stopped by the police after making a ballsy u-turn on a street with about 17 lanes of traffic. We played dumb gringas, especially the driver of the car who tried in vain to bribe the police officer with the equivalent of about $1.75 for a "Coca Cola." Just when we thought that the car would be impounded, an expensive ticket would be given, and we would never get to enjoy our chain food lasagna, one of the passangers of the car jumped out, grabbed the officer by the hand and dragged him out to the street. She kept screaming "Mira (look), Mira, he's doin' exactly the same kind of turn. Why don't you pull him over!?!?!" Because police officers aren't used to being grabbed and dragged to the street by Amazonian Americans, the whole thing caused quite a spectacle. The other attending police officer informed us that he would let us go if we would just "calm her down!" We gratefully stashed 200 pesos in the officers' book of rules and regulations (I guess it's the expected way to bribe) and wer off to enjoy Mexico's very own version of "Hospitaliano!"

2006-12-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

PERRO BAJO!

I am reaching a frustration point with my language skills. I always fancied myself quite a linguist, but this Spanish, the most practical and reputedly easy language I have tried to learn yet, is stumping me. My first yoga class presented a challenge. I understood the words bend, butt cheeks, knees, chest, down dog (perro bajo), but there would be moments when I would be on my back, legs overhead and akimbo while everyone else was doing some sort of pretzel leg asana thing on their feet. Another nice touch to taking a yoga class in D.F. is that there are very few quiet places (just now I am being regaled by the distinct whistle of the knife sharpener on a bike who uses his back wheel to propel a spinning blade). The whole time we were in class, the teacher blared new age music to drown out the banda music--which somehow doesn't jive with deep breathing and sun salutations-- from a raucous party at a hair studio below.

Today I also struggled to say anything involving prepositions, nouns, ordinal and cardinal numbers, adjectives or conjugated verbs. My Spanish teacher tells me "mas despacio" that I need to speak more slowly and enunciate the words. It's so hard when the language being hurled at me sounds like verbal machine gun fire and I am expected to respond in turn.

So what will I do? Turn into the dumb gringa who says "embarazada" because it sounds like embarrassed (but really means pregnant)? Should I just write my requests on notepads worn around my neck like the tongueless characters in The World according to Garp?

I just feel as though my age has taken its toll on my tongue, making it slow, sticky and accustomed to its familiar consonant-vowel patterns. Like I should sit on a rocking chair with a corn cob pipe and say "Why when I was a young girl I could do Czech consonants...have you ever tried to say a /c/ and /t/ and an /r/ sound all together? Well, dagnabbit, I could and I was good!"

2006-11-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

Baffled by Basura!

In Mexico City, nearly every time I so much as lose a hair in the shower I start thinking What am I going to do with this? Will I need to add it to my trash? Please let it just go down the drain. You see, in Mexico City garbage is a major problem. There is a garbage truck who speeds through the neighborhoods daily, blowing a very inconspicuous little whistle to signal that it is your chance to run with your bags down many flights of stairs and meet the truck being commandeered by understandably grumpy men standing calf-deep in a mysterious roux of orange peels, diapers and god-knows-what else. The problem is that the garbage truck arrives during working hours-- one reason why everyone who can afford it has a maid who meets the truck daily and disposes of the household garbage. So I don't have a maid (yet) and I am left to deal with the garbage by myself. In the process I have turned into a stealth guerilla, a basurista, if you will. Here's why.

It is illegal to dump garbage anywhere...not that this stops anyone from transforming any flower pot, ditch or stray bucket in the road into a trash receptacle. However, if one of the plentiful and very corrupt patrolling policia was to see me leaving my bag of trash curbside, I would most likely be fined and have to pay a bribe. Near my old apartment, a median in the road had been relegated to a trash pile. I felt less guilty about adding my trash bag to this consistent mountain of waste. I also felt that the rubbish pile gave the neighborhood vagrants a fun hobby of sifting through potato chip shrapnel and peelings for rare treasures (a discarded diamond earring? a gold tooth?). At my present home, my block is pristine and I am left to saunter out in cat burglar gear in the darkest predawn hours to dump my trash bag by the side of the road. By the time I return from work at the end of the day, the garbage is gone..either picked up by the men in the truck or kindly delivered to the truck by a good samaritan maid. It's not like I haven't tried to find a better solution to this problem. Once, I tried to bribe the doorman in the building next door to take it out for me. Either my Spanish was too bad or my offer wasn't sweet enough, because he promptly declined and gestured toward the street, giving me his blessing to leave the garbage on the curb.

