Igor, bring me my pathogens!

This post has a bunch of pictures I took at school to make my mama happy. More pending, quite probably. The tour shall begin with the nopal forest, as I shall call it, or a field of cactus for those lay-persons among the readership of this fine blog. Since the camera randomly decides to take stripy photos, some of these are going to totally suck, but ain´t that the way. Anyway, this is a cactus pad that really wants OUT!! The nopal forest is pretty cool, and I´ll have to take a shot of the whole thing, because it just got chopped recently so it looks like a new recruit in the military (space monkey!), only with lots of new little green things poking out. For those who are unaware, plants get tired of growing once they get old, so you have to scare the crap out of them by chopping them down and then they start pushing new growth. So that`s the logic there. Oh, and they sell the stuff they grow here. How cool is that? Including bunnies: I will take a picture of the big sign that says, LIVE BUNNIES FOR SALE, GET 'EM WHILE THEY'RE HOT.

The next photo is the backside of the belly of the academic beast (the unimpressive library, also known as my home base) on a hazy morning.

Next are the shots I took while working in the orchard. This is my new fun-time in the great out-of-doors. Since I am again bikeless (boo!) I gotta get out somehow... and I get nice and dirty too. This shot features (tinily) my fruit production class. What have we been learning in the practicum hour? How to plant an orchard!! They ordered a crapton of baby trees two years ago. They've waited quite a while for the spot to be ready... one girl took initiative (as it is her dream in life to have a vineyard) and planted all the grapes and made it her Thing last year. Last year's fruti class also took on the responsibility of planting the first 400 or so trees. And they, like us, were only four people... we pretty much finished the thing last week, so that' s pretty cool. I know what you're thinking: Cat, how is it exactly that you plant an orchard? So I'll tell you. You start by digging giant trenches on the north-south axis at 3 or four meters apart. Then you measure out key points on your grid, each at no more than 35 meters from each other (because any longer and you're not going to get reliable lines), and you stick in some stakes at intervals of 3 to four meters. Then you run strings on the east-west axis between the stakes to serve as a guide for tree placement--but it's just a guide, mind you. When you start planting, you have to line up the trees by sight to make sure they are just so, both with relation to the trees in their line as well as those diagonal to them, and then you place the sapling--just so--facing north, of course... and you bury that sucker, making sure that the graft is well above soil level, because otherwise the scion will root and you`ll lose the benefits of the rootstock. Then you pat yourself on the back and move on, except that the string ends and then he had us plant trees without the string as a guide. I felt very accomplished with my well placed treelings.

On Friday afternoons I have my plant pathology lab, which is very pleasant. Last class we got to make cultivation media, which includes the use of such fun things as autoclaves, beakers, bunsen burners, autoclaves, anti-contamination chamber thingies that are kind of like fume hoods but with the power of ANTI-PATHOGENIC UV RAYS... plus, potatoes, agar, and dextrose.

There are only three of us in the class (another girl added it last week), so it goes pretty fast. Here are some pictures of the lab, for your viewing pleasure. I also provide for your amusement and evaluation, photos of the Agrícola part of the FESC campus, which is about as architecturally defunct as UCD, but they also likely blew less money building it. In the second picture you will notice a cool mural featuring various prehispanic themes. Why they don't let you rotate your photos once you've bloggered them I don't know.

This post is kind of boring (ie, There's no Pictures): School, the Underdevelopment Complex, and a delay in Return Date

There’s lots of self-righteous rambling in this post. Beware.

