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.

Class 2.0 October 17, 2007

I’ve gotten a couple of requests (hey b&s!) to put warning labels on graphic posts in the future. I’ll definitely try to do that, but I thought the best thing at this point would be to try and push the last post down the page a bit. And, in case you’re wondering, the finger is doing really well.

So, I was laying awake in bed this morning, home from my early morning class and trying to get some sleep before my afternoon classes, but the high school kids from the two high schools on either side of my building were sitting in the street yelling and laughing and I was fairly unsuccessful in my efforts. I was super tired, though, so even with all the noise (damn kids should get off my lawn!) I was managing to drift in and out of sleep. And somewhere in between waking and sleeping it occurred to me what the best comparison for my job is.

The best classes are ones where I show up, set a topic, introduce some useful language or structures, and step back to observe what the students make of it. The trick is to set the original constraints such that the students will be interested in them and become engaged with them and use them to create interesting new things that I never previously anticipated. I was thinking about my morning class, how I had used a video podcast from the Onion (In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex^), and how I had been able to design some activities that really got them talking and how they were actually able to teach me a few things as well. The premise was that we were learning how to talk shite, how to hold a conversation when you knew nothing about what the other person was going on about. Needless to say, some of them were already experts in doing this in Spanish and, with a little effort, they were able to transfer this ability over to English. Everyone really enjoyed themselves. The students were speaking to each other for almost the entire class and, apart from some upfront work coming up with the original idea, I really didn’t have to do much except listen and note down some errors for a short error correction slot at the end.

Of course, in my field, this is known as The Communicative Approach^TM, which is the pedagogical theory du jour and the professed goal of most language schools / teacher training programs; the main idea of this approach is that the focus of the class should be on the students, not the teacher, who should ideally be able to blend into the background. But what I realised today is that it is also the goal of every Web 2.0 application developer: create an app that people will find useful and interesting, lay some ground rules, provide some simple and easy-to-use tools, and then step back, let the users create what they want, and provide moderation only when necessary and in small amounts. In my half waking mind, this was a super exciting idea. I had pictures in my head of a community of linked users, round-cornered pastel-coloured buttons, user-driven tagging systems, and Ajax interfaces. And somehow all of these things were floating over, maybe superimposed on, … no, fully integrated into my physical classroom space. I was imagining myself standing in my classroom, watching as my students interacted with my app: jumping into a light pink button, traveling down a pathway, following links to related data, creating new paths as they moved through the system. It really was a beautiful sight.

Hey, anything to get you through another day, right?

Subungual Hematoma October 14, 2007

I’ve had a request to tidy up the smashed finger story. So, I smashed it in a car door Monday afternoon and it pretty much hurt a lot that evening. It throbbed all night long, waking me up a couple of times. But it really hurt the next morning. And it just kept getting worse. It was all I could think about. I was walking around holding my finger up by my chin to try and stop the blood from pooling under my fingernail. I couldn’t write. I could hardly use my hand at all. Later that evening, when I was making dinner, I accidentally touched my finger against the counter. I say “touch” because I didn’t hit it or bang it or even really tap it, I really just lightly brushed my finger against the counter. I jumped about three feet in the air, cursed wildly, and tears starting welling up in my eyes. My roommate said I needed to go see a doctor (this was also after me spending pretty much the whole day complaining about the pain). Of course, this sounded like a lot of trouble, but it also sounded like maybe it would be a good thing to at least consider. So, at this point I decided to google it. I googled “fingernail + blood”, found out this thing was called a subungual hematoma and that all the major medic sites suggested going to a doctor immediately. Well, this wasn’t the advice I wanted. So I next did what any reasonable person would do: I searched AskMetafilter. It was here that I learned that, yes, other people agree with me that this is a hugely painful condition. I also learned that if I went to the doctor, they would probably drill a hole through my fingernail to relieve the pressure of the blood pooling underneath it. This sounded fabulous. I also learned, however, that I could accomplish a similar result with a hot paper clip. Wow! Even better! So, I enlisted the help of my roommate and we heated an unbent paper clip over the flames of our gas stove and then placed it on my fingernail. I tried it at first, but I couldn’t hold it steady (I was using my left hand after all). She took over and (like a champ!) proceeded to burn a hole through my fingernail. You don’t have to press at all, the red hot tip of the paper clip burns through without pressure, but even just gently resting the paper clip on the fingernail made me want to scream it hurt so badly. It took a few tries. Eventually she got really close to going through, but I pulled back because it was starting to feel really hot. It wasn’t quite through, though, so I took a straight pin and dug through the little last bit of nail. When the blood finally started to ooze out I almost started crying; it was such a release of pressure, and the pain started going down almost immediately. It still seems to me like possibly one of the best feelings in the world. I spent that evening using the needle and some warm water to keep the blood from clotting over the hole. Every day, a little bit of blood builds up under the fingernail again, but nowhere near as much as that first day. And the hole is still there, so I’ve been using hydrogen peroxide to re-open it regularly and drain the nail. It’s always very satisfying, but nowhere near as much as that first time. And the pain of the original injury has almost completely disappeared. It still feels slightly bruised, but I think that should completely disappear in a couple of days. There is still some occasional pain from the fresh blood under the fingernail, but a little draining always sorts that right out.

