mom and dad are gonna be maaaaaaaaaaaad.

my sister arrived in mexico city on monday afternoon. we have had a great time exploring the city, with me showing her some of my favorite spots and the two of us discovering things that are as new to me as they are to her.

one such place is not too far from my school. and it's a dangerous prospect.

it's a casino.

as is fairly well-known by those in my circle of friends and immediate family members, i have a slightly sordid past with gambling. it dates back to what should have been a more innocent period of my life, pre-pubescence. in reality, i was spending an unhealthy amount of time and money at the claw machines where you waste a lot of quarters trying to maneuver a mechanical claw around any type of cheaply assembled stuffed animal. as i moved into the late elementary and early middle school years, my habits brought me into a new realm of my developing addiction to games of chance. i started hitting the kiddie slot machines at side show pizza and would explode with excitement every time i got an invitation to a birthday party at said locale. by age twelve i was a regular at the our lady of grace church fair, where i would show up to all three days of the annual festival, and sidle up to the craps table with all of my classmates' dads and an assortment of retirees. my allowance sustained my habit in the beginning, and once i was actually employed as a gymnastics teacher at the age of fourteen, the stakes were growing exponentially. i would sometimes win big, as i bounced back and forth between craps and the money wheel, and i still remember the time i took a chance putting my crisp dollar bill on the long-shot 20 dollar bet. the money wheel spun and spun and finally landed on... indeed, the only $20 bill on the entire wheel. sweet winnings. i panicked the year i showed up on a friday evening for the fair's opening day and there were signs everywhere that said you had to be 18 to gamble. fortunately for me, enforcement of this rule was lax at best.

you might see why the casino discovery in mexico city's own condesa district could be problematic. well, it quickly did become problematic when my sister had to go to the bathroom, and the street vendor she asked suggested we go into the casino to use their facilities. it didn't take much convincing to get me to agree to play a little something. they only had slot machines, so my yearning for a craps table and the days of yore was futile. we settled in at machines that creatively combined the games of bingo and lotto. i only played 10 pesos, spaced out over many games, but it didn't take long before i got a double-line on one of my four bingo cards and won 100 pesos. luck was clearly still on my side, so many years later. i claimed to want to play it all away, since i had only put in a dollar to start with and i was having fun. secretly, yet obviously, i was hoping to win another 100. it didn't happen, and i cut myself off when my winnings were gone. my sister had gone to wait for me outside, as her lucky streak was not up to the task that night, and for some reason it wasn't fun for her to watch me - with that crazed look in my eye - as i kept on playing.

it was a thrill and a treat, and i am scared for the days when i go to school just blocks from that shiny, gold-trimmed hall of bright, beeping money machines. when i find myself with time on my hands and no one to stop me.

and i finally understand why, of all of the TV shows that could have been off limits in the jones household growing up, it was the price is right that i absolutely was not allowed to watch.

crepes and waffles

i am having a lazy sunday after a saturday full of new friends, rich food and hyper-stimulating visuals. yesterday i had the chance to get together with good friends of mike bosworth... eduardo and layla live nearby in san ángel, another beautiful part of mexico city, that is often paired as the counter-part to coyoacán in terms of location and feel, though i thought it was noticably more upscale, with many more tree-lined streets and fancy stores and residents. they picked me up yesterday morning, and i was introduced to layla's sister and 12 year-old niece who were visiting from colombia.

we started the day with a hearty breakfast at sanborn's. sanborn's is a mexican chain of stores/restaurants that seem to be a bit of a catch-all... cd's, jewelry, chocolates and candies, bakery, and lucky for us, saturday brunch. (sanborn's stores are also, incidentally, owned by the man who owns telmex, among dozens of other companies, and is the third richest person in the world, following our own mr. gates and mr. buffett. but don't quote me -- that comes from my spanish classmate who i don't entirely trust, or like for that matter.) i took layla's suggestion of the huevos divorcados, which i had had once before when brendan and i were in mazatlan. i have learned that you can't go too far wrong with eggs, tortillas and *two types of salsa*, and the side of chilaquiles and refried beans didn't hurt either. i took the easy way out and we spoke english all day. their english was quite a bit better than my spanish, and well, i'm kind of lazy... so we got to know each other over breakfast and i was amazed by pamela's (layla's niece) english. they were all marvelling at it as well, and were relieved by the the fact that her private school's hefty price tag seemed to be proving its worth. she is possibly the sweetest 12 year-old i have ever met. very thoughtful and earnest and free (for now) from any of that adolescent garbage that i know wreaked havoc in the jones household as elsewhere. when we were driving around mexico city after breakfast, she gave me a beaded bracelet, since she had two. i want to take her home with me, but i wouldn't be able to afford her tuition.