There is a complex. I'm going to call it the “underdeveloped” complex. At the University it seems common: as they are lecturing to you they make subtle but clearly pained reference to the fact that Mexico is “subdesarrollado,” or “underdeveloped.” The scientists hate it. They want expensive equipment and new plant varieties and all that jazz. I have been asked on more than one occasion why I chose to come to a country “less advanced” than my own. What the hell do you say to that? “Advancement” wasn't really what I was thinking of when I came to Mexico; it's not like I'm wondering where the transmogrifier and the flux capacitor are. My stated reason for wanting to come here was that Mexico has the precious resources of diversity and antiquity that my country lacks. Ever since we slaughtered all those native people who actually knew all about the land and what lived on it, we've been shooting ourselves in the foot, land-wise. “Yeah, let's plow the prairie, just like we plowed stuff in Europe!” Hello, Dust Bowl. And today, hello scary rates of soil erosion. That's just one example, but I mean come ON, advancement is just another word for short-term, rapid exploitation resulting ultimately and inevitably in the exhaustion of resources and an import-economy at best, and mass malnutrition or starvation at worst. I was interested in not “going back in time” but seeing how other people have figured things out. Okay, I'll admit I had way more of an image of traditionality than I could ever have found at a university, of course, and I should have seen that coming. I'm really hoping I'll get the chance to go hang out at an autonomous germplasm repository or an indigenous university just to see what's up. I think that new perspectives on what it means to “develop” a society are what we need, not just the further prattling of privileged people who fancy themselves experts. That said! That said, I need to also acknowledge that a position of privilege does not invalidate one's opinion. I think there's a role for everyone here on Spaceship Earth. I just think that there's been a monopoly on “advancement” for way too long and things have got to change and that it's only going to happen if we start shutting up and opening our ears to people who have historically been on the margins. I don't think I even like what “advancement” has entailed up till now. We need to redefine which way is “forward”.

So here's my thing: people think that there's one way and it's called ADVANCEMENT. I think we often put our blinders on... the options for the future are infinite from any point in history. Furthermore, with so many free agents roaming around the planet (there's six billion of us now) we can see a lot of different proceedings into various kinds of futures. I'm really over the SOCIETY mentality that says that all of humanity moves in a giant blob toward one sole future. In a way it's true because we're all sharing the planet, but in another sense that limits our personal and community-scale agency just by believing it: if I'm just a brick in the wall why would I try and create a path or a perspective? I'll just get employed and follow a prevailing logic. Gross.

Something has to change in the collective consciousness such that whatever remnant mental diversity we can scratch out gets cultured and let to grow and talk amongst itself. Don't you think? How else are we going to get out of this sinking ship? TECHNOLOGY is not a single entity either, so if technology holds solutions we need to set out to develop a variety of options from multiple perspectives to actually find solutions that fit individual contexts. One kind of snake oil is not going to fix the ailment.

That`s my trip. But basically when people ask me that, I just say, ‘It isn’t really like that…’ and leave it there.

Enough with that then...

Last week my gang and I went to a sort of underground bar thing after school—major sketchball—they call it the Hotel, because ostensibly the place is a “hotel” and the bar (which is just a big room with a bar behind which are giant boxes of chelas) is ostensibly the “dining room”. Clever. It's run by the family who owns the spot, and it's sort of weird to go to the bathroom because it makes me uncomfortably aware of the fact that this is their house (there's their shampoo, and their soap and toothpaste all in there...). It's pretty funky. In any case, we mixed beer with veggie juice along the lines of “V-8” (sounds weird, tastes good, especially since I don't like most Mexican beers too much). Peter says he likes Indio, and I guess Indio is pretty good. It's nobody's Boont, though. To its credit, it is incredibly cheap, but only because it's so dilute...

Though this weekend I went out with another friend and I think Leon is pretty good. Do they even sell it in the States?

The FESC campus reminds me of a TV high school, lots of low brick buildings and grassy patches with trees; fliers on the walls, courtyards where the students wait around for their perpetually late profs to show up.

