Adam Crayons

District Conference

2009-06-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

I stayed home from school on Thursday, slept in, packt, and left in an ADO bus for Tuxtepec. This weekend was the rescheduled date of the Rotary District Conference, which was supposed to take place the first weekend of May, but was canceled due to hype about swine flu. They played Christmas with the Kranks on the way there. We arrived around 6 in the evening, and my host dad for the weekend came to pick me up. He was a short, younger man with braces, a lawyer. He lives with his mother and operates his law practice out of his house; in the waiting room, he has four framed reproductions of parts of the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

That night, I spent a few hours in my room, reading Borges' Ficciones in Spanish and writing down some varied thoughts, which turned out to be some rather interesting ones comparatively. Around 10, my host dad finally got back from some ambiguous errand, and we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant called La Casona. I got some delicious gooey green lasagna. There was some rather tacky but talented live music.

The next morning we didn't begin until 11, so I had a relaxed morning eating a delicious fruit feast and reading Borges. There was one overripe mango that kind of disgusted me, though. We went in taxi (the family has no car) to the Casa de Cultura, where the conference was held. The morning was full of opening ceremony bullshit, the presentation of the flag (with the requisite mediocre military band and group of girls who march liked fascists), etc. We were given free time to look at artesan booths; I made for the library, which is also a part of the Casa de Cultura.

Libraries in Mexico in my experience feel old, but not very old; they are from the 50s or so, I imagine, all skeletal metal shelves and carts. They also have a better selection than Cass City's library, perhaps. I feel like there was a small, highly cultured group of people at some point in or perhaps throughout the history of Mexico, who had very ambitious ideas about education, art, and things like libraries, and used their political influence to try to get these things installed in society as a whole. I feel like they failed entirely, but that there are numerous relics of their ambition evident in school textbooks, libraries, and in the sort of "enlightened" attitude in which some people here understand the world.

We were reunited after a long while to take a group picture. They made us wear the blazers, in the hot noonday sun. The Hottest? We were then bussed to a big hall at a hotel for lunch. I got a lackluster plate of steamed vegetables. After food, the adults left for Bigger and Better Business, and we stayed to learn a rather simple dance (swaying, and later walking in a line, and later holding hands and moving in and out) to Mexico en la Piel (the Mexican version of "American the Beauty," except that it is actually good). I stubbed my toe on a Thai girl's shoe and broke off the right half of my big toenail. It didn't actually break off, however, and every once in a while it would catch on something and that Great Pain. I have by now excised that nail bit entirely.

From there, we were bussed to a park and left there essentially alone for about an hour. At that point the adults arrived and planted a tree and took a lot of pictures of it and shook each others' hands a lot. They didn't involve us in this. We were then walked around the park to the stage, where we saw some speeches and the traditional Oaxacan "Flor de Piña" dance. They then bussed us back to the hotel to dine and have a sort of "kitschy middle-class adult" talent night. Imagine something white people would like. We did our dance, and then there was a surprise dance that Yana sang a song and we all ended up in the dance area pretending to dance salsa. That was pretty cool I suppose.

Saturday, the morning's fruit feast was an improvement on the previous day's, and I read more Borges. I think that the adult Rotarians didn't want to wake up early either; exchange students are of course notoriously lazy and slow and late-to-rise, but no one ever seems to adjust for that. In spite of Tuxtepec's too hot, those were very nice mornings. The morning was more conference bullshit, but the speakers were more interesting, inspirational people with good messages (seize the day, your attitude determines your happiness, help other people, give money kill polio, etc).

We headed to buses again to go to the Lienso Charro, which is where rodeo-esque events called Charreria are performed. An extremely busy young waiter served our table. When we finished eating, we went to see the event. My current host family lives in the same building as my host mom's brother, who works as a horse therapist. His daughter is a member of a Escaramuza team here, and I had went with them the previous weekend to Veracruz but the event got rained out. Thus, I already knew some of the team, but had never seen the event performed. Note that the wikipedia article claims the first 9 events are for men only, but I believe this isn't true; I think the women do all of the men's events as well as the escaramuza. They also ride side-saddle, which is really weird, isn't it? What is the logic behind that, anyway?

We were released to go spend the afternoon resting with our host families at that point. My host dad was at a VIPS eating with some friends, so I was taken there. They talked to me a bit about Rotary politics (apparently the current district governor, Carlos Vera Vidal, is irresponsibly mixing Rotary and politics and religion; he is a Priista and there were several almost explicitly Catholic events listed in the program, though I didn't end up seeing any of them). Then we went and took a walk downtown, and went to the market. He bought me some natural Oaxacan chocolate (for making hot chocolate) and a little wooden rabbit. I also bought some secret gifts for unknown people. We went home and rested for a few hours, and then went to a formal dinner dance in the same hotel hall.

We were served food on mirrors, which effectively doubled the quantities of everything. I ended up with some lackluster cooked vegetables. There was some business about choosing district queens. There were three of them: a district queen, chosen among the queens of each club; a Rotaract queen, and an exchange student queen. All were chosen by chance. Our queen was Beth, an Australian girl. Dinner came after the coronation ceremony, and there was this great group, a keyboard, violin, and accordion trio, who played some classic Eastern European music. I talked briefly with this great violinist afterwards, and headed him in the direction of A Hawk and a Hacksaw. He gave me his email address. The most productive exchange of the weekend, certainly.

A dance followed, and I, for some reason, I guess was tired of something or other, or expected we would be waiting less, went outside with some other kids and just sorta waited for the next three hours or so until we went home. I enjoy the fact that that sort of thing should never happen to me again now, now that I am free.

Sunday, we had closing ceremonies, all in the auditorium, and rather brief. The power kept going out. There was a parade of exchange students, which was kind of lackluster too. Amanda, our president exchange student (a joke) from Brazil, spoke a speech she had written and showed a sappy powerpoint, and some people started crying. I didn't really feel anything. Am hartless basterd?

We waited around for a while there, said goodbyes, and then I went home. I used the internest for a while, watched this cool new Hawk and a Hacksaw video, and slept a bit. Then the bus rides home; they played Life is Beautiful, which of course ranks among the best sad, powerful, beautiful movies, and also fumny, and then Perfect Stranger, plus an episode of "American Chopper." The Moon while we were leaving Tuxtepec was gorgeous, glowing an effusively golden orange. Is it possible to take pictures of the Moon with a digital camera and 4x optical zoom? How?

A Little Opera Recital

2009-05-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

We didn't have school on Friday. Perhaps no one had school on Friday? It was Teachers' Day.

In the evening, I went with my new (now 3rd, if you have lost track) host family, whom I had just moved in with the night before to an opera recital in the SIMAC (an engineers' club). The concert was given by a 19 year old girl (I believe) who had graduated from the school I am attending now, and is studying opera in the state capital of Jalapa. I don't really know anything about opera or singing, but to my ears, she seemed very good. She sang a few songs I didn't know by composers like Gounod and Puccini, and Gershwin's Summertime. There was just one of her (with her accompanist, of course), so the recital was short. Afterwards, everyone started talking and eating baked goods. I met a bunch of friends from school and we went outside to play on the playground.

When my family was getting ready to leave, Javier decided we were going to go out for coffee. I went got permission, and we piled too many people into Javier's car: Javier and Carla Alejandra in front, and me, Jonathan, Jonathan's brother, Laserre, and I in the back. We went to Italian Coffee, which is the standard meeting place for people our age to do things like this. They are a big chain and there are franchises all over the place. It's probably no good to support them, but it's a thing exchange students do here. Not that that means I do it, to be clear.

We went home around 11:30 PM.

San Pedro Soteapan

2009-05-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (May 3) we went to spend the day at a waterfall near San Pedro Soteapan. We were me and my host parents, Claire and her host family (her host mother is also our Counselor) and another family who had previously hosted Marlene, the Ahumada family.

The big waterfall sits at the head of a steep valley, such that one must descend a lengthy set of steep stairs to get to the valley floor. There are a number of small palapas (little thatched umbrellas, essentially, with benches and a small table of unfinished boards) on both sides of the river, and we got one for ourselves. After spending a few hours talking and eating the mountain of food we had carried down, Claire and Karina and I decided to go explore and swim.

Paty, my host mother, Doctor Guicho, Claire's host father, and Doctor Erasto, my host father drink some beers.Claire and Paty stand under a waterfall.

Paty, Paula (my Counselor), me, Karina, and Claire, after climbing halfway up a waterfall.

One of 5 stepped pools made to catch falling water; this is the one we went swimming in first. The water is ice cold, and the waterfall that fills the pool creates a natural massaging effect. From here we went to the main waterfall pool and swam across to the rocks beneath the outcropping visible in the photos above. The land there is composed of giant rocks that have fallen from the roof of the outcropping. From underneath that outcropping, the rim around the valley is extremely grandiose and impressive.
After swimming, we went back to the palapa for a while, then Claire and I went around taking pictures and climbing on rocks and such. Finally, Karina came looking for us and we set out to climb all the way back up to the parking area. The men (area natives who help tourists for money) in the parking lot, incidentally, were speaking Sierra Popoluca.

Claire has changed her ticket and will be going home on Thursday. I will be changing houses again sometime this week, and Claire and I are both supposedly going to give our presentations this week as well.

House-Family

2009-05-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

I should expand this post later.

El Tajin and Tuxpan

2009-04-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

This past weekend (24-26 of April), we had an obligatory meeting for all the exchange students in the district in Tuxpan, Veracruz. Tuxpan is some 11 hours from Mina, so we left at 4 AM and didn't arrive until 2 PM the next day. We (the exchange students from Mina and Coatza) were the first to arrive, and so we got some extra time in the pool before the others arrived. That was all we did that first afternoon, sit around the pool at a hotel, eating and talking. Around 8 that night, we were given shirts and sent out with our host families for the weekend.

The four of us were assigned to stay with some Rotarians from Tuxpan, who have sent both of their children on exchange to Brazil. The younger, a girl, is still there now. I am on the left, Oliver (Wu Pin-Han) from Taiwan, Denis from Belgium, and Lukas from Brazil is on the right.
The first night, we went out for dinner to a meat roastery, where they gave me a big salad covered in hot melted cheese, and plenty of (Queso Fundido? - cheese, melted or something) with guacamole and tortillas. They also had delicious deserts.

Saturday we were bussed out to the ruins at El Tajin. They are Totonaco ruins. Tajin is the god of rain and thunder, equivalent to the Mayan Chaac or Nahuatl Tlaloc. Instead of writing down what the excellent guide told us (most of which is in the wikipedia article) I am going to talk about the romantic ideas I get from these places. I suppose the whole "European explorer stumbling into a vast, overgrown ancient city" thing is fairly stereotypical, but it is still striking. I also wonder how a city like this is abandoned, and after that, how it is percieved by the descendents of its inhabitants and the inhabitants of other Totonaco cities that survived it for hundreds of years. I can't think of any contemporary example that compares. It seems rather post-apocalyptic.

After a short tour of the ruins (these sort of events are always hurried and brief, because exchange students are typically somewhat apathetic to them, and always move slowly and tire quickly), we went outside the site proper into the impromptu trinket market outside. There is a small amphitheatre with a huge pole, use for the Voladores de Papantla ceremony. Incidentally, the marketpeople all sold vanilla and coffee, which are grown there. I had tried to get the whole dance on video, but apparently didn't actually press the shoot button. So you can find something on youtube, I'm sure. It is very impressive, as the pole is extremely high and sort of sways a bit with all their moving around. One of the dancers actually dancers and plays his little flute/drum while standing on top of the pole (imagine doing this on top of a telephone pole, but with a much taller pole).

We were returned to our host families then, and stayed with them a few hours to rest and bathe, and then were delivered to a disco on the river in downtown Tuxpan. Stupid discos. It seems like practically all the exchange students smoke now (though probably only 75% do) and the music is bad and too loud to carry on a conversation. I sat with the son of a Tuxpan Rotarian and shouted the whole night about politics and videogames.

The next morning we were brought to a Naval Base, the center of communications for the Mexican Navy in the Gulf. They showed us some propaganda videos and gave us tours of some rather unimpressive frigates. They also gave us some pastries and agua de jamaica at the end though, so it was cool.

After that, we walked to a hotel and ate and talked until it was time for our buses to leave. We were also sent on a completely boring and non-plussing boat tour while we waited for our food. The food was delicious, though; green chili peppers (not spicy ones), onions, and corn cooked in some sort of white sauce, to be eaten in tortillas.

Winston from Taiwan.

They handed out white surgical masks for us to wear on the bus ride home, to protect us from the swine influenza. I guess I don't need to explain that because it is a big deal in the news? They have canceled the Ruta Colonial, the second of the two big trips we take, and no permissions will be given to travel at all. School is canceled until May 6, too. Probably more. I have little to do.

Scuba Diving in Veracruz

2009-04-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Easter weekend, we went to Veracruz to to stay with my older host brother, Erastito, who is going to college there. We didn't really do anything at all the whole weekend, except that on Saturday, I went scuba diving. I went with a company called Veracruz Adventures. We left around 9:30 AM, after waiting for all the people who got there late (practically everyone). There were about 14 of us; two instructors, two lithe young boys who took care of the equipment on the boat, and all the customers. We drove out into the Caribbean for maybe twenty minutes and arrived at a buoy where a boat from another company was anchored (or whatever they do to stay in place; I think they just attach to a line there that is attached to a sort of permanent anchor on the bottom, but I am not sure).

By this time me and an older woman who reminded me of my mom were rather seasick, and they told me to jump into the water right away, and then the two boys handed me down all my equipment in the water. I am an idiot and got hit in the leg with my air tank, and had to work that out for a little while. It is a good thing our training included putting on and taking off equipment in the water, because that is what I had to do for this first dive.

Backing up a little bit, I went to a beginning Scuba diving course this summer to take advantage of any opportunities I might have to go diving in the Gulf. It turned out I had to make those opportunities myself, but that is for the best. There is also some question that this is against Rotary rules, but no one said anything about it before I went, and so I guess if it is and you are a Rotarian, yell at me? I hope to do it again, anyway.

After everyone finally got suited up and in the water, we partnered off. I ended up with one of the instructors, mostly since all the other people came in pairs; either married couples or father-son. We got lost from the group on the first dive, as visibility was quite poor and we hadn't followed the line down with the rest, and had to come back up and ask for directions from the deck boys (I assume there is some other, much more appropriate term for them?). We did finally arrive, at an incredibly impressive coral-covered sunken ship, rife with big tropical fishes. I am no-good writer at this point, and these experiences are really difficult to communicate, and I apologize for that.

We had to come up soon after arriving, because my air ran out frighteningly quickly. Incidentally, we were 80 ft underwater, which means the air is used up faster. This is because the pressure is higher at that depth, and more air has to come out to fill the same volume. My certification only allows me to go to 60 ft, so don't tell my instructor, please. :)

After coming up, I stayed in the water as long as I could to avoid getting seasick again, but finally I did get into the boat. I took a drink of cold water, and then immediately and quite unexpectedly threw up off the side of the boat. No one seemed to pay much heed. The other woman who had gotten seasick had also already thrown up, and from that point we both felt much better.

We continued out into the Caribbean, towards a big black object visible on the horizon. It was really unclear what it was, even when we got close to it. Apparently, a ship had sunk out there, or just broken down, and I guess the land must be high there, such that now, the upper parts of the ship are visible above the water. It is rather impressive. I was afraid to lose or damage my camera, so I didn't bring it, but I would have taken pictures. It was a cargo ship, one of those that has a giant metal rectangle visible above the deck, and that is what you could see above the horizon.

That wasn't why were there, however. For this second dive, for some reason I never figured out, we divided into two groups, and I decided that I would wait for the second group, as I was tired. I am sometimes a very foolish and oblivious person, so I got cold in the shade and laid down for a nap in the sun. I didn't think anything of this at the time, but my wetsuit was shorter than I had expected and didn't cover my legs (I had put on sunscreen on my face and arms, but I had expected the wetsuit to cover my legs). They are still red now, after a week, and stung horribly for the next few days. Certainly the worst sunburn I have had in my life. Everyone else had proper length wetsuits, and it was cold enough in the water to warrant them, especially at depth, though I was down there I didnt notice it as much as when I was hanging on the line waiting to dive. I am getting ahead of myself, though.

The first group came back, and by this time I felt much better, well-rested and no longer nauseous. I got my equipment on in the boat and did the entry where you fall backwards into the water, from a position seated on the edge of the boat. I actually don't remember practicing this ever, though maybe we did? Nor do I remember what it is called.

After I was suited up and in the water, I waited as the rest of the group got ready, hanging on the line on which we were to guide ourselves down to the reef. The water was rather chilly at this point, especially without sleeves on my wetsuit. We did finally go down, and with the activity and the distracting beauty of the reef, the feeling went away. I went around following the owner and main guide, along with my partner. The owner was filming with an underwater video camera, and knew to find the most interesting things. We saw all sorts of typical tropical fish, the little blue glowy kind, angel fish, that sort of thing, as well as a fish that camouflaged itself with the sand on the bottom and three gigantic moray eels, hiding down in there holes and snapping at us languidly. I mention these things to give some idea of the cool things we see, but the really impressive thing was the reef itself as a whole. It is excessively exquisite, and I cannot given even the slightest sense of it at all. The beauty, diversity, and seeming creativity of the natural world can't be expressed anywhere as clearly and higly concentrated as they are in a coral reef.

My air also ran out quite quickly this time, though I was down a bit longer than before. I was completely loath to go up, and my partner surfaced with me but sent me swimming back to the ship and went down. The ship was by now rather far away, as we had of course been swimming away from it, and so I was stuck with what is easily the worst part of scuba diving (except perhaps seasickness?): a surface swim. I don't really know why, but swimming at the surface seems infinitely more tiring than doing the same distance at the bottom.

If this entry is noticeably more thorough (tedious) than the previous ones, it is only because the event is more recent and I remember more of it.

Incidentally, I slept more in school today than I ever have in my life, or even thought was possible: 6 straight hours. I was awake for only 40 minutes the whole day.

Catemaco

2009-04-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

The 29th of April the Capitan Pablo Rios drove me and my host family to Catemaco for a Rotary convention. Memo and I did not enter the convention itself; instead, we went to eat, he took a nap in the car while I read Frankenstein, and then we took a boat tour of the lagoon there, which is a tourist destination for the area.

The day was exceedingly gloomy and dreary, a mood perhaps heightened by reading Frankenstein (which takes place partly in the north of Scotland, also apparently a very dreary place, and is a very good book, incidentally).

The major sight to see in the lagoon is the Isla de Monos, or Island of Monkeys. Everyone threw peanuts at them and they came down to us. Some of them even got into the boat.

This is another island, a bird perch. There are hundreds of birds there, shitting and raising children. The smaller black birds are extremely common here, even more so than pigeons, and seem to be some sort of raven. The larger black and white birds are herons, as are the even larger bluish grey birds.

