Last day in Cuernavaca

Bueno. Today was my last day at CETLALIC and in Cuernavaca, and I feel like it was a good day for closure for my short (3 week) life here - the life at the school, the social life, and the life with the family I´ve been living with. It´s sad to go, and I´m grateful for my time here, but I´m ready to go home and start approaching Spanish from different angles.

Yesterday our maestro, Roberto, instructed us to go home and ask our host families for some Mexican jokes, then bring them back to class and make him laugh. So last night at the dinner table I pulled out my notebook and asked everyone to tell me jokes. I´ve been living with a part-time nurse close to retirement whose 3 grandchildren live across the street with their mom and who come over often, so the kids start pulling out jokes which I guess circulate in their milieu. So the 8 year old boy starts telling this joke about African children not getting presents from Santa Claus. I said ´¡no me gusta ese chiste!´ and looked to the 15 year old boy for another one. He goes on to tell a joke which I´m pretty sure was about gay men not having balls, though to tell you the truth I wasn´t following enough of it to say for sure. I didn´t like that one either, and asked for another, so they gave me one pretty lame one about baloons, the another one which used a play on words about a little chicken named Resistol which I didn´t at all get but recited to Roberto this morning and he did in fact laugh then explained it to us. We then had a pretty interesting discussion about culture and humour, cultural stereotypes used in humour, and the grammatical function of the subjunctive used in spanish humour. Then he gave us a couple good jokes in Spanish, suitably dirty and political to be fun!

Classes have been great. I´ve actually mostly been with the same teacher, Roberto, which isn´t the norm (classes rotate and get reshuffled every week), but there are very few students right now so it is a little more difficult to make sure students are suitably arranged to their skill levels, plus I was sick for 2 days when I had a different teacher in the middle week. Roberto takes a very structured approach to language learning - he sets out a road map of the grammar from the beginning then gets us to learn to use the different branches in the mood\tense tree, plus learn different exceptions and helpful rules to decode idiomatic uses within the gramatical system. He likes to joke around and have fun in class through the examples or in discussions

Normally every Friday there is a special celebration for those students who are leaving CETLALIC, where the staff brings in a cake onto the patio then professors say a few words about each departing student before giving them their diploma, then the students say a bit in spanish with varying degrees of proficiency, then all the departing students surround the cake, bend over with their hands behind their back, and take a bite out of it at the same time. (It´s then cut up so you get the piece you bit into). Today there were 5 of us moving on, which made for crowded cake biting. But this week has been exceptional in that there were people leaving on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, so there was cake 4 days this week! It felt good to get the diploma and say my gracias a todos. I grabbed some promotional material I´m going to try to put up at Kings and Huron Universities - I´d definitely like to promote CETLALIC to anyone who is interested in learning Spanish effectively, and who simultaneously would like to learn about the many solidarity and rights movements which flow through and beyond Mexico.

Today was also the 15th birthday of Angel, the oldest grandson in my host-household. In Mexican culture the 15th birthday for a girl is a very important event meriting a big party, but for a boy, I guess it´s no big deal. So we all headed out to the mall (Cuernavaca Plaza) and dined at Pizza Hut, which was oookay, but nothing compared to Marco Polo, an Iplace downtown with a wood stove and the best pizza I´ve had in a long time. Anyway, it was nice to dine with the family (we also had a 6 month old baby with us, my host-mom´s new grandson - his mom is a professional ballerina and has a show, so we are babysitting). Afterwards we went around the Plaza and I hung out with the kids. Geraldo, the youngest (Dennis the Menace-like), was having a ball imitating Michael Jackson dance moves, so he was running around the mall spinning around, grabbing his crotch and thrusting his pelvis out. I was a little worried the security guards with automatic rifles might have been thinking about taking him out, but we all made it out OK.