This dilemma presents a stark contrast to my former experience living in Japan where trash was meticulously sorted and I was even given a rule book for what week I could throw out items like twine, batteries, or lone socks. Additionally, when I made mistakes such as trying to discard dryer lint in the same bag with an egg shell, my garbage was left in the parking lot with an admonishing note stapled to it. In fact, a friend just reminded me that in order to get rid of a suitcase, I hefted the thing to a busy Tokyo train station (only a one and half hour train ride away) parked myself in a phone booth where I pretended to make a call and then ran, leaving the suitcase behind. I am sure that Japanese authorities are still trying to find me to give it back.

Here in Mexico I resort to the same rogue behaviors for the opposite reasons. Here there are no real rules, just the ever present threat of the police. Do I hire domestic help just so I am not holding on to kleenex boxes, water bottles and plastic bags reasoning that they are too bulky to throw away sneakily? Or do I continue my secret dumping, guarding myself against the flashing lights of the passing patrol car and reproachful stares of the infrequent passerby?

2006-11-15T17:27:00.000-08:00

And on the eighth day, God created high speed internet

my new departmento and its charming view

After spending several days waiting at my apartment for an unreliable operation called Cablevision--which promised me a handsome cable TV and high speed internet package, promptly charged me and never delivered services--I have signed on to Telmex high speed internet. Because I did the whole transaction over the phone in Spanish, I got serveral key details about my account wrong,making the initialization process daunting. Despite these small linguistic hurdles, I am now connected to the beautiful world wide web and will be able to post more of my daily adventures and missteps from the land of calamity and quesadillas, El D.F.!

3 things I love about the Latin world and working in close proximity with the Spanish language:
*that there are countless landmarks of Virgin Mary's; therefore many street directions I receive go like this "Walk 50 meters and turn left/right at the virgin."
*that I am referred to as "Mees" (short for maestra), "The mees" or "my mees" by students, fellow teachers, custodial staff, taxi drivers, baristas and fruit delivery people.
*that the word phlegm is a cognate, making decongestant shopping easy.

3 things I dis-love about Mexico
*that the Superama grocery store near my house belches out a steady stream of margarine smelling exhaust from their transfatty resplendent bakery department.
*that the only reasonable clothing options for purchase are made out of mysterious fibers (regurgitated cat hair?) that rips the second it strains slightly against the contours of the human form.
*that my washcloth is filthy, I mean grey and filthy, after simply washing my face...and no, I don't work in a coal mine.

2006-11-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

Mucus: The Universal Conversation Starter

When I was twelve, my mom and I lived in Swansea, Wales for a gloomy, windy six months. On our way back from one of our Saturday trips to Cardiff, my mom and I were approached by an old red nosed, white haired rather classic Welsh septagenarian. My mom had been fighting a fierce cough for what seemed like months and her affliction was not helped by the living conditions in our moldy, slug infested Edwardian flat or nor by the constant tromping through freezing rain storms. The gentleman opened the conversation with my mom, who was surely holding tightly to a gargantuan wad of kleenex, with a one-word conversation starter I will never forget, "Catarrh?"

I had never heard of this word, let alone opening a conversation with it. From the context clues, I divined that he meant "Are you drowning in your own mucus?" My mom held back her laughter, affirmed that she was suffering from the cattarh and the older gentleman proceeded to start on a tedious tale of how he bought two mismatched shoes for six pounds on the High Street and on and on.

Fastforward to present day: I live in Mexico City. Almost every week I have some new fungus or unexplained illness. Living in the most polluted city in the world has not been kind on my lungs or sinuses and I have been battling the kind of lungy cough that makes me long for a vacation in an iron lung.

One early morning this week on the way to work, my cough was particularly bad, but I was excited to have my daily Spanish conversation with my taxi driver. It seems that taxi drivers are the only humans in this country who put up with my unconjugated baby talk and seem genuinely interested when I say things like "There are lots of traffics today."

I hailed my rattle trap, green VW Beetle cab, got in, started fiercely coughing and fumbling for Kleenex and clutching my throat to sputter directions to the driver. Before I could mutter a word through my coughing and snorting, I heard the word "Catarro?" and was offered a Halls cough drop. Apparently this rare word for a snotty cold is not only a surprisingly easy cognate but a one-word conversation starter to be used world wide! Try it!

