Hasta luego!

Hola,

Sorry it's been a while. Have a bit to catch up on.

I made it to San Cristóbal in southern Mexico I think a few weeks ago. I love it here - hoping to come back for some study maybe next year. The day before I left San Fran I visited the Mission district with a really lovley English girl I met called Jess (who is technomologically far more advanced than I am so she tought me how to use my camera. It was a fortuitous meeting – she also showed me all about skype). Mission is almost totally a Latino area. Having been south of the border for a couple of weeks now, I can see why I much prefered it to central San Francisco. Latino living is so very civlised and relaxed! Mission is a poor area with an undeserved (as far as I could see) bad reputation. I guess in many tiny minds, poor/Latino = rough/bad. In Mission there are murals and mosaics on pretty much everything. It’s a community project started by artists/muralists to include the community and it makes for a beautiful place, both in aesthetically and in general vibe and feel. The schools are all painted, as are houses, shops, just about everything. Si, if you ever come across a computer in your lifetime and happen to read this, you’d really love it. Unfortunately the photos I took are crap and don’t do it justice at all. Just as well I have only managed to put one up here so far. Baby steps, baby steps. If you want to see this one really boring photo of a hill in San Fran, click on lourob(2) I think.

It was a pretty horrible journey from San Francisco to San Cristóbal. My last day in San Fran was marred by witnessing a nasty incident involving three men and a knife. So while I was very happy to leave the US I was also a little shaken up and on a bit of a downer. My plane from San Fran was delayed due to ‘passenger action’, whatever that means, but I managed to get a red eye flight with Mexicana Air. The (all male) hosties were very cruisy and 'swaggered' down the isle with bottles of tequila. I knew then that I would like Mexico. Once again I didn’t get a vege meal, since I was on a different flight to the one I had originally booked, so I picked the top of my sandwich and ate peanuts. I also got a broken isle seat next to a fat guy so nada sleep for me. I arrived at Mexico International at about 5am, very hungry and tired, and quite worried about whether or not I actually had an ongoing flight to Tuxtla, a town about 80 or 90ks from San Cristóbal. I had booked this flight over the internet in Spanish and had no idea whether I’d actually booked a flight to Tuxtla from Mexico City on 22 May at some time after my incoming flight had landed, or if I’d ordered a pizza or something . Amazingly I had booked it correctly – now I just had to find it, which took literally hours. Mexico airport is HUGE and scary and I don’t really want to ever go there again. When I first arrived, none of the official type people including customs officers could even tell me where to collect my luggage. I got sent from pillar to post, upstairs, downstairs, north, east, south, west until finally a kind hosty or pilot or something took pity on me and showed me to the right place. Then I had to find my next flight, a process which nearly caused me a nervous breakdown, because the airline I went on called itself something ’International’ even though it was a domestic airline and never left the domestic terminal. All in all, it took about three hours. After finally checking in I set off to try and turn my mobile and phone card from North Americans into Mexicans, which I thought would probably be muy dificil if left until I arrived in San Cristóbal. I managed the phone card (which works occasionally), but the mobile is no longer. After being held captive for two hours and completely broken by a Mexican telecommunications company I nearly missed my plane to Tuxtla. By now it was about 11am. And still no food, and of course no veg on the next plane. I was also now coming down with the flu, aching and coughing up nasty stuff. In the end I went two days without food and nearly as long without sleep. By the time we touched down at Tuxtla airport I was feeling like I couldn´t stand anymore. But I had to find a ride to San Cristóbal, and be there before 2pm when I had arranged to meet someone (which I knew wouldn´t happen), but I took a deep breath and kept going anyway. I paid some crazy driver some amount of money and was on my way.

I arrived in San Cristobal at about 3 in the afternoon. Before I left San Fran, I found a Spanish language school on the internet in San Cristóbal, called Instituto Jovel that I thought I might like to go to. It is a great school and I can’t believe my luck in stumbling across it and getting a place at such late notice. Anyway, I had arranged to meet the director of the school, Reginaldo, who had organised a homestay for me with a local Mexican family. Because I was late getting there, I arrived at siesta time and had to sit outside on the pavement until people arrived, pretty much the last thing I needed to be doing. I was disoriented, almost delirious from lack of sleep and hunger, and by now also pretty sick. I couldn’t for the life of me speak any Spanish to the man, but he struggled on with me. He called my Mexican family, and the woman (Coco) came to pick me up. While I was well beyond speaking, I could still understand their conversation. Glancing at me, Coco asked Reginaldo ’habla espanol?’ He replied, ´No. No habla nada,’ with a shake of his head. Then Coco said (with a slightly sarcastic tone I swear) ‘perfecto’. I wanted to let them know I understood what they were saying, but just thought ahhhh fuck it.

I put my backpack back on and walked home with Coco. We tried to talk back at the house but it just wasn’t happening. I felt so wierd, seeing things out of the corner of my eye and all sorts of strange things. In the end I managed to spit out, ‘necessito mi cama ahora mismo por favor’ (I need my bed right now please). So I finally got some sleep, though it was very strange, and I woke up not knowing where I was and dreading going downstairs to ‘converse’ with my Mexican family.

