The Gods, they have a sense of humour November 19, 2007

Not hours after I wrote my recent post complaining about my crappy washing machine, the gods got their revenge.  I tried to do a load the next morning and, every time I touched the machine: the body, the lid, the dials, the tub, the water inside the tub, the hose that is our water source at the back; I got a huge shock.  It was really strong.  I finished up my load (after the first few shocks, I wasn’t thinking too clearly), but afterwards, when my head stopped ringing, I turned off all the electricity to it and warned my roommates that they might not want to use it.  So, now I’m doing all my washing by hand.  Here are my thoughts:

1.  It takes a lot of time to wash all your clothes by hand.

2.  It sure is easier now that I have this plastic bucket.

3.  I use a lot of detergent when I wash things by hand.

4.  My clothes are actually getting a little cleaner now that I’m washing by hand.  Of course, it takes a lot longer, a lot more water, and a lot more soap.  But for the first time in a month or two, my clothes smell fresh after I’ve washed them.

5.  I’m still struggling with my socks.  I feel like my life is a constant struggle to keep myself in clean socks.  I haven’t yet figured out how to get them really clean.   (any thoughts or tips here would be really appreciated)

6.  Thank god I don’t own jeans.

7.  I understand now why they call it “greywater”.  Although I wonder why it’s not blackwater.  I don’t know if it’s just that there’s a lot of pollution here or if it’s a month’s collection of grime leftover from substandard machine washing, but the water is pitch black after I wash one pair of pants or two shirts.   Or maybe it’s always like this, and I just never knew.

I’ve been using straight-up machine detergent up to now, but tonight I bought a bar of laundry soap.  It’s much cheaper, so hopefully it won’t matter that I’m using so much soap.  Also, maybe it will be easier to rub the clothes against the soap bar.  I’ve been a little worried that I’m not agitating enough.  I’m sure I’ll iron out the kinks eventually.  I’ve washed small things on the road before, but never all my clothes.  Certainly never washed shirts more than once or twice in a row.  I feel like I’m learning all sorts of new things.  I’ve realised that I haven’t really put all that much thought into the process before.  Tonight in the grocery store, though, there were lots of women parked in front of the laundry bar soap shelf.  Most of them looked very middle class.  It made me feel a little less alone.  Apparently it’s not such an uncommon thing here.  No wonder lots of women stop working after they get married.  But more on my gender observations another time.

RSS through Google Reader and RSS through e-mail November 14, 2007

My friend Sarah has a new post on her blog with a super-easy explanation of how to follow a blog by RSS.  The first half of the post talks about a new service that allows you to receive e-mail updates anytime someone updates their blog.  The second half is a video that explains why RSS is great and how to sign up for it.  Let me know if this is something that interests you, and I can help you set up either service for my blog, my sister’s blog, my cousin’s blog, or any favorite blog or website you regularly follow.

Work November 10, 2007

So, sometimes living here is pretty hard. The weather changes a lot and it will be close to freezing in the early morning and late evening (during my 1st and 4th walk to/from work each day) and then really sunny and hot during the day (the 2nd and 3rd times I walk to/from work). The houses here (and most businesses) don’t have heat, so when it’s 10 degrees here (50 F), it’s cold all the time. I end up drinking a lot of tea and hot chocolate to keep warm, plus wearing my one sweater a lot and trying to keep my four pairs of socks clean so that my feet can stay warm. We have a fairly crazy split shift schedule, leaving us able to get only about five or six hours of sleep a night. Luckily I can usually catch a nap in the afternoon, but it’s still not exactly ideal. Queretaro is ideally a driving city and the bus system is expensive and not very good, so I end up walking a lot of places that I’d rather not have to walk to. It’s good for my health, but sometimes a little annoying. This includes places like the grocery store, so sometimes I end up not having proper food in my house. Not that I ever really have time to cook it. Laundry is an ordeal. We have a machine (thank goodness!), but it’s only a cold water machine and not very good. So when I want to do laundry, first I soak my socks and some shirts in hot soapy water in a bucket overnight. Then I have to manually fill up the drum with a hose, mix the soap into the water by hand (you have to agitate it or it just won’t mix), add all the clothes, agitate those by hand for about five minutes (or else they don’t really get clean). When the wash cycle is done, you have to manually fill up the tub again for a rinse. After the spin cycle, you still have to wring the clothes out, and then we have some clothes lines on the roof (a part I actually kind of like; nothing like fresh sun-warmed clothes!). This process makes one load of laundry an all-day sort of ordeal. Which isn’t horrible or life-threatening or anything, but it sure can be annoying.

So enough complaining already! I mostly just wanted to give examples of how I’m frustrated by everyday life here sometimes. This sets up our story.

