Monterrey, part II

After another day in Monterrey, the first full day here, I feel like writing more...a lot of thoughts go through my head as I am living in a place that is a mix between the States and Mexico...so it has American chains and brands, people play American football here, but at the same time we're in Mexico, everybody speaks Spanish, or castellano, and everything is "dirty, loud, broken and poor", as most Americans would say. I guess that is how they see it, and now that I've been in the US for a long time I can kind of see where they come from...but still, there's so much they're missing! People are more simple, friendlier, more "normal", and I feel more alive here...social interaction is just Latino-like I guess, so it seems quite different from that in the States...the way cars drive, the way people walk and cross the street, the way people greet and spend time together, the way things look and work is just very close to what I am used to, at least before my time in the US, and it just seems so much more real!
They still have all the American trucks, chain stores, a lot of brands and stuff...and they probably look up to the States as some sort of model I guess,...yet it seems so different!
Today I went around town in a car twice, during the daylight and at night...and I learned some interesting things about this place that most Americans are so ready to look down upon: I went on a hill from where you can see the whole city, and where the 2nd largest flag in Mexico lies, on top of this hill. Well, I learned that to use the Mexican flag in non-official situations and without the due respect is prohibited, so you can't find any clothes or things with the flag...yeah with the colors you can, but not with the whole flag (colors + "shield"). You can't sing the national anthem just whenever and however you want, but you have to do it in the appropriate situation. This is a world away from what they do just 2 hours away over the border, where, as everybody knows, the flag is way overused and can be found in anything from bags to underwear...2 completely different ways of being "patriotic", although on both sides of the border there seems to be a lot going on about the flag and stuff, in the schools for once.
Also, I got to get groceries for cheap (including bread and cheese!) and I got to try some local specialties, although the number one seems the "cabrito": the legs of a kid (baby goat). Well, I got to try some sort of pumpkin immersed in honey, and some sort of cornbread cooked with butter...interesting, although kind of heavy! :)
No vegetarian restaurant for me today...hopefully I will get to go there at some point...tomorrow is the Horsetail Waterfalls (Cascadas Cola de Caballo) and maybe some caves (Grutas de Garcia)...and then Saturday I am off to Saltillo for the day, before I head back to Tejas on Sunday morning! But I better not think about that and go enjoy my night out!

Monterrey, Mexico.

here all is well. the bus was/is nice, except for the little detail that it broke down in san marcos, tx and we were waiting all night for another one that was coming from laredo, tx...in the meantime they had the great idea to put on movies, except that they were all in english without subtitles, so i don't know how many people were doing more than just watching images! (it's a Mexican bus)
finally at 6am, after having tried to make the bus run a gazillion times (which means doing 1 km on the highway, stopping on the side for 10 minutes, ...each time..) at 6am the new bus came to our rescue and brought up to laredo, tejas
we got on a mexican "Conejo", which is a bus a little smaller and quite crappier (not complaining, just describing), and then drove through the border. we got stopped by the mexican customs police, and they had a brilliant idea: since you guys have so much luggage and you're late and you wanna get going, we propose to you that if you pay 10$ EACH we will not check anything...(way to go, i feel much safer now)...of course me and other people refused to, so they got every single item out of the conejo and searched the ones that didn't want to pay...hahah but it was fine, then we got here at around 12:30 noon that is...then i messed up with the buses and got to R's house, very nice people.
the university is a polytechnic, and it's nice and full of foreign students from europe and guys with soccer jerseys...i am at their lab now...i also got to walk around and it was so much fun!
now i can see it through the eyes of the gringos, sort of, and i can see them saying: it's dirty, noisy, loud, unsafe, and whatnot...but guess what, so is italy then, and it's really fun anyway!
i got a "paleta", and i loved it, and i will get more tomorrow! a paleta is a homemade popsicle, with fruit and water in the same thing! haha :)
tomorrow i am definitely checking out the veggie restaurant that's on the lonely planet, easily the only one in town...and then the next day is Saltillo...

