The Wormlips Scrapbook

I’m so far behind on this blog, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to catch up. Since my last entry there have been trips to México City (I still want to put up some video of the amazing Ballet Folklórico), trials and tribulations of life in Pachuca, an evening at the fútbol stadium watching the Mexicans’ beloved Tuzos, exploration of Teotihuacan and a black market mercado outside México City, and of course lots of teaching and hearing the dog being beaten.

As of last night I’ve survived 72 hours in the classroom. (I succeeded in getting my children’s class back from La Maestra.)

I left Pachuca this morning. Here is my luggage, with La Serpiente blocking my escape.

When my taxi didn’t arrive as scheduled, I dragged my stuff a block to the busy street, while Reina yelled at me and rolled her eyes. Apparently she had some better idea, but who knows what. Oddly, when a cab arrived and I said goodbye to her, she started crying. As I wrote to my mother, it was probably because I didn’t grease her palm before departing.

I survived one part of the trip I’ve been dreading: dragging all my stuff from the bus station to the airport terminal to the shuttle area to my hotel. After dumping my stuff I had a free afternoon to explore la ciudad muy grande. First I went to Mercado de Sonora, which is the strangest market I’ve been to, with all kinds of herbs and flowers and bark and candles and magic stuff related to Santa Muerte. I don’t quite understand her yet, but she’s fascinating. She’s sort of a barrio version of La Virgen de Guadalupe: much more sinister. I like her. The Virgin has a soft, gentle smile. Santa Muerte has a skull for a face, and she carries another skull and a scythe. Of course I bought a small statue of her. Her devotees were a bit wary of the only gringa within miles, so I didn’t linger.

I also found my way to El Museo de Arte Popular. I know how to ask directions pretty well, and by now I understand much of the reply, listening for key words: “block,” “straight,” “corner” and “walk a really long way in that direction.” Trouble is, after I walk a really long way in that direction, I find that the direction-giver had no idea what s/he was talking about. I remember my first ex-husband telling me years ago that Mexicans never want to disappoint; if they don’t have an answer, they’ll make one up, just to be helpful. It’s true.

Way-finding aside, my Spanish is worse than ever, but my Spanglish is on the rise. I had a blast today in México City talking to Mexicans who have equivalent amounts of English to my Spanish. Our conversations were colorful collages of never-before-heard linguistic structures.

And lastly, I visited El Palacio de Bellas Artes. I love the city’s public gathering places. They’re full of life and music and old buildings and the smell of Mexican street food.

As I left Bellas Artes I looked way up at the Mexican version of the Sears Tower. When I saw what I saw, I said right out loud, “Aw, hi Dad!” There, in bold glowing letters, was his name: Ears (short for Earlobes). It’s a nickname I gave him — I don’t know why — a million years ago. I suppose it seems silly, but it was like he’d come all the way to Mexico —  land of celebration of the dead — to visit me.

The metro, on the other hand, I didn’t like as well, particularly just after dark when I headed home tonight. It’s confusing enough not to know where you’re going or what the signs mean, but to do it at top speed is especially novel. During rush hours they divide the platform into a men’s and women’s section, allegedly because the men are pushy while the women need a kinder, gentler environment. I was a little surprised to be nearly squished to death by herds of forceful, armpit-height mujeres.

To regress all the way back to last night: I’ll pop one video up here before I leave. It’s of three of my students on our last night together: the painfully shy Illaly (who wanted to drop the class because she couldn’t understand me, but stuck with it), Jaime (talkative and muy amable) and Alexis (whom I aptly dubbed “Motor Mouth”). I was very touched by what Jaime said, and you’ll see why.

And at this same class, I produced a Freudian slip on the white board, which sent me into hysterics, much to the mystification of my students. I was drawing a grid so we could play Basta, in which people race to think of words in a particular category, as you can see. But instead of putting the names outside the matrix, I got confused and wrote the boys in the wrong column. Or did I? I had to stop the class so I could take a picture.

Okay, now I’m caught up on today pretty much. Guess I’ll have to work backwards from here. But for now… I’m out of the clutches of the Evil Forces in Pachuca, and headed for Philadelphia tomorrow and Vermont the next day and who-knows-what after that.

Things could always be worse. Still, the situation is increasingly bleak on the domestic and teaching fronts. I’m grateful for Kim and Sarah, to whom I sent an e-mail a few days ago canceling our lunch date because my spirits are too low. They both called to check on me, and Sarah encouraged me to meet her for lunch the next day, which turned out to be a Very Good Idea.

But I love my students in two of the classes. The kids, on the other hand, remain a challenge. But I’m undeterred, working harder than ever to think of ways to engage their interest in material that’s a mile over their heads. Thus, on my return from Mexico City on Monday, it came as a shock and a serious soul-crusher when the school director suggested she take the class over from me. She has no faith in my ability to handle the situation, which doesn’t do a lot of good to my own shaky self-confidence. Nor did she stand behind me when a parent complained that a child hadn’t done exercises in the classroom workbook. (That’s because the child didn’t bring her book to class.) But I refuse to stand down. In yesterday’s class I was able to wrangle the kids into a semblance of order.