I figured out my schedule once and for all today. I dropped my soil science class (in which I was the only student) so I could keep my other six clases (mother of god! It's still a lot now that I say it out-loud-on-paper-on-the-internet). I know you are anxiously awaiting my list of classes, so here it is: Entomology, Advanced Fruit Production, Agriculture in Tropical Zones, Plant Pathology, Genetics, and Field Practicum 4. What's that? You want to know all the boring details of my academic life? Why yes, I will tell you all about it. Entomology is saving me from the hazy ignorance and confusion I acquired in Intro to Biological Control (DON'T take that class, Davisites, unless you already know entomology pretty well. They just make you memorize things that don't make a lot of sense if you aren't already an entomologist). The professor is muy buena onda, very charismatic, perpetually late, and generally appealing and friendly. He relates well with his students and cracks a lot of jokes. But the surprising moment was when he quoted “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” in perfect English: “Assumption, my dear, is the mother of all fuckups.” It was funny twice over because I was the only person in the class who understood. Most classes here at the FESC are divided between practicum and theory; we spend one session a week in the field and one in the classroom. So yesterday we went out collecting bugs. The whole thing started like this: he tells us we have to form groups by Monday. One of the kids from class, who's also one of the four students in my genetics class, asked if I wanted to join his group. The new kid does not say no to invitations. So we get together and have to figure out how to divvy up the prep work: making a net, getting jars and alcohol. I should mention that all the kids in this class are in their fifth semester, so all younger. My group is a bunch of boys and me. Oy vey. But anyway, we wind up with a net made from a mop handle, the reinforced top-three-inches of a five-gallon bucket, steel wire, and some tulle. It's pretty impressive. But here is the point: here the students are expected to be resourceful, which I think is really cool. It clearly fits in the culture... and I really feel comfortable with that—except that I don't know how to be resourceful yet, as I just got here... So at times I feel sort of useless (exhibit A, not doing a damn thing to make the net), but still I like the system. We caught a ton of cool looking bugs; I learned how to kill a butterfly; I got to peel apart a bunch of corn plants looking for beetles, and best of all we called it Science. So that's entomology. My fruit production professor is this tall (by Mexican standards—I am such a freak here) skinny, cigarette-smoking wrinkled, five-o'clock-shadowed guy who reminds me in his personality of one of those sheep-herding dogs with their eyes all different colors, and they're kind of slinky and a little bit crazy and sometimes they run around all fast and then just stop for no apparent reason and look around like something just happened... that's what he's like. He's a fruit guru, what do you want? I like his class a lot. He's really into weather monitoring and “agrometeorology” which at Davis doesn't exist but here it does. He has three weather monitoring systems in the brand new FESC orchard, one of which was developed at UCD. He also arrives perpetually late to class. But his lectures are really good and it's worth the wait. He cares SO MUCH about fruit production, and has a ton of stories and such that he throws out there from time to time. It's also an itty bitty class: me and a girl who is serious and very smart and broke her foot at football practice (yes, this school has football-- and for women!), and two other girls. I offered to help the professor out in the orchard since he manages it all alone, with whatever help he can scrape out of the students, so that`s where I`ll be on Thursday mornings. So that's fruit. Tropical Zones is way cool. The prof is this short round little lady who's very energetic and, like all my other professors (who appear generally of the same age range, 40-50), herself graduated from FESC. She talks super fast but she's always checking in with me to see if I get it. This is another tiny class: we're 6. That's the tropics. Genetics is tiny too, we're five, and it's too dull for detail work, but Plant Path deserves a blurb. There are two professors, one for practicum and one for theory. I sense that there is some kind of conflict going on among the two of them, which is sort of awkward, though it's appeared to have died down; they were double-booked for teaching the class, so there was some kind of spat about that, but there was pretext that never got explained too well. It's usually best not to ask about politics. You don't want to know. Anyway it seems like it will be a lot of work, but we get to do cool stuff in the lab, so that's fun.

Can I just say how much I like this education system? I like it an awful lot. Why doesn't Davis do this? When you start off, you choose your major and they tell you which courses you're going to take every semester, with very limited wiggle room. At some point you choose an orientation within your major, and later, a specialty within that orientation. It's a cohort system. I think it makes the University able to direct your learning so that it's cohesive and makes sense, and you have a community of students with the same experiences to help you out. Everyone knows all the professors, and the classes aren't ever bigger than 20 or so. It's a good education. Furthermore, they get you out in the world. Every year the whole class goes on a mass field trip for their Practicum class, and they all have to not only visit all these places, but each team gets deposited for a few days in a spot of their choosing (resulting from a semester's worth of research) to work on a project, which they summarize and present at the end of the trip. So the practicum that I'm taking is the last in the series, and they take you to Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, for 19 days in January.

