some photos

here's a link to some photos that I slaved over uploading. San Luis Photos

prevert student and el toro

The term is over. We had to spend a day there doing all the paper work, and meanwhile some students would stop by to retrieve their final grade, etc. One student had his ipod and asked if I wanted any pictures. So, I’m like, ok, why not? While he copied these pictures onto my laptop I left the room for some odds n ends. When I returned maybe twenty minutes later, he was still copying these pictures. I asked jokingly if he were giving me porn. As it turned out he was indeed, so now I have 342 soft core porn pictures.

…went to a house party last night. Got wasted. Danced like a fool. So it goes …

The next day, today, I went to a bullfight. Now, this shit is awesome. There’s a lot of impressive horse riding and sheer stupidity there. One dude got gored, and 5 toros were backstabbed. The format of the whole event wasn’t as I’d expected. I won’t explain it here, though. Instead I think I’ll post a powerpoint presentation with photos, descriptions, and such. In the meantime, here’s a picture of me. I’m happy.

ouch

Welp, this week marks the end of the term. Today is Tuesday and Thursday is the final. The very next Monday is the first day of the next term. No rest for the weary. I have no idea what level I will be teaching, but I prey to Vishnu that I will be blessed with a lower level. The higher levels that I’ve been teaching are albeit fun, but taxing on the ol’ gulliver. At this point I’d like nothing other than being able to pass the time in class holding up pictures and saying “house.. say it.. house… good!”

 

Try explaining “rich” in terms of the sensory verb “taste.” I used dark chocolate and filet mignon as examples, but feel that they somehow missed the mark… I’m going to chalk this one up to qualia.

 

I can’t move my neck in either direction without experiencing the worst sensation ever. Aspirin costs 80 pesos and I’ve only got 100 ‘till payday – 2 days away – so I asked everybody within an earshot for some pills and managed to land myself 3 aspirin and a red pill. I don’t know what it was but it made me feel a little relaxed, but didn’t dull the pain. I conducted my classes from a chair and had a student do my bidding on the whiteboard. After my last class a student offered to bring in some pills that he had left over from when he was having some back trouble. We’ll have to see how they work out. He said that they didn’t make him drowsy and that they don’t say not to drink while taking, so I don’t suspect them to be that great.

 

misc.

So today, Friday, nobody came to my 5 o’clock class. Right now I’m writing this in another teacher’s class. I decided to crash his class because they’re watching The Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s probably not a good movie to show ESL students because even I don’t understand what the hell the actors are saying sometimes. On Fridays you’re lucky to get half of your students; the same statistic is true for when it rains. Surely I’m committing some sort of logical fallacy when I reason that nobody came to class because it is raining and it’s Friday… I wonder if it’s sounder to say that a quarter of my students should have showed up (half of half, right?).

 

Three female teachers are slated to move into the teachers’ house. I’m not looking forward to that. Luckily however, I should only have to tolerate the lack of elbow room for a week or so. Tomorrow we’re going to be checkin’ out a place around the corner – furnished… affordable… If for some reason we don’t want it, we still have another place available to us: An apartment soon to be vacated by two current teachers. It, too, is affordable and furnished. This plan B also has 2 completely functional toilets, as of now. For as long as the current tenants have lived there, a Brit and South Carolinian, one of the toilets had never worked. The shower in that same bathroom also had (or has still, I’m not sure) a leak that ran (or runs) into the downstairs apartment, directly into a 6 year old girl’s bed. When the other toilet finally broke, they decided to piss into that shower – forgetting that has a leak. The other day after class these guys went home to find the downstairs neighbor patiently waiting at their door to remind them not to use that shower. To the best of their knowledge, the neighbor believes that all that dripped into his little girl’s bed was water. The other funny bit needs less explanation. These guys shat into bags until their toilets were fixed. I don’t know what became of the bags.

 

My neck is killing me and I think my wisdom teeth are coming in. I’m told that dentists are cheep and reliable here. The Brit, for example, got a few fillings for a mere 500 pesos. As with all my past dental troubles, I will probably wait until I’m in unbearable pain. Currently it’s only an occasional nag.

 

Once again, we don’t have any water. I think that either the ground tank is leaking into the ground or that we’re not getting any water from the city. In either case, I have serious doubts about getting a shower within the next week. Pretty soon I’ll have to start teaching French instead of English. To flush our shits, we’ve been filling up a bucket with water from what’s left in the water heater. This won’t last for long however until I, too, am shitting into bags.

