the minus five, tim seely and a very shy woman i met in france.

tonight i was reintroduced to the seattle music scene. my very dear friend anne, who is visiting seattle from her new home in portland, and i went to see a local fave, tim seely, play at the crocodile cafe. she also knew another of the bands that was playing, and the third band, the she bee gees, would be new to both of us.

we got there on the early side, so we had a couple of drinks at the bar. while we were sipping and chatting, i noticed a woman who was unmistakably from our study abroad program in france. the interesting thing about having studied abroad through the university of minnesota in montpellier, france seven years ago is that there was a program through the university of washington also in montpellier. that means that on occasion i will see folks around seattle who i don't necessarily know, but i do recognize from my year in the south of france. tonight was one such occasion. ellen was in all of my grammar classes that year. she always seemed very mysterious and cool to me. but she also seemed very shy and quite demure, so i never got to know her at all. so to see her out on the town whooping it up - in a miniskirt no less - was a bit of a surprise. i pointed her out to anne (we studied abroad on the same program) and we moved on with our conversation.

when we went into the room where the bands played, another surprise was in store. who was in the she bee gees - an all female bee gees cover band - but shy, demure ellen herself? i have to say that, despite my surprise at seeing her up on stage playing bass and singing back-up, her on stage persona was not unlike the one she displayed in grammar class all those years ago. a little self-conscious, a little unsure, and certainly a bit out of place rocking out to bee gees covers.

the next installment of the evening was the minus five. i didn't know much about them before tonight besides the fact that one of the rotating members is peter buck, of my very very favorite band from my middle and high school years, R.E.M. we're talking a situation where i would buy any 30 dollar import i could get my hands on, even if all of the songs on it were ones i already had, just because it was recorded at a different venue. it was a sick and very costly obsession. the object of my R.E.M. affection has always been michael stipe who i stand by as the sexiest man alive, but as of tonight i have seen peter buck in a new light. i can't disassociate him from his airplane rage history, but it was pretty fun to see a bunch of middle aged plus dudes rocking out for a crowd that was just as middle aged.

when tim seely came on, a new definition of middle age emerged. anne and i bopped a long to a few songs, then went to find a seat because our legs were tired and it was approaching 1am. as we sat and looked around us, we were baffled by the frat boy and sorority girls who had taken the place over. as our aching legs throbbed we glanced down at our sneakers glowing under the black light and decided it was time to go.

so it was a night of old acquaintances and a lesson that age really is in the eye of the beholder. i am going to take my old bones to bed... i've got a 9am move with a 17 foot uhaul ahead of me tomorrow.

home again

i rolled back into the spruce street abode yesterday afternoon, after a long day of travelling that was not helped by grumpy united airlines employees and jerky security people. i had to give away a bottle of duty-free tequila en route (the duty free shop lady in mexico city managed to convince me that duty free liquids were A-OK) which made me a very bitter traveler, but it was a relief to be home nonetheless.

it feels a bit like i have been gone forever, and a lot like i was gone for about two weeks. a strange sensation, but still a relatively easy transition.

the water here smells strongly of chlorine, traffic is far more orderly than it seemed before, and three months free from the wrath of telemarketers was so much sweeter than i ever took the time to notice. other than that, it's life as usual.

hasta luego, GIRE

i am about to leave the office and head to lunch with jennifer. i am sorry to say that my last day was increasingly painful, as it was spent at an all day seminar on sexuality and citizenship. a very interesting topic with incredible potential, indeed. in actuality, though, the seminar was transformed before our eyes into a room full of people who like to talk a lot, about the exact same ideas over and over again, without stopping. so it was an excrutiating four hours or so, and jennifer and i opted to not stick around for the after-lunch session. wise move, ladies.

i am happy to say that my second to last day is a brighter picture. they had a little party with tamales and homemade atole, which is a hot drink that i had only had once before and had reminded me a bit of snot, but this time around - with elba's chocolate version - i was pleasantly surprised. so we feasted and jennifer and menny, the executive director, said some kind words about my efforts and efficiency and i got to say my final good-byes to everyone. menny attempted to get me to say a few words, but in a room of 15+ spanish-speaking people i froze, and put my thoughts in a pressure-free email to the whole office instead. i had finished all of my work before brendan came to visit, so the afternoon was spent working away on a job application and piddling around on the internet. it has been nice to wrap things up at such a relaxed pace. it seems that in the past i have always left jobs in a whirl of panicked chaos.