Jicacal

2009-04-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

The 21 and 22 of March, a number of exchange students came to Mina to join up with a larger group of Rotarians and their children from the surrounding cities. We drove up through the relatively hilly countryside towards the mountains and the beach to a place called Jicacal, a tourist destination beach populated by Paisanos and scavenger dogs. The objective of the trip was to clean the beach, though that seems to have been a false pretext, as there is some doubt about whether the beach was cleaner before we got there or after we left.

I went with my host dad and brother, and an exchange student from Belgium named Denis. On the way there (the trip is about two hours by car and fifteen minutes by boat. We decided to drive.), however, the back left tire was punctured by a gigantic screw in the road, so we drove back to the nearest town (Tatahuicapan), still quite close, and they set to work to repair it. However, when the mechanic took the tire off, he broke three of the five lugs that hold the tire on, so my host dad spent the afternoon taking buses and taxis around to different small towns looking for replacements. This was really fine; the three of us just sat there and ate and watched things all day, and we got out of doing any work all weekend.

Denis and our invisible tire.

My host father, El Doctor Erasto, and brother Memo.

Me posing in front of people leaving church.

Finally my host dad did manage to find the parts and everything was straightened out, and so we got there just as the few people who did any work were finishing up, and dinner was ready.

This is the view looking out from the beach where we slept at night, at sunset. The stars were the most beautiful and worthwhile part of the whole weekend, but it is very difficult to take pictures of them. A few of us from Mina sat around a campfire and dined on oranges and bananas and pears, listening to Veracruzano guitar music. Very nice. On the other beach, the Rotarians and other exchange students were drinking and yelling and singing poorly.

Having went to bed fairly early that night, I decided to get up and see the sunrise, around 5:30. I crossed the little strip of land where from the beach were we were staying (from which one sees the sunset) to the beach on the Caribbean (from which one sees the sunrise.) To my surprise, I found a group of kids there. They were all children of Rotarians from Acayucan, who had not slept all night and had decided to stay up to see the sunrise. I stayed there with them until we got hungry, and then returned to my campsite. Incidentally, the firepit where the Rotarians had been the night before was surrounded by empty bottles of tequila and beer, and I dont know as if anyone ever did clean that up or not.

We spent the day there on the beach, eating, chasing shade, and taking turns on Capitan Pablo's jetski, and went home fairly early.

A really big fly-type insect that dove upon us around midday.

Puebla

2009-04-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

A week or two after Carnaval de Veracruz, we went on a school trip to Puebla, a large city near the center of Mexico. The trip was sponsored by the UDLAP, or Universidad de Las Americas Puebla, and thus we spent the majority of the day there.

The architectural style is Mexican Colonial, and there are gardens everywhere. This first one was full of cacti.

A group of my classmates sitting down while waiting in line to register.

Juan Omar and I

Another garden with many cacti.

While we were waiting to register, I went off to take pictures in the garden. On the side opposite the cacti, there were plots of flowers, as well as a sculpture, a fountain, a big tree, and some wheat. There were perhaps some thousands of visiting students there that day, and an interesting thing happened to me while I was taking these pictures. A girl I of course did not know, approached me and talked to me for a few minutes. She had become interested when she saw me taking pictures of flowers.

After taking a tour late in the afternoon, I stumbled upon this marching band performance. They are a group of middle and high school students in the area who come to the campus to rehearse. They are apparently famous in Mexico, supposedly one of the best in the country. I was not very impressed, but that is normal here. From here, however, I met an engingeering student in the University who plays violin in the orchestra, and was directed by him to a tour of the music facilities. These were also not very impressive, and their percussion studio consisted of two timpani, a two marimbas, a xylophone, and a few sundry parts of a drumset.

I spent the afternoon cooling off and immersing myself in this beautiful library, which surprisingly contains mostly English books. I met another girl there who is from Australia, a student there who I guess has half Mexican parentage. Once we were getting ready to leave, I went to buy a delicious strawberries and cream paleta with Juan Omar, and we got on the bus and went to the mall. The mall was lame, in that it didnt have a bookstore. It was very upscale and everything was expensive and fancy, though.

I got struck with allergies during the day, and was feeling fairly bad during the ride home. The next few days I recovered from a cold and then endured a week of aggravated heartburn.

Carnaval de Veracruz

2009-04-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

The weekend of February 20 or so, I went with my new host family (which will be covered in due time in their own entry) to the Carnaval of Veracruz. Carnaval should be familiar to some of you as the famous event in Rio de Janeiro, or if not that, then realize that it is along the same lines as Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

This trip, I stayed with three sisters of my new host dad, one of whom is married with two little daughters. They are all extremely kind women, and all of them look like each other very much. They also cook well. I shared a bed here with Memo, my new host brother, and the bed was also very comfortable and cozy.

Carnaval itself is nearly a week long, and consists of a lot of drinking. There are concerts scheduled nearly every night, and a lot of cheap beer. The main event, however, and the only thing I actually saw, was the parade. I had actually expected something completely different, but it turns out the event has been rather corrupted over time, or perhaps I am simply an idealist. I had expected a giant street party, something like what a Reclaim The Streets event actually is. However, things are not so; the parade route, which is the main street that runs along the beach, is lined with bleachers. Coming at the head of the parade were a large group of riot police, who got in numerous fights with drunks as they cleared the street and moved everyone with tickets back into the bleachers. When the parade itself arrived, it was accompanied by Military Police (or perhaps they were just sailors? They were dressed like sailors) on both sides, armed with big plastic tubes.

The parade was not exactly what an American would imagine as a parade, but was not drastically different either. There were several types of entries, which repeated themselves over and over in random series for nearly 4 hours.

1. Official Government Floats - decorated with big constucted things and fog machines and people (typically children) dancing to salsa music.

2. Salsa schools - A minivan or truck carrying a sound system comes first, followed by a group of uniformed salsa dancers.

3. Batucada - What I gather is the traditional Brazilian Carnaval thing, a group of students (almost entirely boys) and some older men marching (in the loosest sense of the term) with different size drums. The rhythms are very fast and aggressive and loud. Imagine a normal marching band drumline, but the size of the entire band.

4. Normal Marching Bands - Mediocre for US standards, at best. They seemed to be making little effort to keep time or stay on the right foot. But I suppose that shouldn't really matter?

5. Sponsored Floats - There were only a few of these, and they came at the end. I am not sure what the relationship exactly is between Sol beer and Carnaval, but the general appearance is that Sol sets the theme and such for the event, and its float came last as a sort of crowning piece. The point of the float is to showcase women dancing in skimpy costumes (something fairly common throughout the whole event), and supposedly they are the most attractive of the event as well. The other sponsored floats are from Coca-Cola, with big soda bottles and figures and characters made of foam or something and covered in flashing lights.

After the event was over, things began to deteriorate; little parties sprang up along the length of the Malecon (the beach street) and everywhere stank of beer, which was flowing freely in the streets.

District Breakfast Weekend

2009-04-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

The 6th to the 8th of February, the last weekend I was with my first host family, the Dazas, I went with the Police Capitan Pablo Rios and two of the other three exchange students in Mina, Claire from France, and Inah, the Brazilian girl who arrived in January. There is also little to record about this trip, and nor are there photos. However, the character and behavior of the Capitan seem of some passing interest. He is a Federal Highway Policeman, and apparently as such earns a respectable salary. Always very confident and self-assured, he is one of those men who seem to have everything thought out and, though they admit they don't understand the world, at least everything in it has its place and its value for them (many Rotarians are this way, especially with young people, and especially with exchange students).

During the trip from Mina to Veracruz, we never once payed a highway toll. The first one, in Acayucan, we drove the wrong way up an entrance ramp and reentered the highway on the other side, having a policeman there let us through the barricade (he was given a coin for his trouble). All the rest, we simply drove through quickly behind the car in front of us before the gate closed. Once in Veracruz, we frequently went the wrong way down one way streets (by accident) and passed red lights. The thing that is in any way notable about all this is that he is a policeman, and a man who has everything figured out. As such, he frequently expounds on the virtues of the rule of law and that sort of thing.

The weekend itself was rather uninteresting. We stayed with the family of Pablo's godchildren, who were extremely nice people with a nice comfortable bed (I always sleep more deeply and cozily in these situations). We spent most of our time at the beach with a few other exchange students.

Another note: Pablo paid for everything the entire weekend for all of us from Mina and any other exchange student who was around. Since he went with us on the Ruta Maya, he has gotten along well with all of us and they are very familiar with him. He frequently makes invitations to them and is almost certainly the reason (along with Claire, his host daughter for most of this time) they have come to Mina so often.

Cordoba and Orizaba

2009-04-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Back the time ago, perhaps in January, I went with my first host family to visit an Aunt in Cordoba. There is not really anything to say about it, but here are some pictures:

The woman who made the picadas we had for breakfast, outside the market.

A great pile of chile peppers inside the market.

Aforementioned Aunt and her skittish dog.

After spending the morning in chilly Cordoba, we went to the house of some Cousins, with whom we went to Orizaba to see this valley and a hydroelectric plant and such there. There are 500 steps, which we went down and up, essentially (though not in such a direct route). This is a mural we found at the top of those steps.

Brambly tree.

It began to drizzle just as we were arriving there, and by the time we were leaving, everything was coated with this fine dew.

A butterfly.

Bedewed flower.

Ants.

Hello Christmas

2008-12-25T05:10:00.000-08:00

I take a moment in the predawn light of 7 AM Mexico to record Noche Buena - Good Night, or Christmas Eve.

Having become nocturnal about a week ago, I awoke at 5 PM today, ate a bowl of delicious granola with soy milk, and made no-bake cookies with my host mom. They turned out well, except that we lost a considerable portion of the batch to the Dry Crumblies. They'll be good toppings for something, like ice cream, anyway. After pissing away a few hours reading Sophie's World, I went to Mass with my family. This was the second time in my life I ever went to church, and I went only upon my father's strong recommendation. I assure you that my father is rarely wrong (otherwise I probably wouldn't have taken his advice) but he is still sometimes wrong. He was wrong tonight. Mass was boring, hot, stuffy, and had little redeeming value, aside from its brevity.

After Mass, however, we came home, accompanied by several other family members, including some aunts and uncles and both grandmothers. We ate pasta and they ate turkey, they drank tequila and whisky (none of the girls here drink, so why is it so odd that I don't drink? Girls are essentially half the population, aren't they?), and they made me play marimba solos three times over. After a few hours of discussion and new arrivals, which always warranted new marimba solos, they started dancing. I left soon after (around 3 AM, I believe), but they continued until almost 7 AM.

This, you will all realize, is a Long Time to dance, and it is not like what you probably did on Christmas Eve, which was probably to go to sleep early so you could wake up early and open presents. In any other year (any year I haven't become nocturnal over winter break), I would be waking up within the next few hours. Instead, I will probably sleep through most of Christmas day, waking up (I predict) around 6 PM. The sun is rising, and the birds are singing.

Guanajuato

2008-12-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

Over the last weekend, a little more than half the exchange students from my district, including myself, went to the city of Guanajuato for the 2nd Annual National Gathering of Exchange Students in Mexico. Guanajuato is a city of about 150,000 and is the capital of the state of Guanajuato, located slightly north of Mexico City.

December 3 - Claire, Marlene, Capi and I left from Mina at 5:30 PM or so, in an ADO bus. ADO is really the only way to get from one city to another without driving there yourself. They are fairly nice buses, as buses go. On the way there, we watched "The Prince and Me 2: The Royal Wedding" and selections from a Steve Irwin show, in which he and several zookeepers moved a number of crocodiles back and forth among zoos and cages; notable if only for this approximate sentence: "I've got to say, Connie is the cleverest crocodile I've ever met!" which I shared with Connie upon our arrival in Orizaba later that night.

We arrived in Veracruz rather early; around 9:30 PM or so. We waited with other exchange students in a big parking lot outside a football stadium or something. I finished up Cosmos by Carl Sagan while sitting there, waiting for everyone to arrive and for the bus. After finishing, I started blocking out the floodlights illuminating the parking lot with my raised arms and squinting at the sky until I could make out a few of the brightest stars. The bus came, it smelt like shit and piss and cleaning solution as always, and we set out for Orizaba. The stars were particularly bright and clear that night, and I spent the entire trip gazing up into them as best I could. Orion is the only constellation I recognize.

Arriving in Orizaba, I saw Yana (our chairwoman)'s house, with a lot of white moving Christmas lights, and the park full of trees on the left. I went outside and stood in the cold and helped load boxes. It is cold there, because it is in mountains, but it is not really cold; just cold enough to be exhilarating. The Orizaba exchange students and Yana boarded the bus, and we set out for Guanajuato at about 2 AM.

December 4 - We woke up at a small chilly restaurant I believe was in Toluca - though I'm not certain. We ate cold bread and quesadillas or eggs and hot chocolate or orange juice. After breakfast, we watched 21 (about those MIT kids who played blackjack) until we got to the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in the state of Michoacan.

The bus took us to the top of a hill, at the top of a small town. After the parking lot, however, we passed through another "town" uphill to the Welcome Center. I am not sure it was actually a town, because I believe the people there lived down in the town below, and the buildings up there (all small one-room wooden boxes open to the street, unsealable) seemed to be just storefronts and restaurants. All the restaurants cooked on tiny black woodstoves shaped like half-barrels, with a dull silver smokestack lazily exhaling just above the food.

Numerous groups of very young children followed us and sang songs about love. Some sang well, but some did not. Others tried to sell a few random things, like gum and candy. There were dogs all about, as always, and even a donkey. Claire bought a styrofoam cup of blackberries from someone I didn't see, and I resolved to buy one on the way back down.

The trail up the hill from the welcome center was something like 630 steps, although near the top there are no longer actual steps - you are left with nothing more than a steep path. There are no butterflies near the bottom, but about halfway up you begin to see their trampled, dead wings lying in the dust, and then gradually the concentration increases. The trees along the way were gigantic, thin cedars (I believe), and in general the area looked just like Michigan in the summertime. It was warm and sunny, and the journey was tiring - we took frequent rests, and the group got entirely strung out along the path.

At the end of our climb, we reached this excessively idyllic meadow. We all collapsed on the ground, hoping butterflies would overcome their shyness and come to visit us. No one wanted to leave, but eventually we were made to continue into the forest. On the way, I talked to the man in the last picture, who was in the area for work and made the random decision to trek up the mountain in his work clothes. He spoke good, funny English.

This was the time the butterflies started to get thick. It was frustrating for those of us trying to take pictures because they were always big enough and plentiful for us to see, but they didn't show up in pictures until we got here.

And here, about 5 minutes into the forest, was the real thing. None of us had realized that it was going to get better, but here it was. They are all Monarchs, migrated from Canada and the US, and apparently they are attracted by fungi. The first photo there is a Monarch sitting on a rope next to two fungi put there to attract them for tourists. The second are quite normal tree branches, covered in butterflies until they are black and thick as beehives. And finally, Jade, with a butterfly on her lip. In this part of the forest, they are no longer skittish, and deliberately landed on us. Of course, everyone wanted photos, and they were extremely docile for those as well. One could pick them up by the wings or proffer a finger-perch, and put them wherever was deemed best for the twin ends of art and silliness.

Passing back through the meadow, we met this shy flock of sheep.

I was one of the last to come back down, and while doing so my legs began to tremble, threatening to fail me before I reached the bus. However, I got to the welcome center, rested a while, and Connie and I headed off in search of the cheapest blackberries. We purchased a big cup for $2 and ate them with lunch in a little restaurant there along the path.

That night, we arrived in Guanajuato late, around 10:30 PM. The "ice breaker" was already nearly finished by then, and I managed to avoid it almost completely. I met my roommates and promptly went to sleep, declining a late-night dinner from Claire at midnight. My roommates were Paco, from Brazil, Sam, from Taiwan, and Alex, from The Netherlands, with whom I shared a bed.

December 5 - We awoke around 6:30, had breakfast in a large gallery with all the exchange students present - some two or three hundred - and took buses downtown to a little park. There, we formed into groups by country and took a boisterous stroll through charming Guanajuato. The city is gorgeous, and the street we took was perhaps especially romantic. All the houses are different colors, of course, and they all have little balconies with wrought-iron railings that support little flowerpots.

Brianna and I in the hotel. Note my muttonchops - may they rest in peace.

I fell in love with these little window porches and took lots of pictures of people in them

A Theatre

At the end of our parade, we were seated in a bleachers in the sun, in front of a big yellow church. The Rotarians made speeches and kept us there for about an hour, until we were moved down the street to the University of Guanajuato. Bob Sanchez was there, by the way. That was interesting.

The University of Guanajuato steps, covered in exchange students

After the photo, an intelligent ice cream man sold out his delicious home-made ice cream to hot exchange students. I bought a vanilla paleta (like an "ice pop" except made with cream) for 50 cents. From the University, they moved us gradually down into another park, but we got stuck because exchange students move glacially. And further, they kept mixing us up when we arrived to places and insisting we divide up into ditricts again when we left. Anyway, while we waited to continue, Connie and I spent like half an hour in a tiny one-room bookstore. It was the most wonderful bookstore, simply because it had been so long since I'd seen one. They had a ton of classics and such, books worth reading, as well as a big shelf of local Guanajuato authors published by the University. Connie and I vowed to return when we had free time.

Finally, we arrived at some city buses that had been procured for the occasion, buses that forced half of us to ride standing up, hanging on the rails. Our guide shouted over the loud engine, little tidbits about various statues and theaters and churches. The main thing is that Guanajuato took in some writer or intellectual from Spain during the Civil War or Franco's despotic rule (don't remember which), and he was an expert on Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote). So, in return for what Guanajuato had done for him, he started a Cervantes museum. And thusly, the city is now home to the Cervantino, which is like a monthlong medieval culture fair, with art and constant performances in churches and theaters and in the streets and such.

We ended our tour in a distant part of the city, in front of a VIPS. I have never eaten at VIPS, but I assume it's shit, since it's a chain restaurant, and no one really seems to like it. Anyway, we didn't eat there. They sent us off for half an hour while they prepared our food, and Connie and Eika and I ended up just across the street in this beautiful tiny cafe. They ordered coffee and cake while I ransacked the bookshelf. We found many old books, many beautiful books, and a few books with little notes stuck in the pages. They were mostly Spanish, but there were books in English, French, Portuguese, and Japanese as well. Eika read in Japanese and Connie in Spanish, while I made sure not to miss anything.

Going back to the first shelf, I found something I had missed the first time, a copy of "Vita Brevis" in Spanish, a modern novel written as a response to Augustine's Confessions, from the point of view of his lover. Incidentally, it is by the same author (Jostein Gaardner) who wrote Sophie's World, a book we've been required to read in Philosophy class here. It was warped and moldy (which gave us the tantalizing idea that it had been in the flood a century before, but it was written far too recently for that), and had a card inside with these quotes on it:

"When you were born you cried and the whole world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the whole world cries and you rejoice."

"Ma'am, God is going to come in and tell you how to get well."
"Oh, wonderful!"
God entered the room and said:
"All you have to do is love, accept, forgive, and choose to be happy."

