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?