MexicoDisney

I have now been to the city of San Miguel de Allende five times. This place has grown on me, from outright revulsion to something I can tolerate and actually enjoy. Now I think I was too harsh on the town at first.

The problem is, the first time I came here I had gone from one extreme culture shock back to another. My first six months or so in Guanajuato, I was very unsettled, still trying to navigate both the linguistic and cultural differences. And I came to San Miguel and ran smack into those Ugly Americans who aren't actually ugly, just rigid, who don't want to have to adjust to the realities that living in another country with another language and culture brings. And you feel really awkward and uncomfortable being polite and appreciative of what they are doing for you personally, but knowing what pains in the asses they are for the people who were here first.

The first time I came here I had been in Guanajuato for about two and a half months. I went to a seder hosted by a couple who had been retired down here for about 20 years and didn't speak a word of Spanish. Nor did any of the other guests at the seder. Colonialism:1, Integration:0.

The second time, my mom and I had gone to Dolores Hidalgo earlier in the day and got to San Miguel in time for a late lunch, with a quick trip to the artisan's market before we headed back to Guanajuato. We were very tired and at that point just wanted to go home. Coffee:1, Initiative:0.

The third time, I went to hot springs just outside of San Miguel with a friend and a couple of her friends. We sat around by the pool, tanned, and hung out. I seem to remember driving through the town to leave it, but I don't think we walked around at all that day.

The fourth time was during the swine flu, with the same friend. There were no tourists anywhere. It was totally awesome. We bought her pretty things to take back home to Colorado, and went out for Thai food. Mediocre Thai food, but better than the non-existent Thai food in Guanajuato.

And today, after my fifth mini-visit, I've finally gotten off my high horse. I came here today, alone, with an agenda. I went to the larger-than-the-one-in-Guanajuato English used book store. I went out for Thai food. I bought some things (both necessary and unnecessary but pretty) at the artisan's market. Now I'm sitting at a cafe, enjoying the change of scenery and relaxing.

...sounds a lot like how I used to go into Cambridge when I was in high school. Some things never change. Needing different scenery is definitely one of them for me.

There's the part of me that still feels kind of awkward knowing that I'm coming here specifically to do things distinctly foreign. And this town isn't really big enough to integrate a foreign population without losing most of its Mexican-ness. It's a little commandeered vacation town. But Mexico City is 5 hours away and I don't have time to go there just for the day.

I suck at blogging...better luck next year!

Fingers crossed, anyway.

I can't believe the last thing I posted was about my freaking visa. That is ridiculous. In the past 8 months, I have:

• Visited the family twice.
• Been switched from the older primary school kids to the younger ones, and
• As a consequence, realized that I can't stand lower primary school. I think kids need to be at least 8 years old to be considered human and not sociopaths.
• Started an English teaching certification course.
• Applied to 2 grad school programs.
• Seen a gajillion movies.
• Had the dog eat freaking everything.

Oopsies.

I'll be better next year. After I come back from Copper Canyon with train pictures.

Yay I Finally Have A Goddamn Work Permit

My visa situation here is finally resolved, but (for posterity's sake, and before I completely block out all the gory details) I would like to record the entire, painful, tooth-jerking process.

• January 9: My tourist visa has about a month left and I take a day off of school (where I have already been working since October) to try and sort things out at the immigration office. Immigration office is in León, an hour away, and I don't have a car. Yay bus. Get to León, taxi driver rips me off. Get to immigration office (which is only open from 9am to 1pm on weekdays minus national holidays) and wait. By the time they give me the forms I need to fill out myself and use to pay at the bank, it's too late to be able to give them a completed application that day.
• January 16: Go back to León and submit completed paperwork.
• February 3: Go back to León and am informed that I need to give them some kind of document (description of document is intentionally vague), internationally certified, and officially translated to Spanish (ie stamped by someone who took the government certification course or whatever) to show them that I am qualified to teach English. And I have 10 business days to do so. I freak out, since I have none of the above.
  
