El Peregringo

One week down…

So, we’re watching the Italians play really poorly while the French dominate…sigh. Fortunately, Zidane demonstrated such excellent sportamanship that the French were sufficiently demoralized and lost. Yeah!

Guadalajara Update

It’s interesting here in Guadalajara. On Sundays, the large avenue– Av. Vallarta– in front of our hotel is closed to traffic from 8 am until 2pm and reserved exclusively for pedestrians, skaters, and cyclists–not something I expected in a large Mexican city. If anything it was nice to have a little peace and freedom from ambulances and buses.

Tomorrow we’re all off to work. Ana will begin to teach en serio, the girls will start their day program at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, and I will start working on my license in the UAG library. They’ve said that there will be no problem with my working there from 9 to 1:30 every day while the girls are elsewhere on campus at their program. We’ll see what actually happens when I turn up with my laptop and scanner, and ask for network access. It’s a beautiful campus–as Ana said, the creme de la creme of Guadalajara society. Mostly light skinned, anglo-featured kids. Last Friday when we were on campus finalizing the girl’s registration for their program was the undergraduate school graduation–lots of very nicely dressed kids and their families and very few mestizo or indio faces.

José Clemente Orozco

Yesterday was an incredible day visiting three sites here in Guadalajara with José Clemente Orozco murals: El paraninfo, an auditorium of the Univerity of Guadalajara (the public university), el Ayuntamiento de Gobierno de Jalisco, and el Instituto Cabañas (a former orphanage, now designated by UNESCO as one of very few sites in the world that forms a part of the Patrimonio Internacional de la Humanidad). The Instituto Cabañas is sometimes called the Capilla Clementina–a play on words to compare the Orozco murals there with the Cistene Chapel in Rome and the Michaelangelo murals there.

Some samples: (click for larger versions)

So one of the problems with coming to Mexico is not being used to the bacteria here, and the resulting “digestive issues.” Add to that the fact that one is not to drink municiple tap water because it contains amoebas…and you can see the writing on the wall.

In my case, I didn’t get amoebas, but I was hit by another problem with Mexico–the food is damn good and the peppers are hot. I love hot food, so I’ve been eating hot sauce and peppers with every meal. Those of you who occasionally eat hot food may know what I’m talking about…

New name for a pepper I discovered: chile del arbol.

Just a quick post to get things started. Much to do today…

So, we arrived in Guadalajara after 20 hours of travel. Leaving the house at 4 am was fun with the girls… Everything was cool getting to NYC and JFK, but we had to stand in line at JFK for 2 hours waiting to check our luggage and get our seat assignments. Turns out the electronic tickets we had were screwed up, and the dweeb working the counter had no idea how to fix them. His supervisor worked for half an hour to get them fixed, and then there was still a problem that we had to have worked on at the gate for another 20 minutes.

By the time we got to Mexico CIty, we had missed our first flight out to Guadalajara, and we had to stand in line again another couple of hours to get through immigration. We missed a second flight to Guadalajara, but finally arrived at our hotel at 7:30 pm–where Ana promptly fell down and we thought, broke her foot. The doctor confirmed today that it’s not actually broken, but she’s not supposed to walk on it much for a week….

The apartment we have is great. It’s quite large. Pictures later.