30 days

In exactly a month from now I will be in Buenos Aires...hell yeah.

Everybody should see this!

Please do me a favor and take the time out of your day to watch these...and spread the word!

WARNING: the Falluja videos contain extremely crude images!

THANKS to ArcoIris TV and CoolStreaming.it IPTV

Falluja - The Hidden Massacre (in Italian, English and Arabic!)
(The .asf file seems to be working the best)

Falluja - The Day After
(RealPlayer DSL) (RealPlayer 56k)
(WindowsMediaPlayer DSL) (WindowsMediaPlayer 56k)
(MP3)

September 11th - Four Years Later
(RealPlayer DSL) (RealPlayer 56k)
(WindowsMediaPlayer DSL) (WindowsMediaPlayer 56k)
(MP3)

Twin Towers - Passive Collapses, or Controlled Demolitions?
(RealPlayer DSL) (RealPlayer 56k)
(WindowsMediaPlayer DSL) (WindowsMediaPlayer 56k)
(MP3)

Finally...after waiting so long...I get to see an NBA game! And not just a game, but Mavs VS Spurs...a TX classic...with Ginobili, Nesterovic, Udrih, Novitzky, Van Exel, Finley, Parker, Duncan,...what to say, I am stoked!

American English Pragmatics.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you " really means "I am about to leave"

"Well, I am going to let you go" really means "Let me go"

It was about time!

Saturday was a beautiful day, nice, sunny but breezy too...yesterday it got kinda chilly, and was chilly (9 degrees C) all day, so I was freezing while visiting the Texas State Fair, and during the bike ride at night.
Last night it went down to about 6 C I think, and this morning it said 3 C around 8am!!! Wow! So i finally got to break in my new fancy jacket that had been sitting in my closet for way too long ever since I bought it online when I was in Florida: it had never been used!
But back to the fair...it was a little bummer as we didn't get to see the country/rural side of it: the stuff we hung around was kind of normal for a fair (rides, cotton candy, ...), the food kind of gross and overpriced...as one of my students put it, the fair is the place for real Americans with a think regional accent where they serve food that not even the animals would eat! (It was much funnier in her not-so-broken Italian!). So the car exhibits was pretty much just a bunch of huge pickup trucks, all about being the "-est" at something (the roomiest, the biggest, the toughest, the tallest,...), although actually none of them were good at anything worth mentioning (gas mileage, safety,...). Almost anybody ever uses those things for what they're supposed to be used anyway, so who cares I guess...
I posted some more pictures in the "Dallas" album in my online photos.
I still need to post this one though, it says a lot!

Experiences

Today I finally made it out to the weekly bike ride starting Uptown, and it was fun. the meetup place is this diner that's in Uptown, which is the ritzy/fancy/snobby/pretentious part of town I guess. One thing I definitely like about it is that it is really bike-friendly and not as much car-oriented as the rest of the country.

Since it was a nice warm-but-not-hot Sunday afternoon everybody and their mom was out, and people were showing off their cars. So I got to see a new shiny Ferrari and a BMW convertible I had never seen before...no, it's not the Z4, it's a little bigger...anyway, it kind of reminded me of the "aperitivo" (cocktail) ritual in Italy, with nicely-dressed people and stuff...I ended up talking with this Turkish guy who was in a professional waterpolo team in Turkey for 15 years...but the most interesting part of his life was when he found a backdoor in the Pentagon website! So he and his crew got an invitation to the Pentagon to show the FBI how they managed to do it...and in 22 minutes "poof" they showed it to them right before their eyes! And they got a certificate thanking them for finding the fault so that they could fix it...how crazy is that??? He also supposedly stole several thousands of dollars and gave them to Greenpeace...all through the Internet I think...I didn't get the part about how he did this or where he got the money from, or from whom, since his English was not too clear...but it's definitely not something that you come across everyday!