My other roommate walked in while we were trying to burn the hole. She completely flipped out. She tried to tell me that I shouldn’t do that because there would be a hole in my fingernail until the nail grew out, that it could be months. I think this is the advice I would give to someone with a similar problem. If you are considering this procedure but aren’t sure because there might be a hole in your nail for a few months, don’t do it. However, if you are at the point where you would gladly remove the fingernail or possibly the entire finger if only it would stop this pain oh please isn’t there anything i can do to stop this pain wait what did you say i couldn’t hear you because this pain is SCREAMING in my head, then I would wholeheartedly recommend the heated paperclip.

Gorditas October 14, 2007

Gorditas are pretty awesome. They make them here with yellow corn flour, but you can get them in other places (I’ve seen them in the DF and a small town called Bernal) with blue corn flour and this is just about the best thing ever. My roommate found some blue corn tortillas and I made some pan fried quesadillas with these, but it just wasn’t the same. Here’s a recipe for basic gorditas; if you’re able to find some blue corn flour (masa harina = corn flour), I would highly recommend going to the trouble. Once fried, you can put cheese on them and re pan fry them (way less oil this time) to melt the cheese. My favorite things to stuff in are sauteed mushrooms and pulled pork in a mexican sauce, but you can put just about anything into them.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup masa harina flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon shortening
• 1 cup hot water
• 1 cup oil for frying

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, stir together the masa harina, salt and hot water. Gradually mix in the shortening and flour. If the dough seems dry, add a little more hot water. Form the dough into balls that will fit into the palm of your hand.
2. Line a work surface with waxed paper or plastic. Sprinkle with water. Flatten balls on the wet surface until about 1/4 inch thick.
3. Heat a griddle or comal over medium heat. Cook the gorditas on each side until they are cooked through.
4. Heat oil in a large heavy skillet over medium to medium-high heat until hot. Fry each gordita until puffed, pressing it down into the oil occasionally with a spatula. Drain briefly on paper towels. Slice it open (only halfway around so that it’s like a pocket) and stuff with your favorite fillings.

Thanks to allrecipes.

Dosai October 8, 2007

Eating that Thai red curry reminded me of how many foods and flavours I’ve been missing since I’ve been down here. So, in an attempt at catharsis of sorts and perhaps as a reminder to myself of things I want to try, I’m going to post some recipes of things I wish I could eat and that I might actually be able to accomplish if I put some effort in. Here’s my first installment.

from the Indian Food Kitchen:

(Plain) Dosa

 

• 1 cup plain rice
• 1 cup parboiled rice
• 1/4 cup white urad dal
• 1/2 tsp. methi (fenugreek) seeds
• 1 /2 tsp soda bi carbonate
• 1/2 cup curds
• 10-12 tsps. ghee or oil as preferred
• water for grinding

Wash the rices and dal together. Add plenty of water and methi seeds. Allow to soak for 7-8 hours or overnight. Rewash the rice by draining the water 2-3 times. Grind to a paste. Rawa -like grains should be felt in the batter. Add soda bicarb and salt and mix well. Keep aside in a warm place for 8-10 hours. Beat the curds well.

Add to the batter, add more water if required. The consistency of the batter should be thick enough to thickly coat on a spoon when dipped. Heat the iron griddle or non-stick tawa well. Pour a spoonful of batter in the centre, spread with the back of the spoon to a thin round. Pour a tsp. of ghee or oil over it. Remove with spatula when crisp. Serve hot with chutney and / or sambar.

