my weekend and a fixed link

So, I just realized that the link to the Jackson C. Frank song in my Pandora post doesn't work. Here is the correct link to his song "Blues Run the Game." I'll fix it in the other post, too.

In other news, I tackled my closet last night (finally). I'm going to get the rest of my room cleaned up this weekend. Once everything is sparkling I'll post some pictures. I have more photos from Mexico to put up, too, so hopefully that will get done within the next couple of days.

I spent most of this past weekend on my couch. My shoulder had been causing me tremendous amounts of pain so I finally went to the doctor on Friday morning. With the help of a muscle relaxer/painkiller cocktail my shoulder has greatly improved. Most of this time was spent reading.. it paid off because I finally finished The Prince of Tides. It was pretty good. (Next up: The Time Traveler's Wife.) I also spent a lot of time hanging out with Ashleigh and Carolyn, watching movies. I highly recommend Sunshine Cleaning, by the way. We did do one extremely exciting thing this weekend but I'm not going to post about that later!

Well, I'm going to turn in for the night. I have a meeting with the Sociology and Social Work department head in the morning, and then it's Latin for the rest of the day to prep for my first exam on Thursday: Puella defessa est Sara et dormire vult =]

Pandora- Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

I'm loving Pandora lately. My favorite station right now is based off of the song "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" by Bob Dylan.

Some of the songs on the station that I love right now (not including Dylan himself, since we all know I adore him) are:

*"Blackbird" - The Beatles

*"Catch the Wind" - Donovan

*"The Road I'm on (Gloria)" - Dion

*"Empy Chairs" - Don McLean

*"From the Morning" - Nick Drake

*"Blues Run the Game" - Jackson C. Frank

*"Kathy's Song" - Simon and Garfunkel

*"Landslide" - Fleetwood Mac [the original.. NOT the Dixie Chicks version.]

*"New Paint" - Loudon Wainwright III [live version; the song starts at 1:15]

*"A Good Time" - John Prine [I couldn't find the original, but here are a few covers: one. two. They're unfortunately not very good.]

*"What You Stole From Me" - Tom Kimmel [I love this, but it was impossible to find it online. The song is from a live album titled Bones; here are the lyrics.]

There have also been a few good covers of Dylan songs.. but ultimately none compare to the original songs.

recipe: Barbecue Sauce/Pulled Pork

I made pulled pork sandwiches today, and I must say, they were excellent. (I also made tuna macaroni salad, which was pretty good too.)

I had leftover shredded pork from last week. We had made a pork tenderloin in the crock pot with chopped onions for flautas, so I thought that making pulled pork sandwiches would be a good way to use up the leftover meat. I also made homemade barbecue sauce! And, since I am extremely generous (modest, too), I'm going to share the recipe. I think this originally came from a Paula Deen recipe but I'm not sure.

Barbecue Sauce

*1 cup ketchup

*1/4 cup brown sugar

*2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lime juice (orange or lemon juice would work as well)

*1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce

*1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

*1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

*a few "dashes" of liquid smoke

*salt and pepper

Mix well, and let sit for at least an hour. I made it last night and left it in the fridge overnight. Pretty much all the ingredients can be adjusted according to taste. I personally added a bit more of the mustard and the cayenne pepper.

I threw my meat back in the crockpot on low, stirred in my bbq sauce and just let it sit all day until dinner time... and MMMMM was it good! Bon appetit!

el DF: parte dos b

[I split this post into two parts because it was just too long; this is the second half.]

After we left the basilica, we made our way to Teotihuacán, which is something like 30 miles outside of Mexico City. Before going to las pirámides (the pyramids), we stopped at a shop owned by local stone artisans-- El Sol: Piezas Finas en Obsidiana y Cuarzo (The Sun: Fine Pieces in Obsidian and Quartz). They provided tiny shots of tequila, pulque, and tuna juice (not the fish! the tuna is the fruit of the nopal cactus) so that we could taste them, but I'm a huge chicken so I passed on all of them. Then we got a demonstration on how they make their stone figures, after which point we got to poke around their shop. I bought a little pig and a little squirrel carved out of obsidian. After that, we took this picture:

...and then we had lunch there. Lunch was a very heavy type of corn bread with nopales (remember? cactus!), guacamole, and bananas for dessert:

We had some entertainment during lunch. As it turns out, Oscar is a mariachi singer in addition to being a driver, so he and some guys that just happened to be there and just happened to know how to play instruments performed for us. Gerson found an afro wig and jumped on the bongos (see, I told you he was weird) and Kyle joined him. Here's a picture of the "band":

From there, we drove to the pyramids. Teotihuacán was not, as is commonly though, built by the Aztecs. In fact, no one really knows anything for sure about the culture of the people that built the city, which is believed to have been home to as many as 200,000 people. When the Aztecs showed up some 700 years after the city had been abandoned, they gave it the name of Teotihuacán, a Nahuatl word meaning "the place where the gods were made", or "birthplace of the gods". They were quite impressed with the city, and took up residence there until the Spanish conquest. anyway.

This is a view of the Pirámide de la Luna, or the Moon Pyramid, taken when we first got to the central part of the complex. Note how the top of the pyramid looks a bit crunched in; a Japanese firm was excavating inside the pyramid until early this year, when the top section began to collapse. The firm was expelled and the internal structure fortified, but visitors are no longer allowed to climb to the top of the pyramid. We climbed as far up as we were allowed.