Which leads me to my next point: it looks like I can graduate here. Ha. How nuts. Last semester of my college career. I was pretty sure it was never going to end. So since I'm going on this field trip I'm going to be coming home a little later than advertised, likely in late January. I might come visit for Christmas though, because I would probably be the only person on my own in an extremely Catholic country. Just so you know. Maya, I'm still down to be your roommate as of February. We could go live in the Bay too if you want.

NOTICE: to all Spanish speaking people who may be reading this blog: is there a word in Spanish for “sketch,” as in “sketchy” or “sketchball”? I keep wanting to call stuff sketchy but don't know the word. “Creepy” is another important one.

Next time, a short history of the FESC.

Not dead, Mom, plus 3 million other things

My mom sent me a few desperate e-mails and this is a message for her: I´m still alive and kicking!

AVISO: Since it's been awhile since my last post, this is ridiculously long. Pace yourself. I'll start with a picture of a rickshaw, which are all over the blessed place on the outskirts of town, and some shoutouts copied from my notebooks:

For Darach, a note on soundscapes: It kills me that I don't have a tape-recorder sometimes: the echo of a glaucominous old man's harmonica in La Raza station, mingling with the jingle of his bescarved wife's little basket of change, and the muffling of footsteps and voices on the marble...

7 August: Dear Chris Salam and/or Congleton: I am on a bus almost as janky as yours—and not nearly as fun. There are like 7 people on the bus and the driver, who grows his pinky nails long like a narco, is blasting norteña over the speakers. The question is open: whom do I trust less, the driver (who, I am rapidly and dismayedly realizing, is majorly agro, as he guns the motor and elbows the horn), or the bus (which, I am quickly and upsetly aware, is rattling in ways I don't like and makes unhealthy noises and has too many shattered parts to its windows)?!

Dear Jordan, how many times do I have to tell them, AGAVE IS NOT A CACTUS!?

Dear Tom, who definitely is not reading this, so if somebody could relate this to him that might be nice, my entomology prof called topology a ¨stoner´s hobby¨ today (in a good way...).

Dear Chrises again, I saw a bus jankier than yours: sitting atop a mound of garbage, it had no windows, wheels or soul. Cuautitlán Izcalli, Estado de México.

And onto the rest of the post, which fortunadamente tiene mucho que ver con las bicis:

I have had the pleasure of riding Erika's bike a bunch this month, and I have learned a great deal about the City and biking therein. I will herein provide observations:

Some roads are one-lane, and that lane is usually narrow enough that fat cars can't get around you if you're on a mountain bike. Most drivers are very conscientious and will wait for you to notice and signal them on, and they'll approach nice and slow, yadda yadda yadda. But I've had close encounters sobretodo en rush hour, cuando no te esperan. I got clipped last week, by a middle-aged lady in a minivan who tried to breeze past me (how do you breeze in a minivan??). Oof. I started riding in the middle of the lane after that to make sure that they wouldn't try anything till I was ready. It works pretty well; I never felt it was necessary in the multilane roads though, because cars actually fit...

Note to self: business plan for Davis: invest in an enormous basket. make a bunch of tacos. make bomb salsa. ride your bike around and sell abovementioned food.

Pesero drivers are all out of their nut. Beware of peseros.

The left turn lane is on the right side of the road in some places. Who the hell made that up?! Help us, ITS!

Last Saturday I went with Erika and Daniel to help them teach a basic bike safety and roadside repair class to a bunch of kids. They were all volunteers at the new Centro del Ciclismo and they're going to help out with the “Muévete en Bici” program that closes off Paseo de la Reforma on Sundays to give cyclists/pedestrians/roller-skaters the run of the place. They were about 35 of them, really receptive and sweet, and I was a nervous wreck. Ah well. It was pretty sweet to have 2/3 of the experts be chicks. WTF lives!!!!

To get to this event, I had to ride down Avenida México-Coyoacan to Avenida Universidad, dogleg onto Gabriel Manceras, dogleg again onto Obrero Mundial... then you take a left onto a street whose name I forgot and you get to the Angel de la Independencia. I provide you with a photo so you can see: it's iconic of the city, and it also illustrates the sinking (hundimiento) problem described a couple posts ago: this monument is affixed below the level of the silty-squishy part of the soil so it hasn't been sinking, and for this reason serves to mark the rate of sinkage of this part of the city: those stairs? They weren't there before, because that part of the monument was underground. That's a few meters. Fíjate que this is only since 1900 ish. Yikes!

