Places I Visited in Mexico

1. Guanajuato, Guanajuato:  it's not, like, ALL of Guanajuato, and it's definitely not as if I actually lived on a callejon, but a girl can dream.
2. Mexico City, Distrito Federal: CIEE group trip to D.F.  We went to so many places.
3. San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato: I actually went three times, but only the first and third were productive.
4. Zacatecas, Zacatecas: The other CIEE group trip.  I liked Zacatecas, which is a mining city like GTO.
5. San Luis Potosi, San Luis Potosi: This is when Becky and I noticed our habit of going to capital cities.
6. Michocan: For Dia de los Muertos, we went to the state of Michocan--Patzcuaro, Janitzio, Tzintzuntzan.
7. Zihuantenejo/Ixtapa, Guerrero: At the end of the semester, it was time to chill in the Pacific Ocean.

I loved Mexico, and, while I'm glad to be back with my family, part of me will always be in Mexico.

exploration Tuesday

because Facebook is not being my friend, I can’t upload all of my pictures from exploration Tuesday.  Becky and I went and explored a callejón that seemed interesting.  I really like the following.  Hover over the pictures for a description of the picture. :)

      

Celebrating life and death

Recently I was witness a critical piece of life, namely death.  My host mom’s mother passed away two weeks ago, and it was quite impresionante for me to not only watch my extended host family deal with this important event, but also be asked to participate.  Here I’ve included something based on something I wrote the day after she passed away (original in Spanish).

It seems odd to me that today is the first cold day since I’ve been here. Yesterday la señora passed away, and today the family hasn’t really seen the sun.  It’s like something from a story, all symbolic and literary, with a gray day to match the sad day.  --Except that it’s not totally sad.  Dulce spent the night with her siblings but came over in the morning to tell me she would be over at her mother’s house all day for the vigil and that I could go over whenever I was ready.  I met all of the siblings and close family friends.  I usually met them while they were in tears, but after they’d spend their time in the vigil room, they’d come and join us at the kitchen table and laugh and joke and tell stories.  Sometimes they’d laugh until they started crying again.  Other times they’d go silent for minutes and stare at nothing, but they always came back to the conversation and the memories. 

I didn’t hear much about Josefina and her more recent months, but I heard so much about earlier years.  She was a terrific person, by all accounts.  She would feed, clothe, and shelter whoever needed it; many of the men and women who stopped by to pay their respects truly loved this women.  Flowers were delivered pretty much all day, and phone never stopped ringing.  Announcements were made on the radio stations, announcing her funeral Mass at San Francisco Church at 4 P.M. 

It should be noted that the details of a funeral are still business details – scheduling the Masses, organizing meals, cleaning the house, carpooling, greeting visitors, post-Mass arrangements.  Dulce and her siblings shared the responsibilities, and believe me, I’ve never seen a funeral put together so quickly in all my life.  Señora Josefina died on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday afternoon, she was set for her funeral.  All of the Masses intended for her were planned along with her funeral Mass, and so many people attended each Mass.  Having lived in Guanajuato all her life, she knew many people and as one of the sister-in-laws put it, she was an abuela muy querida; everyone wanted to say their final goodbyes. 

As far as the “abuela muy querida” I can’t argue.  She always asked Dulce if she was taking good care of me, a throwback to earlier years.  Everytime we talked, Señora Josefina made sure Dulce was feeding me and that both me and my family were okay.  Even though I didn’t know her that well, it was clear to me why her children are so close-knit, and why her Masses were packed with people. 

She is missed.  One of her great-grandchildren, a little boy two years old, came over to the house after one of the Masses.  He went straight to her room, peaked in, and said hola abuelita, not understanding that she wasn’t there. All of Dulce’s hermanos, gathered in one of the living rooms, were moved by the little boy’s actions, reminding them of their loss.

But they will be fine.  They were able to say their goodbyes while their mother was alive, and as one of Dulce’s sisters told me, “We’re 11 brothers and sisters and we take care of each other.  We love our mother, and we know we can get through this.” 

A few lessons

During my time here in Mexico, I have uncovered some truths.