After leaving the cafe, our guide guided us to the courtyard we were to eat lunch in. There were several big white canopies set up to shield us from the sun, and dozens of circular tables set with white clothes and pitchers of horchata, jamaica, or limonada. We sat with Yana and Flor and Capi, and Marlene and Claire, and had a hard time getting food. It arrived to our table last, and they had shit for vegetarians - I ended up with two little plates of pasta and bread.

A napping Koala Bear

Connie and I didn't bring our pins and cards, and so during the time after lunch, which had been designated for pin and card swapping, I somehow convinced her to be a meek, lazy person like myself, and come lie in the grass and watch the moon with me. She climbed this tree, and then we laid down and she educated me about Australian politics. At one point, a bunch of kids from our district ran over and dogpiled us, then quickly left. Later, a little ladybug arrived, and we held an impromptu photo shoot.

The two best results of our ladybug photo shoot

After that afternoon in the courtyard, we were returned to the hotel. I had a short nap, and then we were taken to wait outside, at the end of a giant line of exchange students being taken in groups of about 75 or so up a set of stairs and into a network of alleys behind and above the main streets. We were led by a group of what I suppose you'd call troubadors. We stopped in several places along the way, and they performed songs. It was very quaint and nice. I wore a scarf that I stole from Clara last year.

Candy Store

After the alley tour, or "Callejoneada," which included a passage through the narrow "Kiss Alley," we were sent into this tiny candy store to try sweets typical of the region. After that, we were siphoned out into a large plaza to wait for buses to come back and take us to a disco. They arrived, and we arrived, and they gave us shitty food in plastic bags, and then I got to go back to the hotel and sleep because I hate discos.

A legitimate ad campaign by the only major bread company in Mexico

Samn Johnson's Australian Doppelganger

December 6 - They took us all to a gigantic sports complex. They were originally only going to have those who signed up play, but I guess they changed their minds and decided to make it mandatory, only revealing later that "they couldn't obligate us to do these things." For me, it made no difference, because I snuck out of it anyway, and sat and read Joseph Conrad's "Youth" next to three Thai girls. Later I met a Brazilian, and then we ate more shit plastic bag food before heading back to the hotel.

At the hotel, we had a short time for napping, then we had to learn La Bamba and then perform it immediately after. After all the districts performed their bit (most of which were performances of "Mexico en la piel," which is pretty much like America the Beautiful for Mexico), we went back to our rooms to nap again and change into "formal attire." We ate a mediocre dinner and then we had a "gala dance," which was essentially a disco in the gala room with formal clothes. They played reggaeton. Fuck reggaeton. They also wouldn't let us leave without specific permission from our chairmen. I went to my room, watched the stars, and watched Hellboy on TV because I had felt like watching a movie. I slept late, when the others came back from dancing.

December 7 - Sunday, I saw Brianna at breakfast and finally got a chance to talk to her. We had a big fancy ceremony, a bunch of people made poor speeches, and we all got into buses by district to go to the Mummy museum and never saw each other again.

Guanajuato

The Museum was in a distant part of the city, a poorer, newer, drier part of the city. Mummies:

A mummy?

After the mummies, we were carried back into the center to eat at a cool music cafe/buffet, and from there we all split of every which way. Connie and Eika and I head off with no directions to find our little bookstore. She claimed I was a genius when my Taoist technique for finding a place led us there with no detours, though I truly had no idea where I was going. For those of you who don't know, this pretty much just means walking where you feel like it. I followed a few particularly appealing alleyways, and let the intuition of my memory take me there. You all know to trust your intuition, don't you? It's a real thing, and it is usually right.

The bookstore was inhabitated this time by the same woman as before and a man. The man recommended easy and good books for us to read in Spanish, and I ended up buying six books, mostly by Guanajuato authors, for $20. We moved on down the street past the University steps, and they found a little postcard shop. I, however, returned to the steps to talk to English speaking people. The first group were Rotarians, on a dental mission, from northern Indiana. The second were a hippy-esque couple with a little boy. The third was a University exchange student from Vancouver studying design, with his visiting family.

After them, I met up with the girls and we continued down the street to an art cinema/art gallery, which was closed, and we didn't want to spend the last of our time in a French movie. The building itself was gorgeous, however.

We continued down the streets, deciding we were looking for a market. We passed through several parks, including the big one in front of the theater pictured above, and also in front of that church with the exquisite front. We talked to a painter there, a middle-aged woman selling her works. She told us her son had gone on exchange to Germany, and that she had hosted several exchange students that year. We moved on, down into a random series of streets, again without directions. This time Connie knew where she was going, by some Taoist intuition, and we arrived at a market that I don't think either of us were intending to end up at. It was a big building with a second-floor mezzanine around the edge and a lot of fruit and vegetable stands in the center. We bought a lot of produce for snacks - two guavas, a yellow pepper, an apple for Eika, a bag of grapes (which didn't turn out to be any good), and a peach. We ate in the streets and went searching for a cafe.

We ended up sitting outside in a little cafe in a little park. I ordered apple-cinnamon tea and some extremely sweet crepes, and the girls had coffee and alcohol. Two tables near us were occupied by English speakers, and they were the only ones there for most of the night. The closer one was an extremely talkative American, who kept explaining things in a rather pedantic way to his two European companions. The others were black and white pair of college roboticists from UPenn, there for a robotics competition. I went to talk to them, but not the middle-aged guys.

After we ate and drank our fill, and gave away our bad grapes to little begging children who tried to sell us gum several times, we went to the meeting place in a taxi. There, we boarded the buses and headed home. Connie and I were perhaps the only ones talking for most of the night - everyone was fairly tired. I felt moderately bad by that point, and so I spent the conversation with my eyes closed, drifting into and out of sleep, in a state of mild pain-induced nauseous from my headache. Connie was the best and rubbed my neck for me for far longer than she could have been expected to, and we talked about a number of things I don't believe I've ever talked about to other people before.

A Stunning Photograph

My walk home from school and assorted others

2008-12-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

This is just a normal business. Observe the architecture and color scheme, and compare to any local business where you are.

Neat graffiti

Dalid in silly glasses

A random pink and blue house

Dog

A blue and pink school, just down the street from mine

Church down the street from school

Dog

A stunning example of mutualism in nature: this bonnet-bearing turtle carries its plant away from predators and ensures it gets sun and water. In return, the plant shades the turtle and provides it with stimulating conversation. Note the turtle's booties.

A house

Magazine stand

Balloon boy

Old building

Hotel Central

Colors

Milk boxes reused as planters near school

Still life with dessicated orange

The same picture, from behind and upside down

Further extrapolation of said dessicated orange

Still life with trash and ants

A praying hands and salsa packet I found near the trash outside of school

Facebook Bandwidth Heist 2008: Ruta Maya Photos

2008-11-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

I apologize that it was impossible to get these in any kind of order - if you're interested, you should read the blog first and then go back through and find pictures for certain things, so it actually makes sense. Either way, I imagine this will aid your imaginations quite a bit. I didn't realize it would cut the pictures off on the right side, but there seems to be nothing I can do about it, so realize that all you have to do is click on any picture to see the whole thing.
Cathedral, San Cristobal

2nd Cathedral, San Cristobal

Palenque

Tulum

Cancun

Tulum

Cancun

Chichen Itza

Campeche

Campeche Plaza

Campeche Plaza Cathedral

Cenote

Tulum

Crocodile in the Canyon of the Sumidero

Gate into Tulum

Agua Azul

Palenque

Hotel in Palenque, with mural barely visible in doorway

Palenque

Hotel in Palenque interior

Monte Alban

Steinar from Iceland, Luise from Belgium, and me in silly glasses at Monte AlbanMonte Alban

Monte Alban

Oaxaca

Hotel in Oaxaca interior

Landscape in Oaxaca

Landscape near Orizaba

Monte Alban

View from Monte Alban

Monte Alban

Someplace in Oaxaca

Overlook of Oaxaca

Palenque

Agua Azul

Macaws at Xcaret

El Canyon del Sumidero

Tulum

Landscape behind Mezcal Factory in Oaxaca

Group picture in Mitla

Does anyone know how to describe this phenomenon?

Mitla, with me standing oddly at the top

El Arbol del Tule

Connie, entombed

El Arbol del Tule

Mezcal

Tour Guide for Mitla and Monte Alban, at Mitla

Tree roof at first restaurant

Mitla Cathedral

Cactus forest in Puebla or Oaxaca

Landscape in Oaxaca

Agua Azul

Man-sized leaves at Palenque

Agua Azul

Palenque

Tour guide for Palenque

Hotel in Palenque interior

Flamingo at Xcaret

Macaws at Xcaret

Our hotel in Cancun

Beach at Cancun

Exchange students drinking

Beach in Cancun

The imperfections of Campeche

Sunset in Campeche

Oaxaca

Campeche

Plaza in Campeche

Chichen Itza

Ballcourt in Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza

Claire at Palenque

Palenque

Lacandon Jungle

Oaxaca

Lacandon Jungle

Monte Alban

Agua Azul

Monte Alban

Agua Azul

La Ruta Maya

2008-11-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone!

I recently returned from the Ruta Maya, a 12 day bus trip around the southeastern part of Mexico. At the risk of overwriting the whole thing, I intend to give a thorough description of the trip, emotionally and aesthetically, as well as a few thoughts on it and the things I learned. This is necessary because, unfortunately, I forgot my camera in a taco restaurant in Veracruz a week before we left (though fortunately it has now been recovered, and should be returned to me soon), and thus I have only the pictures I have pirated from my companions on Facebook. You should all look up these sites on wikipedia and google images, to get a more complete sense of them than I can give with words.

November 2 - We left in a bus for Veracruz in mid-afternoon. Claire and Marlene and I were accompanied by police Captain Pablo Rios and his wife Lucha "Luz" who were to be the chaperones of one bus throughout the entire trip. After an uneventful bus ride, we arrived in Veracruz, greeted by Rossey and Pepe, two Rotarians, and Paulo, the Brazilian who is staying in Coatza. Soon after, we were packed off with our host families for the night. I was to stay with Paulo. Our hosts were two tall, curly-haired boys only slightly older than myself (Paulo is only 15, so perhaps they are more than slightly older than him?) They were really "cool" and we listened to music and they talked about girls and stuff while we drove home. Their house was extremely nice, one of the more luxurious homes I have seen in Mexico. We stayed out in an attached back part, with a bedroom, a living room, and two bathrooms. While it was attached, it seems that it there is no way to pass from the entrance to the back except through the dog's open-air yard, which seems kind of odd. Anyway, they had a very excited puppy, some sort of white-brown-black dog. Paulo convinced me to play Rock Band with him for a while, and we ate Domino's pizza for dinner and played until about midnight. The game was boring, but addictive, of course, and Paulo played until like 1:30. Typically of him, he had expressed to me earlier that he wasn't going to sleep at all, but of course he did anyway. The bed was big and very comfy, with green sheets. I felt very optimistic and clear in that bed.

November 3 - We watched the news over cheese sandwiches and fruit for breakfast before meeting the rest of the exchange students at the bus. They miscalculated something somewhere, and we had to load up far too many students in one bus on the way to meeting the second bus and the rest of the kids in Orizaba. We all sat three every two seats, but somehow for the first leg of the trip I ended up sitting in the tiny space between the back seat and the bathroom. I am not sure if I am just masochistic, or lazy, or if reading about the confines of prison cells in the Gulag had made it seem more acceptable, but I didn't say or do anything about this until Megan and Lia, who were sitting in front of me and blocking my escape, decided to stand up, at which point I could as well. There was no room to stretch out my legs, and my shoulders were pinched inwards because the space between the wall and the seat was a few inches shorter than my shoulder width.

This will be a good place to insert a description of the buses. They were identical: red on the outside, with those big rabbit-ear floppy mirrors. Inside, they were bluish mostly, though the seats had patterns on them with some yellows and reds also. There was a bathroom in the back, though when using it you had to brace yourself against the door because the roads are so bumpy. The bus drivers took turns, of course, and when we took night long trips, the one who wasn't driving slept in a tiny compartment down by the luggage. The seats reclined a bit, but not much, and it was difficult to sleep in them unless you had a towel or sweater, or best of all, a real pillow.

Finally, we arrived in Orizaba. There we met Yana, the district Chairwoman, the rest of our group, and the second bus. Yana distributed our t-shirts, some choice advice, and some bottles of water. I bought the water bottle I used for the rest of the trip here, 1.5 liters for $12 pesos. On the bus, we saw the most delightful parade of landscapes - starting in the verdant mountains of Orizaba, we eventually crossed into the arid cactus world of Puebla, and as we entered Oaxaca, the mountains became even more beautiful - no longer smooth, here you can see all the lines water has carved out - it's as though the land has been scrunched up.

From my journal on the bus, cleaned up a little for order: "Mountains near Orizaba: There is an odd juxtaposition of colors here: light blue sky with huge white mountain-clouds over dark green pines and bright green grass and cacti. Sheep, goats, horses, and cows graze. There is one kind of broad-leaf cactus bush everywhere, as big as a man at its biggest. There is one mountain with a tree line, and another with snow. It is starting to look more dry and brown here. Some kind of plant, a cactus I assume, is like a tall, thin reed. By the road, there are small, round, white, domed shrines topped by crosses housing gilded figures of Mary. A cemetery full of bright white graves is decorated with bright colors and big piles of golden marigolds. Cactus trees blur the line between pines and cacti.

There is a sense you get when traveling by car or bus or train, arising from the quick glimpses of things you get of things you'll never see again, things you'll never understand, and sense that lends everything an air of magic and mystery. Two examples:
Two men sit on the median of the highway in front of the gas station in Orizaba. They sit on packs, reading short books that are falling apart. Their clothes are stained and dirty. It is not clear what they are waiting for; presumably hitch-hiking, though if so, they weren't trying very hard.
An old woman dressed in royal blue, with a shawl and dress of the material, climbs a mountain path lined by grazing cows."

We arrived in Oaxaca (capital of the state of Oaxaca) rather late. After unloading our luggage and settling into our rooms, we headed a few blocks down the street for dinner. Oaxaca, like all the old capitals, is a very colorful, historic-feeling town reminiscent of Europe. The streets were dark by this time, and the atmosphere was very warm and enchanting. The restaurant, however, was divine! We ate in what should have been an open-air courtyard, but that a small tree growing in one side had been permitted to stretch its branches out over the area (supported by a grid of wires) to form a multi-layered tree branch roof! The food was decent, I suppose, but the highlight of the night was the grasshoppers. I was tricked by the Rotarians into trying them despite my vegetarianism, because they didn't tell me what they were and I trusted them. They are like crunchy herbs; very flavorful, though not particularly good.

The hotel was three floors, with a long rectangular courtyard in the center that all three floors opened out onto. Each floor had a mezzanine on three sides that allowed access to the rooms. The centerpiece of the courtyard was a big tree with a fountain installed in it. Minerals had encrusted the part of the tree over which the water flowed.

At this point, I want to make a note of some things. First of all, the most important written rules for the trip:
7. Smoking is prohibited on the bus, in hotel rooms, and in front of Rotarians or Coordinators.
8. It is prohibited to bring alcohol into hotel rooms or to drink in front of Rotarians or Coordinators.
9. Amorous relationships are prohibited.
10. Leaving the hotel or the group, in the form of going independently to other places, is prohibited. You may only go out with permission from the Coordinators.

By the way, the Coordinators/Rotarians are Pablo "Capi" and his wife Luz, and Rossey and Pepis, two married Doctors from Veracruz. I was in Capi's bus the entire trip, except when we separated by gender. Keep these rules in mind as we go along.

Anyway, we got back to the hotel that night after dinner, and kids wanted to go out to discos and bars. The Rotarians said they could go, but they had to sign out and sign in, and be back by 2 AM. However, I believe none of this ever happened - though I am not sure, because I went to bed immediately. My room situation was lucky, because my roommate and I got a room and a bed each to ourselves, while the rest of the kids had four to a room and two to a bed. My roommate for the whole trip was Frederico, from Brazil. He is tall and thin and laid-back. He is very nice and considerate, and always made sure to ask me several times to make sure I didn't want to go out and drink with him.

November 4 - The morning in Oaxaca was cold - we ate a delicious breakfast of Mexican "french toast" in the hotel restaurant, and afterwards I bundled up a bit with socks and a sweater, which proved to be ill-advised in the long run. Another quick note: I wore my silly kindergarten glasses (the ones I stole from Claire after our recent visit to the Kindergarten, remember?) the entire trip except when I felt bad, which wasn't often. I decided the glasses should represent fun and happiness and should only be worn when one is having fun and happy, so sick people are out.

We were headed out of Oaxaca to the east, towards Mitla, though still within the city itself, when our bus gave out a great big cloud of smoke from the back, and we had to move to the other bus. Thus, once more, we rode a bus overcapacity, though this time with even more people. Mitla, however, was worth it. The town is a sparse desert town with a clear, close blue sky. It is surrounded by desert mountains. The main attractions are the market, with little square tables covered by tarps, run by indigenous craftsmen selling cheap wooden animals or jewelry, and women practically giving away big white shirts and blankets they've made, the church, an old building with three big red domes, built overtop of Zapoteca ruins, and the main ruins themselves, a royal palace with exquisite patterns and two tombs. The ruins are incredible, of course; these intricate designs are constructed by the careful placement of rocks, not by carving or even using any kind of cement. This particular site was not very big, however. It was surrounded on all sides by a cactus fence.

I met a black puppy sleeping in the shade of a cactus pot alongside the church. I gave him a piece of my watermelon because he seemed interested in it, but he didn't eat it. He seemed to enjoy licking it, though. I hope he didn't get bothered by ants coming for the sweet fruit.

Next, we visited a mezcal factory. Mezcal is an alcoholic beverage made from the agave cactus, the same plant used to make tequila. They grow the cactus to maturity, cut all the branches off, leaving the "heart" of the plant, and then cut those up into pieces. They throw the pieces into a round hole in the ground overtop of heated stones, and then they cover the hole and let it cook for several days. Then the plants are removed. At this point, they have a very delicious, sweet meat, which we got to try. Then, they grind the pieces with a millstone driven by a horse, collect the pressings, and ferment them and distill them. After this explanation, they gave each and every one of us a free sample of a grape flavored variety, and after that we could ask to try specific flavors. We could also buy whatever we liked - Frederico bought 750 mL of some deep purple variety. I tried one of them, and surprisingly it actually tasted really good, contrary to any other alcohol I've ever had. However, it was very strong alcohol, and I can't imagine drinking it in any amount.

After that, we went to the town of Tule, to see its tree, El Arbol del Tule. It would do for all of you to go find as many pictures of this tree as you can. It is absolutely beyond words - the magic tree to end all discussion about magic trees. It is the widest tree on Earth, easily bigger than your bedroom, no matter how big it is. I was in awe, and took a ton of pictures with Capi's camera. The entire thing is swarming with insects, gilded by the sun. If normal trees are magic, this one is unreal - beyond the imagination. The tree lives in a modest but clean and appealing horticultural garden, with a big white church.

