Intro to My Mexico
MEXICO | Friday, 4 April 2008 | Views [757]
I’ve started this blog about 8 months too late. And apparently I’m so far behind the times that it was my dad who suggested I do it (although he is also a self-professed “computer geek”). When I decided to move to Mexico City for a year, I figured that I may as well segue from Asia to Mexico. I only stopped at home for 6 days where I unpacked, packed again, drank many a gin’n’tonic, saw neighbors, family, friends, indulged in all those treats I’d missed in Asia and would continue to miss on my next spat away, and said goodbye to my 14-year old, deaf, cataract-wearing, wart-ridden, arthritic husky-lab who was supposed to die while I was away with Jessica in China. Note: she’s still alive as I write this and freshly 15-years old.
I had cultivated this grand - albeit romantic - idea that I would take my laptop down to Mexico and “write” on the roof of my Mexican boyfriend’s house in Colonia Roma between teaching English classes and spending all of my spare time traveling. As it turns out, the peso isn’t worth a whole lot. In addition to this, it proved be more difficult than I expected to find a company hiring teachers for the right price. The combination of the peso’s value and my initial 4-hour work-week didn’t afford me much (my current 16-hour work-week still doesn’t), never mind the romance. Time, yes, but travel was a clear-cut no. I could go on about those first few months, but that would be me being long-winded (it’s a vice) and thinking people are actually that interested in the details of the past.
Back to the writing aspect. Let me put it this way: the time has come that I have sufficiently deprived my brain of hard, critical work since leaving university two years ago, and I have also finally amassed enough experiences on which I can write. However, I now realize that while I’ve been waiting on these experiences in order to write informative, theme-based short essays I’ve probably forgotten most of the things that are actually worth writing down. In my opinion, it’s the small things that create the clearest and most interesting picture of daily life. For this reason, I have decided to put aside my romantic ideas of going artistic and literary with my year down here and will instead recount both my day-to-day happenings and the thoughts that go with them. An outlet. Trust me, it’ll be much healthier for my brain. And hopefully it’ll be useful to anyone who has plans to either travel or move to Mexico City or beyond the Federal District, as it’s known (Distrito Federal, D.F.).
So I’m living in Mexico, have been for nearly 8 months now, and even though traveling has become a peso-based possibility it remains a priority in my books. For that reason I’ve been trying to go somewhere I haven’t visited before every month just to keep the “bug” at bay until June arrives. June is when Kristen comes down from the rainy suburbs of Vancouver to the rainy season here and we have wicked plans to hit-up Cuba, drag our packs through Chiapas, then traverse our way along the south coast of Oaxaca. But I’ll catch-up on my travels so far and the travels to come on a later date because I’ve got to get back to today.
I went teaching this morning, bright and early, there at 7am. My classes have been a little out-of-whack lately mostly due to the sudden withdrawal of two classes - one of which I was glad to see go due to budget queries just because it was in Vista Hermosa, a short hour away from my house on the way there and an hour-and-a-half on the way back, and the other shocked me. My usually optimistic student had been working for the company for 15 years, had two kids, a wife the polar-opposite of him, a house, but no dog. This wasn’t the problem. The day of our, unbeknownst to me, last class, he revealed that he hadn’t been feeling well physically, had been having doubts about his marriage, and wasn’t sure about his career anymore. He handed in his notice the following day and left the company exactly two weeks later. This was a great move f or him - but I was still out of work and the spot still hasn’t been filled because the company I work for is owned by Captain Awkward and run by a few clueless men and one very capable woman. But she’s still only got two hands and 24-hours in her day.
In place of the other class I wasn’t so sad to see go, I did some placement testing on Tuesday morning and today I started teaching an advanced group. Half-an-hour in, only two of the five students had turned up so I opted for a conversation class. More or less, this was my way of simultaneously distracting the students from the ugly bags under my eyes and trying to get paid. We discussed, none other than the great topic of travel. And actually, this part of my story is more Mauricio’s story than it is mine.
Mauricio went on a business trip to Brazil some months ago. Once the business part of the trip was over and done with, he was alone but being a small boy from the big city this didn’t seem to stop him from wandering the streets both day and night. A man approached him during one of his wandering and with a fearful look in his eye, warned him not to wander anywhere alone at anytime. Though his encounter with this stranger was peculiar, Mauricio heeded his warning and stayed put as soon as the sun went down. One day, perhaps a forgetful moment, he set up a lonesome plot on one of the beaches in front of his hotel in Rio de Janeiro and had a beer. Literally a minute or two later, a dark, burly man talking Portuguese on his cell phone started in the direction of Mauricio. Mauricio was told that he would buy this man a beer and the man sat down next to our innocent friend. Realizing the potentially dangerous situation he was in, Mauricio told the man, “I know that you think I’m here alone without any friends or family and you want to rob me.” The man nodded in silent agreement. “I’m a drug-dealer from Acapulco, man,” Mauricio continued, “My family’s in the business. I‘m here on vacation.” He improvised a lengthy explanation and in the end the other man gave him a strong pat on the shoulder and told him, “You can go anywhere in the city, on the streets, no one will touch you.” Mauricio had apparently become part of a brotherhood through his lies and sure enough no one touched him the rest of his time in Brazil. Who knows whether or not this man’s power spread so far as to protect his own kind like that, but whatever the case, Mauricio invented a shield and it proved useful.
That’s one thing I’ve learned here. One way or another you’ve got to protect yourself. In China I had protected myself from being stared at by picking my nose or taking pictures of people who took pictures of us. But here there’s a real threat, and when I’m taking the metro at 6am or walking between buses, I’m not so concerned about my belongings, believe it or not. I bring my iPod with me wherever I go, my cell phone too, and to date have had no problems touch wood. Kind of like Mauricio did that day on the beach, I become someone else when I’m traveling solo. Sometimes I employ tactics I used in China, although it’s not nearly as funny without Jess there to laugh at me, simply to appear as unfeminine as possible and ever since the butt-grabbing incident back in December, I always have a bag over my butt then box myself in with my books at either side whenever I’m walking up from the metro to the buses. Also imperative? An uninterested face that says that I know where I’m going and I’ll put up a fight. Make-up is out and scuffed shoes are in. If I was brave enough, gel would also be in then I might have a chance at blending in. Okay that’s enough, I sound like a really unattractive woman…and if you saw me on the metro at 6am you might just think so.
The good news is that my 6am metro days are over! In fact, my class this morning was the first and last with that group as well. I received an email an couple of hours ago from Captain Awkward and I will be starting a new class on Tuesday to replace another teacher who didn’t quite click with the students. No pressure right…
This is getting long - onto other thoughts later.