Then we got to ride through the Bosque de Chapultepec, which is pretty cool. There´s a bike route not much unlike that in Stanley Park in Vancouver, so that´s pretty cool, and there´s a spot in between the first and second sections of the park where there´s an outdoor photo exhibit, right now featuring photos from the fototeca nacional de Cuba, so there are a ton of photos

Montezuma's revenge: yeah I had a bad day last week. I still eat tacos from street stands and old men's bike baskets. Take that, sensible people. It was only one day. If I get sick one day a month, I think all the delicious and cheap food is totally worth it. God bless.

We had three guest presentations in Lucía's history class that are worth mentioning:
1. Gabriel: he came in and talked to us about indigenous people. What are indigenous people? They are classified as such if they have their own language, are marginalized, and self-identify as such. Okay, let's think about that. All indigenous people are marginalized. Good grief. They coevolve with the place and then the conquest comes and there goes the neighborhood. All indigenous people are marginalized. The gravity of what that admits (complete and ongoing exploitation) and the implicit self-fulfilling prophecy that comes along with it are mindblowing. So what happens if an indigenous group lifts itself from poverty? What do we do then, change the definition or graduate them to some other name? Stew on that. Gabriel's presentation was particularly cool because he told us about a lot of autonomous efforts to preserve culture and attain recognition and defense of their rights. This includes germplasm repositories (“fuera transgénicos gringos!”), universities that teach ethno-agriculture (HOLLA MS F!!) and traditional arts and ecological know-how. I need to go hang out in one of these places and learn how they do what they do. He was telling us specifically about spots in Puebla, where he works as an ethnographer through UNAM. Badass.

