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.