i got mabye a little glimpse of how any latina woman feels when she is told that she looks so much like salma hyek, or penelope cruz (or insert other famous latin woman of your choice here) when pamela pulled a *cinderella barbie doll* off of the sanborn's shelf and told me "you are like this." i will mark that down as most probably the only time in my life i will be compared to a barbie doll of any sort, much less of the fairy tale variety.

after eduardo drove us all around mexico city - which gave me an even better sense of its size than i had before, since we would seem to leave the city's main central area behind and then emerge alongside a neverending slew of brand new office buildings - we headed to xochimilco. xochimilco is a strange place... one that i had read about and was hoping to make it to... dubbed the "venice of mexico." as was asserted by eduardo when we were preparing to embark on our "gondola" xochimilco, in reality, has absolutely nothing to do with venice. it was still really neat though -- we floated along the waterways for a bit, passing other boats where men and women were selling beer, and potato ships and the ubiquitous pork rinds - at this point, i would swear that the atkins diet staple got its start in mexico city. i took a bunch of photos, which will eventually make their internet debut. kind alfredo at GIRE is still trying to work his magic to get me set up with some sort of reliable system for posting photos.

from xochimilco, we went to a big mall in the south of mexico city to have some lunch and then go to see the new pirates of the caribbean movie. my favorite fact of the day: the restaurant where we ate lunch - crepes and waffles - is a colombian (the name baffles me too) chain of restaurants with just this one spot in all of mexico, and in colombia their policy is to only hire single mothers. there were quite a few men working at the one where we ate, so apparently this policy didn't accompany the restaurant's expansion into mexico. maybe i am being naïve, but this idea seems so simple, but so brilliant, particularly in countries where - thanks to strong religious institutions - family planning policies might be less than progressive. i will step down from my GIRE soapbox now. to me, the idea here gives jobs to those among the people who need them most, and it would seem to create a great support network for women who are in what is bound to be a trying situation. i started envisioning all of these scenarios where it is so much easier to get your coworkers to cover for you and vice versa, and you can come to work and talk about how hard things have been with your teething baby and everyone understands. my little crepes and waffles fantasy land. the food was great too. i have to give a short presentation in my spanish class on tuesday, and the topic will be crepes and waffles. so simple, but so enlightened. i love it.

the movie was just fine too. i am generally not one for action-adventure movies, but i am generally one for orlando bloom, so it all worked out okay. i don't think i have seen johnny depp in a movie since benny and joon (i am conveniently excluding my painful viewing of edward scissorhands, dubbed in spanish, a few weeks ago) so that was a bit of a blast from the past. the bad guys were really bad, and i wondered if pamela was as worried about the potential for nightmares as i was. have you ever seen a man with a face morphed into an octopus? with lots of tentacles, but no nose? you don't want to.

i am getting very excited for the arrival of the jones contingent. my sister gets here tomorrow, and ma and pa follow on wednesday. i stocked my kitchen with delectable fruits and mexican beer in honor of the occaision. i also got some chicken soup just in case montezuma should have the gall to show his face again.

i'm good.

i was trolling around (my friend and fellow evans student) subarna's blog when i stumbled across some mysterious computer-speak gobbledygook that looked like it had some potential for taking my own blogging efforts to the next level.

look left and feast your eyes on the fruits of my new tech chops.

enjoy... and be warned... the meanderings of scooter and lulu rank among the best procrastination material i have found to date.

do you want me to tell you how many kids you're going to have?

another week begins anew in mexico city. i am into my fifth week at work, which i somehow find very hard to believe. it's the same confusion i often felt when i was in france in college, where i couldn't figure out if the time was crawling or flying by. regardless, for the amount i want to accomplish in my internship by the end of the summer, i've got my work cut out for me. i have gotten organized and have a plan for how i am going to attempt to do it all. this plan is now five hours old, so we'll see how it holds up.