• February 5: My mom gets my high school diploma and transcript certified to stall the office as I try and figure out how the hell it's possible to get my college transcript certified when Canada doesn't do the international certification procedure.
• February 17: 10 business days after the freakout begins, I go back to León and submit the documents my mom sent down, I translated, and the director of the language school at the University of Guanajuato stamped.
• March 13: I didn't want to go back to the immigration office until I was sure that my internationally certified college transcript was on its way down here. This took about a month, and is its own horror story. In the meantime, turns out, my high school transcript was enough, or the immigration office just wanted something with a shiny seal and didn't bother to read what I submitted. My change-of-migratory-status is approved. But do I have my new immigration documents? Of course not! They give me new forms to fill out, a new fee to pay, and a sheet of paper with a new list of requirements.
• March 20: New paperwork submitted.
• March 30: Previously, I had been told that my file would be definitively reviewed by this day, so I shuffled around my kids' week-before-vacation English tests and was at the immigration office when it opened. It was, in fact, not definitively reviewed, and not there. I freak out for many reasons, but mostly frustration with the whole goddamn process, and start crying in the immigration office. Nobody seems to care.
  
• April 3: Return to the immigration office. Everything is there, signed. The lady behind the counter, very archly, looks at me and says that I didn't need to make a big drama out of the whole thing.

On average, I waited at the office about an hour each time I had to go. It varied, from as little as 15 minutes to as much as 3 hours, but I was prepared to wait at least an hour every time I stepped foot in that godawful boring waiting room.

I would like to point out that this heinous process will have to be repeated, because it took me 3 months to get a visa that is only valid for one year.

Observations at a Café on a Friday Evening

Last night, my boyfriend and I went to one of the cafés in town to hang out for a while with the owners, friends of ours, and play a few games of Chromino without the stupid dog jumping up and upsetting the pieces. We get to the café, sit down, order and break out the forest green bag.

Now, I know I've had my fair share of café conversations where I probably sound like a loud twat to the people sitting nearby. We all have those conversations - loud, random, somewhat intellectual but mostly just predictable conversations with people, be they good friends or those with whom we just start talking cos they're there, that are kind of fun but mostly just familiar (How can you NOT like (insert book, author, movie, director, etc)? or I know, it was SO great about (random political and/or cultural event)...

I actually like having conversations like these, even if they are ultimately kind of vapid and pointless. And I think they're necessary, especially for people with academic interests, to feel like they're not just rotting away in their own mental masturbation. I can safely say that after 8 years of being a regular patron of various cafés in Boston, Montreal, and now here in Guanajuato, it's a haven that I am not willing to relinquish. You get a break from your usual apartment surroundings, from the feeling of confinement that comes from being somewhere you know far too well. You take out your book or notebook, or find the newspaper or an old magazine, and settle in. Someone is there to immediately make you a nice drink, and you never know who or what you will come across.

For better or worse.

So, anyway, we start to play Chromino, and the only other people in the café, seated in the corner just would. not. shut. up. For, like, an hour and a half. Some of their topics of perambulating, intentionally inoffensive "let's make friends cos you have a Mac" conversation included, but were not exclusive to

1. A hatred of trivial formalities and useless chatter (ironically)
   
2. Various zodiactic musings
3. The importance of life not being too "easy" (defined as being able to run errands and transport your groceries in a car)
   
4. Needing to make the most of every day i.e. not sit at home when there are Things to be Productive About
   
5. Not dwelling on negativity but being ready to, quote, move on to the next thing before the negativity happens
6. Russian women and inherent hotness therein, yet, somehow, they are so emotionally distant, and what's with that

Participants in this discussion were: Young Mexican Man with a Mac, Older White Gentleman Who Has Experienced It All with a Graying Pompadour, Much Younger Mexican Girlfriend of Older Gentleman.

Ruins and Tourists and Holes, Oh My!

On my third trip to Mexico City last weekend, I FINALLY made it to Teotihuacán - that place that every kid in Mexico (or, at least, the ones who can afford it) goes to on a field trip when they are in elementary school.

Museums are free on Sundays for Mexican citizens, and although I am still mired in the paperwork for my work permit, I am most certainly a Mexican citizen when passing through museum gates on a Sunday. Here, in pictures, are the highlights of a fun day getting sunburnt.