We ate lunch at a restaurant just outside of Oaxaca, an open air buffet with a playground out back, and two excellent marimba players for entertainment. They served each and every place with a little plastic shot of orange mezcal - though this one tasted foul and no one liked it. Claire asked me to play the marimba, so we went up together and they let me play my Paganini. Only a few people saw, but they all complimented me on it.

After eating, I never really felt well again the rest of the day. However, this was the worst by the time we were back in the hotel, and I didn't want to eat again (for some reason, we ate, then came back to the hotel, beat, and they had us eat again). My neck was tight and my skin felt hot and burnt. I stayed in the room and read for a while, and then Frederico brought Dennis the Belgian and Viktor the German in to help him with his newly purchased mezcal. They made sure several times over that I didn't want any, and then Frederico took three glasses and divvied up half the bottle between them. They took them in a gulp, and I went downstairs to find medicine.

The doctor, Rossey, took me up to her room and examined me, and determined I had a fever. She gave me painkillers with mineral water (ew) and told me to drink and rest. I went back to the room and drank a bunch of water and read in bed. I felt much better fairly soon, and then took a shower. That shower was absolutely incredible - there doesn't seem to be hot water in my house, so it was a luxury to have it in all the hotels we went to. In addition to that basic aspect, the window in the bathroom was open and it was a chilly night, so it created that cool effect where the hot water feels even more invigorating in contrast with the cold air.

November 5 - This morning we ate an equally delicious breakfast in the hotel restaurant. This time I knew to endure the morning chill, so I was better dressed for our hot day on the mountaintop. I read The Gulag Archipelago (my book for the entire trip; any reading I do in this account is this book) on the way up the mountain to Monte Alban. Monte Alban was an important Zapoteca royal city for several hundred years. It looks out over the modern city of Oaxaca, and of course, as it is a mountain in the midst of mountains, there are valleys on all sides. The old city included several smaller surrounding peaks and the city ruled the valleys around it, as well. They told us several things about the history of the city and Zapoteca culture, but I will save that for the end, for those who are interested.

From my journal: "I am beginning to doubt my capacity of expression - these ruins seem to be getting progressively cooler, and I am already beyond words at the second of them. The thought that struck me at the time was that it was like heaven. I don't mean this in a hedonistic, "Mountain of Ice Cream," "kid in a candy store," sense, but rather aesthetically. It is at the top of a mountain, there are trees all over, of all types, and many varieties of wild flowers (each tended carefully by flitting bees). The trees smell strong and musky in the wind. Butterflies dance everywhere, underneath a close blue sky filled with what may be my favorite kind of cloud: cirrus (known to some as "wisps"). Birds dart into the sky, as well, and once a big vulture dove down just off the side of the mountain. And then, of course there are all the ruins. There are no ads, no technology, no pavement - to be there alone, in the night!"

After Monte Alban, where we spent a considerable length of time, we went back to the same restaurant. From there, we separated into girls bus and boys bus. However, ironically, I ended up sitting with a girl, Connie. As there are more girls than boys, they had a spillover, and she was one of the five trusted girls allowed onto the boys bus for the night. The reason we were split up was that we were traveling all night to Palenque, and they wanted to avoid kissing and etc on the bus at night. Keep this carefully in mind as we go as well.

November 6 - From my journal the morning after arriving in Palenque: "We slept in the bus, and not poorly, either. I am afraid I am becoming a morning person - at least, when I have enough rest. I feel great this morning, even after a bus sleep. An observation about bus trips: A decent part of their nature is to tire, discomfort, and distort the traveler's perception of time and reality, while giving them extensive time for philosophizing."

This was true - I felt very good and energized this morning, oddly. We spent a while recuperating in the rooms, and then headed the few miles to Palenque. Before we left, I looked up upon leaving and saw the incredible mural above the doorway to the hotel. It seems to be intended as a sort of summary or encapsulation of the Mayan worldview - all sorts of sky and earth and corn imagery, jaguars and such. I like these a lot.

Palenque itself is another archaeological site, this time in the jungle. We stopped in a parking lot and checked out the merchants and artesans. Those on the right side wore typical fieldpeople clothes, while the women wore traditional colorful black dresses (that is, they are black but covered in beautiful colored patterns). On the left, however, they all wore long white "dresses," men and women alike. Beneath, they were clothed normally, however. These in white are Lacandon natives - this is the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, famous for the now six Declarations of the Lacandon Jungle, made by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation or EZLN. I bought Alex a present from the Lacandon people.

We were led along a gravel path through the jungle the short distance from the parking lot into the site itself. I am not sure you can get used to emerging from a totally normal jungle into a complete white stone city - it is breathtaking. Still no words for it. It's something that has to be experienced, perhaps. There was one plant with leaves each taller than a man, big enough to wrap yourself up in, that was worth mentioning.

Our guide, a young man native to Palenque named Victor, had an extremely impressive knowledge of the site and its history, apparently due to his history degree. As Palenque is Maya and not Zapoteca, the style is completely different. The stones are white and not brown, and they are much smaller than the Monte Alban stones. There are also still people working there - a man was pressure washing the steps of the center building, and there was scaffolding up over the tomb of King Pakal, where men were reconstructing the building with hammers and stones.

We returned to the hotel after spending plenty of time wandering around Palenque with Victor and learning everything we could from him; a note: every time we visited a site like this, me and never more than 5 others, typically less, would stay with the guide. Then we ate and went to rest. I went to bed immediately and slept, and didn't wake up all day or night. The others swam and ate and partied and drank a lot, and had karoake and all that shit. I guess they had a good time?

November 7 - I was startled awake at 7:50 in the morning the next day, still in my clothes from the day before. It was Frederico's cell phone; Pepis was calling, and apparently the buses had already left without us! We scrambled to get all our things together and ran downstairs only to find that a bunch of them were still finishing up breakfast, and that we had plenty of time. We ate quickly and boarded the buses for Agua Azul.

Having slept through the afternoon and all night the day before, I was the only one awake on the bus on the way. The bus driver who wasn't driving invited me down to the front to look with him, which was nice. I overheard something about Zapatistas, and inquired. Apparently, we were already in Zapatista territory! I began to look for differences, evidence. Things here looked the same, and I am still not convinced he was right about this, especially in light of later evidence. Anyhow, it was beautiful; the lush mountains, poor jungle people carrying produce home or to the market, and the houses full of shirts and dresses made by local women to sell to tourists. The area does look poor, and as we passed higher into the mountains, I could begin to see a difference. The houses were made of aluminum (which is normal for the poor here) and wood (which I hadn't seen before). It seemed they were constructing a lot of new buildings, as well. Big sections of the jungle along the steep mountainside had been clearing and planted with corn.

When we got close to Agua Azul, we were stopped at a little white hut with a red "EZLN" star on it. There were women with banana chips on the left and a group of youngish men stacking wood on the right. An older man approached the bus and explained the situation: we were entering Zapatista territory, and we were being charged 10 pesos per person to enter. I payed 50 to support them. The guys were great, all smiley and friendly and laughing. They were neither armed nor uniformed. Their shack had posters on it that said things like "Drink with a conscience: Don't drink coke!"

Agua Azul itself was lovely. It is not one big waterfall, but miles of waterfalls; or so it seemed. I tested this experimentally as far as I could, but I did not have time to go miles. When we got there, I headed off alone immediately, politely disengaging the girls selling sugar cane, bananas, and chestnuts. One tiny girl, probably about 4 years old, handed me a chestnut and said "Un regalo," that is, a gift. Besides the waterfalls themselves, I saw three huge ants, black but with bright yellow-white bums, a beautiful tiny bird striped all over in tiny slices, like the flesh of an orange, black-white-blue, went off into a jungle path (a banana garden, I guess), fell in the mud and washed in the river, at which point I saw two Lacandon women bathing downstream. I went back earlier than I had intended, hoping to find a free bathroom and borrow Capi's camera, but by the time I got back, it was time to go already. I felt like a real explorer, though. The jungle is ever so beautiful, though. My heavens!

I began to feel quite nauseous on the bus from all the curves we were taking. I switched seats with Winston so I had the aisle, which helped a lot. The mountains near San Cristobal look exactly like Michigan, (except for the Mexicans, of course). San Cristobal itself was wonderful - cold, with amazing architecture reminiscent of Europe, hip people with dreads and long hair and tattoos, and a lot of those "Mexican" weave sweaters. Also, on almost every block, there were two or three stenciled pictures and messages, things like "Stop Fascism," "End military and police torture of indigenous people" etc.

Our guide was great - a tall long haired man who took me and Connie to a store so I could buy batteries for my camera (the one my family lent me) that didn't work anyway. We ended up alone with him the whole time we were there, and he told us a ton about the EZLN, as well as the history of San Cristobal itself, which involves a lot of tragedy for the indigenous people, of course. He took us to see the first building the Zapatistas took in '94, from which Marcos delivered the 1st Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, and the church where they signed the first peace agreement, which the government broke violently. Apparently, his mother was a close friend of the bishop of this church, and had been "in love" with Marcos at the time. She asked and was permitted to cook for him during these first talks. He also took us to see the first theatre in San Cristobal, where they were showing a play in Maya, called "Palenque Rojo." Of course, we were going to Tuxtla that same night, and couldn't see it.

From there, we went to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas. We went at night, and we saw the twinkling city lates of all the land in between the whole trip, as we were in the mountains and got a great view.

November 8 - In Tuxtla, we stayed at a really commercial hotel, a chain that was very impersonal and lacking in plants. The breakfast we had this morning was unlike any other we had in the trip, in that it was a typical American continental breakfast, and was horrible. The others were all good Mexican cooking. Anyway, I ate a bit but not much.

That day, we spent the morning on a tour of the Canyon of the Sumidero, which of course I had already seen with my family. However, it was good to see it a second time, though this time the waterfalls were dry, because we saw many more animals. We saw a sleepy spider monkey, iguanges, hundreds of birds (big black vultures resting in flocks on tree branches at the banks or floating in great circles in the sky, and herons, floating downstream on branches or like branches), and even an unmoving, completley dormant crocodile. After that (around noon), we boarded the buses and, without eating lunch, drove the five hours to Villahermosa. We ate seafood, which it didn't seem like anyone liked much, and the "vegetarian" plate they gave me had jam and some weird green strips they told me were chicken, in addition to the typical uncreative vegetarian fare here, raw vegetables.

We watched "Take the Lead" and "Mamma Mia" on the bus on the way to Cancun after dinner, which are both sufficiently beautiful and provocative films. During Mamma Mia, we were stopped for several hours between something like 4 kilometers of traffic from where a truck had hit a Beetle, killing all four young passengers. (Speaking of beetles, a big black one flew into my room and is hanging on the ceiling by my light as I write this)

November 9 - In the morning, we arrived in Cancun, which is ugly. It is all hotels, and everything is in poor English. We didn't stay long that morning, but instead, after unpacking our bags and resting for a while, we went on to Xcaret.

Xcaret is odd in that it is a theme park, built on the beach on top of Mayan ruins in the jungle, whose theme is Mayan culture and history and the jungle and the beach. It is a very sterile and commercialized version of the same things we saw across the whole trip, and yet was cool in a few ways, because it is very beautiful. When you first walk in, you see a flock of Scarlet Macaw and Military Macaw, which are both very beautiful birds, and behind them a flock of flamingoes. Further in, there's a Brahma Bull, a Tapir, and a family of white-tailed deer.

I spent my afternoon there going there a completely sterile and boring underground river with three Thai girls, and afterward wandering around lost with Noah, from the Philipines, who hung around with me at first because he speaks English well and has only three weeks of Spanish. That night we all gathered together for the show. It is a mock reenactment of the Maya culture and the Spanish conquest, complete with the ballgame and the flaming ball game, and then the second half was a smattering of traditional Mestizo songs and dances from all over Mexico.

That night, I slept, and the rest of the kids went out to Cocobongo, which is supposedly one of the best and most famous discos in the world. It was $50. Supposedly it was cool, with characters and stuff. They all got the Open Bar, and stayed out until 4 or 5 or all night. Some, however, didn't go to Cocobongo, choosing to be economical and stay at the hotel bar, where everything was free! Capi went to Cocobongo, however.

November 10 - The next day, I was tired, despite having slept, and the others were even more tired, since they had hardly slept at all. They slept in the bus, instead. I slept too, this day, however, avoiding the boring bus ride down past Xcaret to Tulum. Tulum was dusty and hot, and we had to trek on foot for about fifteen minutes along a dirt road to get to it. Once there, we passed through the thick stone wall into the city itself. Tulum is distinct from the other sites we'd seen thus far because it was hot, low, by the sea, and there were few trees. The ruins weren't particularly impressive, because many were just stone foundations, but there were a couple cool temples. There were iguanas sunning themselves of ruins and rocks everywhere.

The main attraction here was the beach. It is rocky and hidden, and very small. It has the same beautiful baby blue water as Cancun, but in front of a romantic rocky cove at the bottom of wooden stairs instead of in front of hotels and hotels unending. On the hill from which the stairs descend sits the most impressive temple of the site.

I was going to go Scuba diving that night, a night dive at 6 PM, but we got back too late. I watched TV, conversed, and saw two simultaneous programs on the South Pole before going to sleep late. The beach in Cancun is nowhere near as cool as the one in Tulum, but it does have an attractive distinct sky blue color along the beach, and a lot of clouds.

That night the kids went to Hard Rock Cafe or again stayed at the hotel and drank. Connie later told me that this night she and Eika had met some jazz musicians from San Francisco and went to their hotel with them, and she and a saxophone player sat on the beach drinking rum and talking about important things, and watched the sun rise.

November 11 - We did very little this day - we woke early, ate early, and waited hours for something or other. Then we boarded the buses and slept on the way to Merida.

Merida was supposed to be really cool but I guess I didn't get it. It was nice, but nowhere near as cool as a lot of the other cities we saw. Our hotel, the last one we would stay in the whole trip, was an old hotel with a french name (Hotel D' Champs) and poor lighting. It had a pool, and a lot of plants, however, and I thought it was fine, though the Rotarians and a lot of exchange students were complaining about it.

From my journal: "We arrived in Merida after 4; I spent a short while soaking my feet in the pool and getting my left fingernails painted by Jade from Belgium, and then went out to dinner with Claire and the Rotarians. After dinner, we took a carriage tour of the city center. The guide, Jesus, hardly spoke, which was disappointing for those of us interested in history. He was a mountain of a man in a blue shirt, with a thin stripe of facial hair along his jawbone. Our horse was named Big Boy, ironically, because he was small and the driver was huge. Merida is cool, I guess - not particularly impressive but not ugly. There are a lot of sculptures along the sidewalks, and people are smily when you wave to them.

After the tour, Connie invited me to dye my hair with her and Eika. We ended up going out with Dennis and Noah as well, and never finding dye. We ate (or rather, they ate, and I drank horchata) and walked into the plaza to find ice cream. Connie and I laid down in front of the cathedral under the Moon, the others left us, and we talked there, gazing up at the stark face of the cathedral and the glowing moon, until the police politely ejected us. We bought a tub of freezer-burnt ice cream from 7/11 around midnight and ate it under the flagpole in the center of the plaza, in the company of skittering almost-invisible tan bugs, similar to grasshoppers but not as long and moving more like cockroaches. There was a shy cockroach around as well.

Before too long, a 44-year old man with alcohol on his breath came and talked to us without any provocation for probably an hour. He is a native Yucateco who grew up in the country and moved into "La Blanca Merida" for work. He claimed to be a sportsman, that he played soccer and traveled all over Mexico and boxed and went to Cancun, Las Vegas, and Africa. He has two sons and one daughter, and has been divorced for ten years. His wife taught him to cook, which he claims he now does well and enjoys, and take care of clothes and clean. He claimed that he once killed a min, that he hit him or beat him to death in the street, and that he's been paying the consequences ever since. However, he claimed that the man's time had come, and that if he hadn't killed him, he would have died in some other manner instead. As with all drunks, it seems, he was very Christian, and talked a lot about how imperfect we all are, talking of how we can never be satisfied or content or comfortable; he also made the First Mover argument for God. He pointed to a nearby tree moving in the breeze and asked "Who's moving that tree?" Connie replied "The wind," and of course he countered, "Who moves the wind?" This seems like a remarkably anthropocentric question. He started to repeat himself and I had to pee, so we left and took a taxi back to the hotel."

November 12 - The next morning we left for Chichen Itza, which was very impressive but absolutely crawling with tourists and artesans. We scarcely had two hours there - though that was good in a way, because it was oppressively hot. Our guide lost everyone except me; even Connie went off shopping among the fantastic things the artesans make, and he started to look annoyed that this one kid was keeping him from some rest.

We ate, also very quickly, and went to a cenote - an underground lake with a hole in the roof that lets rain in. It is full of stalactits and accumulated minerals, and the lake is fresh, cool water. It is very deep - 20 meters - and you can hear bats chittering in the ceiling and see them fly around. Not knowing I would need it, I didn't have time to bring my mask and snorkel, and thus missed the best opportunity to use them. I cut my big toe on a rock, and kept trying to knock Connie and Eika off one of the ropes they had put across the water.

This was our last hotel/free night of the trip. After trying to make us learn some awful reggaeton dance for about an hour, everyone left for bars and discos, like always. I hung out in Dennis' room with him and Eika and Connie, and later Marco, who made a mess with water and shaving cream. Filipe from Brazil came back and wanted to go to sleep (for this was already quite late, and we had to get up early the next morning), so I convinced them all to move to my room. We watched TV for a while with Frederico, who seemed to like TV a lot and always had it on whenever he could, even to sleep. I sat down on my bed, Connie on Frederico's, and Dennis and Eika lay down on mine and starting making out with their heads literally pillowed on my right thigh. This was fine for me, but Connie went to go to bed, and Frederico decided we should leave them their privacy (and our room). As a note, the Rotarians had long gone to bed by this point. However, their room was literally right next to ours. They never checked rooms at night.

I can only assume that at this point Dennis and Eika had sex in my bed, and indeed there are a lot of things that indicate this is the case. I went to meditate on the steps near the pool, and Frederico began to wander with Paulo, in the same situation. Eventually they two went out, which made me feel less bad. I had no time to meditate, as Connie came back and we talked alone for hours, which was perfect. An interesting note is that in all of these long conversations we had, we could never see each other. By the cathedral, we were watching the sky, at the flagpole, we sat with our backs to it, facing in different directions, and this night, we sat face to face but in the dark.

Around 2:30 AM, she went to bed, and I went to investigate the lovers. Dennis answered the door, freshly showered, and asked for two minutes. They took longer than that, and then let me in. They decided to sleep in my bed, and so I slept in Frederico's. He got back about a half hour later and joined me. Remember that this was how every other boy on the trip slept every night - we had merely gotten lucky, so this wasn't particularly bad or anything.