this weekend was a great one. i had my spanish class after work on friday... in fact, i have it after work everyday. it's just three weeks long, which i figured i could manage, but it's tough to give up the better part of my evening after getting used to just lounging around and doing whatever i wanted. we're an interesting crew in the class... there is another person here from the states (though originally from taiwan) - he's a grad student in the international studies program at johns hopkins and is here working for the taiwanese consulate. so our situations are pretty similar. i don't know as much about the third - we are only three in the class, so it's almost like a private tutorial - besides that she is polish and probably quite a bit younger than me, and, well, not so swift on the spanish. the biggest problem is that you can't hear a difference when she says words ending in -a vs. -e. we are reviewing the subjunctive, where -ar verbs change from an -a ending to an -e ending and -er verbs change from an -e to an -a ending. i think you see where i am going with this. most of friday was spent with her conjugating a verb in the subjunctive, the professor correcting her, then her repeating the verb exactly as she had said it the first time, and so on until the teacher had to trust that she was saying what she was supposed to be saying and not what it sounded like she was saying. and so it went.

later friday evening i headed into the plaza, which is the center of everything, in coyoacán. i had an ice cream and strolled around, then took a seat to people-watch. it wasn't long before the man sitting near me approached. he wasted no time informing me that he is a palm/tarot card reader. i am not one for new-age amusements in general, and certainly not one for anything that claims to predict the future. i didn't convey this to him, so he continued with "do you want me to tell you how many kids you're going to have?" i politely declined, telling him that i - perhaps oddly - prefer not to know things about the future but rather to live them. he seemed to respect that but continued to chat me up. he was really friendly and i got a generally harmless feeling from him, so i took the opportunity to practice my spanish a bit. he then suggested we see a movie or have coffee sometime, which i declined, but told him that i could stop by and visit him at the plaza, since he is there every evening. the most bizarre part is that i wasn't just saying that. it was nice to have a little social interaction that was unrelated to where i work or live.

a few minutes later a young man, who felt noticably less harmless - his facial hair was far too thought-through and manicured - approached and chatted me up in english for a bit. he apparently had a bet with his friends that related to the existence of gondolas set up in the middle of supermarkets to sell things. i still don't understand it, but he went away after awhile. as he was leaving he asked for my number, almost as an afterthought, and seemed annoyed when i told him i don't have a phone... it was the best i could up with on the spot. i waited for awhile for an outdoor table to open up at a nearby cafe, but relented when it started to rain since no one appeared to be moving anytime soon anyway. home i went to do my laundry in the sink... and just as i was rolling in the new california girls were headed out to go dancing. so the feeling old thing didn't take long to set in. they went off to shake their booties while i spent my friday night at home washing my undies.

saturday i got up relatively early and planned my day. first i went to a vegetarian cafe near my house for chilaquiles. there may have been some gringo sabotage going on, because they were the spiciest thing i have ever willingly ingested... i am convinced that not even a mexican could eat them without a problem. i tried to enjoy them nonetheless, and had some fresh squeezed o.j. and coffee to help counter the spiciness. there was a nice guy sitting next to me reading the paper and we chatted for a bit... he was a professor of economics and political science at the national university (UNAM -- student body of 200,000. and that's not a typo.) so i asked him for his take on the elections. my mistake delving into somewhat complex territory, but i got the gist of the four outcomes he could see happening. just don't ask me to restate them.

after breakfast i went into town to this incredible artisans' market. taxco unleashed the arts and crafts buying monster in me and now i can't stop. so i spent a long time strolling and browsing and buying. it was a great spot, and i will definitely be returning. after that i walked in the general direction of the historic center. i stopped at the museum at the alameda that houses one of the many diego rivera murals around town. it's called a dream of a sunday afternon at alameda park and it was really striking... it traces many decades of mexican history, all set in the alameda. i didn't think i would like his stuff... mostly because i didn't want to like it since he seemed like such a jerk in frida... but i have come around to it just the same. i paid my 5 pesos to be able to take pictures, and will hopefully get to post them online once i have the brendan-engineered photo posting scheme underway.