1) There are all these random tunnels that go through a small line of of barriers that line the Avenue of the Dead - the main street that transverses the ruins. So, of course, I climbed through one. A great idea if you are three. Not such a great idea if you are twenty three. And keep banging, alternately, your head and knees on the stone. Even when you try to crab-walk through. There were four or five of these that I could have gone through, but one was enough.




2) They sold little kid bow and arrows in the parking lot, in the gift shop area, and about every 10 meters or so throughout the ruins. And although I am not seven years old, I wanted one. Seriously, they looked awesome. Also - the thing on a pole behind those kids? There are trained professionals, dressed in their native outfits (someone told me from Veracruz) who twirl all the way down to the ground in a controlled decline while one of them plays a pipe. It is pretty impressive.




3) A cop chilling during his shift on the Pyramid of the Sun. Which only took 5 or 10 minutes to climb. Third largest pyramid in the world, y'all.

Stupid Dog

While I was taking a shower, my dog knocked over a bottle of Advil. By the time I got out of the shower, she was happily chewing on the plastic bottle, I could only find one complete tablet left, and I had no idea how many tablets were in the bottle to start with.

I took her to the vet right away, and apparently dogs absorb medicine so rapidly that it would have been pointless to pump her stomach or to make her vomit. So he gave me some other pills, and told me to keep her hydrated and bring her back if she starts puking blood.

But she hasn't been puking, or had diarrhea, or anything, and this happened about 3 hours ago. Advil is one of the worst things that doggies can eat, and while she's a decent size dog (about 40 pounds now), eating maybe 10 or 15 tablets is not a good thing.

Stupid dog. I hope she's OK.

Office Politics

If your current boss asks you about a past job, what is the best way to go about it if you have nothing nice to say - but you were asked directly?

Like, Omigod, Shopping

One of my favorite things about Mexico is that the local markets always have a thrift store-ish section...where basically a bunch of clothes are thrown onto folding tables, and you can root around until you find that pair of jeans that would cost at least $60 at home for 100 pesos. (Of course, at home, I would be making $60/hr for private tutoring instead of 100 pesos/hr, but that's another story.)

When I was in high school, my favorite store of all time was The Garment District...in a time before hipsters made mix and match vintage and trendy cool. And when I was little, my grandmother would regularly take me to the thrift stores in her neighboring towns to see what we could find. I've never been, and never will be, adverse to buying something in a sketchy-looking situation as long as I know I'm getting something quality. The idea of something falling off a truck doesn't really bother me either.

I've always been kind of ambivalent about popular brands, and I think that mostly has to do with feeling like I'm being ripped off. I don't, and never have, owned anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, Aeropostale, Hollister, and only here have I bought anything from American Eagle (awesome pants? For cheap? At aforementioned collection of folding tables? Yes.) And it also has to do with not wanting everyone to know where I got my clothing, exactly what other colors it comes in, and how much it cost. Even if a shirt is nice, if I know I am going to pass 5 people wearing the exact same thing, I'm not going to get it.

This is not to say that I have any kind of grudge against mass clothing production or mass marketing or mall stores. It's just not really my thing. And this feeling was honed over the course of a childhood and adolescence growing up in a town where, when a girl bent over, 95% of the time you could be sure of seeing "Victoria's Secret" on her underwear band. Ironically.

I know that these issues of branding, and keeping up with the Joneses, and whatnot, are part of how the US is - needing to have the right clothes and the right look to fit in. And to a certain extent, it's like that everywhere in the world. But I find it refreshing that Lucky Jeans are mixed in with the brand from WalMart at the folding tables, and what matters the most is that you find a pair that fits.

Now, all they need are dressing rooms...

Blech

I am never doing any kind of immigration paperwork ever again. Period.

What Jessica Simpson's Existence Says About A Double Standard (Or Not) For Female Appearance

Because I read about these things (since it's less depressing than the real news, and more digestible in junk food size portions than The Magic Mountain) apparently Jessica Simpson got fat. I never actually watched Newlyweds, but I do know what it was about thanks to the vacuum that is pop culture. Um, and also, its title.