Here’s a cautionary tale from yesterday’s class with the kids: “Lupita, come show everybody the game you played last week with your hands,” I said, waving my own paws to illustrate. “NO!” Lupita shouted. She turned to the others and warned in Spanish, “She’s going to cut off our hands!”

I expect to be deported any minute now. My defense will be that I never dreamed of having their hands decommissioned, but only their mouths.

Not sure what the moral of the story is. Let me know.

Here’s a video I took yesterday of the little shkitters playing aforementioned game. I don’t know why the video quality is so funky. Maybe it’s the subject matter. It’ll take a wee bit of time to load.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

And here are two cool drawings of made-up creatures that the kids made for an assignment I gave them. About the first one, Lupita wrote: “It lives in France. It eats snakes.” And the second, by Luz: “He eats bad boys. He lives under my bed. He is extinct.”

Let me stop talking about the reason I’m here and get on to the stuff I’m fitting in on the side. I really do like México. I don’t know exactly why. I like the desert. Overall, the people are wonderful. It’s rich with scenic and cultural and historic beauty. I like the Spanish language, except when I hate it for eluding me. Of course there’s the food. And I even love the chivalry.

Sometimes, though, I find myself wishing I could have gone to South Africa instead. I’m such a pain.

I promised you more pictures of my trip to Puebla and Cholula, which I visited with my supervisor Elka, my jefe Magdalena and my amiga Kim. It was a tense day. I don’t know what I would’ve done without Kim and the mole enchiladas for lunch. I’m glad I had my bandanna to hide behind during the car ride.

Puebla (known as City of Angels) is huge. Various sources say it’s the third, fourth or fifth largest city in Mexico. The old area (circa 1530s and beyond) was the only part we saw as we raced around behind Elka and Magdalena, trying to keep up. A pretty place, but deficient in good coffee. Looming on the outskirts are two snow-covered volcanoes: Popocatepetl (or Popo, which is Mexico’s most active) and Iztaccihuatl: the second and third highest spots in Mexico. I couldn’t get good pictures of them, but I did capture some mole images. Yes, Puebla, too, is famous for something. Many things, actually: its chapulines (those spicy fried crickets); the moles poblano and pipian (with ground, toasted pumpkin seeds) and rojo; and talavera (a kind of blue pottery).

Oh, gross. I’m sitting on my bed with my computer on my lap, and my stomach is bulging out over my blue jeans. How can this be? I’m down to only 19.2 kilos with my boots on. I guess the only place I ever lose weight is in my face.

Okay, I’ll shut up and you can look at pictures, or not. We made our trip on Valentine’s Day (Día de San Valentín), which is a huge deal here. Hey, that’s cool: I just looked up the old Saint and learned something. (My Internet connection knows I’m searching from Mexico, so all I get are Web pages in Spanish.) I just read that the first mention of Valentine’s Day was in a Chaucer poem:

Porque esto fue el día de san Valentín,
Cuando cada ave vino aquí a elegir su pareja.

Well, whaddya think about that Chaucer — decent Spanish for a Middle-English guy.

Cholula is essentially a suburb of Puebla, and home to the ruins of Tlachihualtepetl, The Great Pyramid of Cholula. According to Wikipedia, the name comes from the Nahuatl word for “artificial mountain,” and it is the “world’s largest monument and largest Pre-Columbian pyramid by volume.” I don’t know what they mean by “volume.” Did they weigh it? Fill it with water and then pour out and measure the contents? ¿Quién sabe?

Historically, Catholics have loved to build churches atop the worshiping grounds of other religions. At the end of the sixteenth century here in Cholula, they plunked Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Church of Our Lady of the Remedies) smack on the crown of a pyramid begun in the third century BC. [Why do people call it BCE now? What does that stand for?] The majority of the ruins is buried under what looks like natural hillside, but is in fact earth-padded construction, still unexplored by archaeologists.

Okay, here are photos. [In the next post: last weekend's trip to Mexico City.]

I hate children, which is too bad because I live in Cuidad de los Niños (named after the giant orphanage nearby) within Colonia Boulevares de San Francisco.

One of the things I’ve always known about myself is that I never wanted to teach kids. Oh, sure: they’re fine at times, like when they’re asleep. But like dogs in a pack or Nazis in a mob, they are dangerous when clustered.

Ironically, here on this very blog I wrote nice things about these same children a while back. But they’ve transformed from a nice little set of Jekylls to a Hyde, a Frankenstein, a werewolf, a zombie, and A Thing That Shall Not Be Named.

It came to a head on Tuesday. I had a brilliant lesson plan, full of drawing and role-plays and hands-on stuff about dinosaurs. I’d scoured the city for plastic animals and had printed out really cool color photos from the Web. I was excited. I was well organized. It was going to be perfect.

Only moments after class began I noticed a shift in its personality. Even the two sweet ones got an evil glint in their once-studious little brown eyes. The others were jumping out of their chairs, hitting each other, talking loudly to each other, and of course laughing. The progression from bad to worse was visible: Jack’s beanstalk shooting toward the sky — or maybe in the other direction. None of my diversionary tactics worked. By the end of class — two hours is a long time for anyone under any circumstances — I was irate, embarrassed, frustrated, addled. To be outdone by a cloud of demons whose combined age doesn’t begin to touch mine — that’s humiliating. They even stole my eraser.