i spent some more time strolling around town and taking in the start of AMLO demonstrations that would culminate with the march and rally yesterday (unbelievable photos here). i went home feeling pretty beat, stopped at the grocery store and made some food. later i headed to a party for a friend of jennifer's... it was a lot of fun and i realized what a month of not consuming any alcohol means for my tolerance which added an element of surprise to the evening. i chatted a good bit with gillian, who is a good friend of jennifer's and works for a sister organization, catholics for the right to decide, and i tried to chat a bit with miguel, jennifer's partner. i still get intimidated, because any time he says anything where there aren't context clues i cannot understand a word. fastest talker ever. i was especially pleased when the music was turned up and the dancing started. i was only a spectator, but these mexicans can dance. it was amazing. when i got home at 3am i immediately called brendan to tell him that we *will* make good on our long discussed but yet unrealized dancing lesson date, and salsa comes first.

sunday was kind of wash since i was so tired from saturday. i have gotten very used to a 10:30 bedtime so 3am did not sit so well with me. i hung around coyoacán (sunday market... bought more stuff!) and read quite a bit of On Beauty (zadie smith)... it's wonderful. i should know to expect nothing less.

i am bracing myself for this evening's spanish class... we'll see what the professor has worked out in terms of strategy for our little mismatched trio. i can only hope that the protracted subjunctive review is behind us.

the bulls of taxco

my weekend away was a nice break from the smoggy, crowded, noisy world that had started to go unnoticed in my daily life in these parts.

i left on saturday morning for taxco on a very fancy-pants bus where they even gave you your choice of soda and a barf bag as you boarded. i had had the foresight to go to the bus station on friday evening to get my ticket, mostly because there didn't appear to be another feasible way to get a reliable bus schedule. i got to choose my seat from a computer screen, but i was confused by which side of the diagram was the front and which was the back... but i chose a seat that was definitely a window seat, regardless of what side of the bus it was on, and would allow me to do some serious daydreaming and window gazing on the 2 1/2 hour bus ride.

when i boarded saturday morning, i was surprised to see two women sitting in my seat and the one next to it. i showed them my ticket, and they realized that they had been confused and moved to the seats on the opposite side of the aisle. it got complicated when the third in their party - a gentleman who must have been approaching 80 - then had to switch to my side. i was just about to settle into my seat when he pointed out that seat 20 (my seat) was in fact on the aisle. i was confused, but i have gotten used to generally being confused - and often wrong - here, so i acquiesced. he also was old and all of that, so i didn't particularly want to put up a fight when i was feeling unsure of myself. i gave it an embarrassing amount of thought on the ride to taxco, and realized there was no way seat 20 was on the aisle, since that would mean that the seats in my row going across were numbered 17-18-20-19. not likely. then he closed the curtains on the window so i couldn't even see out from my distant aisle seat, and went to sleep and - of course - started to snore. by the time we got to taxco i was feeling pretty bitter and determined to get a window seat on the way home. i booked the same seat - 20 - for the ride home simply because i had a point to prove.

with my sunday return to mexico city assured, i went off to find a taxi into town. i was dropped off at the square in the taxco's lively little center and then set off to find a hotel. i checked into a place from my guidebook - the price had doubled since the book was published five years ago - but i was hot and hungry so it was good enough for me. i had a bite to eat and then ventured into the NEVER ENDING silver market. i probably browsed and shopped for close to three hours and i still didn't see close to everything. it was completely insane. my book said that the silver trade employs virtually all of taxco's 10,000 inhabitants. i don't doubt it, and the saturday market must bring in as many folks from outside of taxco to sell their wares because it really did go on and on and on. it was unbelievable. the nice part was that the sellers seemed as overwhelmed and exhausted by it all as the buyers, so they didn't waste their energy pressuring you unless you were seriously interested. so you could browse and browse and never be bothered.

after the endless silver maze, and then resting and recovering at the hotel for a bit, i went out for dinner and then hung around the town square people-watching and enjoying the bright hot sun that we don't get much in mexico city. i chatted with a friendly couple from bombay... the man also works for an NGO so we swapped causes and he told me about their plans to head to acapulco the next morning. i sang the praises of zihuatanejo (where we went for my mom's birthday a few years ago) and they changed their plans, just like that.