I know that the shtick was that she was ditzy and cute, and he put up with it in a finger-shaking way. I Love Lucy for people who:
A) Can't deal with words with more 3 syllables. (Vitameatavegamin? Huh?)
B) Can't deal with anything in black and white.
C) Forget about something within a few weeks after its lifespan expires.

OK, a half bit reality TV personality got fat by Hollywood standards. No big deal. But then, apparently, there was a backlash because she LOOKED GREAT and MAYBE PUT ON A FEW POUNDS and HOLLYWOOD HAS UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS FOR REAL WOMEN'S BODIES.

I'm gonna call equal measures of duh and bullshit on that.

Part of the business of Hollywood, of MTV, of entertainment in general, is selling a fantasy. And the fantasy of Jessica Simpson includes someone cute, impossibly skinny, and with huge boobs. That's what she's been marketed as since she was just another virginal-not-crazy-Britney wannabe; that's been the image she and her managers have very conscientiously been trying to sell for the past 10 years. Is it unrealistic? Yes, of course. Did she starve herself? Maybe. But it's a living, and a very lucrative one at that.


So, now that she looks a little more normal, no wonder people are calling her out. She is literally not living up to her own her own image, of what the red blooded American woman should look like. And something everyone, red blooded Americans included, loves is schadenfreude when their graven idols fall and chip.


After all this time, she and her handlers should be savvy enough to know when she has to get to the gym, and when she should diet, before being photographed in skintight clothing for a public performance. They should know that Jessica Simpson, as she has been marketed, is not a real woman. She is more like a Barbie doll.


If an issue were made of Meryl Streep, or Aretha Franklin, or Hillary Clinton gaining weight, then there would be a double standard at play. The difference there is that these women have built their careers on their respective talents, intelligences, and bodies of work, rather than on their physical appearances. If their physical appearance were brought into play, it would have little, if anything, to do with the way these women have, in fact, presented themselves to the world.

So, this is why I say that there is not a double standard being applied when Jessica Simpson is called fat. She is failing to live up to her own standard of beauty, which a good chunk of the money earned off of that probably goes right back to maintaining. Since much of this public figure's career is based on appearance and very little on substance, what else is there to go on?

Why Rock of Love Bus is Amazing

As long as I can remember, I have always loved trash TV. When I stayed home sick from school, my big rush was watching Jerry Springer without my mom realizing it (she forbade my watching it...this involved a lot of "channel surfing" when I heard her approach.) Jerry Springer and Maury were my favorites, which made life in the sickbed great because it was 3 full hours of alternating freakshows in the mornings, from 9 until 12.

So, really, it's no surprise that I love the trashy reality TV shows that VH1 purveys. I love them to varying degrees, with Flavor of Love probably the least favorite, but I suppose that that was their trial period. The shows got better, and trashier, as the production team got more experience.

Hence, this, the third season of Rock of Love, is AMAZING. Beyond amazing. Life altering.

Life altering in the sense that you didn't realize people could be just THAT idiotic.

I'm a bit of a sadist. I love watching people make complete idiots of themselves, for the viewing pleasure of whoever stops to rubberneck. With the trashy talk shows, it's a bit different. If you sign up for a show entitled "Are You the Father?: Paternity Tests Revealed" you have a pretty clear idea of what you are getting yourself into. But when a similarly trashy show has a "true love" (albeit with a skankyass washed up hair metal lead singer) theme, the actual participants try and justify their behavior through a kind of moralistic jargon. And you end up wondering if they are just reading cue cards, and actually understand what the words they are saying mean.

The hypocrisy evident in a competition for "true love" that inevitably involves strippers and penalizes those contestants with a disdain for this kind of voyeuristic bullshit is amazing. To be fair, though, being on a show like this is definitely voyeuristic bullshit to start with...maybe the contestants are being penalized for not taking the premise to its logical conclusion.

Regardless.

Rock of Love Bus is amazing. And here are some reasons why.

1) Where, on any dating competition anywhere, has it been so obvious that every single contestant has had a boob job?

