stuff

I was going to go to La Huasteca (waz-tec-ah) today, but that plan fell through at the last moment. We were all strapped up to go, money put aside and everything. The hurdle though was that we had to leave at 3 in the morning the day after St. Patrick’s day. Ironically though, this fact bore no influence on our not going. Simply, we all fell asleep (and we blame each other for not waking everybody else up). This isn’t so bad however because at least I’m 700 pesos richer – the amount that I had intended to take. Bus fair is 500 pesos alone! La Huasteca is about a 5 hour bus ride from San Luis, to the gulf state of Veracruz. There are waterfalls there. Here’s a picture I grabbed from a person’s camera that had already been.

Earlier in the week we were eating breakfast at this place when a parade began parading down the street. It didn’t seem that we were the only people who hadn’t expected it, now drawing a small audience on the sidewalks. There were small home-made floats, some fancy cars, and lots of people dancing. At first it all followed a red theme. Later, a blue one. As it turned out, these color-coded groups were rival high schools. I don’t know what the purpose for the joint parade was though. Maybe they were going to have a soccer game later or something.

Speaking of la pelota, Cruz Azul recently lost against SLP, a big upset for Cruz Azul apparently. Today Chivas are going to play América, and América is from Mexico City. Potisinos, I think, don’t much care for this team. Generally speaking, Postisinos care for neither the team nor the people. For some reason I derive some humor from what they call people from Mexico City: Chilangos. It just sounds derogatory. 

I’m 162 pounds now – two pounds away from when I had my license renewed in ’03.

For the past week I’ve been seeing posters for Violinista en el Tejado (yep, Fiddler on the Roof). This is surprising to me because I never would have expected a play about Jews in Russia in über Catholic Mexico, little alone conservative San Luis. But, así es, so I went. It was alright. They held it in some historic theater – a small one. In some parts of the halls I had to duck a little to pass through. They translated “if I were a rich man,” my favorite song in the play, to “si que fueron rico.” “Tradition!” as I had already suspected however, is translated “tradición.” I was trying to listen for how they translated “matchmaker” because it had come up in conversation once that there really doesn’t exist a straight translation. I don’t believe this though – surely there must be. The best a couple friends have both come up with, after admitting that, yeah, there really isn’t a good translation, is “Cupio,” or Cupid. I haven’t tried bablefish yet.