November 13 - We didn't get up until 8:30 the next morning, though we were supposed to be up by 6:30. Nothing happened; people were just now gathering in the lobby to leave, and a group was still eating breakfast. We were mostly already packed, so we all ate except Dennis (I feel bad he didn't eat, since I was supposed to get them up earlier), and gathered in the lobby. We were awoken by the Rotarians, and they did catch Dennis and Eika in our room, but she didn't say anything more than "Get your things, hurry!" and they were never punished or yelled at or anything.

This, the last day of the trip, we spent in Campeche. Campeche is just beautiful - though not perfect. The buildings are are all light, bright pastel colors, and there are old colorful churches spattered around. We arrived in mid-afternoon, saw a fort, which had been turned into a museum housing ancient Maya treasures, and then went to the main plaza. The plaza was to me like a quintessential Spanish plaza, with a big gazebo in the center, a ring of rare Carribean trees (gifts from the Cuban government) just inside the square fence, and pigeons everywhere. Off to the north lies the cathedral, the typical Mexican design with the two-towers-bridged-by-an-arch face and a buttressed dome behind it. To the west, the library, which we will get to later. To the south, there is a refurbished antique historical house, which will be our first destination.

What was perhaps the most sublime experience of the entire trip took place while we were walking from our rendezvous in the center of the plaza after dinner toward the little visitor's center next to the cathedral. It was something extremely simple, but completely beyond words. As we were walking towards the gate at northwest corner, all the pigeons in the plaza took wing and formed two clouds over our heads. They crossed through each other and quickly settled back down into the trees. I was left stunned, with my mouth hanging open. I don't believe anyone else noticed.

The house was like the rest, colorful, but with antique replica furniture. The central part was an open air courtyard with a cistern for storing water. I suppose it was cool, but not particularly interesting. There was no history - everything was complete supposition to make a nice tourist attraction.

Next, we took a guided tour around the city in a little open-air bus thing. We saw the city, the old city, with all its vibrant, UNESCO-dictated colors, the new city, with its ugly modern buildings and Wal-mart, and the beach, with numerous scultpures and statues, and the sunset. The sunset was beautiful, colored like the city itself, more reds and pinks than golds. We stopped to take pictures.

Returning from the tour, we were given free time. I tried to convince Connie to go to the library with me, but she wouldn't have it and struck off on her own with Eika. I went alone, and discovered its beauty and charm. It is a typical building, long-faced, with a second floor section hanging out over a sidewalk, supported by columns. Upon entering, you find a large, circular desk of dark wood. To your right, the one room of books, and ahead, an open courtyard with a Day of the Dead altar. In the staircase there is another of those "Mayan Worldview" murals, this one most notably with a little ear of corn whose kernels are floating off to form a man. At the top of the stairs there is a room full of glass-encased beautiful old books from the 1800s. The selection in the library itself is good, with few but essential classics. The room is full of tables, occupied by giggly uniformed Mexican students.

I went back when I though the free time was up, and discovered we had about 15 more minutes. Connie was there again, and this time I was successful in luring her to the library, along with Carolin. Carolin (from Austria), I had discovered in the bus the day before, shared my love of Herman Hesse, and she gave me a pile of recommendations of German and Austrian authors for my list. We went to the library and gazed upon its wonderful-library-ness, its mosaic-pattern tan tiles, beautiful dark hardwood shelves, and books! Carolin found a favorite Rilke poem in German(!) and a bunch of obscure Austrian children's books.

After the free time really was over, we went down a few blocks to get a drink. Two middle-aged women served trays of beer (on our own account) and took orders for things that weren't beer but never served them. Connie and Dennis and Eika and Noah and I talked about future plans, and I helped Eika write a note in Spanish in Connie's sentimental notes book for the trip. Eika speaks better English than Spanish, being Japanese, and though she's got better Spanish now than she had before, she's still more comfortable with English.

After a short time for beer drinking, we went back to the buses to get to our final Campeche destination: a smaller, out-of-the-way plaza with much less traffic, located in an area with no businesses or shopping or anything of the kind. Very nice, hidden, and romantic. Upon arriving, we had nothing to do but wait for the restaurant people who were catering our last dinner to set up folding chairs and tables. Paty gave Maria Carla (both from Brazil) an extensive sharpie tattoo covering her entire left arm while we waited.

The most important incident of the night, however, was something Connie and I spotted at the same moment, and moved off to investigate together. A group of hippies (or whatever should be the appropriate term, I have no idea) were sitting on the curb outside the fence, talking to some of the musicians I guess had been hired to play for us that night but never did(?). Anyway, there were two Mexican guys with djembe, hand-carved, wooden djembe. The first looked like Omar from the Mars Volta. Further, there was another Mexican, a firetwirler, who had long black hair. Beyond him, Sebastian: a shirtless Belgian with long, dirty light-brown hair and a firestick, and a Swiss girl with those long claw-like firesticks.

They were smoking a joint and talking, and we talked to them for a while before we were called back to eat. They soon came into the gazebo and performed for us, so it was alright regardless. The two djembe-players played aggressive sixteenth-note patterns while the firetwirlers took turns and danced in groups in front of them. The Mexican was by far the best; Sebastian had started upon arrival in Mexico, about two weeks before. He was taking a trip throughout the area, and perhaps further down into Central America, he told us.

After they had finished performing, the rest of the exchange students moved in around them, and supplied tips. Most of them were looking for weed, which they didn't get. Elise, from Norway, got pretty friendly with "Omar," which was funny. They did some chill playing and rapping for a while, and then later I played the djembe for a while and Connie freak-tribal-danced along (something she is naturally very good at).

I was naturally very excited by all this, and said as much to the Mexican firetwirler. He gave me the standard but good advice "Just pack your backpack and jump!" I made sure they were fed, and the Rotarians were kind enough to permit them to eat. Our food was delicious that night, too. Very spicy and tasty.

On the bus ride home, we watched a Coen Brothers film (Burn After Reading) which was typically awesome (I guess this movie just recently came out? I had no idea. It was pirated, like all the movies the bus drivers showed). I wrote the most tear-jerking, eloquent letter I could in Connie's awesome journal, which she was using to collect such notes. I am jealous of that journal. I slept fitfully all night, and we arrived in Mina the next morning around 8 - we were the first stop!

A bit of business - I made a note about the rules before we really got going, and I'm sure that if you paid attention you realized that the Rotarians did not take these seriously in the least, and allowed us to take our lives as our own responsibilities, something which does not typically happen in organizations of this size and with this level of responsibility. Anyway, there was never a good time to note that easily over half of us smoked at every available opportunity, whether there were Rotarians around or not. This made it very difficult to talk to people while we stopped for bathrooms and such, and was supremely annoying.

Notes Regarding History
Monte Alban - A Zapoteca royal city founded in 500 BCE, lasting until it was abandoned approximately 500 CE. We saw several houses first; the notable thing about them is that they buried their dead underneath their own houses, for generations. They built several pyramids around the top of the main, most royal and reserved part. There was a ball court, the same game they played in the Maya civilization, but in their culture this was not a ritual activity, and there was no sacrifice involved; it was merely a game. They lived on the top of a mountain, and did no agriculture there; all their food was brought from the valleys below. Their water came from a cenote that is allowed to fill with rainwater. Back then, the area was more like Mina is now - very rainy. Currently, Oaxaca is dry and arid, and a city like that could not live on the little water there during the dry season. This seems to be the reason the city was abandoned. The mountaintop was flattened by the Zapotecas themselves, and the rock they removed was used to construct all the buildings there. The ruins there nowadays are 30% original, 70% reconstruction. There were several observatories there, and the plaque on one of them had this cool quote: "Astronomical observation was an important part of daily life, and had a strong influence on urban planning."
Palenque - The main topic treated was Pakal and his son, and some of the Mayan worldview. I have forgotten too much of this; Victor told us a mountain of information. Pakal was one of the more famous and powerful kings of Palenque. His son, K'inich Kan B'ahlam, was apparently a genius in astronomy and math, and calculated many of the most important discoveries of the Maya civilization. They named a supercomputer after him in Mexico City because he was so smart. Apparently he also led his city to victory against the armies of Calakmul, a neighboring city. There was a spined tree in front of the tombs; it symbolizes the Mayan world, with the roots being the underword, the trunk the human world, and the branches the heavens, of course. They used the spines for self-mutilation. In the tombs, there are three (I believe) 13 year old boys laying with Pakal's wife. They were sacrificed to accompany her in her apotheosis after death as servants. The most interesting thing about these ruins is touching even the outer edges of what it would be like to believe this and be killed at 13, or at any age for that matter.

October 24: Trip to the Kindergarten

2008-10-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, Claire, Marlene, and I left school around 9:30 with Lorna and her mother, having been invited by them to go to their Kindergarten downtown for "United Nations Day." The kindergarten, called "John Dewey," has one big area with a plastic playground, and it was here the children had been gathered to await our arrival. On the gate had been hung a meter-square poster they had made us, which read "Bienvenidos En el Dia de la O.N.U." Beneath this were stylized representations of each of us with our names and flags. Walking through the gate, we were greeted by six students dressed in "international" costumes, including a Pakistani, two "Americans" dressed in red, white, and blue tissue paper, and a butterfly girl. The children brought us each a tray of candy, and the girls got flowers. For some reason, they forgot to bring a flower for me.

We were led to a row of white plastic chairs at the far end of the room, in front of all the separate classrooms of children seated on the floor. Lorna occupied the fourth chair. We were asked to introduce ourselves, and then the children sang for us and did cheers for all the countries. Then we posed for pictures with the dressed-up children. Throughout all this time, my face was fixed in a wide smile, delighted at seeing children and their interactions and faces. It became almost painful after a while; it was a truly wonderful experience.

After this, the children were led by their numerous teachers (all female) into their respective classrooms, and we traveled to visit them one by one. The first was a group of about 10 diaper age kids who didn't have much to say. We followed that with a series of older groups, telling them colors in our languages and singing songs and stuff. One of the older groups made a plate of "American food" and an American flag out of paper and craft material, and gave Claire and Marlene each a pair of glasses made out of pipe cleaners. I only got an itchy necklace, and I had to pester Claire a bit about how jealous I was to get her glasses from her. It's not like she was going to wear them, though, and I certainly plan to.

After the first three classrooms, we took a break and had lunch upstairs, in Lorna's house. The house is big and open and wonderful, with an patio in the front with a big roof that we ate under. The food was a big vegetarian sandwich on baguette that had been divided up into pieces for us, and french fries. The sandwich was delicious, with beans and cheese and tomatoes.

We finished up the last classroom after lunch, a group of older kids that included as its most outspoken member the young granddaughter or niece of Paty and his wife, Doctor Erasto. They asked many questions, and gave Claire and Marlene their flags and gave us all paper skulls with rice eyes for the Day of the Dead. One boy kept getting really agitated and falling or jumping out of his chair.

Assorted pictures

2008-10-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

Rosario, Misael, Deyanira (captured by Misael), Dalid

Tomas, Monica, Karla, and Suner

Tomas and Luis Alberto "Tigre" sleeping on the floor

Mexican Halloween Yard

Oddly placed Legend of Zelda logo

Marimba

2008-10-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

I believe I've forgotten to make mention of this important thing:

Thursday, October 16

2008-10-17T20:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had four friends, who I consider to be among my closest here, over to my house to work on an English assignment. The assignment was to make a complete newspaper in English, including every section we thought worthwhile, documenting events in the school, which of course leaves almost total creative freedom. We titled ours "Dead Cat." I'm getting ahead of myself, anyhow. Javier, having left school early to get a passport, came back to pick up Dalid, Lasserre, Deyanira and I from school and bring us to my house. I am sorry I have not built up descriptions of my friends over the time I have known them; you all have no way to know who these people are beyond their pictures. Rest assurred that they are all very unique, beautiful people.

After I'd changed my clothes, we left the house again to pick up supplies at the paper and office supply store across the street, attached to Soriana. Soriana is the biggest grocery store chain in this area, and the building itself is rather large. We set to work in the living room, with Dalid and Deya and Javier writing articles, and Lasserre wrangling the giant sheets of paper and drawing the title and frills, while I translated anything they finished.

About halfway through the night, my mom invited us all into the kitchen to share a dinner of noodle soup and tacos. It was somehow extremely refreshing and cozy to eat with close friends in this setting. I never truly eat alone here, but Pedro makes bitter, rude company in the morning, and I don't seem to eat with anyone at school. At home, we eat as a family, but even then there is the odd fact that my mom doesn't eat with us, instead essentially acting as a cook/waitress for us until we are almost done.

We finished writing and translating all the articles by 7, and everyone left shortly after. One more notable event of the night was that Javier and Dalid kissed, and made Deyanira and Lasserre do the same. Something similar happened in class earlier, when they had me kiss both Deya and Bola. None of these seem to be serious at all; I am not sure how it can be explained beyond "teenage sexuality."

Friday, October 10

2008-10-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last friday, I was invited out to eat after school by Javier and his friends. We went to Burger King, which was disappointing, and I didn't eat. Anyway, the people involved were myself, Claire, Marlene, Javier, Jonathan, Pedro (not my brother), Lorna, Lorna's little sister, and, a little later, two girls named Carla and Dora. Nothing terribly interesting happened at the restaurant, I suppose. I found a scrap of paper with school notes on it and gave it to Carla, saying I'd written her a letter. Oddly enough, she returned it with her email address.

Later, after stopping by Dairy Queen for ice cream, we dropped off Claire and Marlene, and went to Dora's house "to watch movies." We sat around watching TV for a while, and then watched a half-hour japanese vampire cartoon, and then played Scrabble. For some reason, Dora's house made me feel like this night was taking place in the past. I won at Scrabble when we played in English. Only because I got lucky, though.

La Colonia 18 de Marzo

2008-10-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

This is where I live.

The Flood and What I Did About It

2008-10-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

Semi-recently, that is, a few weeks ago, the Coatzacoalcos River and all the towns along it were flooded. One of those towns is Mina, and, while I hardly saw the water at all, my parents' store and my aunt and uncles' house were both flooded, so they are now living here with us, and the store was closed for a couple weeks. More importantly, however, many people lost there homes, and in some places, the roads, the only source of clean water and adequate food, were also flooded. Because of all this, our Rotary Club started working to help these people. The exchange students helped, to a greater or lesser extent, including myself.

Starting Monday, September 29, Claire, Marlene, and I went to a makeshift collection center and helped sort donated clothes, made bags of food and toilet paper to be distributed, and asked donations in front of the supermarket. Claire and I continued to do this the rest of the week. It wasn't until the next Saturday, however, that we actually got to help in a real way, or at least a visible way. On Saturday, we rode in the back of pick-up trucks and drove to the poorer areas of the city, which had been hit by the flood. We gave food, water, mattresses, and giant boxes of clothes to churches and schools, where people would distribute them to communities. I don't know if I can give any good description of this, but it was extremely gratifying and wonderful. We visited one church, and as we were unloading, there was a faint, ghostly church choir singing in the distance.

Later, we went down the riverside. There is a road that runs along the river, and after a certain point, that road was the only thing above the water. People apparently still live in or near these flooded houses somehow; at least, they were there when we drove by and gave them things. There were animals everywhere on this road, including one bone-thin black dog that got chased away violently by some healthy-looking bigger dogs. There was a family of horses as well. The most striking was a situation where all the animals of a household, including puppies, turkeys, chickens, and pigs, were all standing just below the road, on the narrow, steep strip of land left dry. They weren't moving, just milling about there. Later, we saw a family catching these tiny fish in the river, and they showed us a tiny crab they'd caught.

The next day, we took a boat much further down that same river, to communities that had been completely cut off from the roads. We had to wait a while to leave, something about gas. . . while we wait, I'll describe the area. This is a staging point for boats, just past a bridge. There are big army trucks here, and milling soldiers. They all carry weapons, which they shouldn't really need for this kind of work, should they? Upstream from the bridge is what looks like a swamp, or a meadow. No water is visible. However, downstream, you can see that the water is clearly flowing. There is a gigantic field of sod and plants that have washed up against the bridge. There was a giant backhoe clearing it out, however. I wondered if this interferes with an important natural process, but then I realized that there are no natural bridges. Though the question stands if this kind of material can be blocked by other things; I have no idea. On the field rested close to 50 white herons. There were probably thousands of these herons along the river; you could describe this place as having a lot of herons. Their flight is sublimely beautiful. Finally we left, in a tiny, uncomfortable boat. The morning was really beautiful, full of sun and clouds and herons and underwater trees. The river has many islands around, but they were all completely flooded, leaving only the treetops showing. These were uniformly full of herons.

After two and half hours of uncomfortable small boat travel, we arrived at our first destination, a village called Hidalgotitlan, of some 10,000 people, approximately. We scarcely left the dock area our first time there, just enough time to unload the cargo and eat. They served whole fish and tortillas. I had some beans and tortillas and cheese, which is about what I normally eat. Even if you are not a vegetarian, is there not something repulsive about a whole cooked fish, with head and scales left intact? I believe they ate the scales as well, but I can't be sure. A few of our Rotarians stayed behind to see our cargo up the hill to its final destination.

We consolidated into two big boats after this, which were faster and a bit more comfortable. Our next stop, two more hours away, was an extremely small and poor (at least, it looked poor) rural town. All the men there carried machetes and wore wading boots, and there was no pavement or sidewalk anywhere. The women had rough, worn hands and skin. One man wore a funny shirt. An aside on funny shirts in Mexico: they are all in English, but they aren't the bad-English funny shirts you apparently see on everyone in Japan. They are grammatically correct, they just have silly things on them. Like Mr. Square. While we're on a tangent, does anyone else think it's funny that there's a chain of pharmacies called "Farmacias Similares" or "Similar Pharmacies." It's as though they are acknowledging that each one of their chain locations will be slightly different due to staff, layout, stocking, etc, if nothing else. We handed out bags by family, and had them empty our jugs of water into theirs, things that included buckets that I wouldn't have thought were safe to drink from. This was so we could have them refilled, which I guess is pretty cheap? Mayo, a loud man who is very friendly and warm but is sometimes boorish and rude (he whistles for the waiter at Rotary meetings) fell in the mud twice getting into and out of the boats.

We then returned to Hidalgotitlan, ostensibly to pick up our comrades. However, we ended up staying much longer than I had anticipated, with many Rotarians taking some time to beer and relax. This was only worth mention because we were tired and had school the next day, and already we weren't looking to be home until at least 8-9 at night, if not later. Anyway, Claire, Mayo and I went walking into the town and discovered it is extremely sleepy and beautiful. Claire and I both fell in love with it. We got some delicious "Tortas," which I guess are just hot sandwiches? They have buns, but aren't hamburgers. Mine was cheese, of course.