Dena: Boy, did I need you! You’ll have to tell me one appealing thing about working with a herd of children.

They’re sweet kids. A lot of the problem is that this class is way over their head: not my doing, but something I’m stuck with. I’d be the same way if I were they.

At any rate, the woman who runs the school seemed quite pleased by this turn of events. It proved, once again, her pedagogical superiority. Those forty years of experience do give her that slight edge. I’d like to see her produce a radio documentary. However, a few days after her gloat-fest she acknowledged that she doesn’t like working with this bunch either.

Here’s a picture I encountered when I was researching stuff for their class. It cheers me up:

Oh, Syd: Thanks for your help with the rock versus mineral thing. I guess I should’ve taken my cue from the name of the museum: Museo de la Minería de Pachuca, not El Museo de Peñas y Piedras. (Actually, minería is “mining,” but still I should’ve known.) If “mining” comes from “mineral,” what is it called when you’re digging out a rock? What is silver: a mineral? I’ll show you the cuarzo oscuro that I bought; it’s a mineral.

Monster Update: Reina (the Queen) is still at it. I spend as much time as I can away from the house. I’ve lived here five weeks and still she doesn’t bother to remember my name. When she talks about me, she calls me The Gringa which is overtly rude. There are a lot of things I want to call her, but none about her race. It’s so weird: she’ll either be outright aggressive and cold, or she’ll be all faux nicey-nice, but then talk about me to la maestra behind my back. I can’t even imagine what she has to complain about. I’m sure she makes it up, because I’m really quite perfect, except when I use the orange plastic cup instead of the yellow one.

The good thing about her is that I usually can hear her approach. Flapping footsteps across the shiny tile, and quick single knock, and a query: “Puedo pasar?” However, by the time she’s asked me if she can come in, there she is. She’s like my ex-husband. He would turn on the car’s turn signal after he’d begun to turn; I called it his “I-have-turned signal.”

While I’m trying to work she sits at the foot of my bed and chats. As perhaps I’ve mentioned a few thousand times here, I don’t speak much Spanish. When I don’t understand her, she rolls her eyes and throws her hands in the air.

Two weeks to go.

Here, I’ll show you the picture I took of her the other night, just to see if a camera could capture her image. Had it been film, it might not have worked.

Two shocking sights today: Reina beating the crap out of the dog, Karlotta (a huge Rottweiler) who was crying and cringing. And a man whaling on his three-year-old son and calling him a puto. The child was sobbing, as would I if my father accused me of being a cross-dressing male whore. I haven’t seen much of that kind of violence here, fortunately. Mostly I think Mexicans adore small ones.

Two weeks to go.

And I do like Mexico a lot. It’s just that the living situation, the teaching situation, and the town itself aren’t too great. Initially I tried to let all this roll off me. But after sustained exposure, it’s now embedded deeply under my skin and working toward my vitals.

Two weeks … and then onward, to two thousand feet of snow in Vermont. But I’ll be in my barn without people complaining about how much of which water I use.

So I’ll bet you all want to know how much I weigh now. At Farmacia Guadalajara, you can pay two pesos to find out your peso, your altura y your I.M.C. (indice de masa corporal). If your IMC is 19 or less, you’re underweight. If it’s 24.9, you’re normal. If you’re mas de 30, you’ve got a problem with obesidad.

I’m 19.5. I didn’t know that. Nor did I have any idea that I’m 1.72 meters tall. I wonder what that means. Let me check online…

No, the machine is lying. I’m way taller than 5.6430446194225725 feet. Why, that’s 17 hands! I’m thinking that’s about right for someone who weighs in at a little over 9 stones.

And there are other things that are good. I really get along well with my other two groups of students. They’re challenging to work with because they’re at a low intermediate level in English (equivalent to my Spanish, mas or menos) so everything has to be very slow and simple. With more advanced classes you can do more fun and imaginative stuff. But they’re full of character and are respectful, so I couldn’t ask for more. I’m very excited about the progress my conversation class is making on the group project about México. My boss looked chagrined when I started to rave about the students’ ideas and involvement. “This is supposed to be a conversation class,” she reprimanded. Well, they’re talking, and they’re reading and writing and listening. So I’m moving forward.

I have several pictures to show you but I have to get ready for bed. Oh, here: I’ll show you what I almost stepped on at the ruins in Puebla:

I teach a four-hour class tomorrow morning and am then jumping immediately onto a bus to México City where I hope to be able to negotiate the subway system and find my way to my hostel and meet up with my colleagues. Sunday I plan to stay all day at the Museo Nacional de Antropología and after that I’ll watch the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández. For years I’ve wanted to go to both. Coming back to Pachuca on Monday.

xoxoxo [besos y abrazos y besos y abrazos y besos y abrazos]

P.S. Bully-stick: Thanks for the digital Valentines. An extra x and o to you.