When I got home I called one of the other students from the school who had said she might be heading out tonight. Her and another woman were at a bar downtown so I hopped on a bus to join them. I had a nice night chilling with them on a patio over beers and marguaritas with a mariachi singer behind us laughing about school and cultures and life. We were joined by a young Cuernavacan woman who is doing research with one of the CETLALIC students and doing her PhD at Colombia in NY, but who also visits Toronto often and said she would visit me next time she´s up. It´s interesting, every time I travel I end up meeting a very metropolitan crowd of people, and it is in fact a global metropolitan class of people who are more members of a global culture than just their own national ones. CETLALIC attracts students who have interesting perspectives and experiences on issues which go far beyond the borders of their communities and their countries, and its been very interesting to share and hear those experiences both in a social setting and in the midst of our language studies.

So I´m back at the house now, about to hop in bed, then tomorrow I´m off to Mexico City for 4 days on my own, which I hope will both be fun and frugal, because I´m damn near broke!

¡Hasta Luego, Cuídate!

I took Dennis the Menace to a museum

(Cuernavaca, Mexico)

I´ve been sick for the past week so I took the day off from class. In the morning I was downstairs at my hosts house, in my underwear, eating breakfast, and I hear a buzz at the door. I run upstairs and put some clothes on, came back down and opened the door, and found Geraldo, the 8 year old grandson of my host mom (who lives across the street with this mom, who normally drives him to school). He hadn´t gone to school for some reason (turns out he had left his backpack in the house I was in, so he just stayed home). So I let him in and he hops on the computer and starts playing online flash games. After a while I was about to go out to join my class for an afternoon trip to a museum, as I was feeling better. I didn´t know if I should leave him at the house, and what my host mom would think about the doors being open (because you need a key to open or close the doors, and I wasn´t going to lock him in. So I told him he had to go when I went. So we both go, and when we pass his house, he just keeps on walking. I asked him, ´are you going to your house?´, and he said that he couldn´t, it was locked. So I asked him ´well then where are you going?´ And he just shrugged and said ¨no sé¨. I was going to take him back to his grandmothers house, but then I asked him if he wanted to go to the museum with me and he shrugged and said ¨por qué no?¨. So off we went to catch a bus downtown, me suddenly with an 8 year old charge falling asleep against my arm during the ride.

So we got downtown and I most definitely took us on a terrible route to get to the museum, so we stopped at a tienda and I bought us both ice cream bars. We got to the museum a little late but caught up with the group, who had an English speaking tour guide who was obviously very enthusiastic about the museum. The museum is actually a house, the house of an American artist named Robert Brady. The building was originally a part of a Franciscan convent (the cathedral is still attached next door) built in the 16th century which he purchased when he moved to Cuernavaca (I think in the 60s). Equipped with access to his fathers fortune, he proceeded to decorate the casa exquisitely with art from around the world. Every room is positively stuffed with art, carvings, statues, beadworks, from every continent and many epochs. Everything is placed acording to his artists aesthetics. For instance there is a Hindu Buddha placed in an enclave that was added to a shower because it was directly visible through the doorway in the next room. The interior is painted with particular colors which they called ´Brady Colours´ and he left them instructions for how to mix them before he died. Brady died in 1986 and his house was turned into a museum afterwards. The website of the museum is here. Pictures from a Google search.

Anyway, before we got to the museum Geraldo reached into his back pocket and pulled out a slingshot and started fiddling with it - and I realized, I´m bringing Dennis the Menace to a museum! He skipped school, and when I told him he couldn´t stay at his grandmothers house he was going to just wander around on the streets for 3 hours until she got home! Then he hops on the bus with me with nothing in his pockets but a slingshot! Definitely Dennis the Menace material. In reality though he´s a really good kid, and he enjoyed the museum. He looked at all the room and kidded around with me about using the shower and the toilet and eating from the fridge. Everyone else in the group loved him and thought it was cute that I suddenly had an ¨hijo¨.

Anyway, we got back home and his grandma thought it was cool that I took him, so all is well! By the way, I´m in Cuernavaca for 3 weeks to learn Spanish. I was going to write an introductory blog post about it (had a really good first week, then got sick, and I haven´t felt like doing much of anything). I went to the hospital last night and got a new perscription and I´m feeling better now, though still weak. I´ll try to get a post up about my first week at some point, and I hope that my last week is worth writing about!

Neil