Halloween and other adventures

I would like to start this post by saying that I just realized we got an extra hour last night and that makes me so happy! I have so much reading to do and the extra hour will help immensely! Or at least it gives me the chance to take a moment to tell you about the crazy weekend I've...

Actually, before I start on this weekend, I wanted to mention just a little about last weekend. A few weeks ago, some of us met with the people organizing the gay pride week here in puebla, and we agreed to be volunteers. They had lots of cool events like movie viewings, and panel discussions, but the week got really busy and we didn’t end up volunteering for anything. But in the end, we made up for it by volunteering at the most important event- the march. As volunteers, we were supposed to keep people moving along and try to make sure things stayed peaceful. As it turned out, these two things pretty much took care of themselves, so we didn't end up volunteering as much as participating, but I think participating was just as important. I haven't been to any pride events in the states, but apparently this one was pretty small in comparison. We were a decent crowd, but it wasn't huge, so it felt like our presence was really important. Homophobia is pretty bad here, so it was really nice to take a public stand against it. And we even got our picture in the paper! It was a big shot of the crowd, but Jenna, Rouwenna and I are clearly visible right in front. I don't have a scanner, so I can't post it, but here are some pictures Rouwenna and Jenna took.

Friday was our program halloween party and it was amazing! Thursday night I went over to Patricia's house to carve pumpkins for the party which was really fun. I was a little surprised to see that they were green instead of orange, but they still had the same smell when you opened them up and pulled out all the gross pulpy seeds. It made me feel very nostalgic in a happy way.

I didn't end up going to help decorate more on friday afternoon, but those who did did a spectacular job. Patricia's house was totally transformed. And almost everyone was in costume- and there were some pretty amazing ones, including max wearing courtney's dress, which was one of my favorties. I'm not going to lie- my costume was pretty terrific. Rouwenna and I had decided to use the masks that we got at the lucha libre and go as luchadoras (I went a second time with Rouwenna, Sarah, and Sarah's parents who were visiting from the states a few weeks ago, but this time we sat with "los rudos" who are a giant fan club, who blocks off an area of the cheap seats and sits together exclusively- we were allowed to sit with them because the president recognized rouwenna from a conversation they had on the bus- they told us which luchadores to cheer for and taught us lots of groserias (swear words/vulgar sayings) to shout at the enemy luchadores and rival fan club and afterwards they took us out back behind the arena to take pictures with the luchadores as they left in their street clothes and masks so as to preserve their luchador identity- not really relevant, but a good story). We both went really over the top in creating our costumes. Getting ready reminded me of getting ready for a crazy themed smith party. Since the party was a halloween/rocky horror party, those us who arrived in non-rocky horror costumes (a lot of people just went all out rock horror style from the beginning) changed into our costumes at midnight for a traditional rocky horror showing. It was so much fun and made me appreciate my study abroad program so so much!!! How many other programs have a rocky horror picture show viewing with everyone dancing around in their underwear as a program activity, and how many resident directors would dress up in a red corset, a garter belt, big red boots and carry a whip for such a viewing? It was a pretty amazing night!

But the excitement didn't end there. Moises, rouwenna's host brother, offered to drive us home since we all live in the same area, but just after we left Patricia's house, we got pulled over for a "random" check by the police. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, except that Moises forgot his license and we're in Mexico. When they found out Moises didn't have his license on him, they made us all get out of the car. Lord knows why, but they asked for our ids and checked our bags as well. After talking with the police for a few minutes, Moises motioned to us to get back into the car. Apparently, they told him that because he didn't have his license they were going to take his car. But, if we paid them some money, they would just forget that this ever happened. We were all out-raged that the police could be so blatantly corrupt, but Moises assured us that this was the easier way to take care of things. Some people wanted to call Patricia, and in hindsight we probably should have. I was talking to my host mom about it the next morning, and she said that if we had told them we were calling our program director the police probably would have gotten scared, and just let things go, but I don't know if they would have let things go completely because Moises didn't have his license, so it's not that we were completely innocent. But at the same time, the punishment they were threatening was ridiculous for the "crime." So I feel kind of bad, because I was one of the ones who said we should just listen to Moises and not make it something bigger by calling patricia. But hindsight is 20/20 and at the time, just listening to Moises seemed like the best plan, so we all chipped in some money and gave the police the equivalent of about 60 american dollars, and then they returned our id's and just let us go.