 

Time goes by, so slowly October 8, 2007

Okay, so not so slowly, actually more like really quickly. Or at least in a haze. I’ve been working for The Co now for over three weeks. My first two weeks were crazy. Working from seven to nine every morning, from four to nine every evening, and then last Saturday from nine to one in the morning. It takes half an hour to walk to or from work, so each day was about five hours of sleep at night, seven hours of work, two hours of walking, and trying to catch whatever sleep I could during the middle of the day. I had been enjoying eating this thing called the comida corrida, which is a three to five course meal, often with fresh limeade (or sometimes pineapple or apple ade), that includes a nice homemade soup, maybe a tostada, an entree with rice and beans and tortillas and some sort of homecooked lovely main dish, and then a small dessert of some kind, maybe rice pudding. This is all fresh and served hot and costs about four dollars. I was really enjoying this routine. But since I’ve started working, I’ve been lucky to get a banana and a slice of wheat bread for lunch. Breakfast has been a banana or a granola bar (actually more like a cereal whole grain bar with no oats; they’re really good) on the walk to work, and dinner is usually some yogurt (which is still really good. there’s this shop down the street from me that makes their own homemade yogurt with fresh strawberries or pineapple or all sorts of flavours including cactus. i’ve been sticking to the strawberry and pineapple). Sleep has been spotty and difficult and there’s never enough of it.

But the past two weeks things have been a little better. My schedule’s been changed so that I have a lot more business classes. I go to one factory in town in the mornings from 7 to 8:30 or 7:30 to 9 Monday through Thursday. Monday and Tuesday night I have a two hour factory class one hour outside of town from five to seven, so I’m “working” for that one from four to eight if you include the travel in the school’s private car with the driver (which they do, so I basically get paid to sit in a car for four hours a week). Wednesday and Thursday I still have a five hour shift in the evening, but then Friday I work from nine to eleven in the morning and then I’m done. I still work every other Saturday, but really it’s been a lot easier so far.

This past weekend was nice.  I didn’t have to work on Saturday, so work finished for me at eleven on Friday morning.  Friday night my roommates and I ordered in pizza and bought some beer from the store down the street.  It was really nice to sit around the house eating pizza and drinking beer, wearing messy clothes, chatting.  It felt very relaxed.  Saturday night one of my roommates (a 29 year old chemist from Veracruz), her friend, and I went to a dance club.  We were definitely some of the oldest people there, but we had a great time anyway.  And I was definitely more in the mood to enjoy dancing with my girlfriends than worrying about dancing with guys, so it ended up working out really well.  They played an interesting mix of pop music from all over (Europe, USA, Mexico, all over Latin America) as well as some hip hop, some banda, some electronica, and some reggaeton.  It was a good night, and a lot of fun to get dressed up and “go out.”  On Sunday, I made it out to a new grocery store (well, new for me) that is out of my way but has a way better selection and better prices than the one on the walk between my house and my work.  They even have a special this month: Tailandia exotica, so today for lunch I had some Thai red curry and rice.  What a treat!

Today was pretty good and all my classes went well.  I’m really enjoying this one class that is really advanced and all young women.  They are really interesting and a lot of fun.  In the afternoon, though, as I was getting out of the car to go into the factory I slammed my pinkie finger in the car door.  Really slammed.  Hard.  I thought I was going to throw up for a couple of hours after that, I felt so nauseous.  I didn’t break it or anything, but it’s been bleeding since then and the nail is cracked near the cuticle and I’m worried the nail will fall off.  I didn’t have time to do anything for it during the day, so I just had a fingernail caked with blood, but tonight when I got home I tried cleaning it up with a wet napkin.  It’s crazy sensitive to the touch, but I was able to get a good deal of the blood off.  But it’s apparently still bleeding because the nail has gotten bloody again.  Oh well, I guess I wasn’t really using that nail anyway.  At least I don’t feel as nauseous anymore.  That lasted for a good four or five hours.  Anyway, so probably more details than you were hoping for, but it’s definitely what’s on my mind tonight (especially as I’m trying to type capital I’s and apostrophes; I never realised before how much I use my right pinkie finger while typing).