I have now left the family after two weeks with them. They are lovely but I really needed a bit of space. Through my school I found an apartment of my own which is really great and a lot cheaper and more convenient than a youth hostel. The apartment is a kind of colonial building with one room, bathroom, kitchen, and lots of beautiful colours on the walls. I have extended my stay here, so I’ll have the apartment for a couple of months. So life in San Cristóbal for me at the moment is going to school everyday, doing homework, seeing some friends and getting out and about on the weekends. Last weekend a friend Kait, from the US, and I went to Palenqué to check out the town and see some Mayan ruins. They are thousands of years old and still very much intact which is really amazing, though cruising around with a thousand other tourists kind of detracts from the magic. I am a terrible tourist, and luckily so is Kait so we both had the same half hearted approach to sight seeing. I was a little worried she might actually be interested in walking six miles to a mediocre waterfall, or listening to some tour guide sprout boring facts about what kind of frogs live in a particular area. But she wasn’t, thank Dog, so we kind of did our own thing. Unfortunately, the night before we left San Cristóbal, we decided to drink enough cerveza for ten men and stay out until 4am. This is the only time we have done this and it just happened to be that the bus to Palenquè was picking each of us up at our respective houses at 6am. Of course we both slept through our alarms, so I was rudely awoken by Coco telling me stuff in Spanish that I didn’t understand. I stared dumbly at the clock which said 6.45 so I thought I’d missed the bus. But as it turned out it had been outside beeping its horn for 20 minutes, probably waking everybody else in the street but me. I ran outside in only a towel begging the driver to wait ‘dos minutos! Dos minutos!’ He relented, and the other passengers scowled out of their windows. We then drove off to pick up Kait who was in a similar state to me. We were a couple of feral animals that day.
In a few weeks I’m off to Tapachula (still in Mexico) and then probably Guatemala for a little while. Kait has moved to Tapachula. She is a scientist and is studying ants there. San Cristóbal just isn’t the same without her so I’m looking forward to seeing her again.

Likes and dislikes:
Likes:
The food. I crave chilli first thing and the mango with chilli and lemon from the people on the street is amazing.

Speaking English. I know I’m horrible. I never realised how great it is to actually know a language.

Being the luckiest person ever and finding my purse still on the church steps where I had been sitting in the middle of the crowded market, filled with hundreds of people constantly asking and always on the lookout for money, after leaving it sit there for a full hour while I wandered off to the other side of town. My friend Manuel proclaimed it a miracle, and I think he would know – his middle name is actually Jesus. Should’ve bought a lotto ticket. Tengo suerte!

Meeting a person whose middle name is Jesus. His mum had high hopes.

Siestas

Being allowed to be late. I was asked to a party the other week. When I asked what time to meet, they said 9, 10 or 11. So I decided to dye my hair at 11… Just joking, Paul, Geet and all the others I have kept waiting in my time. But I think I’m going to pick up some bad (or worse) habits here!

Dislikes:
At the moment, learning Spanish. It’s really hard! For some reason I thought it would just happen.

The rain. It happens nearly everyday- a sudden torrential downpour that floods everything.

The cobblestones after the rain. Grip or no grip on your zapatos, you’re going down anyway. I actually just fell over half an hour ago outside a shop.

Going really well for a few days with Spanish, then taking a giant leap backwards so I struggle to make sense of the most basic things. For a couple of days I was telling people I love myself and I also told Coco that I love her husband. I just wanted to say he’s nice.

Mexican Catholic Celebrations. They involve fireworks, 24/7, 7 days (nights) a week. Very noisy. They seem to have a lot more to celebrate than Australian Catholics. Actually, this I like.

Communication breakdowns. At the shop last Friday, a really bad Spanish day for me, I forgot to get my two onions (cebollas) weighed before I went to pay. I didn’t know I had to, actually. The man tried in vain to tell me what I had to do, but my thinking cap had blown a fuse a few hours before and for the life of me I couldn’t work out what he was trying to say. He kept talking about my cebollas, and because my brain was in such a vegetative state after a long week of Spanish school, I thought that cebollas was also some Mexican slang for breasts. This was confirmed in my mind because he was holding both his hands up in front of him in what I thought was a really suggestive way. It looked like the kind of action I’ve seen a thousand times amongst blokes at the pub in Australia. I realised (much) later he was trying to sign a set of scales, meaning I needed to go and get my onions weighed. But my mind was set on its course and wasn’t going to be sidetracked by the plain and obvious meaning of this man’s words. So I got annoyed, and the more he held out his two hands to show me he wanted to play with my cebollas, the worse it got. Fortunately, just before I told him to go fuck his mother (very insulting here apparently – some locals have armed me with some necessary street language), the penny dropped and I realised he just wanted to weigh my cebollas, not weigh my cebollas. We both cracked up.
In my defence, I have had a couple of terribly wrong encounters with men here, and always at times when I have least expected it, so my mind was primed and ready to jump to conclusions.

Must go, I’m getting kicked out of the internet café and I have homework! Monday tomorrow. And I will put photos up soon.

Love, Linda