i got back to the hotel just before a downpour hit, so that helped to solve any issues i was having in deciding what to do for the evening. i stayed in and read and went to bed early.

sunday morning, i took a cab up to a hotel on a very high cliff that golden girl #1 had recommended for its view more than anything. i had brunch there, but i wasn't feeling bold enough to try most of the hot foods (i almost scooped something resembling chilaquiles onto my plate, but thought better of it and first asked what it was exactly -- pork rinds in green salsa... no gracias. i'm not ready to go there just yet) so i gulped down a lot of fresh squeezed orange juice and had granola and some sweet breads and a bunch of fruit. i took some pics from the restaurant balcony and then headed back down to town on the funicular. i haven't been on a roller coaster in a very long time (well, besides the one at seattle center that pretty much gave me a mild concussion a few years ago) so the funicular was feeling pretty wild and crazy. but i made it down in one piece, and will eventually post the pics from the my little psuedo-swiss alps joy ride.

as i trudged back into town from the funicular station, i came upon some sort of parade. i'm still not exactly sure what it was, but a bunch of different mexican states had contingencies who made their way through taxco's little winding streets in traditional dress, looked pretty, and didn't do much else. well, except for the group from guererro, which had a bunch of men dressed in bull costumes bringing up the rear. their masks were kind of scary, and to make it worse they had long whips that they would slam onto the ground and - just for fun - sometimes whip in the general direction of the crowd. i huddled in the back with the toddlers. when i was at a safe distance, i took some pictures and then made my way up to the town square, following behind the guererro group.

before i knew it, one of the scary bull men had grabbed my hand and pulled me into the procession. it was fun for a minute but then i remembered the whips and got scared and scooted away. when everyone from the parade was gathered on the plaza (with signs about a festival of mexican dance but i never saw a single person dance, so it just confused me more) the bull found me again and this time pulled me over to the guererro group's photo op! so there are all of these beautifully made up women wearing long flowing skirts with their hair in perfect braids and decorated with flowers, and men in elaborate bull masks and furry capes, and a sunburned gringo tourist in sneakers and a t-shirt lumped in there with them... i wonder what all of the tourists who were taking pics and videos will think when they go back and look at the group. the least challenging where's waldo game ever. after the photos i chatted with the bull briefly and he attempted to invite himself to come watch the world cup game with me. well, he did invite himself, but i declined. i didn't get to watch the game anyway, cause the bar i knew of was full. so i spent the afternoon on the square, taking it all in while keeping a low profile to avoid bull and his buddies.

getting on the bus to come back to mexico city, i seized up for a moment when i saw a young boy sitting in my seat. or i should say one of the window seats in my row, which at this point i was sure was seat 20, and i wasn't about to cave to a five year-old. so i politely told him that that was my seat, and his parents had him move. i savored every moment of the scenery on the ride home... traffic was bad so it took an hour longer than it should have, and i was amazed by all of the vendors who wove their way among the slow moving highway traffic, selling everything from slushees to wooden serving bowls. what continues to amaze me both about the informal economy here is that people actually buy the stuff. i have seen businessmen buy pirated CDs on the subway, and mothers buy their kids coloring books. it tempts me to find something to hawk.

the work week is moving right along, and i am looking forward to my family's visit in a couple of weeks. i start my spanish classes tomorrow and have plans to get together with friends of mike bosworth. it is rumored that there will be some college students from california arriving at my house in the next few days, so i am preparing myself to feel old and out of touch. it might be a nice change from feeling woefully anglophonic and out of touch.

felipe, frida y yo

so, last night felipe calderón was declared the victor in the presidential election. i was out at dinner with four frenchies, two mexicans, and another american (jennifer) when it was announced on the news. those who don't live here were mostly inquisitive (three of the frenchies and myself), and those who do live here (one frenchie, two mexicans and jennifer) were thoroughly forlorn. miguel talked emphatically about moving to another country... sound familiar? i wonder if the hits on the canadian embassy website will spike like they did in early november 2004. though there doesn't seem to be a viable escape from conservative commanders-in-chief in north america at the moment. at the very least, calderón does not appear to be strutting around making statements about all of the "political capital" he has to spend given his win by .57%. and power in congress is thoroughly split, which gives some assurance against truly reactionary policies. the good news on the congressional front is that the far-left presidential candidate (who is a woman, a feminist *and* on the Board of GIRE!) got enough votes for her party to become officially recognized. so there will be representation and recognition of truly progessive ideas in the legislative branch... to get anywhere, they will have to cozy up to the more mainstream parties, but it is still a step in the right (or left! oh! were you ready for it?) direction.