1. Any food can be prepared with tomatoes and onions.
2. Lime, avocado and/or jamaica water can improve any meal.  In fact, a meal with just those three ingredients is legit.
3. Tortilla chips do not exist, but bread does.  Oh boy does it.
4. Mexicans are hilarious, but don’t trust any of them to dress you.
5. When something is “a little bit spicy” you might feel like the Spice Girls just jumped you.
6. I have la cara de una mexicana aka I pass for a Mexican.
7. Corn tortillas are the bomb and go with any meal.
8. Chips of the Frito-Lay company are spicier then you expect.
9. You can fit more people in there than you think is logically possible.
10. Any flavor can be a drink, given a blender and plenty of sugar.
11. Mexicans are super polite.
12. When studying another language, sometimes you forget how to speak the first. (or both)
13. I can’t guess ages for the life of me.
14. Action and drama movies are always better when dubbed in Spanish.
15. Any problem is resolved with alcohol, preferably tequila.
16. Haggling is an accepted form of capitalism.
17. Don’t rely on maps or directions that are based on street names.
18. Fruit, corn, chips, and other street food are always served with hot sauce and lime.  No exceptions.
19. Horses and mules are common transportation modes.
20. Don’t drink the tap water.

Mi pata hueca (aka Me, the bottomless pit)

I haven’t updated in a long while, and tomorrow is my four month anniversary in Mexico (OH-EM-GEE).  *cue quite the number of blog posts in the next week or so*

To start my updating frenzy, I would like to take a moment (aka less than a minute) and remind everyone that I love food.  To this end, I have created the following slideshow: yes, it is cheaply made and no, I don’t care.  I just want you to see the beautifully made food I’ve been eating.

Note: this slideshow does not include any food from Dulce or any great majority of the food I’ve eaten out of the house, just the few plates I remembered to take a picture of.

Note.2: Pata hueca means “hollow leg” in Spanish, as in: La verdad es que come mucho, como si tuviera una pata hueca. (He eats so much, it’s like he has a hollow leg.)

And now I’m hungry.  *cue Dulce calling*

*****

Sopa de cebolla

ingredients

• large white onion
• chicken powder
• egg
• cheese (a white one)

Slice onion and lightly fry (with a dash of chicken powder) until rings are transparent.  If not already in a soup pot, dump into soup pot and add water.  Add a dash more of chicken powder and salt, pepper, seasoning you want, etc, and heat for ~30 minutes (will be boiling).  Add grated cheese on top and watch it melt.  Beat up the egg and add to boiling water as well (it looks like egg drop soup).  Allow cheese to melt and egg boil, but not so much that they completely disintegrate.  Serve hot with crackers.  Is delicious.

Sin luz or How to deal without power for two days, part I

On Monday, the wall plugs in my house started exploding.  Sounds kinda cool, you know, except the part where the power strip your laptop is plugged into starts to BANG! POP! WHIZZZZZZ!, sparking and sending up plumes of electronic circuitry, which you then proceed to breathe in and cough up later, pretending to be a dragon, but I digress.

No sooner than I’d been able to unplug my laptop charger from the now-defunct power strip, I heard a BANG! POP! WHIZZZZ! from upstairs.  I freaked out.  No joke.  I was home alone, and things were beginning to EXPLODE.  It was frightening. 

De todos modos, I ran upstairs to check out what was exploding in the kitchen.  It took me a while to determine the source of the smell, así que the same burnt electric smell that was concentrated in my room was fairly well dispersed throughout the upper floor. Of course, by the time I realized that the microwave and the radio were the sources of the smell, they were goners.  I said a small prayer for them as I unplugged them, then continued my search for popped plugs.

This part of my search was complicated by the fact that while I kept hearing BANG! POP! WHIZZZZ!, I didn’t see any sparks or pulverized circuitry.  I eventually decided to see if the other power strips had been demolished.  I couldn’t think of any reason they could be – they were all turned off (mine was on, and I figured that was why it exploded).  I switched on the power strip for the TV and DVD player; both se aprendieron, so I figured they were okay and switched them off.  I returned to the kitchen to switch on the power strip for the toaster, blender, and small TV/radio and nearly electrocuted myself, srsly.  I flipped the switch and lightning jumped at me from one of the open plugs.  SO SCARY, pero everything worked, so I found a rubber pot-holder and switched it back off.

I went back and unplugged EVERYTHING.  When Dulce came back after the torrential rains, we went through and checked everything again, with no change.  We called up the electric company (right down the street), and we were told someone was already checking it out.  I, of course, had a presentation/paper in Spanish the next day, so I ran out to the printer’s.

Cuando volví, Dulce was outside, on the side of the house closer to la panoramica, talking with a couple of chavos.  The three of them were standing at the far end of the driveway, next to what turned out to be a downed power cable.  A large vehicle of some sort had knocked it down and the combination of almost-connected-but-not wires and the mixing of the 220 and 110 cable made the plugs in the house start exploding.

And, somehow, aunque everything (except the microondas y radio, of course) checked out before, the TV was somehow burned up as well.

We didn’t get power that night, so we spent the night at Dulce’s mother’s house.  So ended day one without power.