Later on I came back to campus to watch About Baghdad, an interesting documentary directed by a Christian Iraqi who came to the States in 1991. A Q&A session followed, and it turned really interesting, as a guy in the audience had spent over a year in Iraq...and even though most of the "info" that were introduced to the public as new are actually almost common knowledge in Europe, it was still interesting to hear what Iraqis had to say 2-3 months after the invasion of their country.

Gotta grade now.

So I managed to go one daylight day fasting for Fast-A-Thon here at SMU. It turns out the money raised (total of $3500) for Islamic Relief goes to the victims of the earthquake in Pakistan, which I know next to nothing about. But I was gone when it happened...yeah, I celebrated my birthday on the bus, as part of a 32-hour trip to reach Gainesville, FL. Most of the ride was spent hanging out with Hondurian immigrants who spoke no English and had been traveling for 35 days to reach their relatives or friends in the States, where they can work temporarily. It was definitely an eye-opening experience: the guys were all in their high school age, and one asked me to read his phone card, who was in Spanish indeed: he just didn't know how to read! Others did not know how to dial their relatives'phone numbers although they did have a phone card with instructions in Spanish...I lent my mp3 player to one of them, who was fascinated about the discman: go figure!

It was nice to be back in Gainesville, the only place I can call home on this continent. Most things were still the same, although Gainesville is always fun! It was hard to get to spend time with everyone, or at least to spend as much quality time with everyone as I was hoping to!

The ride back was "only" 26 hours, but it was worse: all bus rides were full and I never had both seats to myself. Also, I had to go through Alabama and Mississippi, so a lot of the passengers were white (trash) Southerners in camouflage gear: hunting and God is a combination that seems strange, but not down (t)here. I can recall a tattoo on a tough guy reading "Only God knows"...but the best of all was one lady's t-shirt, all colorful and in "Who wants to be a millionaire?"-style, reading "My definite answer?" and then in the middle, in big characters:"Jesus!". Nice, huh?

I had a good time talking to a Chinese man who was a "chef" at a Chinese buffet restaurant somewhere in Mississippi: he's been in the States for 4 years now, but his English wasn't very good. He was telling me how he used to live in Biloxi, MS and when Katrina came his house was flooded up to his chest; he said he swam all the way to the highway where he sought help and walked for 30 minutes to a firestation, where he got new clothes and food...

This older man next across the isle was reading crazy books that seemed to come out of some sort of white, Christian, spiritual "sect": this one book he spent the most time on (taking the time to underline things...) was called "Animals are Soul too" and for what I could glance at was made up of little silly (madeup) anecdotes about how all these animals were really carrying "God's message" or something scary like that...the best was the language used: a kid in elementary school would find it too simple!

I was glad to finally be back in Dallas and be able to ride the Dart home. Campus feels such an educated environment compared to the bus stations!

On another note, it is interesting to notice how Katrina was all over the news for at least a week, with catastrophic words all over the place. Final dead toll? Barely 1'000 people. The earthquake in Pakistan has so far allegedly killed about 30'000 people at least, yet it is not nearly as important as the new (video) iPod...the tsunami in SE Asia did receive adequate coverage in the news, but I suspect it was mainly because of Phuket and the touristy destinations for us Westerners. What would we know about it if it had only hit Banda Aceh, the Nicobar and the Andaman Islands?

Oh, I also started getting to a decent amount of shows, and I have been posting pictures from my Labor Day weekend trip to El Paso, TX and Juarez, Mexico. They're all here, along with some more random shots: http://photos.yahoo.com/xdambox

Well, I better go now...Russian is calling me! But the pictures from El Paso and Juarez talk for themselves: it was definitely an amusing experience to wade through the sewage waters that were rising by the minute after a 30-minute storm. Being able to bargain for stuff in Spanish and eating 5 "paletas" in one day were the other highlights, as well as being in the city At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta are from. And, as a certain commercial would say, being addressed in English by Mexican vendors wanting to show you the Rolexes they sell is priceless! Do they know that I have been living in an unfurnished apartment and sleeping on an air mattress for the past 2-3 months? Probably not!