 

rain, apartment, water, and bags of shit

So today, Friday, nobody came to my 5 o’clock class. Right now I’m writing this in another teacher’s class. I decided to crash his class because they’re watching The Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s probably not a good movie to show ESL students because even I don’t understand what the hell the actors are saying sometimes. On Fridays you’re lucky to get half of your students; the same statistic is true for when it rains. Surely I’m committing some sort of logical fallacy when I reason that nobody came to class because it is raining and it’s Friday… I wonder if it’s sounder to say that a quarter of my students should have showed up (half of half, right?).

 

Three female teachers are slated to move into the teachers’ house. I’m not looking forward to that. Luckily however, I should only have to tolerate the lack of elbow room for a week or so. Tomorrow we’re going to be checkin’ out a place around the corner – furnished… affordable… If for some reason we don’t want it, we still have another place available to us: An apartment soon to be vacated by two current teachers. It, too, is affordable and furnished. This plan B also has 2 completely functional toilets, as of now. For as long as the current tenants have lived there, a Brit and South Carolinian, one of the toilets had never worked. The shower in that same bathroom also had (or has still, I’m not sure) a leak that ran (or runs) into the downstairs apartment, directly into a 6 year old girl’s bed. When the other toilet finally broke, they decided to piss into that shower – forgetting that has a leak. The other day after class these guys went home to find the downstairs neighbor patiently waiting at their door to remind them not to use that shower. To the best of their knowledge, the neighbor believes that all that dripped into his little girl’s bed was water. The other funny bit needs less explanation. These guys shat into bags until their toilets were fixed. I don’t know what became of the bags.

 

My neck is killing me and I think my wisdom teeth are coming in. I’m told that dentists are cheep and reliable here. The Brit, for example, got a few fillings for a mere 500 pesos. As with all my past dental troubles, I will probably wait until I’m in unbearable pain. Currently it’s only an occasional nag.

 

Once again, we don’t have any water. I think that either the ground tank is leaking into the ground or that we’re not getting any water from the city. In either case, I have serious doubts about getting a shower within the next week. Pretty soon I’ll have to start teaching French instead of English. To flush our shits, we’ve been filling up a bucket with water from what’s left in the water heater. This won’t last for long however until I, too, am shitting into bags.

 

Requested Politica

Alright, about that other stuff;

the political stuff: At least one class believes that the whole Zapatistan movement was a wasted effort – that no intended social benefit arose from their struggle. I’m not sure if I believe them simply because of their status. Moreover, that assessment flies in the face of the research I did in school. Their opinion though falls right inline with what they told me about the teacher’s strike in Oaxaca. They said that, frankly, it was bullshit on the part of the teachers. They recognize that Oaxacenos are severely underprivileged and that for teachers to demand higher wages is improper considering. That is, everybody down there is paid tiddly winks, so teachers should expect the same treatment. Further, they said that the governor down there, Ruiz I think his name is, who they were trying to oust, paid-off the organizers of the teachers’ strike to encourage them to not make any waves. My students said that what happened was that many teachers found out about this kickback and decided that they wanted some for themselves, and went on strike in hopes to get some of that money. Cars were burned, shops were looted and a few teachers were shot, but I don’t know about the extent of their wounds. According to my students, the strike leaders are now in jail. But my roommate, Oaxacan, says that this isn’t true. My roommate also told me that there’s a teacher strike every year and last year’s happened to be the nastiest. Some suspect that their coverage was due in part to the political climate of the time: A presidential election.

I was also informed that Fox, the guy that was previously in place, was useless because he married some woman, Marta I think, who is somehow related to the former dictator of Chile.. I may be getting that totally wrong though – I forget. They all had very nice things to say about Calderon, so I suspect that they didn’t vote Obredor. But like the rest of the world they don’t like Bush. I thought it interesting that they refuse to believe that Calderon is Bush’s lapdog (thought I’m not prepared to substantiate that claim this very moment).

And speaking about US-Mexican relations, they don’t like Venezuela because Chavez openly criticizes Mexico for being US friendly. The larger reason that some Mexicans don’t like Venezuela is however because of its increasingly socialistic political environment. I find it shocking that more Mexicans don’t appeal to socialism – it may just be this part of the woods though. While watching the Super Bowl I saw on Caribbean league baseball – yeah, winter league, eh? – Mexico getting whooped by Venezuela. 9 to nothin’, at the bottom of the 6^th. Later, Mexico held onto some later inning with 5 behind, bases loaded, and one out. They fucked that up and probably lost. We joked that maybe Chaves called the manager and said that he’d nationalize their ass if they didn’t win. I don’t really have all the facts in to form an good opinion about Venezuela yet, though.

Oh, and corn. Mexicans are pissed about their corn. Through NAFTA, Canada and Mexico brokered a deal where the Mexican government cuts subsidies to corn growers so that Canada can sell their stock to Mexico. Canada, in exchange, is supposed to eliminate all their tariffs on their corn exports to Mexico. They haven’t done that, but Mexico has already cut their subsidies. The result is that corn and especially tortillas have shot up in price. Boy, I tell you what, they need their tortillas here.

