popurrí

There is a really, really whiny little girl next door who has approximately 84 nuclear-grade meltdowns every day. She seems to have a sixth sense for when she is going to irritate the most people possible in a ten block radius.. especially if those people (*cough* me *cough*) are trying to nap. The whining and the crying and the shrieking is really just a bit much. I will definitely not miss her when I leave.. which, incidentally, is less than two weeks from now. Hard to believe we've been here this long.

This weekend we just bummed around and went to some museums. Friday night we went out with some friends from school, as it was Andrew's last night here. We went on a tour of the city with the callejoneadas; click the link to see who they are/what they do. It was an interesting experience for me in particular. I'll post some pictures & an explanation eventually.. ¡ojalá! After that we went to Zilch for a couple of hours. Jaime, Amber and I were pretty tired so we left "early" (probably around 2am).

Saturday, we got up, ate breakfast, and then went back to bed. Well, Amber and Jaime napped, but I messed around with blogger until I finally got up my Mexico City post. We eventually went to the Museo Casa Diego Rivera after we had lunch, which is a museum dedicated to Diego Rivera located in his childhood home. There were a couple of contemporary exhibits too, but nothing by which I was particularly impressed. Afterwards, we came back here and I napped.. not sure about the others. About 8:30 we went downtown and got pizza at a place called Peter's Pizza. It was super good but we had way too much food. After that, we walked around for a while and then went to El Bar. Apparently Saturday is the big night for salsa there so we wanted to check it out. At first it was okay, but after a while this guy started bothering us. He sat at our table, insisted we move to his table, we said no, so then he brought the case of beer that he had purchased to our table for us to drink. Well, we're not stupid, so none of us touched it. We didn't want to be rude so we each "danced" with him a little bit, but I swear he was on drugs. None of his sentences made sense, except when he was trying to get one of us to go home with him. At first it was just annoying, but eventually he started to creep us out. José, one of the dance instructors, and his friend (girlfriend?) came to sit with us after a while because he could see that the guy was bothering us. Eventually he picked Amber up (as in lifted her in the air) on the dance floor so we left immediately after that. I think we were too worried about being rude, because none of the Mexican women there paid him the slightest bit of attention, unless it was to tell him that NO they did not want to dance with him and NO they did not want any of his beer and NO they were not going to go home with him. We really probably should have been more firm. For my part, I didn't interact with him as much as the other girls because I ended up dancing with a different weirdo-- long hair, tight pants and ugly boots. It was an excellent combination. Really the icing on the cake was that every ten second he would say "Eso, eso es (For the intonation, it was more like "Esssoohh, essooohhh es"; translates as "That's it, there you go," because I actually kind of have an idea of what I'm doing.) It was kind of creepy but he really seemed pretty harmless so I think it was more funny.. or, at the very least, it's more funny now. At any rate, he was better than the creeper who wouldn't leave us alone. After that, we were pretty disillusioned with the whole going-out scene (not to mention pissed off), so we just went home. It didn't help that earlier in the evening, a man had run by on the sidewalk and slapped Amber's butt (and kept running). We were not exactly pleased. (Sidebar-- the same thing happened to me in Almuñecar, Spain, two years ago... except that the perpetrator in this case was a 12-year-old boy. I'm really not sure which is worse.)

Sunday, we went to the Museo Iconográfico del Quijote, which is a museum entirely full of artists' representations of Don Quijote. Pretty cool. As I mentioned, Rosario essentially started the museum and I believe was in charge of it until she retired. We saw her friend Paco while we were there. I think he runs it now but I could be wrong; at the very least he works there. Part of the reason that we went Sunday is that admission is free.. can't beat free! After that, we shopped a bit and then came home and ate. After lunch, we discovered that we had an avian visitor and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to chase it out of our house. The bird must have flown in through the door/window upstairs that we leave open because of the heat. When I came upstairs he was in the bathroom, and when he heard us he got really agitated, flew around the room, into the wall and then fell down the staircase opening. He seemed okay though because after a while we got him to fly out the door downstairs. After that we napped (or tried to, given that the brat next door had like seven gran mal fits over god knows what). We stayed in the rest of the evening and just kind of hung out. Fortunately the internet was working again because earlier in the day it wasn't. I think we all needed the time to relax.

We started new classes again today. This week, we have a grammar class, two conversation classes, the latin dance class, a class on the history of Mexico and a class on Mexican culture, specifically art. It should be interesting. Hopefully not too much homework this week!

Well, I'm off to relax for an hour before I have to get ready and go to salsa classes. The girls tell me I didn't look half bad Saturday night so hopefully I'm getting something out of it! Now if we could only find some place to take salsa lessons in Marquette...