the evening out was a trilingual bonanza. we had the frenchies practicing a bit of spanish, the mexicans practicing their english, the americans translating from spanish and french to english, and everything in between. it made my head spin at times, but it was a relief to be able to formulate something above the level of toddler in a foreign language for a change. i'm still not sure what happened exactly, but it took a good couple of hours before the french crew put together that the year i spent in southern france in college, and the six weeks i spent in paris last year indeed meant that i speak french. it was a great little group, but i probably will only get to see two of them again - the couple that are friends of miguel and jennifer, who put the evening together. though they're off to travel around mexico and france for their nine weeks off (they are both french teachers here), we may see more of them in september.

i also went to the frida kahlo museum yesterday. it was my second attempt. i had gone on tuesday after work, showed my student ID, and handed over a 50 peso bill to pay the 20 peso student admission. the young lady at the ticket booth asked me if i had change. i showed her that i didn't, and she told me that she didn't have change, in a very matter-of-fact, "and there's nothing i can, or will, do about it" kind of way. i'm not sure who is behind the profit-making operations at the frida kahlo museum, but not being able to make 30 pesos in change is probably not their best approach. at any rate, i took exact change yesterday and was successfully allowed in. i was more taken with the house itself (where she and diego rivera lived) than the art on display, and i was left baffled by the movie they were showing, which more that anything involved a lot of interpretive dance and brought to mind the phantom of the opera movie i had to watch in my middle school music class. but it did teach me some things about frida's life that i didn't remember from the salma hyek version. my impression by the end of my visit was that i preferred the paintings by diego rivera to those by frida, and that i'm not sure i would even want to be a fly on the wall of frida's psyche. too unsettling.

this weekend will hold something new in store. i am planning to take the bus to taxco, which is a little silver mining town in the mountains of guerrero. from the photos i've seen, it looks picturesque and hilly. i'll pack my walking shoes. i'm debating spending a night there, or just going for saturday. i'm going to the bus station to investigate tickets this afternoon, and i'm guessing the bus schedules will help me make up my mind... a good dose of clean mountain air and a silver shopping extravaganza at their saturday market should be a nice change to my weekend routine. and watching the world cup finals on sunday in a sleepy little town is probably more my cup of tea... though they might be expecting me at vips.

nail biter

the outcome of sunday's presidential election hangs in the balance... this morning's news brought some hope... AMLO trails by 400,000 or so votes, and as it turns out the lovely, very competent folks who are counting the votes hadn't mentioned that 3 million votes - from the far flung regions of the country and who knows where else - are still at large. it's unclear to me if there is any firm idea of when exactly we might know - at least unofficially - who won. the mood at work is still pretty down and out, but jennifer is keeping up with the reports of double-counted votes and such, so she is trying to keep the hope alive.

this week is off to a good start. my stomach is back to normal, though i have not yet tested it with anything that doesn't revolve around bread, rice or potatoes. not entirely true, actually... i was forgetting the gigantic piece of blackberry cheesecake i started my morning with today (it was the E.D.'s birthday yesterday, so we had a belated celebration) and that seems to be sitting O.K.

like my digestive system, all pieces of my life here seem to be settling down very nicely. it felt like it clicked just yesterday. i got into more of the meat of things at work, and then went into downtown for the evening (the metro at rush hour is NUTSO). i am feeling more motivated to get out and explore new things and generally not be such a wimp. as many many people told me before i left seattle, mexico city is not the scary place that people make it out to be. i may eat my words later, but for now i am beginning to feel right at home. and the truly brilliant part of it all is that the language business really does get easier.