A couple days later, I was still going at night to help the Rotarians, though there was less and less to do. Claire quit after Sunday. Monday night, I was talking to Pepe, a Rotarian, and he decided to take me to see his work. He works at a dog food factory a few blocks away from our collection center. I suppose there's nothing morally wrong with a dog food factory; it's certainly better than wasting all that shit, and of course it's no factory farm or slaughterhouse, but that doesn't mean it's pleasant to see. Essentially, they take the bones and fat from delis and butchershops and such, and grind them up into a powder. This powder is presumably made into pellets somewhere else, I guess. The entire plant smelled terrible, and in the back, they kept barrels and barrels of animal fat. I saw an entire skinned carcass of something, which looked like a dog but was probably a bird of some kind sitting at the top of one. They load these barrels into the crushers with a conveyor belt, and at the bottom of this conveyer belt sat a pile of grisly bones, focused around the horned skull of a bull. They also keep gigantic tanks of tallow around, though I'm not sure what they use that for.

Thursday was the last day I went; I was told they were going to finish by Sunday, but I don't know if they're still going. The last few days I went I did nothing, so I stopped going. This blog will become much more interesting when I have pictures, I hope. Sorry they lack now.

Tuxtepec

2008-09-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

Beautiful gilded clouds at my Tuxtepec Family's ranch

Cows at that ranch

Maried and Angel playing in water

A hare

Cows

Chococat

Me, a man, Angel, Maried, a boy, and Alice (from France)

The swimming hole at Zuzel

Exchange students there

The river leading away from the spring

Exchange students and Rotarians at the top of steps

Cloud hole above beer factory

Australia?

From a distance

Fascists?

Not a fascist

These are all cute children marching in the independence day parade, by the way

Gigantic tree in the park

Chubby boy

Fascists?

Scenes from the river passing through Tuxtepec, taken from a pedestrian bridge

Sun and branches

Palm tree in a garden at the beginning of the pedestrian bridge

My house in Tuxtepec

My Tuxtepec Family: Edmundo, Me, Maried, Marisela, Eddy

Me and Eddy

Parrot

Toucan

Living room type place

The night of Friday, September 12, me and the other two exchange students in Mina, Claire and Marlene, left at 3 AM for Tuxtepec. I had slept since 4 PM the day before, so I spent the bus trip slipping in and out of light sleep, listening to beautiful music, and watching the sun rise. We were alone with all the strangers on the bus, and none of us understood (and we still don't understand) why we left at such a rare hour. We arrived at the bus station in Tuxtepec at 7 AM Saturday morning.

The reason for our trip was the first district meeting for all the inbound Rotary Exchange Students. Our district includes all of the state of Veracruz and part of Oaxaca, (essentially nothing more than Tuxtepec in Oaxaca, I believe) and thus there are approximately 70 "Intercambistas" in the district. As far as I know, we were the first to arrive (except for those who live in Tuxtepec of course). About ten minutes after arriving, a few Rotarians arrived, and we were sent off to our respective host families in Tuxtepec. After arriving at my host family's house and spending the morning getting to know them, we went to their ranch, about a half hour into the country.

My family, first. There are 5 of them, but one was missing. I spent the first bit of time talking to the son, Eddy. He has his father's name, Edmundo, but is called Eddy. He is 15, and lives in an apartment in Cordoba because he's studying at a tech-prep school there. I am unclear on what this "tech" business means. He likes the Beattles and Cream and Metallica and Led Zepellin and Black Sabbath. His parents also like the Beattles a lot, and everywhere we drove, we were always listening to music at a fairly decent volume, of a fairly decent caliber. The year before, Eddy went to school in Dublin, Ireland, at a boarding school for boys run by a religious organization called "The Legionaries of Christ" or something like that. Amira, his 12 year old (I believe) sister is now in Dublin with I assume the same program. So he speaks English, more or less. His hero is John Lennon and he is a pacifist. His parents wanted me to try to convince him to study things other than music, because he has been obsessed with music for a long time and apparently does nothing but practice. He has no teacher and no band, because these things are hard to find here. He goes to an expensive far away school because the schools in Tuxtepec are apparently all corrupt. Teachers take money, alcohol, and candy for grades. Their perception that he is not interested in things other than music is plainly false. He loves watching National Geographic and is fascinated by nature. If he is not putting effort into his schoolwork it is only because of the still poor quality of his teachers and materials.

Later, Eddy disappeared for a while, and I was left with Maried. She is a brilliant little girl of indeterminate age, who showed me various things of interest around the house, like all of her "Stephanie" things. Stephanie is a character from some television show, Lazy Town or something like that. More importantly is Chococat. I'm not sure if it is just childish Spanish pronunciation, but that is a damned cute name. He comes with a pencil and you can draw on him and erase it with your finger. Eddy drew a peace sign on his forehead and Maried yelled at him "He's not a peace cat!"

The house itself is pretty wonderful, with a giant toucan room and a hallway alongside it, in which sits a small white parrot cage for a green parrot. The birds are noisy and move around a lot. They seem to not want to be caged? In the dining room area, there is what looks like a fountain, with no water, covered in small potted plants and such. Across from it there is a painting of lilies and a brick enclosure full of soil, with a few large plants growing in it. My room had three beds and a big mural of nature behind my bedboard.

We went to the ranch with a few of my family's friends, and after eating a bit we went down to the river, or stream. It is about hip deep, with a strong current, and cold. It is perpetually uncomfortably hot here, so swimming in cold water is always an attractive prospect and good idea. I missed my chance to change, so I swam in my clothes. The current was strong, and I sat loosely on the rocks or grabbed on to them and let my body drift.

We returned to the ranch and had a slow night. More friends had arrived, also hosts of an exchange student, Alice from France. We ate a little and watched clouds and cows until late. The children had been playing all day in this little wash basin full of water. There were some magnificent clouds in the sunset. These little bugs were illuminated by the sunlight as they floated out of this big hole in the ground.

We went to a Rotary dinner after changing into dry clothes, and met all the exchange students for the first time. It was small and thick with people and I ended up not talking to many people. We didn't do anything that night except eat. None of us understood why we'd left at 3 AM to arrive at 7 AM for a 9 PM meeting.

The next day we left fairly early and had a group picture and got on buses. The buses took us to a swimming hole, a natural spring of cold water. Half of us swam and half of us played soccer, and then we all swam. On the way there we saw hundreds of magic trees in a variety of contexts. There was one really idyllic spot fenced in by the road on one side and a fence on the others. A stream ran over the road and through the field, and horses, bulls, and chickens chilled all around.

The next day we went to a brewery, apparently the second largest in Mexico. It was a Corona and associated beer friends brewery, by the way. We started outside in this hot air and were bussed a very short distance to an air conditioned building. There we watched Corona commercials (I mean this in the most literal way), and an "informational" video about the company (propaganda). I don't understand in the least way why these kids were cheering at beer commercials.

We went through the factory, it was hot, and it was boring. Then we went to the part where we couldn't take pictures, which was the bottling section I guess you'd call it. There were giant conveyor belts of empty and full beer bottles. It smelled bad and was loud. Then we were bussed outside the compound and back in again to what looked like a village. There were houses and a playground and a swimming pool. We ate nearby the pool and they gave us all free beer. Everyone had at least two that wanted it, I believe. I was surprised. They showed more commericals and then gave us all T-Shirts. I didn't take one. I didn't drink the beer either, for that matter.

When we left, it happened that our bus was without adults. So they pulled down the rain shields, as it had started to rain and wind pretty hard, and then started smoking and making out and dancing. It was weird. I didn't realize we were allowed to smoke. Apparently we are though.

This whole trip exemplifies a trend in Rotary that some people don't acknowledge and others exemplify; that being alcohol. Throughout all of our training and any interaction I've ever had with rebounds or younger Rotarians, all they talk about is drinking. The older ones will make jokes about it with certain kids sometimes too. To be clear, I'm not just talking about Mexico. I don't get it, and I was disappointed I had to waste a day at a beer factory. They asked us not to take pictures of each other drinking, but that definitely happened. Before we left, they took us to a gift shop, where we could buy more beer shirts and merchandise. I also still don't understand how companies convince people to pay them to advertise for them.

That night, we went to "El Grito," the traditional Mexican indepedence day celebration. We gathered in the square under the big building where the Rotary hall was and yelled. They have a certain ritual about it, but it involves yelling "Viva!" a lot. The exchange students were the craziest group in the area, I'm sure. We were running back and forth and jumping up and down and yelling and chanting and dancing. Mexicans kept looking and laughing at us and asking for pictures. Being an exchange student is all about posing for pictures. No. 2 activity after drinking, maybe. It was raining, also. Everyone wore Viva sombreros and waved flags and had horns. The horns were obnoxious and great. Someone passed out a bunch of paper ones and we blew them in a stubborn and painful manner for far longer than we should have. My ears were ringing that night. They were also shooting off fireworks from literally right above our heads the whole night. They had trouble because of the rain, but it worked every once in a while, so they were well spaced and constand. There was a band playing up there as well, although they were out of tune, they were loud and had a lot of beating drums. I was surprised to find myself jumping up and down and chanting "Mexico" in rhythm and blowing a paper horn. When I got home, I found I'd painted my shirt and pants with fireworks ashes and running red papier mache paint from my horn.

The next day we watched the parade. The parade is very lackluster and fascistic to me. Every single school in the city marched all of its children, of all ages. They for the most part didn't play instruments. There were a few bands, but they just played reveille on valveless horns to simple snare beats. The rest marched to whistles from student or adult leaders. They all march very strangely. It's exactly like the videos you see of Soviets or Nazis, with the arms and legs straight and the arms out parallel to the ground, swinging back and forth. There were a lot of cute kids though, and one time a dog walked out into the street and weaved his way in between the students marching along. We watched the parade from that promenade the band was in the night before, overlooking the park. There is one absolutely gigantic tree in that park.

After the parade had passed by our spot, we joined into it, right behind the firemen (who oddly did that same fascist march). We were in a mass, a mob, unordered and without leaders. An anarchist microcosm, as they always point out. The other groups had heirarchy and leaders and emblems, but we yelled our chants spontaneously, initiated by whoever, and the shape of the group constantly changed, as people dropped back or moved forward. People were always yelling "Viva (country)!" and we would yell "Viva!" We also had a couple of Intercambista chants, or maybe just one and a bunch of Brazilian soccer things. We go "Intercambistas!" to start it, in a rhythm to a melody, and do the chant back and forth like this:
"Intercambistas!" (exchange students)
"Soy yo!" (I am)
"Intercambi-i-stas!"
"Soy yo-o-o!"
"Intercambistas Intercambistas Intercambistas!"
"Soy yo! Soy yo! Soy yo!"
"Cuarenta y uno!" (41)
"Noventa!" (90) (we are district 4190)
"Viva Mexico!"
"Viva!"

Tuxtla Gutiérrez

2008-09-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

Chiapas Marimba #1

Same

Boy drummer

Chiapas Marimba #2: Erick and two marimba players

Chiapas Marimba #3

Tavo, Pedro, Me, Erick, and Yadira

Cacti in gorge wall

Pedro sleeping in a boat

Yadira, wet after piercing rain

A tired man sleeps

Children flee the harsh gaze of a camera

Puddle Stomping

The Marimba Maker's Workshop

The Hall of the Marimba Maker

A human and a human construct

In opposition to a human construct, a magic tree stands across a park

cool picture from the marimba museum wall

Balloon Man

Omar in a charming sweater eating fruit

Sunday September 7 I went to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, with my family. We left at a jarringly early time in the morning and I watched the sunrise over green countryside and the human detritus strewn across it. I slept and had to pee terribly. Chiapas is gorgeous, beautiful. There are mountains here, small and green ones. At least, there are places where the clouds touch down onto the mountains (fog) which I reject calling fog.

The city of Tuztla is huge to my eyes, and fills the floor between giant mountain walls. It looks the same as all Mexican cities look. It may be the general foreigness I still have, but all Mexican cities look the same. Perhaps my eyes are still drawn to the things that distinguish Mexico from Michigan and don't see the things that distinguish one city from another. Mexicans presumably gloss over the things I notice and see the smaller details. We wandered through the city for a short time, passing street shops carrying a lot of knickknacks and crafts. Women accosted us perpetually trying to sell handmade cloth bags and bracelets.

We made our way down to the riverside, which is lined with restaurants. The restaurants are all exactly the same and seem to blend into one another, where not separated by streets. They are open air, facing toward the river, which has nothing on the other side. They have wooden tables and white table cloths and wooden chairs. Every restaurant houses one or two or three or more musical accompaniments, all marimba drumset combinations with variable numbers of marimba players. I believe there were at least 7 of these pairs within perhaps no more than three restaurants, in a span of no more than 500 yards. Chiapas claims to be the originator of the marimba, and essentially all of its folk music from a certain time on seems to be marimba music. The true story seems to include the original marimba or its idea being carried from Africa by slaves and then developed to its modern form in Chiapas.

After eating and talking to some marimbists, we went down the riverside a bit to buy tickets for our river cruise. I like that I often don't understand what's going on (because my Spanish isn't good enough to understand side conversations in which people aren't talking to me directly) and so I end up on boats with only assumptions about where they're going. We had to wait a considerable time for our boat, so while we're waiting for it, I'll tell you about the street vendors in this area. There are a lot of them, they're persistent, and they sell a variety of things. We were heckled at least three times by the same mumbling dvd/cd pirate while eating, and then by two different plastic jewelry vendors. Down by the river there are people selling sno-cone equivalents, people selling gum, candy, and cigarettes, and one "trail mix" vendor, who carried bags of peanuts, pistachios, m&ms, and other nuts and the like.

The boat left at a pace that pushed back the skin on your face and made it uncomfortable to keep your eyes open. The river was flooded slightly and the groves of trees on the far side were up to their metaphorical hips in water. We entered the true canyon after passing under an old bridge and a bigger new bridge. There were people waving to us from the top. The canyon walls at the mouth there, under the bridges, is covered in cacti. As we entered further into the canyon proper, the walls changed from steep and rocky to slopy and green and back again. The sky at this point was huge and populous and confused, but very blue; there were no grey clouds. There were a few fishermen around the shores in places.

I can't communicate in words or photographs the feeling of being in a canyon. So go to a canyon and understand the idea I'm comunicating in order that I can adequately share my experience! In general the canyon is huge and green, with grey spots where the plants can't gain a foothold. They are scraggly, though, and plants can hang on just about anywhere. Not actually anywhere, though. There are a few important events that happened passing through the canyon:

A dead dog floats through the filth and garbage in the river. He floats so that the water creates a line that bisects him symmetrically (is it weird that the word symmetric isn't symmetric?). The one regret I have from this trip is not getting a picture of this dead dog. Sorry you can't share this one, guys.

A white bird with orange beak waits in front of a waterfall.

The entire canyon is filled with magic trees. This is true of Mexico in general. There should be many pictures up there, sufficient to illustrate the point.

Birds frequently fly overhead. They are some kind of water bird, with a big pelican mouth and grey-brown colors. Their flight is miraculous. They beat and beat against the air, climbing painfully slowly, with visible effort but at the same time effortlessly, reach a height, and dive back to the water, dipping infinitely close to the water but never touching the water, and then swoop back into the sky.

Christmas Tree waterfall. I hesitate to classify things as the most beautiful of my life, because I frequently get this impression and then forget these things and get the same impression about other things, but I got the impression here that it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever experienced. It's a waterfall, you can see in the pictures, that is shaped like a Christmas Tree, and is green. The branches are these curved stone outcroppings presumably made by minerals left by misty falling water. They are impossibly thin and green. The water falls from the top and turns into a mist. The mist drifts out with the wind over the river, and returns to water as it touches upon the branches below. We took the boat in directly underneath this, and so we felt the water falling on our faces and looked up into the sun, directly overhead. The sun passes through the mist and imbues it with a blissful clarity and glow.

The end of our tour or halfway point more like was the dam. Damn dams. It looked like shit. There were electric towers lining the canyons there and a long strip of floating barrels, against which days worth of trash had piled up, and upon which seabirds alighted.

We returned the way we'd come, but now the sky was turning grey and the sun was hiding. We turned a corner and saw mist pouring out of the canyon before us; a cloud, who had found its way down into the river for a swim, presumably to get out of the beating sun. We entered the cloud and experienced with it its escape from the sun and its slow fall into the river. The rain drops were sharp and piercing and riding through the cloud felt like perpetually walking into a pine branch. I assume that, like the pine branch, sharp rain drops are a defense mechanism against the potential dangers of bumbling pedestrians.

We returned to the city, wandered a bit, encountering three locations of importance: an old convent, and the house of the marimba maker. The convent is important because it housed two gardens, the first of which centered around a gigantic magic tree (the source of the convent's power, undoubtably) which had roots extending out into the streets. The wall of the garden was built overtop of the root instead of cutting it to accomodate the wall. There were a lot of dogs in this part of town.

The marimba maker's house is exactly as beautiful as it sounds. This is a man who handmakes wood marimbas, understand. The hallway from the living room to the workshop is lined with plants, and the workshop is open air. It opens out toward the river. There are marimbas everywhere, of course, and giant resonators laying about, along with woodworking tools and pictures of old marimbas and their makers. In the lower portion there are two giant wooden statues, life size, of indigenous men playing marimbas. One is a marching sort, carried at the waist, and the other just has a few bars on a string hanging on his left arm and a mallet in the right. Also, there is an african marimba, made with gourds as resonators.

After the marimba maker, we went to a few shops and looked at miniature marimbas and zapatista t-shirts. This was all in a park where we had parked. In the park proper there is a contest between a man-made behemoth and a natural behemoth. The tree wins, of course. It's one of the most incredible trees I've ever seen.

Then we ate in a mediocre vegetarian restaurant chain and headed to the park (other park, other part of town. Possibly even another town?). In the park, a marimba band played in the gazebo and people danced all around it. I have a picture of three balloon vendors standing almost literally in the exact same place. It illustrates the high concentration of balloon vendors in this park. Off to the side of the park is the marimba museum. It is not very big, but has one room full of marimbas of all types. There are marimbas without accidentals, marimbas made with gourds, round marimbas, marching marimbas, 3 0ctave, 4 octave, 5 octave, 6 octave, and 7 octave marimbas, metal marimbas, feet marimbas, and exquisitely decorated handcarved wooden marimbas.

On the way home, we were stopped first by the military just leaving Tuxtla. I was scared at first, because the men had automatic rifles and carried them everywhere, but then I realized that we were just stopped as part of a government program to get people to appreciate the most gigantic and old tree off to the right, just immediately where we stopped. We were then stopped once more after stopping to go to the bathroom. This time they looked in our car in the console and shit. A few of us had to get out. I didn't. While we were driving home I got a poetic image of all these magic trees floating out of the canyon, hovering in the air, with people riding in the branches. I imagine it would be a great album cover.

two beautiful puppies and their beautiful home and loving friends

2008-09-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

Two puppies fight and eat my hand

Two puppies

A bird in their cage

Two puppies relaxing

Two little chicken babies preparing to explore an intimidating world

Deyanira

Mi Tia

A beautiful puppy eating my fist

Red Chicken

Small Baby Chickens

A boy with his juice

Me in prison, unhappy

Wisps

Abuelita's Backyard with Chicken coop

Cactus and Abuelita's backyard

Girl

Three girls

Cloud bridge

Cloud Bridge

Clouds obscure the sun

Clouds over telephone wires

Me squeezing two girls

Clouds over construction

(A) window encounter(ed)

The majority of these pictures are from the house of my Abuelita (literally "Grannie") which is perhaps the stereotypical Mexican house. It's very beautiful, with a hot but welcoming and small house and a bigger yard with a chicken coop and puppies and baby chickens and a bird and a brown dog named Terry. It's got all the trappings, the omnipresent paintings of Jesus and Mary and their fiends hanging out in clouds, the stylistic depictions of the sun and moon, lots of plants, scattered dirt and garbage, receding paint and advancing soil. We suck coconut ice cream out of plastic bags while watching the neighbor woman hang laundry. She comes to join us for birthday cheesecake. It isn't so hot, because it's going to rain, and we're shaded from the sun.