It was a Thursday, much like any other here. It was midday and still freezing in the house and yet strangely hot outside. I had been able to grab an hour’s nap, but I was still feeling exhausted and definitely hadn’t wanted to wake up when the alarm went off. I trudged the 35 minute walk to work, feeling pretty sorry for myself the whole way. I really wasn’t in the mood to teach that day. I wanted to curl up in my bed, maybe take a nap, maybe read some Agatha Christie, maybe have a good cry, pretty much anything besides pretend to be chipper and teach factory workers the intricacies of present simple and the auxiliary verb ‘do’. I stopped and bought an empanada with rajas con crema on the way and one of those fake tasting Nescafe lattes from the machine in Oxxo (it’s a convenience store down here) hoping that these things would cheer me up. Nothing doing.

My first class sucked. I was in a bad mood and even a conversation class about breakfast foods couldn’t change that. My second class, I kind of forgot about my bad mood, and by the middle of my third class, I realised I was actually in a decent mood. By the end of the night, I was fairly happy. After five hours of teaching, I was happy. This, my friends, is the first time in history that a job has changed my mood for the better. I didn’t think this was possible. But something about interacting with the students, the satisfaction I got when they finally started saying “Does she have a pen?”, the general satisfaction of doing something semi-worthwhile and doing it well, this was enough to actually make me happy.

When I moved down here, I didn’t know if I’d particularly enjoy English teaching, but I knew it would be a good way to experience some awesome things for a while. But now here I am, sometimes enjoying the work part of the experience more than the living. Who’d have thunk it, eh?

And, for the record, living here isn’t actually all that hard or tough. I get on pretty well and I make a decent enough salary that I can feed myself quite well and have a good time. It’s certainly not desperate. It just gets to me sometimes. But it’s a good character-building/expectation-readjustment exercise, no?

Guanajuato November 10, 2007

Last weekend, my flatmate/coworker and I took an overnight trip to the city of Guanajuato.  What a neat city that is!  It’s much smaller than Queretaro, maybe 200,000 at the most, and it has a huge university in its compact center.  It feels very much like a college town.  It’s also famous for being artsy, and there were a lot of galleries in town and also live performances.  The night we were there there was a big orchestra performance (I realised how much I missed that kind of thing; I’m going to try and find something good in Queretaro, an opera or ballet or symphony or something).  We stayed in a hostel in the center and walked through all the gardens and the market etc.  It’s a really pretty city with very close, narrow, winding streets.  It’s an old silver mining town, and they’ve taken the old mines and converted them to streets that run underneath the city.  Which is really neat and helps to keep heavy traffic out of the center.  We rode a funicular up to the top of a hill for a great view of the city.  It’s set in a valley surrounded by tall hills (they call them mountains, and I can’t argue with them – mostly because I don’t speak Spanish – but they’re really nothing more than tall hills) and we had a great view of the whole city from up there.  We went to the birthplace and museum of Diego Rivera, which was interesting.  It was similar to the Dali museum in St Pete in that you could watch his progression as he matured as an artist.  Both of them started out by experimenting with many of the accepted styles, mastering realism, still-life, the landscape, impressionism, pointilism, cubism, etc, and then eventually moving into painting in a style all their own.  One interesting thing we noted was that the gift shop was full of prints and postcards with Frida’s works on them.  I found three postcards out of two racks that had Diego’s paintings on them.  Kind of an interesting reversal from what it was like during their lifetimes.

San Miguel de Allende November 10, 2007

Three weekends ago, my flatmate/coworker and I went to San Miguel de Allende for a day trip.  It was really nice.  It’s a very pretty city, a lot smaller than Queretaro and much more touristy.  The first thing that struck me was how many white faces I was seeing.  And I realised too that, even if a Mexican is really light-skinned or even blond-haired, I can very easily tell the difference between them and an American/Canadian.  There’s just something so specific about the clothes we wear, the way we wear them, the way we do our hair, the way we do our makeup, the way we walk.  I’ve had a German fool me on occasion, but that’s the only exception I can think of.

Anyway, so friend and I caught the bus from here to there (always an adventure) and walked around the town, admiring the beautiful plazas and the handicrafts that seem to fill every shop of every tourist town.  We had some amazing French food at a restaurant run by a couple of French ex-pats.  I had really tender pork medallions (not sure what the proper name of the cut is, but it was little circular pieces of all meat and no bone) in a delicate prune sauce with a mash of buttery potatoes, a puree of sweet carrots, perfectly done broccoli and roasted green beans.  Add to that the amuse bouche at the beginning (two types, actually: a homemade creamy smoked fish spread and a hard boiled egg spread both on slices of baguette) and the lovely glass of French white wine, and I was pretty pleased with both my meal and my bill of 12 dollars.