2006-10-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

I recently left my mosquito ridden, gas smelling, bad plumbing having apartment and traded up. My new apartment is a fabulous fifties wonder that makes me feel like I should be serving highballs every night and hosting coctail parties and bridge nights. The landlord, a gentle middle aged woman who greets me warmly with cheek kisses and speaks slowly to accomodate my second langauge status, jokes that a gym is included because I have to climb five flights of stairs to get to my place. The place has a wall of windows looking out at the skyline (really a jumble of pollution stained 70s era apartment buildings), a balcony, a working toilet and best of all, the mosquitoes are too lazy or blood engorged to fly all the way up to my lofty heights!

Leaving the other (bad) apartment was no easy affair, however. When I delivered the news to my landlady, she acted as though I was breaking up with her. She hurled insults at me, accusing me of not being trustworthy, breaking the "golden" word, not being a "humanist," and generally let me know that I was a horrible person in every way. Also, despite the fact the we are not bound by any contract, she will "press charges" if I don't pay my $2.00 power and light bill. Quel turd!

2006-10-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

Week 2 of blogging and no new plumbing horror stories to report. I did discover that Watchamacallit candy bars can be found in select 7-11's throughout town. I made this exciting discovery as I was being followed home by an affable man from my local frame shop. He had just framed two cool vintage movie posters I bought at a flea market. He offered to deliver them to my house because they were very heavy (ah, the occasional joys of being a girl!). I assumed that he would be driving and popped into the 7-11 to get change for his tip. After buying my Watchamacallit and exiting 7-11, I found that, to my surprise and embarassment, the framer was following me by foot, hefting the cantankerous load. Que Pena! But he insisted that he carry the bulky posters and walk a few steps behind me.

Spanish Lessons: I spent last night with my Spanish teacher and classmates drinking! We started out at a yuppie beer bar where we shyly sipped micheladas (a delicious concoction of beer, lime, salt and chile). Then the teacher decided to take us to a Mezcal--which is like a smokey tequila-- bar. Our teacher's goal for us language learners was for one or all of us to eat the dead worm marinating sadly at the bottom of the bottle. Once at the bar,a haven for pure organic mezcal, we found out that the type of mezcal with worms in it actual contains more preservatives. (By the way,don't be fooled and say "pres-er-va-tiv" in Spanish because it means something entirely different). As a substitute, we were served a powder of ground worms, chile and salt to eat with oranges. I was the only one in our group who loves mezcal and drank heartily.
After dropping my compadres off, my teacher wanted a drink for the road (always a good idea) and we went out for a final beer. I think that he had had his fill speaking bad Spanish as a Second Language (I imagine I sound pretty pathetic like David Sedaris in French class in Me Talk Pretty One Day), so we had to speak German the rest of the night. My sentences came out as a strange Deutschpan~ol and my brain felt like it had been blended like a margarita by evening's end.

I woke up at 5:00 a.m. naturally very refreshed and ready to teach young people!
Here's a picture from my cute yet deceptively high maintenence "departmento."

2006-10-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

I have been in Mexico City for about two months. While I love the food, am amazed by the friendliness of the people, my apartment leaves a little to be desired. It smells like burnt cooking gas, the bathroom sink leaks an equally sinister smelling water and my toilet, well, it suffers from depression and has no "ganas" to flush.

I have had several appointments with plumbers where I struggle with my limited vocabulary and shaky handle on verb conjugation. Mostly I resort to miming verbs like leak, plunge, flush and flood. In my most recent interaction, my plumber asked if I wanted a formal receipt or a less formal bill, a so-called note of "remission." I heard "permission" and drafted him a note giving him my blessings to fix my faucet.

Aside from the mundane details of my plumbing, I find my life and work here exhilirating challenge. My days are long. At 6:30 a.m., I pack myself into a bus called "The Xola" which is stuffed to the gills with tired teenagers heading to school and wearing way too much eyeliner. The bus driver, who was meant to drive Formula One cars not a honking bus in Mexico City, darts in and out of traffic, stops quickly and cuts off any cars in sight, which usually, at least one time, lurches me forward, into the arms of a sullen teen. From my noisy, personal space invading commute, I pass through the gates of my school and spent 10-12 hours teaching, meeting, taking Spanish classes and, if I have any energy left, exercising.

Weekends offer some respite from the grind. I have gotten to go to the Acapulco area and the old mining town of Taxco. Here's a pic. from the Taxco food market.