I feel so incredibly loved in my classroom, I feel like emphasizing. I can't express it exactly. The way I can make eye contact with anyone in the room for a warm smile when needed. For me this is practically all the time. When can you truly say you don't need a warm smile? People consistently express concern for me, play with me, let the little things slide, teachers don't care when I disregard the homework or their lectures, people recommend music, poetry, movies, and give affirmations of friendship when appropriate. I like that a lot. I am sometimes annoyed by a lot of stupid questions from boys, though. I assume it's something to do with culture shock or something of that nature.

I also am having a really odd feeling toward my past. I feel a complete disconnect between my previous life and what I am aware of now. It's very bizarre. I feel like things that happened to me within a few years ago happened to a different person. I can no longer recall how certain things felt, how I felt toward certain people, that is, I know it consciously but can no longer disinter the ghost of that feeling. The spiritual death and rebirth seems to have carried itself out this time while it failed to some extent when I went to Interlochen. I am still in contact with old friends and my parents occasionally, yet this seems to do little to make any of that seem more real. I like it.

Love to you,
Adam

A day and a good day and pictures of the latter (ladder)

2008-09-02T13:47:00.001-07:00

Bola, Rosario, Me, and Dalid

Rosario, Me, Deyanira, and Dalid

Gabriel

Friend of "I dream with you" girl

The tags made by the girls for the class, professing our love for each other. The first is from all the class to me. Claire got one of those as well.

Me making a face

Popular, Eumir, Tigre, Misa, and Bola, making faces

Tigre

Popular and me

Carlos

Bola, me, and Claire, from France

Rosario with grape stem

Popular, Tigre, Eumir (not really that tall), and Me

Popular, Bola, Me, Eumir, and Tigre below

Tigre, Bola, Misa, Me, and Eumir

Beautiful cloud from lunch

Sun and beautiful clouds gilded by it in the afternoon

The same

Beautiful clouds after school

Over the last two days I have passed through two very opposed states of being. Yesterday at school, I was extremely restless and frustrated with the poor quality of many classes and teachers, and the discomfort of my desk. The school I attend is wonderful in many ways, of course, but a lot of the classes are taught fairly poorly. I don't know if this is because these practices are standard practice in Mexico or because the teachers legitimately think they're worthwhile, however. Neither of those things save them from being really big wastes of time.

The big things here are dictation and note-taking. Dictation has the teacher slowly reading long passages and us copying them down, of course. It is so slow that you never really are presented with a clear idea unless you read what you've written, and we don't really do that. And of course we never discuss them afterwards. Note-taking is bad here because the teachers write big sections on the big and expect us to copy the whole thing down exactly. Then we still don't talk about it. So we don't take notes on what we feel is helpful to learn information, we just copy down images and words without thinking.

The worst of all this in so many ways is the most recent homework assignment from the philosophy teacher. Now, this man, the owner and director of the school, seems really intelligent and respected. He knows the material, teaches through his time slot, and makes sure to some degree that the students know what he's talking about. He's certainly no Mr. Dean, of course, but he's much above average, I think. This all makes the disappointment even worse when he gives the most ridiculous homework assignment I've heard of in my 13 years of public education. That is, they have to memorize and present one by one a page-long Galileo speech. What the hell? A philosophy teacher, an intelligent man, an educator who OWNS a school, should know better than that. The alternative, by the way, is to write the speech out 500 times. If you don't do one of these, you're not permitted to take the final exam, and thus fail the class, I guess.

That said, there are some really good classes and teachers. We still use these same methods of bad teaching but then talk about what we're doing afterward. I am looking forward to Anthropology and Sociology and Communications and Philosophy. I just got pretty fed up with all this bullshit yesterday and had a hard time sitting through it. I think it's something to do with Culture Shock as well. I have noticed really weird things annoying me, like Pedro slurping cereal in the morning, or people teasing me really light-heartedly. They say this happens and is normal, so I guess that's fine.

When I got home from school, however, everything was much better. I got a lot done, it seemed like, reading philosophy and writing a bunch and practicing a bunch. I even read a bit of my Spanish novel, which is really difficult and I never want to do it. I listened to a philosophy lecture before I fell asleep, too.

This morning I felt much less tired at school, and when I arrived I felt all warm and comfy. I have no idea what changed. Maybe philosophy helped out? I wrote a poem, my first poem, during English class, and then some more philosophy and a series of poems by Federica Garcia Lorca. Poetry is much more immediately gratifying than my novel. In poetry, you look up words and comprehend the meaning of the poem at once, an image or what have you. However, a lot of the point of a novel comes from getting to know characters and plots and such, and the fact that you don't get all the little metaphors and similes and vocabulary used keeps you from understanding well enough to trudge through. When you look up the words, immediate images come to mind but aren't necessarily as immediately graspable or beautiful as in poetry. Images fit into a context more than they are meant to stand alone.

At lunch time I took more cloud pictures, which I've been doing almost every day lately. After lunch, a group of girls, Deyanira primarily as well as Dalid and Rosario, were making these great little tags, pieces of paper that we taped to our vests and ties. They said "I love you (name)" They made enough that most of the class loved one or more other people in the class, all regardless of gender and such. It was really sweet and it made me really happy. I had a "Te amo Eumir" tag, a "I heart Weska" tag (I don't really know Weska. He's not in our class), and my class "We heart Adam" tag. Fanny and Kristell started tickling and punching me also. I don't know how I feel about that. Probably pretty good though.

Dalid had brought in grapes with seeds and was giving them away. I ate a bunch and put the seeds in my pocket. I asked the girls if they thought I could put dirt in there and water it and give it sun and grow grapes in my pocket. The vote was 2-1 in favor, with Rosario voting no. After we'd eaten our grapes, Rosario and I put the stems in our hair over our ears like flowers.

Overall, a pretty good really good night and day, following a melancholy and frowny day.

Premature Observations on Mexico (and pictures)

2008-09-01T19:50:00.000-07:00

Mexican street with a lot of foliage visible

Awesome clouds

More awesome clouds, obscured by powerline

Awesome lizard from the street I live on

Closer
Closer
Closest

Things that strike you on traveling to Mexico.

The heat. It's hotter here than in Michigan, especially during the winter but also noticeably during the summer. It's not too uncomfortable most of the day, because we are almost always inside, but waiting for Erick to pick me up from school sucks.
The dirt. Outside of businesses and homes, where things are well kept and clean, the entire area seems to be really dirty. The streets are lined with inches of old garbage that has broken down beyond recognition to form a brown-gray layer in all the gutters. It is worse on the highways, and there are even places on the side of the highway that have giant piles of trash, in trash bags and not. There are always vultures circling overhead of them. It seems that here it is acceptable or at least common for people to just throw trash over their shoulder, so to speak.
The plants. The plants here are all of a type unknown in Michigan, and they are much more aggressive and prominent. Things are green all over, and it seems the plants jump at any chance they get. Wherever the city has let go its stranglehold on the landscape even a little, plants have filled in the gaps. There is also a lot of horticulture, for whatever reason. The gas station across the street has bears and such, and there are some "tree houses" that look like bird houses made of tree branches and leaves. The other interesting thing about the plants is that all the trees are painted white on the bottom. Erick told me this was for aesthetics, which seems questionable as it doesn't look particularly good, and to keep animals and insects out of the trees. I was under the impression both of those were supposed to live in trees. Who knew?
The cityscape. There are several notable things about the cityscape itself. First, it is extremely colorful. Houses are bright colors, bright pink and yellow and green and any color you can imagine, and not always solid colors either. The houses themselves are organized not by streets but by “Colony” or neighborhood. That is, we give addresses by colony, not by street, and colonies are a bit more unified and exactly defined than in the US. Usually they have walls, as well. There are walls and gates surrounding practically every house. The funny thing about the walls is that they are typically covered in advertisements, unless they are in more rural areas. The advertisements are typically pretty funny, too. Finally, regarding the cityscape, we have a lot of speed bumps. That is, almost literally every block. They are really helpful and a good idea, I think. The roads themselves are in fairly bad condition usually.
The food. The food is obviously different than it is in Michigan. In Mina, there is little fast food, first of all, and there are a lot of taco restaurants. All the small food vendors in town have a really great naming system, by the way. Instead of picking a clever or memorable name, like restaurants in the US do, they simply call themselves by their first names. For example, Taqueria “Juan.” Despite the relative lack of fast food, the small vendors serve really greasy and sometimes bad food. These vendors, to be clear, are not street vendors. They have business installations in buildings, though typically small ones. Pizza in Mexico is really terrible. Food is typically served with tortillas and salsa and “salad,” which means a lettuce and other vegetable mix to put in your tortilla. We put practically everything in tortillas, be it plantains or chili or soy meat. I have soy milk and granola for breakfast every day, but soy milk comes in a powder you mix with water. Granola is more expensive and typically used in smaller quantities with yogurt and fruit. For lunch I eat Quesadillas or cheese sandwiches and fruit. They are all delicious. Also, we eat four times a day. My host family was surprised to hear we only eat three meals in the US, because Americans are notoriously fat.
The animals. There are so many more wild animals here than in Michigan. They are primarily dogs and cats, but there are also many lizards and birds and insects and such. The dogs and cats all look starved and mangy and roam the streets in packs. They are not spayed or neutered, which for some reason looks odd to me. I am not used to dog testicles for some reason. People here also seem to have more pets, although they also seem to pay them less attention. We have a dog here who never seems to get much attention except his eye medication. I have never seen a Mexican pet their dog or cat. They also have lots of parrots and fish and even ferrets, however. I know at least two people with ferrets here, which is double those I knew in Michigan. Fanny and my YEO's daughter, Karina, that is.
The music. The young kids or whoever here like to go to the disco, and they like to listen to disco music. Disco music is mostly reggaeton and some bad techno. I don't mind it particularly much in the car, but I would never listen on my own. But the funny part is that Erick also listens to a Mexican brass band cd, which is pretty cool and has some rompin' tunes. There seems to be a mix between dance music, native Mexican music, and “Oldies” from the US. Also a decent portion of Scream-o and metal among the younger kids.
The police/military/Pemex. The police here drive around in trucks and carry M-16s. That's disconcerting enough in itself, but there are also huge military jeeps full of armored soldiers, also with M-16s. The reason for this, they claim, is to protect the two huge refineries that provide the majority of jobs and income for Mina. I am really quite unsure of who they're defending them from. Surely not the Zapatistas. . . I feel less safe with them around, though, that's for certain. The refineries are extremely ugly and are constantly billowing smoke and casting this ghastly yellow-red glow on the sky. My host dad, who works there, tells me the light is from giant fires, boiling something or other. They are like Hell. Pemex is the nationalized petroleum industry here, and all the gas stations are Pemex. They don't list prices because they are the only gas station and I guess prices are the same all over the country. The gas stations all have attendants who fill you up and clean your windshield, without tips. Some sort of government unemployment program, I guess. Pemex owns the refineries and employs all the people in our Colony. We are permitted to live here until my host dad retires, at which point we are kicked out, as far as I understand it. Also, there are white trucks all over town that say Pemex on the door. These I guess are given to employees while they work there, because we have one. I can't imagine they'll let us keep that either though. There is also a Pemex hospital in Mina, the only hospital of note in a city of 150,000 people. It is private (owned by the government) and serves only Pemex employees and their families. It has the right to refuse treatment and does so. The only public alternative is the Red Cross, which runs the ambulances here. After that stage of things, I guess you have to pay for another private hospital. I'm not sure.

Pictures of House

2008-08-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

My house

My house from another angle, with tree visible on left

House with cars visible on right

Sky through branches and their leaves

My house from another perspective

Erick, my host brother, in front of El Manantial, the vegetarian restaurant

Weenie

House from behind

Beautiful Clouds from my Backyard

Refrigerator and door to Formal Dining room, from Kitchen

Living room with Television

Formal Dining room

Formal Dining room with weird picture of jesus

Welcome Poster

My bed and chair

My room

Crucifix on my door

Kitchen

Reasons Why I Am Really Happy

2008-08-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Number 1:
Music. Music is really great. Firstly the Decemberists, and then the new Music Tapes Album, then my discovery of 2nd Imaginary Symphony for Cloudmaking, and the new of Montreal album. Also, all the rest of A Hawk and A Hacksaw. I am in love with Julian Koster very completely, and have finally found the music to express how I feel about clouds. Listening to the 2nd Imaginary Symphony for Cloudmaking while falling asleep was a singularly moving experience.

Number 2:
Enchanting Experience. A girl on the stairway at school said to me "I dream with you." This is one of the most beautiful things someone I don't know has ever told me. I told her so today. She is in photos on the photo bit. I ruined the moment by not understanding her, though. Still, it was really great.

Number 3:
Friends. My friends at school are really great. I am referring here, by the way, to essentially just my entire classroom. We are in a classroom together for the most part all day, and the teachers move among us. So thus, we get to bond a lot more than typically in a school. The classroom sometimes seems a bit antagonistic and lazy and such, but typically there's a more affection than I'm used to in this sort of environment. For example, even though the boys sometimes do weird things like pinch girls and pretend to hit them, and the boys hit each other all the time, they also do things I've never really seen before, like kiss girls on the forehead and hug and caress. It's really nice. This is of course in addition to the customary kiss received by girls from girls and boys anytime they enter or leave a room. This isn't true so much in class but when we leave and such. I have also received plenty of uninitiated hugs from Alde and today from Dalid. Receiving frequent spontaneous affection is really good for me.

Number 4:
The sun and rain and clouds in school. I love so much that my school has an open air section. I think my classmates don't appreciate as much, but I love it. I can always just ask to go to the bathroom and see the sun. Today I saw the most beautiful clouds there, as well. The pictures are up here also.

Number 5:
The tree in my backyard.

Pictures of School and Friends

2008-08-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Dalid, Suner, and Monica

Tigre, Alde, and Fanny

School Entrance

Misael

Eumir

Bola and "I dream with you" Girl

Arturo, "Popular"

Deyanira, Lasserre, and Carlos

Karla, playfully mocked for being Asian

Rosario

Lower Hallway leading to Entrance, door on right is our classroom

Tigre and Tomas

Me and Bola

Two Girls

Me and two girls

Gabriel

Beautiful Clouds

Upper hallway

View from School

Two kids overlooking courtyard from courtyard

View from school

View from School

View from School
View from School open third floor
Kristell and Fanny on School open third floor

View From School

View of construction on open third floor

Beautiful Clouds from School open third floor

open air courtyard from School open third floor

Courtyard from School open third floor

Cafeteria

Alde, Gabriel, Fanny, and Kristell in hallway in front of classroom,

View from courtyard to sky

View from courtyard to sky, Fanny sleeping in classroom

Painting Class, Painting Class again

Poetic Revery in Clouds

2008-08-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

Begin exchange year journal:
My entire flight day was very relaxed, and I spent a lot of time reading and waiting. I never saw a single exchange student the entire day, either. I slept through my flight to Dallas and most of my flight to Mexico City, but saw a few damned impressive clouds. It is a real dream fulfillment to fly for the first time after falling in love with clouds.

A summary of basic information before we begin. I am leaving from Detroit, to Dallas, to Mexico City, to Minatitlan, Veracruz, Mexico. I am here for 11 months on a Rotary Youth Exchange. I will live with three separate families. My first host family, the Daza family, consists of Pedro and Lety, my parents, and Pedro (14) and Erick (18) my host brothers. I am in this house because Erick is leaving on Exchange in Turkey for a year on September 16 approximately. I attend a private high school of about 100 students, called Colegio Nuevo Hispano. We have uniforms and hair regulations and very very nice students. Minatitlan, or Mina, is a fairly large town of about 150,000 people. We are also about 20 minutes by highway from Coatzacoalcos, or Coatza, which is on the gulf and is a moderately important port, of about 234,000 people. Coatza is where we go for American conveniences like shopping malls and Subway and the Home Depot. The economy of both Mina and Coatza depend on Pemex, the Mexican National petroleum company, which is where my host dad works. There are two entire refineries in Mina and more in Coatza, I believe. As Rotary exchange students, we attend Rotary Club meetings every week, help with Rotary functions and fundraisers, and recieve $75 every month. That should explain about everything I can think of now, but please ask if you're ever lost or something. I don't mind a bit.

In the Dallas airport I read most of and finished Off the Map, the Crimethinc. travelogue of Europe. Off the Map is how I would like my journals to sound. I found this wonderful quote in it:

¨I realized then, that the nature of magic is not passing by. Under the waning moon, everything was suddenly steeped in profound and mystic meaning. I was no mosquito-bitten traveler stealing past tattletale farm dogs to sleep in a borrowed field; no, I was a student of life´s poetry, deep in the throes of epiphany. And the glowbug was an undercover philosophy teacher, reminding me that magic isn´t something that happens only once in a while, when someone is really lucky. It´s up to us if we stay awake watching it or fall asleep lulled by it. It´s up to us to trust that it´s real, and if we do, a whole world opens up for us to live in, not in place of irritating dogs and hungry mosquitoes, but right alongside them and within them.
As I laid there staring at the ole glowbug I couldn´t believe I´d ever had moments of blindness to magic, let alone days and weeks and years. I was certain, in that late hour of contentment before I fell asleep in soggy socks and damp overalls, that the imprint of the glowbug would last forever, that never again would I live outside such enchantment as was mine for the claiming. It was with the assurance of fresh revelations that I finally gave myself over to dreaming, the glowbug still inching over the ridges of my mind, in no hurry to reach the morning.¨

Mexico City is impossibly huge. When you come in over it in the airplane, it stretches as far as you can see, and further. Well over half the size of Tuscola County at 578 Sq Miles (compared to 914 in Tuscola County). From the airport, the sky looked this awful gray-blue color and you couldn't tell where the mountain sillouhettes ended and the sky began. Leaving Mexico City we got to fly through some clouds in a real way for the first time. On the previous two flights we just flew straight above the clouds line. That was great and I love seeing cloud landscapes and countrysides, but this time we spent maybe 15 minutes flying through the best clouds, at sunset. Sunset gives all the clouds a beautiful orange-yellow glow. I also wish I were a cloud peasant, so I cloud live among the cloud palaces all the time and wander the cloud countryside. This departing cloudscape over Mexico City was very populous and had a lot of huge palaces and castles. I had a perfect moment listening to "I have been floated," and then "Hoppipola."