2. Fernando (though his name may have been Fransico or Federico, I'm not totally sure): He's an anthropology prof at the UAM, Universidad Autónoma Municipal (the second biggest university in Mexico, also conveniently located right here in the city). He studies transnationalism. He started off by talking a bit about the Mexico-US human-exchange, the Braceros and all that. He told us some of the things that most of us already knew: lots of Mexicans cross the border illegally, and it totally sucks because you wander around in the desert hoping not to die of thirst/get abandoned by your coyote/step on an angry scorpion/get shot by the migra. But when it started to get crazy was when he told us about the increasing phenomenon of indigenous people (folks who don't even speak Spanish) up and going to the States. It used to be that you were probably poor, but not all that poor, if you went to the states. Clearly, if you had money, why would you risk life and limb. And if you're dirt poor, well, you can't even get to the border, let alone pay the coyote god knows how much dough. But the demographics of migrants are changing more and more and are starting to include Mexico's own marginalized. So Zapotecs, Mixtecs and Mixes are making the long trek to the other end of a migrational corridor we're calling Oaxacalifornia and other peoples are forming the nation of Puebla York and changing the face and the linguistic realities of migration. He told us one story of being in a market in California someplace, and this little Mixtec girl (I hope I'm getting the details right) says to her brother, “get the gets”. Confused, Fernando asked, “What did you say?” And she goes, “I was speaking Mixtec.” In Mixtec, “get”is the word for tortillas. So their parents were Mixtec-speakers, probably with some Spanish vocabulary but nothing of English, so what they speak at home is Mixtec. But at school all they get is English. So there's this generation of migrants' kids that have hopped over Spanish, and are the unexpected Mexican-Americans: non-Spanish speaking ones. That blew my mind a little bit. There was a lot more to his presentation and maybe I'll touch on it later.
3. Don Tomás was super cool. He is a chinampero, which is to say that he grows crops on a piece of land on Lake Xochimilco (or what remains of it-- remember my rag on Xochimilco?) in a town called Tlahuac (gringo pronunciation guide: TLAH-wok). Here's the rundown: scoop mud from lakebed. Form into adorable little bricks. Put a lettuce seed in each tiny brick (the size of a plug-tray cell). Let sit under a plastic sheet mini greenhouse thingy until they come of age for transplanting. Since the silty-clayey lakebed soil has such a high water holding capacity and is at saturation when you form the brick, they stay moist long enough to support germination and early growth. Then you plant the little plugs in a field which has had lake mud spattered all over it (lake mud is also really rich in OM, like a cousin to peat moss but with mineral content) and which has been mulched with old crop-trash or straw or some such. Cover with shade cloth and let there be lettuce. Genius. Además he had broccoli, cauliflower, alfalfa for the horses, jitomate (which is what they call tomato here—GPG: hee-toe-MA-tey), chile, and some other veggies. But the awesome does not stop there, dear reader. Interspersed in nearly all his fields were verdolagas (purslane), quelites (lambsquarters), pigweed (common name pending... aguantenme!!) and pápalo (something I have yet to identify). Yes, to sell at the market. Yes, because Mexico is awesome and people EAT WILD FOOD LIKE IT'S NORMAL!! Marry me, Mexico. Some of it he seeded and some of it just showed up. The interesting thing about Don Tomás is that much of his veggie seed is hybrid-certified-blablabla. And he uses a few pesticides, in the case of his lettuce preventatively. It's a very interesting mix of tradition and technology, which I guess is a mix he's formulating to survive on his land. Good luck, Don Tomás. May your lettuce be extremely marketable and your land forever fecund.
4. Xavier took us on a tour of the CU: ciudad universitaria, which is definitely a city unto itself. It's huge, but that's what you get when you're running a school of 250,000. That's 7 Davises! Seven! Holy moly. So here we go. It's the oldest university in the Americas (both of them) and was started by the Espanish. Various facultades or schools were scattered around the city and then in the 20th century, when city planning got big, they decided they should have one spot for the thing, and they created the CU. Architecturally speaking (Xavier is an architect), it's interesting because it was designed via cooperation between students and faculty, artists and architects. Each school had its team of designers from all of the above disciplines and so every space has its own feel. They constructed it on the Pedregal de San Angel (GPG: ped-regg-GAL) or lava flow, so it's on a sturdy, 70+ meter-deep chunk of lava rock. The landscaping (this was before landscape architecture) is cool because they took the original undulating slopes of the lava rock and sculpted the place around its natural curvature, rectilinearizing it but in a kind of beautiful way that definitely respects the land forms. Xavier referred to this as topografía esculpida which sounds very beautiful to me. Much of what it built there is built from native rocks, materials that aren't going anywhere. Recently they opened a nature reserve on a big portion of campus property probably 1/3 - ½ of its area, to preseve the sparse but unique and biodiverse flora and fauna of the pedregal. Lilia had actually given me a book about biodiversity on the reserve that's pretty cool. The library, meanwhile, was designed by someone who liked rectangles, because it's a near-windowless rectangle, and you're thinking, okay, Cat, why is this cool, y yo te digo ahorita. The artist Juan O'Gorman (booyah Irish kids in Mexico! He was one of the core muralists of that age [~the fifties]) designed the intense mural on the outside, which incorporates all these diverse elements of Mexican history into a big mural burrito of imagery. The mural is a mosaic, made from rocks collected from all over Mexico. It has so many different colors in it; it's super impressive. The story according to Xavier goes like this: O'Gorman or the inspired rectangular architect or whoever sent a letter and a crate to every podunky town in Mex saying, “Send us the prettiest rocks you can find and we'll glue them to the library”. And after a while they got tired of waiting, as only a few crates had shown up, and how are you going to mural a library if you only have a couple of crates of rocks from some dumb towns in the middle of nowhere JEEZ! And so they got in the pickup truck, with their picks and crates and an old Queen tape and took off into the countryside, stopping every time they saw a kind of rock they liked, and brought a pile of rocks home. They went all over the place doing this, and when they arrived, dirty-faced and loaded down with rocks (I don't even want to think about the shocks on that pickup—did they have shocks in those days? Well they didn't have Queen or tapes in those days either so we all know the state of accuracy in this story; I think I should maybe put a Bullshit Warning sticker on the top of my blog somewhere-- if somebody designs me a Bullshit Warning sticker I'll find a way to do that), there were a bazillion crates of rocks waiting for them from all over the country. And they looked at each other, totally sick of rocks, and commenced to make this amazing mural. One critic referred to the building as una gringa en un huipil: referring to the fact that its dress was nice but its form was totally un-Mexican (gringa= “American” girl [where do we get off calling our nationality American when we are but one nation in a bicontinental complex of a couple dozen nations that have their own damn names. Cookies to whomever comes up with the best new moniker for gringos/what our country should probably be called instead], and a huipil [GPG: wee-peel] is a traditional Mayan dress that you can see all kinds of gringas wearing in Mexico). The argument being: you can find a rectangle building anywhere (remember this was a period of extreme nationalism, and though the mural is ridiculously Mexican, what about that box you put it on? Which is a good point. In any case the mural and the story are pretty cool. He went on to talk to us about space: how did they create public spaces that were conducive to student interaction (and subsequent student action in the 60s, which came to a tragic head in '68, when a couple hundred students were shot or detained or tortured or raped by police after/during an enormous rally in La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Tlatlolco-- you will hear more about Tlatlolco as well as the student movement later). Additionally there are a lot of little spaces that are cool because they're a sort of intimate-space-in-public-space where you see little groups of friends meeting and sharing space but having their own space at the same time. Every factultad has its own private-public space and there are spaces that unite different facultades as well. Because the whole thing is built on rocks, every time there is a tree there's a lump of dirt underneath it where they had to put down more soil than the grass needed. Okay, let's talk about bikes. They have a bike-brary at UNAM. They have successfully made the campus mostly car-inaccessible, making the transportational protagonists pedestrians and cyclists. That's cool. There was this other thing he was describing, I think it's called the Pavillión de Rayos Cósmicos, that involved a thin thin curved-planar concrete arc-shaped roof that was an experiment, much like the Domes, which, unlike the Domes, actually got removed when it was planned to remove it. If anyone is interested I can do more research on that. Or you can get your best websurfing shorts on and do it yourself, I guess. I really liked the tour and it made me so jealous of the kids that got to go to school there every day...