The whole experience was really bizarre and unsettling. It is really awful to know that the people you would want to be able to turn to if something bad happened are they themselves doing something pretty terrible. After talking to my host mom and thinking about the experience more, I wish I hadn't encouraged listening to Moises and just paying off the police, because it just feels so wrong to have played into their system. My host mom was telling me how if it had been her driving, things wouldn't have happen the same way- if anything, they would have just given her a ticket for not having her license, but because we were young and clearly vulnerable, they threatened us with ridiculous punishments and scared us into paying them. Maybe we should have just said no, and let Moises deal with the consequences, but we felt bad, especially since having a car full of young americans was probably one of the reasons the police decided to "randomly" pull him over, so we just went along with his plan. But again, hindsight is 20/20 and it is much easier to say what could have been a better plan of action now that it's not three thirty in the morning with the Mexican police surrounding us.

While I would have liked to sleep all day on Saturday, instead we went on another adventure. About a week ago, when Jenna and I were at CU (one of the university campuses) waiting for an immigration conference to start (which was also amazing and has inspired us to go to another huge immigration conference in Chiapas and the end of the semester!) and we were speaking english, so this woman sitting on a bench says, "What are you ladies doing in Puebla?" We started talking to her, and apparently she is an anthropologist named Eileen Mulhare from Colgate University who does her research in a small town just outside Puebla. She was giving a guest lecture, so she gave us her card as she left and told us to get in touch with her. So the next day I emailed her and invited us over to her house to visit her house and see the town where she does her work. She was more than happy to have us so yesterday morning we went for a visit.




Jenna, Katy, and Eileen on our tour





We took the same bus that we take to go to CU and it was only about a 15 minute bus ride, but even though it was so close to the city, it had a very different feel. It was more rural- there were donkeys and chickens in backyards and the streets weren't very good and there was just a general small town feel to it. The small town feel was evident when we were trying to find Eileen's house and we asked a family what street we were on, and they said, "are you looking for a gringa like you guys?" and then brought us to her house. Eileen was so nice to us. She told us all about how she got started out as an anthropologist and how she ended up in Mexico. Then she took us on a little walking tour of the pueblo and introduced us to all these people. She told us a lot about the cargo system, which is a system of communal work for things like public repairs and hosting religious events. I read books about it last year in two different anthro
classes so it was so interesting for her to be telling us how it works in this town. It made the concept very real. She also shared a lot about her personal life and what it's like to be an anthropologist living in two places- she lives in mexico a few months out of the year and spends the rest of her time in NY with her husband. It was so much fun to get out of the city and really get the feel for a small town.

These are some really beautiful remains of an old mission in the town.

After that, I was pretty much exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before, so when I got home, I ate and took a nap so I could be well rested for my, drum roll please... date! I had invited a guy from my sociology class to the party the night before and we had a really good time, so he asked me to go to the movies with him saturday night. We got some ice cream, saw "Open Season," and got some coffee. I have no idea where this will go, if it indeed does go anywhere, and I'm really not looking to seriously date anyone here, but they say dating someone is the best way to learn the language, and we had a lot of fun together, so I guess we'll see!

So now it is Sunday, and I have SO much reading to do for my anthro class tomorrow, but I am still in very good spirits. On tuesday we are leaving for our trip to Morelia to see the day of the dead celebrations, so I am very excited about that. Things aren't always a bed of roses here- sometimes I feel really homesick, or I get stressed out about classes or the fact that my spanish still isn't spectacular, but overall, I am very, very happy here and I hope I am able to convey some of that to you all!

Hiking and life in Puebla

So I'm feeling like a bit of an ass right now. Today was supposed to be my first day at "la casa de niñez poblana" which is a state funded home for orphans, street kids, kids with family problems, etc, but I got on the wrong bus and didn't realize it until I was a good half hour in the opposite direction. I didn't actually take the wrong bus, I just caught it going in the wrong direction. About five minutes after I got on the bus, it occurred to me that I might have gotten on going in the wrong direction and that I probably should have asked the driver as I was getting on, but I somehow convinced myself that no, it was fine, I was going the right way. Half an hour later I thought, this is getting a little ridiculous, maybe I should ask someone, so I asked the guy sitting next to me and he told me that the place I wanted to go was about five minutes from where I got on the bus, in the other direction. In the end, I would have been a little over an hour late, so I decided to just not go. A bus mistake is pretty easy to make here since there are no absolutely no bus route maps or schedules, but this one was all on me, because the cardinal rule of going some place new on the bus is to ask the driver if he goes there. Oh well, now I'm sure I will always do that in the future.

To make matters worse, after abandoning the orphans, I stole a candy bar. Not really, but I went to the convenience store on may way home to buy a snickers to make myself feel a little better, and I didn't want to pay with my change since I always need it for the bus, so I handed the guy my 100 peso bill even though the chocolate was only 8 pesos. He asked if I had change, and I said no, even though I did I just didn't want to use it. Change is one of my chronic problems here in Mexico. People are always saying they don't have change. Sometimes they're trying to rip you off- taxi drivers and vendors will say they don't have change so they can just keep your change. Sometimes they really do have change, but they just don't want to give it to you (this is the situation I assumed I was in). Sometimes they really don't have change. This was the situation I was actually in. You would think if I paid for an $.80 item with a ten in a convenience store, I could get change, but no. But instead of just turning me away, the a guy behind the counter offered to pay for me. This is the point where I should have said, no, I do actually have change, but I didn't want to look like an idiot, so I just kept my mouth shut and took my free candy bar. I don't feel too guilty, because I didn't know he was going to pay when I lied, and I am in that store all the time so I can pay the guy back, but the chocolate didn't end up easing my guilt for ditching my community service as much as I would have liked.