A poem:
There are mountains here, small and green.
Those in the clouds are huge and white and wispy.

Love,
Adam

August 21: Inimitable Evening

2008-08-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

After spending approximately an hour writing a letter to Eileen and "looking at the internet," Erick came and he and Yadira and I went to Coatza. Yadira is his girlfriend, whose name I have finally learned. Again, Coatza is like Traverse City, and there is a very long beach and a side walk and highway that run parallel to it, and two long piers with lighthouses on the end. We parked the car at the entrance of on of the piers and Erick and I put on rollerblades. Mine were too small for me, though they are the biggest size available in Mexico.

The pier was full of people walking for exercise and romance and sun. We were both uncomfortable on rollerblades at first, and went rather slow, so Yadira could walk along with us. Then we started going ahead and coming back, making circles. On the way out, the dock is to the right and the mountains are to the left. I spotted a black cat on the rocks surrounding the pier, but he disappeared before Erick and Yadira saw him. This cat knows not what he do. The rocks are reserved for fisherman.

I arrived to the end of the pier first, and the impression standing in the shadow of the lighthouse, looking at its looming figure without discomfort whilst the entire pier is drenched in sunlight was strong. When Erick and Yadira arrived to the end of the pier with me, we sat up on the fence looking north. We watched dolphins leap from the water while a fleet of green plant boats heaved up anchor and floated for the arms of the ocean mother. At this moment, I had a vivid experience of the specious present, the impossibly fleeting and intangible passing of time. I understood at that moment all the poetic imagery one hears describing the ocean as infinite, as eternal, as the mythic mother. I wanted to live on the ocean for the rest of my life. For a fleeting moment it seemed as though there were nothing else in the world but me and the ocean. Then I looked up to the sky, to the vast, vast stretch of the clouds from the sunset stage of the mountains out over the ocean. I had a thought that mountains become cloud mountains when they die and look out over living mountains from above.

We left the dolphins to their play and headed back while the sun set. About halfway back, I saw a fairly big black bug fly just over my head, and tried to follow it into the sky. I lost it after giving a good chase. We found the black cat about halfway back. He was tiny, a teenage cat trying to make it on his own in a pile of trash-laden rocks. He had speckles of coffee all over and a big patch on the left side of his chest. He came and laid down on the edge of the walkway and we watched him from the rail. After a while, he stalked a grasshopper and poked at some trash and came to lay down closer to me. I said "Adios, gatito," when we left and secretly skated back to see him while making circles. He pounced on a skitterbug once, but lost him.

We took off our skates and socks and drank the milk of fresh coconuts while watching the sun set over the mountains and the kids play on the beach. There were two small tents set up on the beach, lots of fishermen on the rocks, and a spearfisherman who had no luck. The coconuts come from a line of vendors surrounding the mouth of the pier who have refrigerated comparments with whole coconuts floating in icy water. They take the coconuts and hack off a side with a machete and stick a straw in. I think this may sound very romantic, but I wasn't in love with the taste of coconut milk. It is fairly bland, and the main benefit was the cold and wet. After you're done, you take the coconut back to the man and he chops at it with the machete again for a while, until he halves it and then peels out the meat and puts it in a cup. You then put lime and chili powder and salsa on the pieces and eat them. None of this tasted anything like coconut.

We went back to Mina, to my YEO's house, for the Rotary meeting. The German and French girls were both there, the French girl having just arrived that afternoon. The German is named Marlene and is from Stuttgart, and the French is named Claire and comes from someplace South maybe. I learned how to play Roullette in preparation for Casino Night, along with a Doctor Nelson. We are going to run the game at the Casino Night Rotary fundraiser Saturday. Gambling is illegal in Mexico, so the only places people can go to do it are these events, where you buy fake money and play with it for prizes, and the real money is used for Rotary projects.

After learning the game, the kids went for dinner. We walked down the dirty streets under yellow phosphorescent lightposts and distant thunder. Gangs of dogs passed by as we talked in broken spanish of school and home and exchange programs. There were quite a few of us, me and Erick and the other two exchange students, Claire and Marlene, and then my YEO's daughter Karina, who wants to go on exchange to Japan, another girl I don't know, and later a rebound from Germany, Juan. The girl I don't know kept asking all of us if we drank and smoked, as per Rotary custom, apparently. Later Juan was asking us the same questions, promising to take us dancing and extolling the virtues of tequilla.

Eating vegetarian here is harder than in the US, but not impossible, and still very delicious. I eat a lot of cheese and plantains and fruit. This night I ate cheese empanadas. Whoever said that Mexican food wasn't actually spicy, and that Mexicans actually question Americans as to why they put so many seasonings in their food was completely wrong regarding where I live. Food is spicy and very flavorful. We ate chili peppers filled with cheese yesterday and put jabaneros in our soup this afternoon.

Love,
Adam

A Horror Movie Dream

2008-08-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

I am shopping in a WalMart at a stormy night with Bryan Hill, Erik and Trey Helwig, and Eileen Townsend. Erik and I and Trey (from left to right) sit down on the couch and watch something I believe, though I am not sure what is on the other end. Bryan is browsing produce or dvds or something in a bin. A man sits down to Trey's right and talks to us for a while. He is probably in his twenty's, dressed in a light blue something or other t-shirt and looking not TOO hip. He suddenly grabs Trey's arm and stabs and saws and cuts to the bone near his wrist, and fiercely starts telling us about how it feels, because it happened to him somehow. We are all scared and really pissed and security comes and puts him in the place where they keep shoplifters until the police come, which was that same couch, incidentally. I run out into the street and meet up with Eileen, and then my parents are here and we are in a hotel room very high, looking down on the window opening onto the couch in Walmart, a big sheet of plate glass window. We are looking at the things he has with binoculars, and noticing something or other, and I turn to say to Dad, look at the things he has, and he comes and does and the couch is now on the same level we are. I say "Weren't we in a very high room?" and then the man is not on the couch and there is a knock on the door. Chills my spine sends down it and I wake.

I hear the same knock on my door, Lety, my host mother, waking me for school.

My First Day of School: Mexican School

2008-08-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

My First Day of School:

School in Mexico:

A woman I'd never met before led me to a classroom full of seventeen uniformed Mexican students, all about seventeen years old. The uniforms were dark blue polos with school logos and sewed on names, last name first. Of course, those don't help, because here everyone has a nickname. A woman came in and fairly well the first thing she did was to have me come to the front of the class and introduce myself, which I was pleased to do. Then she began writing on the board a list of theories regarding the origin of the planet. We all wrote down sentences about each of them, which she dictated to us. I didn't care so much and couldn't understand some words, so I paraphrased.

After what seemed like a very short time, class was over and after a short discussion with some students nearby, a couple of kids (Tigre and Alde) took me upstairs to a classroom about half the size of the previous, with only five students. Here another woman, whom I had seen before, somewhere, entered and lectured about Sociology for a while and then had small talk for a longer time, it seemed. We took dictation in this class as well.

After, I stayed in the same classroom for music class. The other options in this period are, as far as I can tell, painting and cheerleading. Many more students entered for music, many not in any uniform, and one in full dress uniform. We began with the teacher, a man now, writing about two measures of music on the board. I got a sheet of staff paper from a boy I never saw again, and copied it down, without understanding what we were supposed to do with it. Then the teacher took the guitar players (they teach guitar, recorder, and singing, though there are no lessons) into one half of the room and I tried to explain movable Do to Ruben (called Bola, because he's pudgy). In Mexico and I believe in other Latin countries, they use fixed Do, and sing si instead of ti. Because they use fixed Do, they call the notes by their solfege syllables and nothing else. I learned how to talk about notes and sharps and flats but no one understood what a key signature was, and only one boy (a guitar player who kept playing In the Hall of The Mountain King and The Doors songs) knew who to read music and play it. The rest just knew solfege. After a while, the teacher brought a guitar player girl over to the rest of us, and had her play guitar while he sung us a song to learn by rote. It was a pretty good folk song about love.

We returned to our original classroom downstairs for lunch, and mostly just talked there for a while. Only a few people were eating, and I didn't either, until one of the kids said to me, "Aren't you going to get something to eat?" (in spanish, though) and I went alone to the cafeteria to inquire after vegetarian food. By the time I'd found out I'd be fending for myself, the kids who had sent me arrived in the cafeteria too, which I found odd. A kind, bold girl named Dalid gave me an apple, and I had that with melon for lunch, back in the classroom.

The architecture of the school is the best of any school for really only one reason. It is all orange, first of all, and the classes are fairly small, only holding a little over 20 students comfortably. The cafeteria, by the way, is not really a cafeteria. It is little bigger than the classrooms and has only 3 tables. There is a counter and a small kitchen (meaning a stove and sink), and a few racks of things like candy bars and ice cream (served in bags, which you puncture and suck) and fruit and chips. They serve only meat sandwiches from the stove. The really good thing about the architecture, though, is that it opens up in the middle, so the stairs and the way from the class rooms to the cafe is open to the sky and fresh air and sun. The steps were wet from morning rain today. The hallways recieve fresh air as well, through that courtyard. If anyone is worrying, there is air conditioning in every room, and my hands were cold in class this afternoon. The heat isn't an issue.

After we ate, we had English class, which was a farce for me. I like the kids in this class, though, and it's good for me to translate backwards what they're doing and to listen to their teacher's heavy accent and occasional mistakes. (The third day of classes, Dalid and Bola and Deyanira asked me if I laughed when I heard poor English and silly mistakes. I do, and that day in English they kept looking at me during class and I had to stifle giggles). After English, a kind woman named Diana came and sat at the desk for a while and we talked. Mostly she talked to and about me, and she had me come up and introduce myself again, though the students I believe were the same. Eventually she did dictate to us a page about the origins of Algebra in the Middle East. Then we put the desks in a circle and everyone introduced themselves to me and they asked questions.

This is when I begin to feel comfortable here with these kids. By the way, for those who have never tried it, it's much more difficult than normal to remember people's names when they're all foreign and give you first their full Latin name (usually first middle last last) and then all of the nicknames you can call them, none of which mean anything to you. Anyway, I assume none of them will care, because they're incredibly nice people. They took an interest in me all day and asked similar questions, like "Do you drink?" I refused that one enough in the morning that I started to worry I was closing off all my social opportunities, though that of course wasn't at all true. Other common questions are "Why Mexico?" and "What do you like to do?" and "Do you like futbol (soccer)?" But in the afternoon that time, things got more in depth, and I had to tell them about my schooling in the US, and about Interlochen, and about the "culture" in Cass City, and about the impressions people have of Mexico in the US.

I think I also established connections with several people through music and ideas and such. One girl, Alde, likes Interpol and the Strokes, and that guitar player, Carlos, was playing the Doors all the time. Dalid at one point asked me if I was a hippie, and they also made me take my hair out of its ponytail prison (imposed on the advice of my YEO). Alde also asked me if I liked hippie things, and at first I was cautious, because I was afraid she wanted to know if I smoked marijuana, but no, she was talking about Chiapas! She said there are a lot of hippies in Chiapas, and that her and Fanny and maybe others are going there in June or went last June or something. I told them then that the Zapatistas were the only destination in Mexico I knew about and wanted to see. We talked about them for a while and everyone seemed fairly positive, much more so than my host family has been. That is, at least, my host parents. My brothers don't seem to know or care much about them.

After our circle, we moved the desks back and talked a bit more, and the teacher left us alone to talk further (another break, this time). I believe then we had Philosophy, which is taught by the Director and owner of the school (private schools have owners), who was the sort of man who likes to accomplish things. Unlike all the previous classes, he spoke quickly, tolerated no talking (the classes were never silent before) and never slowed down to make dictation. I couldn't understand a word he said, but I believe they were talking about Copernicus and Galileo and maybe Newton. I'm not sure why they were talking about these men in a Philosophy class directly, but things may clear up in the future. Regarding the dictation practice, I assumed it was because we have no textbooks. I believe my host mother told me they would arrive later, or something like that. At the end of the class the director addressed me, asking where I was from, etc, and he made a comment about my hair but didn't say I had to cut it. The other teachers had been making scissor motions at me all day, but my host brother said that when I talked to the director, who is his personal friend, he would say I didn't have to. Anyway, when he made that comment about my hair, all the girls yelled "Noooooo!!" to convince him not to make me cut it. They'd been telling me how "bonita" it was all day.

We had another class but my host brother Erick (who attended the school for three years himself) didn't know the schedule and came to pick me up an hour early, so that is how my first day of school ended.

Appended bit (appendix?) regarding my second day of school:

On the way to school this time I was more awake because I'd been having trouble falling asleep lately, and was woken up several times during the night by the tremendous thunderstorm that happened all night, and because of my scary dream. Thus, I saw this time what I hadn't seen the first time, which is the sunrise. It was completely stunning and of the softest, fuzziest colors of pink and yellow. In school, we ascended to the upper smaller classroom again halfway through Communication. In the stairs on the way up, you can hear birdsong and feel the sun (or rain). In that classroom you can hear roosters rousting from their roasting roosts. I can't resist an opportunity for alliteration, but it's fairly novel for me to hear roosters, especially in school.

But the best part was the little green ant I found on my arm. I was not so much paying attention to the teacher at this point, because I couldn't understand what she was saying, though I wanted to because I thought she was talking about something interesting. Communication isn't like speech like I thought it was, but is actually a fairly in-depth seeming study of human and animal communication and language and signs and mass media and propaganda and such. Anyway, I was not paying attention and trying not to let her notice that, and watching this little green ant scurry his way through the forest of my arm hairs and up my hand to my finger tips. I couldn't feel him at all, he was so small.

At one point he got onto my notebook and I picked him up again and he got blown back onto my arm by the fan. The teacher came over to me (in a classroom of five students) and was giving me looks, or so I thought, and I put my arm down to my side and lost my ant friend. I think I want to write a short story about this from the ant's perspective. I am afraid it will end up sounding like one of those magic schoolbus sort of fun science explanations of human skin though. There are far too many of those in the world today.

The guitar player, Carlos, talked to me about music for a while today and he invited me to play with their band. I am to meet them tomorrow at the birthday party. The kind of music people always ask me about is Metallica and their cohorts, and older stuff like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and Aerosmith and whatever. Carlos likes the Doors and Pink Floyd and The Beattles and such though. I am curious as to why the only modern music they know is Latin, but that older American and British stuff is popular. Is it because they didn't have rock band equipment in Latin America until recently?

My classes from yesterday and today, collected, to give ideas about the curriculum:

The planets (physical science?)
Sociology
Music
Lunch
English
Computer Science (about programming language and algorithms and such) (2 hrs)
Philosophy (about physics, apparently)

The planets again
Communication (2 hrs)
Anthropology (they call native Americans, like Plains Indians and Seminoles and such, "Pieles Rojas," which means Redskins)
Lunch
Literature
"Culture" (we learned about Japan)
Computer Science (2 hrs)

The computer science teacher is the nice woman named Diana, the only teacher's name I know, and today we did little again but talk. She had written a sentence or two on the board but few copied it down. Today our serious conversations were as thus: First, they asked me about the presidential candidates and I ended up trying to explain Anarchism in Spanish and doing a really poor job of it. Then, the teacher asked me why I didn't believe in God. I threw it back at her, to buy time, and the students got a kick out of that because she stalled as well. She got her answer, though, and I ended up trying and failing again to explain my belief that divinity is imposed on the world by human beliefs and perceptions, and that that was not a justification for the existence of God, while trying to make clear that I believed in magic. This is confusing in English, and I may have run into a knot in my philosophy. Things are tough all over, says Mr. Guza.

Then I had to tell them how I felt on 9/11, and they were fairly sympathetic to this one. I talked about how many people the US killed every day, and that I didn't condone or support terrorists but certainly understand how they felt the need to do something. Carlos, the other atheist in the class, asked if I was a pacifist. I said no, but that I didn't support wars, as tools of government and business control. Overall, explaining these things and arguing about them is a lot harder in a foregin tongue, and my classmates and teacher sympathize more with revolutionary politics than with atheism.

Third day of School:

A surprising relief for me. I brought my Zune to show a few kids my music tastes, and when I gave it to Alde, she pointed out practically all of my favoritest bands as groups she knows and enjoys. Things like Interpol, The Mars Volta, Muse, Of Montreal, The Raconteurs, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Sonic Youth, The White Stripes, Bjork, Cornelius, Death From Above 1979, The Doors, The Flaming Lips, the Gorillaz, and Grandaddy. Mew is her favorite. To all of you who know these bands, is this not remarkable? Had you expected it? I hadn't.

We discussed this in painting class. The students brought in black and white pictures and taped them to posterboard and cut out the picture, so the picture showed in relief. We are going to "paint them onto a wall and listen to rock music." I drew a picture of a dog in a pilgrim hat and with human teeth. His name is Pancho Juanito, el Perro. There are a lot of animals here, and a lot wild starving dogs. And cats.

A funny bit for any of you who appreciate the old "City Name Sports Team" bit: The polo uniform shirts we wear on at least Wednesday and Friday have the name last to first, the school logo, and underneath, a word. Divided approximately evenly, some say Bulldogs, and some say "Mascots." They are different classes of students, or something. I don't really understand. But it's funny.

In English today, I told the teacher "Ungenerous" isn't a word. Do you think it is? Wiktionary says so, defined as "Not generous." Also, Mexicans can't say "Unreliable," or "Middle." In Spanish, they frequently use diminutives, much more so than in English. For example, Kitty is the diminutive of Cat. Anyway, we played Bingo in English class today, and the game was clearly fairly dated, because the pictures and words we had were things like "Apache" "Brave" "Small Boat" "Gentleman," etc. But still, I laughed out loud when the teacher, completely unassuming, held up a card and said "Blackie." Same with "Cock." The latter is just normal language comedy, but Blackie could lead to awkward situations, I think, if they ever have an opportunity to use English.

Love,
Adam

Dream 16 de Agosto

2008-08-16T09:54:00.001-07:00

I am in a city, as though Traverse City, with my parents and sister. We come down from our car away from the water, and things progress into a bit more of a memphis/medieval/mexican atmosphere. Eventually we enter (only me and Angela now) what is a definitively European pub-restaurant. We are in the back, however, in this extremely fantastically decorated room used for some kind of artistic deviancy. There is a crowd hanging out in here of people I vaguely know, and others I know more. People like Ann Richardson and Zakk Clark and others from school and definitely some people from Memphis, but perhaps no one in particular. Someone, the artist, is working at the main work table bit, and she is working on the elephant Bekka made in Morgan´s house, which she´d made much bigger and broken in several places. His right front leg had been broken off. We spend a while wandering around the room and gazing at things, because all the walls are covered in sculptures and paintings, all very black and greyish, and the walls themselves are some sort of skin-colored drywall that looks like crumbling paper. I go outside for a walk, and the street is an extension of the inside. It´s nighttime. There are white Christmas lights strung through all the trees and lots of other lit things I can´t see in detail. Everything is very magical here.

I love dreams.