Sometimes things happen all at once September 17, 2007

A lot has happened since I last wrote.  Last time I was despairing because I had no job, no house, and didn’t know anyone in town.  Well, last Thursday I dropped off my CV with a company, had an interview that afternoon, and was hired the next morning.  Yay!  Henceforth, my employer shall probably be known as The Company or Inc. or Co.  or something like that.  I mean, probably not too hard to figure out who I am if you find this page but less easily googleable at least.  Of course I’m sure I’ll have nothing but stellar things to say about them : ) but just in case it’s good to be a bit circumspect.  Anyway, so it’s a really good company.  They are very legit.  They hire most of their teachers from abroad instead of by walk in, which is unusual in many Mexican language schools.  Hence, most of the teachers are trained and have some experience.  It’s run by a European in a European way, which is nice.  That means that paycheques are always on time and the business side of things is run much more like I am accustomed to.  They get the FM3 for you (the type of visa you need in order to work legally) and they do regular evaluations (every three months) to give constructive criticism and possibly a pay raise.  It’s salaried, so you always get the same amount every month.  The curriculum is a bit strange and the teaching situation doesn’t always seem ideal, so there are definitely some drawbacks that I can already see, but I had a long orientation with the DoS (Director of Studies) this morning and he seems really realistic about the situation and what you can expect to achieve in your classes, and he has a lot of good suggestions for making the curriculum work for you.  I like him: very professional, smart, but with a good sense of humour and a healthy sense of skepticism and sarcasm.  So, I started this morning.  I had my orientation this morning and this afternoon I’ll observe the three different varieties of in-house classes: vocab, grammar, and conversation.  These kinds of classes will be most of what I’m teaching.  The other kind of class I’ll be teaching are in-business group classes.  These are more traditional style classes that follow a textbook and for which I am responsible for preparing a lesson plan (the in-house classes are already completely prepared and we just show up and walk them through it, more like tutors than teachers).  I’m starting off with a two hour business class twice a week, but because of my “finance background,” I’ll probably be getting more and more of those.  I’m happy about that, because I think it will be nice to have a mix of no prep and prep classes (a lot of people only do the in house no prep classes).  So, I have my first business class tomorrow at a local factory and then five hours back to back of in house in the afternoon.  My schedule for most days looks something like 7 – 9 in the morning and 4 – 9 in the afternoons.  Pretty normal split shifts for TEFL, although not exactly desirable.

The other great thing about getting this job is that they really try to take care of their teachers, so when I let them know that I was staying in a hostel, they got right onto it and asked around about flats for me.  Turns out one of the newish teachers had just moved into a flat about five minutes from where I had been staying and her landlord/roommate was still looking to fill the other room.  I came round that evening, had a really nice time meeting the teacher and the roommate, and moved in the next morning.  So since Saturday I’ve been living in this really nice flat just a couple of blocks from the main city centre (so not right in the middle of things, but in a central residential neighbourhood just a very short walk from most things).  It’s also only a half an hour walk to work, so completely doable and also an enforced two hours of light exercise every day.  Perfect, really.  And if it’s a really bad day (really cold, I have a cold, etc) I think a taxi is only about three dollars.  So not an everyday thing but definitely doable if circumstances deem it advisable.  Also, the walk from school to home goes right by a Gigante supermarket and home is just around the corner from the main mercado in town, which is kind of like a mix between a farmer’s market and a flea market, complete with butchers and florists and even a seafood restaurant.  My roommates are the other teacher who is 23 and from Massachusetts.  She’s a fluent Spanish speaker and was teaching for a year before this in Spain.  She reminds me a lot of my cousin Ayla.  The other is 29 and from Veracruz.  She works in a pharmaceutical plant outside of town.  She speaks very passable English, so conversation in the house is pretty bilingual: often when she’s speaking to me she’ll speak in English and when the two of them are speaking it together it varies but is mostly Spanish.  It’s great for me.  If we’re all talking together, the language changes almost with every sentence.  I’m hoping that this will help me with my listening.  I’m trying to speak as much as I can, as well.  Some of the other teachers at work take private lessons with this one woman and I’m going to see if I can get on her schedule; twice a week grammar and vocab lessons would be really helpful.  I’m trying what I can online, but most of the material is oriented towards true beginners and Spanish from Spain.  But it’s helping a little bit.

The other main thing that has happened lately is that it was the holiday celebrating Mexican Independence Day this past weekend.  Tons of red, white, and green everywhere, lots of fireworks, lots of people dressed in costume.  But that is going to have to wait until another post.  I need to go look at the curriculum for my factory class tomorrow morning.