Spanish classes in Cuernavaca

I've been here for two weeks taking spanish classes at Chac Mool. The school itself is beautiful. The "classrooms" are actually those thatched roof areas you can see on the web site. The classes run in the morning and there are activities in the afternoon. I'm also staying with a host family that makes my meals and with whom I practice spanish.

A dog lives outside my window who wakes me up every morning at 7am barking. Click to watch a video of him eating a brick.

I have a 20 minute walk up and down hills to go to school. These are some things from my walk: a little ad hoc restaurant on my street and a typical rusty gate:

Every house has a gated lawn or parking area for the cars. There's an element of exclusiveness to this city which, I think, dates back to its colonial past. Sometimes you can peak through gates like these to see manicured yards with tropical flora.

It's been in some ways very hard and in some ways very easy to live here. It's hard because almost every detail of my life is unfamiliar. It's also a struggle for me to understand and speak spanish, so much of the time I feel unable to be myself and unable to follow what's going on around me. On the other hand it's easy because my days are, to a large extent, structured. I don't have to worry about what to do or how to get by because I need only go to school and do what my teachers and my mexican "mom" tell me to do, or follow the other students around in the evening.

I thought I'd have free time to work on some projects, study spanish, photograph, and explore music and art in the city. So far I really haven't had any time or energy for these kinds of things. (That's possibly due, in part, to the fact that I've got a group of friends that go out drinking until ridiculous hours of the morning so when I'm not at school I'm sleeping.... but they are leaving this weekend, so my next weeks might be different.)

I've taken some photos in the city center which includes a palace built by Hernán Cortés:

The Cortés has a beautiful photography exhibit now

as well as Diego Rivera murals depicting the history of Mexico from the battle between the Aztecs and the conquistadors to the integration of spanish and indigenous culture:

One day I went to the Robert Brady Museum. It's his house, converted into a museum since his death. It includes works by the two Mexican superstars, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, among others.

The place is stacked floor to ceiling with his art collection

His house has the most beautiful bathroom I've ever seen - not that I think about bathrooms much, but this is really incredible. The toilet is behind a wall on the right, and the bathtub is below floor level in the back under the buddha. It also has a sky light.

I went on a few excursions which I'll write about some other time. I'm also pretty excited about checking out Mexican wrestling next week:

Snorkling in Cabo Pulmo

I wanted to get away from my resort to see more of Baja. I rented a car and headed east to Cabo Pulmo to go snorkling. Cabo Pulmo, on the gulf of California, has the only coral reef on the west coast. It also turns out to be the Baja California you'd picture Baja California to be, not the disneyland-on-crack that is Cabo San Lucas.

The first hour or so was on paved roads, but eventually you're riding on washboard dirt roads. Yeah, the beach in CSL was amazing, but the open space and quiet of the east cape made it feel like a different place altogether.

The landscape was fantastic. Harsh brush and cactuses, all thorny and crooked, withered under the relentless sun.

Cows, goats, horses and dogs wander the roads freely. Vultures and hawks circle above, or rest on cactuses. The only thing that scared me was the dogs because I had my windows open and they were in a pack chasing my car.

I finally reached the dive shop, rented some snorkeling gear, and drove up to the beach. The dark spots in the water are coral reef.

I didn't have any underwater photo equipment so you'll have to use your imagination. The first thing I saw was absolutely nothing. It was late in the day and the waves had dragged a lot of sand out, clouding the waters. I swam around a little bit further and started seeing small minnows. They were in schools organized by size from pencil-tip to pinky-finger in length. The school moved as one organism, the boundaries shockingly distinct, almost like a giant amoeba moving around with the currents. Before long I was in a place where my entire field of vision was minnows. 10's or 100's of thousands of them. It was like being out at night in a rain storm with a flashlight.

Further out were all kinds of huge, bright tropical fish. There were intense blue fish that swam alone on the floor, big fat black fish with yellow dots, razor fish with noses as long as the rest of their body, giant yellow angel fish, skates, and huge blue fish with lips at the end of a long pencil-thin mouth, sucking on the coral. Maybe the goggles magnified, but most of these fish seemed at least as big as my head. I tried to follow a pelican around for a while as it scooped up buckets of fish, but I could never quite get a good view.

Next I returned my gear and got back on the road. Everything seems to be in a slow state of eternal decay.

I found this place called Crossroads Country Club that was excellent. They had a library, satellite Internet, and the best fish tacos I had in Baja.

As I got closer to civilization, I found more modern houses which were also interesting.

The last hour or two were the diciest. I'm pretty sure I made a wrong turn following some bozos going 15 in their 4wd SUVs and spent an extra hour on the dirt roads. I didn't get home until way past dark.

First international stop: Cabo San Lucas

I arrived in Cabo yesterday after a pretty rough day of travel. So far I haven't done much besides sleep and look out the window from my room at Pueblo Bonito Blanco. So far so good!

Looks like there's some fun stuff going on outside:

4th in Nebraska

People were kinda surprised when I said that Nebraska was my first stop of my world travels...

but the truth is that I've got some awesome friends there and made some new ones this visit. Plus my travels are not just about scenery or exotic places. Seeing Jen and Lateef's life, including their young kids Ivy and Scout, and their extended family which they moved back to Nebraska to be around, meant a lot to me.

Nebraska is also a place where they know how to do the 4th of July right. Jen's niece Faithe's husband Ryan lives in a neighborhood where they have BBQ, a mega water balloon fight and fireworks. Everyone decks out their yards with red, white and blue. Someone even pulled off patriotic jello.

The water balloon preparation starts early in the morning with several filling operations like this one:

In the late afternoon, with dozens of people on each side of a cul-de-sac and a thousands of water balloons, the battle begins. Here's Jen firing one round:

Last was Ryan's fireworks. He spent since Christmas prepping for his show which included a few thousand artillery shells.

They used 6 blow torches to set them off on the same street where we'd had the water balloon fight.

I also got a tour of Jen's dad Spike's apartment, flush with Nebraska Corn Huskers paraphernalia and pictures of his family.

We spent evenings at the fire pit drinking some beers and talkin' shit. They threw in an Arkansas fire log. I guess their neighbor learned how to make this from some guy camping in South Dakota. Basically you take a copper pipe, drill some holes in it, and fill it with garden hose (the cheaper ones are better). Probably not something you'd want to do around the kids, or when sitting down-wind.

Vegas!

I went to Vegas over the weekend with Al and his brother for Al's 35th birthday.

They are all about blackjack and I'd never played before. We went to see "21" in preparation, which was actually a lot more entertaining then we'd heard. I memorized the basic strategy tables the night before and on the flight over. When we arrived Al scanned the blackjack area for single deck games (not "super fun" which has some extra rules and pays less on blackjack) and found one. After about an hour of the pit boss hovering over the table, he went and talked on the phone to someone and came back and said, "you guys can play other games, but no more blackjack". We moved on to the next casino.

Eventually I kinda got the hang of it. The gist is that 10's and A's benefit the player since blackjack pays 3 to 2. The more of those in the deck, the better. So you keep an eye out for how many show up in the first hand of a newly shuffled deck. In the end, after putting down $100 about 5 times, I was down only $10. I was happy.

We also did the usual Vegas things: hung out at the pool, went to dinner, played a poker tournament (don't ask), and went to a hypnotism show.