so i am off now with jennifer to eat my last round of quesadillas at the coyoacán market, and then start thinking about how to spend my last few hours. i have to get up at 4am tomorrow, so it is not even worth it to try and get a decent night's sleep... i'll probably stay up late packing since 3 of my 5 roommates will be working away on research papers anyway, and they are not exactly the quietest people i have ever met. the weather is decent, so i'll probably just stroll around coyoacán, take some last photos, and try and fix it in my memory. it has been an incredible ride over the past three months, but i am ready to go back to my comfortable little life in seattle.

it will be interesting to see how my impressions of things at home have changed, if at all. not much time has passed, but it seems like there is so much that will be different in seattle from how it was when i left in june.

and after three months of wetting my pants while riding in mexico city taxis, i mostly can't stop thinking about what a calm car passenger i am set to become.

winding down

it's my last weekend day in mexico city. i have two more days of work, and then it's off to the airport at 4am on wednesday morning. ouch. brendan left yesterday afternoon, and dang did we have fun. aside from a torrential downpour our second night in guanajuato, the weather cooperated, and i got to show him some of my old favorites and experience a bunch of new things together.

the last night in mexico city was probably the highlight. we got back from guanajuato in the early evening. the 5 hour bus ride was a piece of cake, mostly because the buses in mexico blow anything greyhound could ever hope for out of the water, in terms of both general comfort and amenities. we got served a drink and a lunchibon croissant sandwich, which quickly took its place at the top of our favorite mexican junk foods list, and were treated to two more movies. as you'll recall, the movies en route to guanajuato left something to be desired, so we were sure we had nowhere to go but up. WRONG! the first movie was something hideous with steven seagal and a lot of shooting and blood. when i went to puebla with my parents, we were treated to hotel rwanda. i don't know who makes the movie decisions for these busline companies, but they might want to try something a little lighter and more family friendly. i will say, though, that we were pleasantly suprised - shocked, actually - at the second movie selection on our return trip. a movie that we had never heard of called heights, that stars meryl streep and a lot of good looking twenty-something hipsters. highly recommended, though we don't know how it turns out. they don't time the movie viewing to the length of the journey, so when we rolled into mexico city's north bus terminal, we probably had another 20 minutes to go. i can't decide if seeing a movie - even a good one - in such circumstances is worth anything at all.

so, frustrated by not knowing how it all of the drama turns out and back in mexico city, we cleaned ourselves off back at the hotel milan in the roma, the same place we had stayed before going to guanajuato. we had decided to have a date night, with a fancy restaurant followed by either mariachis at plaza garibaldi, or a dance club in our neighborhood where we could watch people shake their latin booties without having to necessarily participate. we ate at a wine/tapas bar sort of restaurant... shared a bottle of red and did a main course, a dessert and a cappucino to help us power through our night. we decided to forego garibaldi, since i had been there a couple of times and we were both kind of into the idea of staying near the hotel and watching the dancing population of mexico city do their thing.

we headed to gran leon, which couldn't have been a better choice. the guidebook described it as a less hip option than mama rumba across the street. hip it was not, but that's why we liked it. we each had a cup of tequila, brendan sipping his, me choking mine down. i don't think i will ever be able to drink the stuff as though it were a little glass of coca cola. and i'm okay with that. we were treated to two different live bands... one with older poofy haired men and one woman, and one that was a bunch of good-looking young guys wearing matching hawaiian shirts. we much preferred the second group, and i think you can understand why... their lead man was a trip and we were captivated by the guy who had apparently been hired just to show off his dance moves (who also - for the st. mary's crew - in my opinion bears a striking resemblance to matt of matt and dan). the music was great, and the dancing was mostly unbelievable. we sat in awe, vowing to start on those salsa lessons we have talked about for so long.