The steps on both pyramids were extremely steep. This picture was taken looking down the steps of the Moon Pyramid.

I love this picture. That's the Pirámide del Sol (Sun Pyramid) in the background.

Here's the standard tourist photo: me on the Moon Pyramid, with the Sun Pyramid in the background.

Yes, I wore a dress. Yes, it was a dumb idea.

View of the city with the Sun Pyramid

the Sun Pyramid

After much huffing and puffing, we all made it to the top of the Sun Pyramid!

Remember what I said about the dress? I've affectionately dubbed this picture "the Marilyn".

View of the Moon Pyramid

We had to walk a little ways to get out of the complex; this is the view on the way out.

After exhausting ourselves on the Pyramids, we headed back to the Hotel Moneda, where I discovered a nice sunburn (apparently I missed one of my shoulders with my sunscreen.. as well as the tops of my feet).  We just kind of hung out for a bit, I smashed my face into a metal locker, and then we headed to dinner. Kyle has some friends from his graduate program that are living in the city right now, so we met them for dinner. I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but it was a cool little place. We got pizza and hung out for a couple of hours.

All of us were pretty beat by the time we got back to the hostel, so we went to bed relatively early so that we could get up early the next day and do yet another tour. Thus ended day #2 in Mexico City!

el DF: parte dos a

This post goes waaayyy back to my second day of three in Mexico City (I hate to admit this, but that was all the way back on July 11th). It's also extremely long, with approximately 20872027 photos. [update: the post was just too long, so I split it into two parts. This is the first half.]

Saturday morning, we got up early-ish and ate breakfast at the hostel. Then we headed downstairs to catch our tour. There were just five of us, which was a nice sized group: Kelly, Kyle, me, and a lovely Danish couple whose names I can't recall. I think the girl was named Ann, but beyond that I'm stumped. We loaded into a large van with Oscar, our driver, and Gerson, our very interesting tour guide. Case in point: he was wearing a giant sombrero.

First stop on the tour was Tlatelolco. First, we walked through the archaeological excavation (more ruins, surprise surprise). Tlatelolco was the twin city of Tenochtitlán. It was here that Hernán Cortés defeated the Aztecs under Cuauhtémoc in 1521, a decisive moment in Mexican history. An estimated more than 40,000 indigenous people died in that massacre.

the ruins at Tlatelolco; the building in the background is the museum.

Different constructions of the Templo Mayor, or main temple

Every so often, the Aztecs would build over their current temple to make it bigger.

"The 13th of August of 1521, heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc, Tlatelolco fell into the power of Hernan Cortes. It was not a triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of of the mestizo people that is the Mexico of today."

Next to the ruins is the Templo de Santiago, or church of Saint James, built by the Spanish in the seventeenth century. In Spain, James became the patron saint of the Reconquista: Santiago Matamoros, or Saint James the Moor-Slayer. In Mexico, he underwent a transformation to Santiago Mataindios-- Saint James the Indian-Slayer. Our tour guide was quite incensed that Mexican people (who are essentially all mestizo) would worship at a church celebrating the murder of their "indian" ancestors.

Templo de Santiago

Between the ruins and the church is the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, or Plaza of the Three Cultures. It is so called because it is flanked by three different cultures: pre-Colombian (ruins of Tlatelolco), colonial Spanish (Templo de Santiago) and modern Mexican or mestizo (housing complex). This was the site of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, often referred to as la Noche Triste or the Sad Night. On the evening of October 2, 1968, Mexican police fired on a large student demonstration in the plaza. Several hundred people were killed, but the Mexican government placed the death toll at 30. These events are still a source of anger in Mexico today; the famous 1989 film Rojo Amanecer (Red Dawn) is about the massacre, and another film, Tlatelolco: Mexico 68, is currently rumored to be in production. It was definitely eerie standing in the plaza knowing what had happened there.

Me in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas

This is the memorial dedicated to those who died in the 1968 massacre.

After that, we drove to Tepeyec and the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, or Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe is arguably the most recognizable symbol of Mexico. By legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to the indian Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill in the early sixteenth century and left her image burned into his cloak, which he had filled with roses. Construction on the basilica in her honor, which would house the cloak with the Virgin's image, began shortly thereafter but was not finished until nearly 200 years later, in the early eighteenth century. There are actually two basilicas at this site now. The new, much larger basilica (Nueva Basílica) was built in the 1970s because the old one (Antigua Basílica) was --guess what?-- sinking. The basilica is one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world. Some estimates place it second only to Vatican City. The church was stunning.. and it was absolutely packed.

the Antigua Basílica

the Nueva Basílica

Me in front of the basilicas

This is the interior of the Nueva Basílica. The photo doesn't really do it justice, but it was gorgeous.

My favorite part was the view from the Capilla del Cerrito (Chapel on the Hill), which is a climb above the rest of the site.

Here's me with the basilicas and the city in the background.

Kelly, Kyle and me

View from the Hill

a rose in the church gardens

Cinnaberry!

I dyed my hair about two weeks ago, and I really liked it but I used semi-permanent dye and it faded really quickly. So, I bought another box! My friend Ashleigh helped me dye it last night when we were supposed to be doing homework. Here's the finished product, since I didn't put up a picture last time. Hopefully the color sticks around longer this time!

The color is darker than the camera would have you believe, but I still like it. By the way, for those interested, I used Clairol Natural Instincts in #22 Cinnaberry (Medium Auburn Brown).