Recent events; nothing fantastic

If it turns out that nobody’s aboard for Puerto Vallarta, then I may be traveling south for the Holy week and then some. The final destination will be Playa del Carmen in Quintana Roo, on the Yucatan peninsula. We will however stop through Oaxaca and Chiapas for a couple of days each. This may be more chalked-full of interesting experiences than Puerto Vallarta anyhow.

Spanish is hard.

On Monday it rained like a sonofabitch. At one point while walking to work I had to take refuge under the awning of the entrance to this Argentine steak house. The bonus was that normally less than half of the students show up when it so far is drizzles.

Thursday the power was out throughout at least this part of San Luis because for the two days prior the wind was blowing like days reminiscent of spring in Mammoth. You couldn’t walk down the street in the middle of the day without getting dirt and what-not blown into your face, eyes, and ears. Leaves and branches littered the streets for a while. Even our tree-like bush decided to end it all too; it’s horizontal now, roots and all. Maybe it’s taking a little siesta (heh, Word doesn’t believe that ‘siesta’ is misspelled and it actually has ‘forty winks’ as one of the synonyms). Because using a class room after 6 requires lighting, we had the rest of the evening off and had ourselves a little barbeque. Later we bumped into 3 lovely girls and the local joint.

Student evaluations have come back: they’re wildly inconsistent and some are even irrational. It’s left me reluctant to go to my morning class, but more than happy to go to my first evening class. The coordinator has also finished her rounds of observations and hadn’t any complaints, so, whatever. They only thing she mentioned was that I missed good opportunities to correct pronunciation. I disagree. There are times to correct and times to just let them blabber on in English. It’s more damaging to stop them from talking because that’s what I’m trying to get them to do. I think it’s better to correct pronunciation only when they’re giving me one sentence or something.

Friday I broke a 4-day trend of not bathing. For one of those days the water heater was on the fritz, then we ran out of water on top of the roof (water that trickles in from the city stays in a holding tank below the house and is automatically pumped up to the top to provide water pressure), then after we manually turned in on, the dirtiest water you’ve ever seen came out of our pipes. Whatever was trying to get through our pipes clogged up the water to one of the showers. I’m now on my 3^rd day in a row having had a bath.

Let’s see, this is a 3-day weekend because Monday is Constitution day. Independence Day is on September 12^th I think. For teachers however it’s really a 2-day weekend seeing that there’s work to be done on Saturdays. Anyway, on Saturday night we went to some club that was playing drum n base or whatever. Not my style, really. One of my students was there. He got severely out of control – whaling around, etc. I heard that at the end of the night he had a run-in with the cops, but it must have turned out alright because otherwise we wouldn’t have known. With us at the drum&base thing was the 50 year old Canadian. She had a lot to drink, and had a little to smoke so she, I think, was a bit out of her element. At some point in night she was flailing about directly in front of the turn tables. The next day, which is today, I passed her on the street and she was surprisingly in one piece.

There’s this German-Mexican dude who owns a juice shop down the street and apparently has hook-ups. He invited us to his cousin’s club later that night. The cover is 70 pesos, but several of us got in para gratis. The 3 girls that we met a couple of nights before stopped by. This club played all mixed regeton, so it was a little more hoppin’. Some of these girls can shake it, damn.

And today was the Super Bowl. We watched it a Caliente, a casino and sports book. There’re big screens, a lounge like environment, etc. Weeks before, they said that they were going to be playing the American feed, CBS, with the calls in English and with same commercials -- the whole thing as it’s supposed to be enjoyed. When we arrived they kept it on the Deportas channel. One after another, an English speaker – the lot of us and several other patrons – would inquire about getting the American feed on. For every person he gave some b.s. excuse. At the end of the 1^st quarter they finally submitted and changed it to CBS. A round of applause came from the patrons when it was changed. I liked how he ‘threw a rock’ to win a Budweiser while playing ‘rock, paper, scissors.’ I won 10 pesos, but the guy I bet couldn’t make 10 pesos with the cash he had so would have to pay me my winnings later. When we went to the store I was giving him a hard time about a donation card for undernutritioned infants. Unfortunately, he turned the same trick on me and asked why I wasn’t going to buy it. Taking the initiative on what was supposed to be my behalf, he purchased the donation with the 10 pesos he owed me. Let’s see, what’s this thing called anyway …? “Un Kilo de Ayuda” (a ton of help, I guess).

Ugh, SO glad I don’t have to work tomorrow.

That’s about it for now I guess.