guanajuato had given us a much needed reprieve from all that is mexico city. we were taken by its small size, its sun and its familiar feel... its colonial architecture and layout felt thoroughly european. we spent two days walking its handful of streets many times over, and got to know its nooks and crannies pretty well. we made the requisite visit to the mummy museum, which fulfilled any disturbing expectations we had. the deal with the mummies of guanajuato is this: there is a public cemetary, where there is limited space for bodies. so, if you wish to maintain your loved one's burial spot, you have to pay occaisional fees. if you don't pay, the body of your loved one is exhumed and cremated. the crazy thing, though, is that the soil in guanajuato is apparently freakishly rich in the minerals required to preserve dead bodies. so those that were disinterred and looking especially intact have been put on display at the mummy museum. we saw over a hundred corpses, which mostly looked like they were made out of paper maché, but that paper maché was actually dead but preserved skin. some of them still had hair in the usual places, and at least one had eyes that were open and there. we even saw what looked like it must have a been a premature baby that had died, and bore the proudly displayed distinction of being the smallest mummy in the world. and all of this just before lunch! it was interesting, but i don't think i will ever again feel the need to see mummies if the opportunity presents itself. it struck me as a once is enough sort of proposition.

brendan has great (mummy-free) pics of our trip on his fancy google photo site. the photos include a couple of shots of the TV from the state of the union address debacle that had me so transfixed. the first photo is of the unfortunate soul who was left to bring the whole thing to order, with no success. the second shows members of the PRD who took over the whole stage, so as to prevent fox from taking the podium to give his address.

not much has changed since calderón was declared the president-elect last week. the tent cities haven't moved, and probably won't anytime soon. any changes will probably come after independence day, on september 15th, since the lefties are planning a september 16th convention of sorts to figure out what they are going to do in terms of the continued civil disobedience. i have to say that i am relieved i will be gone before then. last time i talked to my dad on the phone, the first thing he said was "has there been a revolution yet?" the interesting part is that he was less than half kidding.

as my days here come to a close, i have mixed feelings. i am looking forward to going back to seattle and seeing my friends and making the major transition of moving in with brendan at the end of september. i am crossing my fingers for some nice weather before the seattle grey sets in. i was hoping that my spanish would be a little further along than it actually is after three months, so in some ways i wish i had more time. i also didn't get to travel outside of the city as much as i had hoped, but there's not a whole lot i can do about widespread civil unrest in oaxaca, is there? im trying to see all of that reasons to return. it has been a whirlwind of an experience, and better than i could have ever hoped for. there is so much in this city to be appreciated and savored. i'll be back.

blogging machine

another day, another blog post. this is evidence of what happens when i am traipsing around mexico with my internet-loving boyfriend.

this installment comes from guanajuato, home of vicente fox and the birthplace of diego rivera. it is an unbelievably picturesque town about 5 hours north of mexico city. we hopped on a bus today at 10:30 and got in a couple of hours ago. we dumped our stuff in a huge but dingy hotel room and have since been exploring the nooks and crannies of this beautiful little spot in the mountains of central mexico. it didn't take long for that exploring to lead us to an 8 peso per hour internet spot. the best part of this whole excursion is that my dreams of hot, sunny weather are coming true right before my eyes. when we arrived, it must have been in the low 80s. my body has rarely experienced such warmth in the past 3 months, and good god, it's doing the trick. the high altitude means it's cooling down quickly as we head into the evening hours, but we're hoping to enjoy a glass of wine or a cup of tequila (brendan was happily initiated to mexico's national liquor, drunken straight, when we were out with jennifer and miguel last night) on a sunny patio somewhere.

the trip up was really pretty, though the blaring sounds of a dubbed boxing movie (cinderella man) followed by a subtitled movie about nascar (something horrible with a name not worth remembering, starring sylvester stallone) took away from the scenery a bit. as did the group of teenage boys sitting behind us, who mainly amused themselves by talking loudly and burping just as loudly. i was prepared for it to devolve into farting contests, but fortunately we never got there. so we got to see a bit of the rural parts of the country, with lots of corn fields and plenty of calderón signs. a reminder of the news from yesterday that calderón was declared the official victor in the presidential election. we all saw it coming, though what remains to be seen is what lopez obrador does about the tent cities all over mexico city, which continue to snag traffic, and obviously - at this point - won't result in the vote by vote recount he and his supporters were demanding. if nothing else, it has been an interesting summer. as i said to jennifer last night, when i was preparing myself for my mexican adventure in early june i was excited to see what being here for a presidential election would hold in store. little did i know that it may well be the beginnings of the 21st century's mexican revolution.

brendan is done at this computer, and has wandered off to take photos of this picture-perfect town, so i suppose i should follow suit.

i'm now officially into my last week here... more on that and much else later.

the anti-state of the union

the visit with brendan moves merrily along... though i just have a few minutes to write. we found an internet spot near our hotel with internet for 35 cents per half hour. we certainly cannot argue with that, but are off to relax with our multilingual cable TV options, after a long day of sight seeing, and before we meet jennifer and miguel for dinner later this evening.