So speaking of school, welcome to Xhala, Cuautitlán Izcalli, Estado de México, home of my school, which is part of the Universidad Autónoma de México, the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Cuautitlán. Let me begin with some preliminary impressions of the spot: most everybody I told in Mexico City that I was coming here gave me a look like I had just handed them a live squid. Like, what's that? It's gross and squishy. What's the matter with you? Those who had heard of the place and could pronounce it told me various unpleasant things: it's... conflictive... a little dangerous... try not to go out at night... it's straight-up ugly... all the way to, if you try riding a bike there, they'll kill you dead to steal it. So, my last week in the city I was in a state of mild panic. The coordinators of my program not only didn't have a place for me to live, but didn't know how to get there or anything.

First day of school, and I really felt like a TV show, where the “new kid” protagonist shows up to high school and everyone else already knows each other. Here's how this school works: you show up with all the other kids in your major and you take all the same classes every semester until you're done. Rodolfo drives me to school because we both have to be there at the same time.

Pause: who's Rodolfo? So I came to visit the place on Friday to go to what I thought was an orientation for exchange students. Turns out it was an orientation for exchange student. One, me. Ha ha. But the administrators who orientated me are super sweet and helpful and chill and such. Maru is the coordinator for student affairs and she's super sweet and she said, look, we know you don't have a place to stay yet. Rodolfo is going to give you a little tour d'campus and help you check out some possible places to live. Rodolfo is a little old man, not that old, a tiny bit younger than my dad. He walks with a little limp but is very animated. He talked and talked and toured me around campus. Then we went into “town” to check out apartments for rent. He told me the last exchange student, a Canadian girl, rented a room in his house, and that I could probably do the same. Long story short that's what I'm doing. His wife Gloria basically adopted me and she's super sweet and a bomb cook and a primary school teacher. They live in this beautiful orange-and-yellow painted house with lots of windows and a soccer field outside that they rent out for games on weekends. They told me this whole area used to revolve around dairies, mostly all of which have since gone under (probably in part because of the forced removal of subsidies despues de NAFTA). Did you know, by the way, that though Mexico has removed all but one of its subsidies (because if tortillas weren't subsidized people would probably die of hunger), the US still subsidizes various products. Some free trade agreement-- give me a break. Back to the present...