2) Every season of Rock of Love, the girls have gotten both dumber and trashier. This time, the bottom of the barrel has been sandblasted.

3) You could write a goddamn masters thesis on how groupies, as illustrated by the Rock of Love girls, have set back feminism by a hundred years. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever, other than being constantly drunk or high, for how these women present themselves, and how Bret Michaels treats them. Fuck Penny Lane.

4) If the women are ridiculous idiots, Bret Michaels looks like he fell off the Botox Bus one too many times.

5) Everyone is a bad actor. No exceptions. On the plus side, seeing everyone lie so obviously makes me smile throughout the episode.

But, beyond the label of awesomely bad, comes a point where the awesome, rather than the bad, becomes the idée fixe. Where else have you seen half naked women playing "ice hockey" with baby dolls with hair extensions as the pucks? What about a kelptomaniac ex-porn star stealing used socks? What about women taking shots from each other's vaginas?

I rest my case.

Once Upon a Cockfight

Last night, I got to go to a cockfight. What? What? Cockfights actually do exist in Mexico?!?! Yes, they do! They are also few and far between, and tickets cost an arm and a leg. So how did I go to a cockfight?

Well, apparently my boyfriend's mom works at a school for rich people, and one of the kids she teaches has parents who had complementary tickets for the cockfight at the state fair. And they didn't want to go. Obviously, if you don't want to go to a cockfight, you give the tickets to your 8-year-old's teacher.

Except she didn't really want to go either, but was told the tickets were worth 500 pesos (about $40) each. As they say here, "Hay que aprovecharselos." You have to take advantage of them. I was bored to tears my one time at the Montreal casino, so not so down with the gambling, but definitely down for this highly cultural (or at least exotic) experience.

When a group of 5 of us got to the little arena where the cockfight/concert after the cockfight was being held, we found out that the tickets were actually going for 750 pesos (about $60) each, and therefore we would not be buying any extra tickets. Elected to enter the ring were myself and my boyfriend's 85-year-old grandmother. So in we went. Me and grandma.

I think cockfighting would be a lot more interesting if it were just fight after fight after fight. At least at this cockfight, there was a new fight every 20 minutes or so. And to fill all that extra time between fights (cos a fight really only lasted a couple of minutes) there were raffles and bingo. Lots of raffles. Lots of bingo. Lots of noise.

But the fights! (Few and far between as they were.) First of all, I couldn't tell the difference between the roosters except for the red or green piece of tape wrapped around the little knife tied to its ankle. And yes, the roosters are equipped with weapons, to make sure the death goes that much quicker. The fight goes on until one of the roosters is dead, basically.

During the 20 minutes preceeding a fight, aside from the raffles and bingo, people are placing bets on which rooster is going to win. I guess 50 / 50 odds are as good as you're gonna get anywhere, so the gambling seemed to be quite fierce. Men and women in suits and quasi suits roved around the central ring of dirt, collecting money and giving out markers.

Then the rooster owners or trainers or whatever they are let the roosters smell each other. They hold them in the air facing each other before the fight, before they walk the roosters over to opposite sides of the ring.


Then the roosters fight.

Then one (or both) of the roosters die. Regardless of the death count, a winner is declared.

So, you know, once is kind of interesting. Or, at least, different.

This went on for THREE HOURS.

Then there was a concert with Ana Gabriel, and apparently myself and my boyfriend's grandmother were the only ones who had no idea who she was, since the little auditorium suddenly transformed into everyone else's personal shower and/or kareoke machine.

In short, a Mexican Celine Dion.
We left, half deaf, after three songs.

My Mind Wanders Too Much

Yesterday I had the kind of thought that I knew I wanted to write more about when I had the time, but now that I have the time I can't remember what it is. Mental note: Do not forget to get a notepad.

Pyramids n Petrified Waterfalls

Monte Albán, Oaxaca



Hierba el Agua, Oaxaca

Pretty gnarly, eh?

Return of the Hot Cops - Rave Edition

The Mexico City Traffic Police have a new uniform! This is very exciting news for all!