the state of the union drama didn't quite live up to the talk as far as the airport run was concerned. in fact, there was less traffic than there was the friday afternoon when my girlfriends got into town a few weeks ago. i guess all of the hoopla and warnings of chaos kept people holed up at home. we got to our hotel easily, thanks to our very grumpy PRD-supporting cab driver. the only evidence we even saw of the protests was a string of riot gear outfitted cops standing on an overpass that we drove under... our driver emphatically showed them his middle digit. brendan thinks he was snarky with us since we were gabbing in the back seat while he was trying to listen to an empassioned AMLO speech on the radio. probably so.

we did catch a glimpse of the whole event on tv later that night... i saw a PRI congresswoman make her address, and was followed by a PRD senator. during his talk, all of the PRD folks - from the senate and house, as far as i could tell - rushed the podium and took their places, refusing to budge in a show of adamant solidarity with lopez obrador, their man of the moment. it was really pretty incredible. a number of these men (and women, presumably, though i don't recall seeing any among the PRD crew) stood up there - at the front of what is equivalent to our capitol building - with large signs that displayed a picture of vicente fox, with TRAITOR in big bold letters underneath. i couldn't stop thinking about our own divisive politics, and how this would never, ever go down. it somehow seems to me to demonstrate how all of our precious american freedoms were intended... though never realized to this degree, or at least in such a context.

when fox eventually arrived, he submitted a statement in writing, pointing out that in accordance with the constitution such circumstances were not appropriate for giving a state of the union address, so he would not give the address. and so the state of the union address evening came and went, with no appearance from the president of the country. and i had misunderstood jennifer's explanation leading up to friday evening... the idea was not to protect fox from threats of physical harm - that was how i had understood it - but rather the intent from the beginning was to physically prevent fox from taking the podium. here, i think we can say, mission accomplished.

my minutes are ticking away, so i will get to the more tourist details of the past few days later. we just filled our tummies with pricey food at a gentlemen's club style cantina. lots of button-down shirts and ties, with older men playing rounds of dominoes. my arrival made the number of women in the room four. an experience indeed, and just one of many. the others will come later. tomorrow we are off to guanajuato, where we will breath clean air and soak up the sun. i cannot go back to a september in seattle feeling like i never really got a dose of summer. guanajuato should fix that.

keeping things interesting

the president gives his annual state of the union every september 1st. today is september 1st. brendan is flying into mexico city this afternoon. the airport is in the vicinity of the legislative building where vicente fox will give his address at 7pm. a lot of people are really miffed with vicente fox right now. this is not good.

there has been ample talk about how the protests surrounding tonight's state of the union address are going to be the biggest of fox's six years in office. a notice went out to GIRE staff earlier this week, saying that anyone who lives in that part of the city (the northeast) could plan to not come in at all today, or leave early, if they were worried about not being able to get home. a bunch of metro stops are closed and as far as i can gather most of the major streets in the general vicinity of where the address will be given are blocked off.

how, then, will we manage to get from the aiport to our hotel? that, my friends, i cannot tell you. we will have to wait and see.

my theory is that there have to be still be taxis running from the aiport. there have to be. brendan cannot be the only person flying into the second biggest city in the world on this fateful day. and the up-side of airport taxis is that you pay before you get in. so worst case scenario, we sit in a taxi for 5 or more hours in an attempt to travel about 10 miles. but at least we still only pay 120 pesos or so. we could attempt to take the metro, but your not allowed to bring luggage on the metro, and will every thoroughfare closed, i am guessing it will be overrun and there probably wouldn't even be room for his luggage. i am taking the metro to the aiport to meet him, and i am bracing myself even for that.

it will be interesting to see what unfolds tonight... in terms of the country's political context as well as my own personal transportation dilemma. jennifer has heard that fox won't even take the podium to make his address since there are serious concerns about his physical well-being. yikes. i have always kind of wondered what the 2000 inauguration protests would have been like... this is probably the closest i'll ever come.

the drama with lopez obrador continues. i have to say that he is starting to sound a little batty. politically, he still has my support, but his recent proclamation that if calderon is declared the president-elect on the september 6th deadline, there will be two president, with himself as the president of civil disobedience...

we just got word of the increasing chaos so i am off to the airport on short notice. will finish my thoughts later.