We find my classroom (10 minutes late) and nobody's there.... He goes, oh, that's just kind of how the first day is sometimes. I guess you have some free time. Enjoy! Uh... being me I just sat down and read, and contemplated buying coffee but my paralyzing paranoia of social interaction kept me glued to my kneewall until I saw María Eugenia, the really nice student-affairs lady, walk over to her office. I strategically waited long enough for her to establish herself in her office in SERVICIOS ESCOLARES before approaching. She was very kind and told me to go get a medical interview around the corner in SERVICIOS MEDICOS. So I did. The secretary was sort of curt at first so I was nervous, and when I'm nervous my Spanish fails me... but the nurse and doctor were super cool and I regained my linguistic footing with them. Entonces... en final, I did get coffee, and pretended to read some more before trying to go to the other class I was going to check out. No dice. So I went in search of someone to cling to: Bayardo, the coordinator of the Ingeniería Agrícola major. He said, well, let's have you check out the Practicum IV class. So he walks me over there and basically shoves me into a class underway and announces: look at the foreigner; she is interested in this class, so let her be here! That is all! And everyone looked at me. And it's like, I am from another planet. They are all staring at my tentacles and antennae-eyes. What the fuck is happening to me?? So I sit down, they make me announce my name, and the class turns out to be super fascinating. They separate us into groups and we're going to get to go into the field for a couple weeks after the semester ends. We have to do research and group work in the meantime, but the class is just one session a week and sounds totally badass, so I'm happy to be here. The kids in my group seem pretty cool, but I'm totally intimidated by the academics of it, even though everyone seems really chill about it. After class I talk with the prof and she seems pleased to have me around, so no problem there. Outside one girl from my group is hanging around with some other kids and we get to talking; the fruit production professor walks by (kind of a pleasantly-nutty, Tom Gradziel type), and it turns out that he's neat, so I'm stoked on fruit-production. Then the girl invites me out for a chela (a forty) with her friends and I accept. We walk into town and there's this house-by-night-pub-by-day place that we go to, where there's nothing on the walls and just a bunch of folding tables with plastic lawn chairs and a bunch of students drinking (this is 3 in the afternoon mind you). I don't have any money so I don't partake (wise anyway... this is my first day after all!). I excuse my nonparticipation with that fact and the additional one that I haven't eaten in 7 hours so it would probably upset my stomach. Two of the girls (we're a group of about 8) go to the market and come back with food for me, without my consent. We hang out for a couple hours, and the guys down an impressive amount of alcohol (officially giving the Irish a run for their money, as I was the only Irish kid there of course...). We head back to campus, me and two of the girls, and I catch Bayardo again to tell him how much I liked the class he brought me to, and he goes, oh, that's nice. And then I am whisked away by a plant path professor who introduces me to a weed science professor who is going to be a visiting prof at Davis come Spring (how I miss you, PES!). They're both very nice and talkative, and eventually I escape back to my new pals who invite me to various theoretical events as well as into their group for the field course, and they take me to the pesero stop and a very relieved Cat gets into the van and goes back to the house. I get in, and Señora Gloria feeds me, tortas de papa con frijolitos, ensalada y una salsita de chile verde y papalo. Goodness gracious that's tasty. Then arroz con leche, with a little canela on top, life is good. Family members accumulate around the table and they proceed to ask me all sorts of things about the English language. The two daughters speak really good English.

They're closing the Guantánamo torture-chamber-prison-industrial-complex according to Mexican TV news. Go Obama! Do it!

There are a ton of “Don't get sold as a sex slave” ads on TV. Gosh.

Lastly these are photos of Daniel´s answer to ghostriding. In case you can´t interpret my poor photography, he has welded an axle onto the back of his rear rack and you can just seat the fork on their and bolt that sucker together. Genius. It looks like the bikes are mating, though.