In the afternoon, it was starting to get a little chilly and we were both pretty tuckered out, so we sat down at a sidewalk cafe on the main square for a cafe and a chocolate.  While we were there, one of the four mariachi bands that had been strutting around the square came and played three ballads for the couple sitting next to us.  The deal with the mariachi bands is that they just hang about, pretending to tune their instruments, until someone offers to pay them for a specific number of songs.  Usually this is a dating couple when the guy is trying to impress the girl.  I say pretending to tune, because I really don’t think they know how to do it.  I’ve heard a number of mariachi and banda groups “tuning” before playing, and it never seems to work.  I think they really can’t hear it.  For example, two violin players waiting for a wedding party outside a church (it’s also popular for a wedding or quincenera party to employ a band to play for them outside of the church) were tuning up together while they waited.  They were both playing the same strings at the same time and they seemed to be listening to each other (they were only two feet away from each other), but they were about a quarter step off from each other.  They “tuned” for about five minutes, just the two of them, apart from the group, but they never actually changed the tension on their strings in a way that put them closer to being in tune with each other.  It was really baffling.  I stood and watched for a while, but it started to drive me a little crazy.  I wanted to go over and just tune the dang thing for them after about three futile minutes.  Luckily, there is truth to the phrase “close enough for folk music,” so the music usually sounds pretty good anyway (although I have heard some out of tune and painful banda music here in Queretaro, so YMMV).

Anyway, so after they played and sang the three sappy ballads for the courting couple, a guy wandered over and negotiated with the band for a minute.  They started laughing, but agreed.  So the eight of them plus the random guy walk into the middle of the street and proceed to do what pretty much amounted to live karaoke.  The guy paid them enough for two of his favourite songs, which he was then able to song along to.  He had a great voice (and a good stage personality), so it worked out really well.  But it was kind of funny.  People stopped to stare and I got the impression that it wasn’t necessarily the ‘done’ thing.  But I enjoyed the performance and the guy definitely enjoyed performing and the band seemed pretty light hearted about the whole thing.  But how neat, to be able to hire a band on a whim to play backup while you belt it out?  I kind of like the idea…

Rajas con crema November 10, 2007

One of my favourite foods down here is the poblano pepper.  It’s a pepper with a lot of flavour and a lot less sweetness than a bell pepper (or capsicum if you will).  It has a very little bit of kick to it, but hardly anything worth noting.  And it’s a very popular pepper to cook with.  You find it in lots of dishes.  For example, the other night I had a taco from this house/cafe a few doors down from my house that was filled was a poblano pepper that had been stuffed with cheese and then deepfried.  That was a pretty amazing taco (more like a quesadilla, really, but who am I to quibble?).

But my all time favourite is the rajas con crema, which is little strips of poblano pepper in a savoury cream sauce.  There is an awesome bakery between my school and the park with the monarchs (see previous post) and they have really good empanadas filled with rajas con crema.  Empanadas here are different than the ones I’m used to; it’s more of a flaky baked pastry stuffed with tuna, ham and cheese, rajas, or chicken mole.  Not deep fried at all.

Today after work, one of my coworkers invited me to have lunch with her at her favourite taco stand.  It’s a stand just off of a main road near our school and it’s really elaborate.  They have a fairly large seating area and about 15 different fillings that you can put in your tacos.  I chose one with mushrooms, one with carnitas (roast, pulled pork), and one with rajas con crema.  Their rajas were amazing.  They were so soft, flavoured perfectly, and I really felt more like I was eating dessert than a meal.  There’s something that’s just so perfect about the roast poblano pepper with the savoury cream sauce.  Yum.

Monarchs November 10, 2007

Okay, it’s been far too long since I’ve written.  And I promised myself I wouldn’t be that person!, that I’d keep up with this thing.  To make it less intimidating for myself to catch up on the last three or four weeks (oh dear!), I’m going to do a series of short posts.  I apologise to those with RSS feeds.

So, even though I’ve heard that the monarchs come in March to Michoacan, there’s been a definite influx of monarch butterflies here in Queretaro in the last week or two.  There’s a park I walk through on my way to and from work every day and lately the trees have been filled with monarchs.  The leaves are also going slightly yellow/orange, so sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance, but then they’ll all start to fly and there will be a small flock (herd?  pride?) of monarchs in the air.  It’s not like the place is covered in them, but it’s way more than I’ve ever seen in one place before.  Maybe two hundred in this one park?  It’s a pretty cool sight, to see all these monarchs hanging about and flying through the air over your head.  I hope we get more of them closer to March.