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!