montezuma - 1, NGJ - 0

my absence for the past little while can be attributed to those little microbial beasties that like to get into your digestive tract and make your life miserable. on wednesday i started feeling a little off at the very end of the day, so i headed home a few minutes early, and sure enough, within hours i was at the mercy of montezuma. conchita/golden girl #1 was wonderful. she forced chicken soup and chamomile tea on me, and just when i had finished sounding miserable to brendan on the phone, complaining about how all i wanted in the world was some sprite or gatorade and there was no one to go to the store to get some, she appeared at my door offering me some sort of apple soda that is the sick drink of choice in mexico, and was close enough to sprite to make me stop acting so pathetic.

overall, wednesday night was one of my worst experiences in recent memory. i was up constantly and when i tried to sleep i couldn't because my body was so sore. thursday i stayed home and jennifer did bring me all of those things i was whining for the night before. so i got hydrated and started in on what would be a 72 hour diet of saltines, chicken soup and gatorade. i went to work on friday armed with anything i might need and just hoped that i could get through the day without any embarassing incidents. and so it went, though there was an office birthday party at the end of the day for all of the may and june babies, and i could barely look at the incredible spread of food.

saturday morning i woke up feeling quite a bit better, and by that point i was pretty used to the gurgling in my stomach, so i was feeling pretty unphased. i headed into mexico city for the second time since i've been here. again, the metro was a piece of cake. it's laid out just like the one in paris and D.C. so it even feels deceptively familiar. i went to chapultapec park, which is a massive greenspace in the heart of mexico city. signs at the park claim that it's the largest urban park in latin america. there are tons of museums there, but i was content to just people watch and get the lay of the land. i stumbled on a couple of interesting street performaces of sorts (pics are on flickr) and then i decided to do a bus tour on the double decker buses i had seen cruising around last weekend. since i was going on a banana and six saltines in my stomach, i thought keeping walking to a minimum was probably a good idea.

the double decker bus tour brings me to two interesting observations on engineering and/or liability, depending on your perspective. before i got on the bus, i went to one of the restrooms around chapultapec... you pay your 4 pesos, and then you go through one of those revolving contraptions like they have when you come out of the subway. coming out of the bathroom, you go through another revolving contraption... what i failed to notice when i went into the bathroom was that when you are feeding your pesos into the coin slot, you are standing in the way of the "exit" revolving contraption... i discovered this when i almost crushed the scull of a small boy who was excitedly paying his way to go pee as i was exiting... when i hit resistance, i looked down and noticed why i couldn't go any further. i sheepishly excused myself to his dad, who was less than amused by the ways of the clumsy gringo.

and my kharma didn't wait long to come around... when i was on the bus tour, i picked a seat that was up top, and on the sidewalk side of our route. i was happily taking in the sights of a few upscale neighborhoods that i hadn't been to on foot, and may never get back to, when it occurred to me that we were driving down a narrow, tree-lined street, where the branches were at or below the level of the bus's top deck. this occurred to me because what felt like a sizable branch whipped me across the face. the bus had just started from a stop, but our speed was great enough to inflict quite a bit of immediate pain and residual tenderness.

both of these things brought to mind liability in the U.S.... particularly because i had just finished a bill bryson book (i'm a stranger here myself) where this is one of the topics he covers. i think lawsuits would have long ago taken care of any public restroom set-up where you could - relatively easily - inflict bodily harm on a small child or where a tourist service threatened to leave any of its less attentive patrons' faces maimed.

after i got feeling back in my cheek, the tour was great, and i will suggest it to anyone who comes to visit. mostly, it shows you that this city is unbelievably massive, and we only say the spots hight on the tourist list.

last night i went to a barbeque with jennifer and miguel. it was with some friends of miguel's from high school... they're in their late 30s now, and don't get together much, so they have little morethan their memories from high school to talk about. and they were thorough. we were there until almost 2am... the upside is that i had something other than chicken soup! carne asada for the first time ever, in fact, and it was pretty tasty.

today was a beautiful day, so of course i went shopping. there are sales everywhere in july so i couldn't resist. it's also election day, but i just checked for any news on TV and there was nothing yet. hopefully they will have at least a tentative ruling tonight... i am really hoping to live vicariously if AMLO (the leftist) wins, since i am still lamenting the 2004 outcome. if he loses, i'll have to look up how to say "i feel your pain" before i go to work tomorrow.