On a more uplifting note, yesterday Rouwenna and I went hiking with the track team to celebrate Hugo's birthday. Hugo is a guy on the track team. We were supposed to go camping saturday night and spend the day on sunday, but it ended up being rainy and cold, so we decided to just go up for the day on sunday. We went to a town called tlaxco about an hour and a half by bus, because that's where Hugo's family lives. We started at his grandparents/uncle's house and they fed us delicious tamales and coffee for breakfast. It was a really old, traditional mexican house, very different from the ones my friends and I are living in puebla. There was a huge table in the kitchen and the room was just packed from floor to ceiling with spices and cooking utensils and all kinds of things. I really wanted to take a picture, but I thought it might be rude so I restrained myself.

After breakfast we headed into the mountains with Hugo's uncle as our guide. His uncle told us all kinds of things as we walked, a little bit of ecology when he told us about how the mountains were being deforested, and a little bit of gossip as he told us about how the owners of the land we were walking on were sad and lonely since no woman would ever marry them since their home was so isolated. On our hike, we stopped at their farm, and they didn't seem quite so sad and lonely to me- I think it may be a bit of small town exaggeration. Overall, the hike was really beautiful and we got the chance to make friends with the people on the track team. I was a little apprehensive about going at first, just because I have such a hard time being social in spanish, but I actually had a really good time. I think these may be my first actual Mexican friends who are related to the program in any way.

Things got a little less fun for just a little bit while were eating after our hike. It was a huge meal with lots of Hugo's extended family, and Rouwenna and I were sitting kind of far from the rest of the team, so I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and clueless. When a woman asked me if I wanted "mole de some word I didn't recognize" I said yes, because I like mole (pronounced mo-lay, it's a sauce famous in puebla) and I pride myself in trying new things. Almost every other time I have had something unfamiliar has resulted in eating a great new dish, but this time my luck ran out. Turns out the word I didn't know means cow stomach. I didn't want to be rude, and I also didn't want to look like the american who's afraid of things like cow stomach (even though I am), so I ate it. I don't know how, because even now, 24 hours later, thinking about it makes me gag. The taste was fine, it was the texture that killed me. There were these huge chunks of this slimy chewy white stuff coved in cilia. That's what really got me. I kept thinking of those pictures in bio books of the insides of intestines, because that's exactly what it looked and felt like. I put tons of onions and cilantro to try and mask the texture, but it didn't help much and I ended up swallowing most of the chunks whole. When the desert came out, I took that as my opportunity to stop eating, although at that point I had finished most of the bowl. I kept telling myself I should be proud of what I had accomplished, but nauseating thought of stomach in my stomach pretty much overruled ever other thought.

One of the desserts was the chocolate chip cookies Rouwenna and I had made, which didn't turn out exactly how we wanted, but were still pretty good. At first people seemed a little apprehensive, but our friends loved them. They have chocolate chip cookies here, but only store bought ones- no one makes them from scratch, so they were quite a novelty.

By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted, and was getting a little frustrated with myself when everyone was telling jokes and I couldn't understand a single one. I would follow so closely, but without fail, when the punch line came, I wouldn't understand. Even when people said them slowly and tried to explain them to me, I couldn't get them. I think this will be the true demonstration of my knowledge of spanish- when I can finally understand jokes.

Cueztzalan

I promise that I really do have a normal daily life here that I will write about at some point in the near future, but today I want to tell you all about the trip we went on last weekend to Cueztzalan. Cueztzalan is a small town in the mountains in the state of Puebla- the Sierra Norte. It was about a four hour bus ride, with lots of curves as we went up the mountains. We left friday morning at and got to Cuetzalan around one.

Our first activity, after we ate lunch, was a visit to some ruins. You would think that as an anthropology major, I would be thrilled every time we got to go visit some pyramids, but honestly, I have seen more pyramids in the past two months than any person ever should in such a time span. So the ruins weren't exactly thrilling, though I'm sure they should have been.

But after the ruins, we visited an indigenous women's coop, which was much more interesting to me. Here is a good place for me to stop and justify my lack of interest in the ruins although I am an anthropology major: When I say I am interested in anthropology, people assume that means I am interested in ancient civilizations and digging them up. While I do find them probably just about as interesting as the next person, what I am really interested in is living people, hence my lack of enthusiasm for the ruins and excitement for the coop. It was especially interesting after having taken "the anthropology of development" last semester and learning about alternative development strategies and then seeing them in action this weekend. The coop is this group of women, living very much in the traditional way, but also adjusting to modern times. They make a lot of traditional textiles like blouses and scarves, but they are also branching out and making things like embroidered towels and bed sheets in order to appeal to the tastes of western culture. They also have a restaurant where they make indigenous meals. We ate some delicious tortilla with salsa. It was very interesting and very inspiring. In the upper left is a picture of it that Max took which I stole off facebook.

That night we went to a nearby small town because they were having a festival. It had the atmosphere of a town fair, except that everyone was dressed in indigenous clothing. We saw some dances inside the church and then we waiting for a long time for "the burning castle." We didn't know exactly what to expect, but as we waited, they started to construct this giant wire type structure which they then hoisted upright so it was about as high as the church. I don't think everyone would agree, but in my opinion, it was well worth the hour and a half or so we waited, mostly because of how ridiculously unsafe it was. This giant wire tower had all these wheel type things on it, and when the flame reached them, they would start to burn like a firework and spin. There were two factors that made this much more dangerous than it needed to be. Number one, sometimes the wheels would fall of the tower, burning and spinning into the crowd. At one point, one didn't just fall, it launched and flew right between two spectators heads. Number two, this wasn't behind a fenced off area or anything, it was just in this plaza in front of the church, so people were free to get as close as they wanted, and one drunk guy did. He walked right up to the structure and started bathing himself in the sparks. He kept crossing himself and then making motions as if he was in a shower, but instead of water, it was fire. Luckily, there was another drunk guy, who must have been just a hair less drunk than the guy in the fire because he shoved him out of the way and made him sit down in the crowd, right next to our group pretty much on top of Max. All in all, a dangerously comical experience and a good example of the total lack of regulations on anything here.

The next morning, was the hike to the waterfall. Patricia had stressed how miserable this hike was going to be- mud everywhere, bugs, steep inclines, hiking for hours at fast paces- so it was a very nice surprise when it wasn't that bad at all! The trail we took is one that is used by the local people to come to and from Cuetzalan from even smaller towns. The first part of the hike was through rolling hills of farm land, and then as we got closer to the waterfalls, it was more jungle like. I'll include some pictures below instead of trying to describe how beautiful it was myself:

Another thing that was really fun about this trip was the transportation we used throughout cueztzalan. It was like a cross between a mini bus and a truck. It was really great for seeing views as we wound along the side of the mountain.

That afternoon we spent in the center of town doing lots of shopping (too much shopping!). I love the blouses that all the women in cuetzalan wear- they're white with colorfully embroidered collars so I got myself one of those. I was also very proud of myself because I was actually able to do some bargaining there. I was buying something and the women said it was 100 pesos, so I asked if I could get it for 80, and she said she would give it to me for 90. Only a dollar, I know, but still an accomplishment. This worked a few more times, and sometimes they wouldn't budge on the price, but it is a skill I am still looking to fine tune.

After some shopping, we got to see the "voladores" (translated as "flyers" more or less). It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. It's a religious ceremony where, first, five men climb to the top of this ridiculoulsy high pole. I have a picture of it next to a church to show just how tall. At the top of the pole, four ropes are attached to something that spins. After some prayers and music, four of the men ( who are attached to the rope at the waist) jump off the top of the pole and slowly spin around it until the reach the ground. The guy at the top (not attached to any rope!) stays at the top until about halfway through when he slides down on someone's rope. One guys was even drumming and playing the flute the whole way down. The whole thing was really very awe-inspiring.

That night, we went to a local restaurant for dinner. Cassie's birthday was the next day so we had a cake at the restaurant, which was really fun. Patricia is great about celebrating birthdays here- there is always a cake and a gift and general warm feelings all around.

Sunday was a free day, and possibly my favorite. Patricia said she would be hiking to the other close by waterfalls with a guide at 8am and that we were welcome to join her. Although it was very early, I decided to go, and am so happy I did. It was a smaller group of us, only five of us and the guide and patricia, which was nice for talking with people. The morning light was absolutely gorgeous and the falls even more beautiful the the ones from the day before. These falls had a big pool at the bottom where we were able to swim around. The water was freezing, but I still felt like I was in a jungle paradise. The whole thing was very peaceful and made me very grateful that we had this chance to get away from the city for a little bit.

Afterwards, another small group of us went horseback riding. The ride was about an hour in total and we had guides walking with us to show us where to go. At first I was a little skeptical because the first part of the trip was through a dump, complete with stray dogs and what looked like vultures. But once we got past the dump, we got to see the most beautiful views. I didn't have my camera, but here some pictures that christina took.

Overall a fabulous weekend in mexico!