Me and my amoebae

I’ve got amoebas! I’m Officially Sick!

I’m quite strangely cheerful and excited about this, which makes perfect sense when you consider that (a) I have been feeling nauseous on and off since last Wednesday—though not dramatically ill enough to be dramatically ill and get it over with, or not work—and I’m getting a bit fed up with it, and now I have a prescription to make me better, and (b) Mike said the doctor [who is on campus, and free] would want stool samples, and he didn’t. I feel as one reprieved. Only the prospect of neverending nausea made me swallow my dignity and go.

My dignity is not, however, unscathed. The doctor played at poking my stomach really hard and asking if it hurt (“yes it does, you’re poking it really hard…”). At the sight of my skin he recoiled in horror, crying “You’re too pale! Are you always that colour?”. To which my response was a mumbled Yes, but in my head was “Yes, you fucker, yes I am. We can’t all be a nice shade of brown, and as it happens corpse white IS my natural hue where not exposed to sunshine, Mr Sensitive Bedside Manner”. Fucker.

Still, I’ve got amoebas! Yay!

Adventure #3: When fairyland packs its bags

Since I saw La Purification (or La Puri to the cool kids) I’d been itching to go back there and take pictures. I know the pictures in my head should be enough, in fact they’re better, but…

So I was toying with the idea, and wondering if I could walk (having an unreasoning opposition to calling taxis unless I have to), and Mike thought it would take about 45 minutes, and suggested that I could easily pick up a taxi up to get back.

Now this turned out to be blatantly the wrong way round, as La Puri is up a bloody great hill. Also, my house is deceitfully always cold, so I didn’t quite realise that blue sky outside + no shade = really quite hot.

Ten minutes after I leave my house, I’m reaching the main gates of the centre, and wondering if Mike might have been a little bit optimistic. Forty-five minutes after I leave my house, I’m still walking along the highway, just reaching the turn-off to La Puri, and having uncharitable thoughts about Mike. Walking along the highway isn’t quite as dangerous as it sounds, as there is lots of edge, but is still no fun: vehicles whistling past at high speed, lorry drivers honking their horns, traffic fumes, and that delicious odour you get in a place where it’s de rigeur to chuck your rubbish by the side of the road…

I was hot, tired and grumpy, and turning off the highway onto a long, dull road and eventually starting up the bloody great hill didn’t cheer me up much… No, it took the graveyard to do that.

Coming up a long curve in the road it appeared ahead like an oasis. I fell in love with it straight away, and though I was a bit nervous about the etiquette of taking pictures in a cemetery on a Sunday, I did anyway. It was beautiful place, white graves with tin cans of flowers, hidden amongst stunted trees and tangles of wildflowers, angels with furled wings and Marias with bowed heads, all dusty and sunbaked and peaceful, and not another soul there. If I’m clever enough to put them in in the right place, here are some pictures:




































Somehow the cemetery and the break transformed me: I started to enjoy walking, and appreciate the clear high air, and the views, and the masses of wild flowers along the road:




















Arriving in La Puri I saw two very cool buses gently rusting by the side of the road, with unicorns painted in their windows:




















As I went on I began to feel discomfited that the bunting was not as I remembered it. There was lots of ‘Viva Mexico’ bunting in red, white and green, and some of the cellophane flowers, but none of the multicoloured stuff I remembered. Well, I reasoned, the Viva Mexico bunting must have been up for Independence Day too (though I didn’t notice it in amongst the coloured stuff), and they wouldn’t take one kind of bunting down and leave up the other, so it must have been a bit further that the magic bunting was up. I remembered coming round a corner and seeing it all laid out in front of me, but as I went on around each corner, still no moment of wonder.




























So, either I am completely mad and deluded…. Or, the inhabitants of La Puri weirdly left up the Viva Mexico bunting, and some of the sparkly cellophane bunting, but took away the magic multicoloured bunting, all in three days. I maintain that I’m not completely mad and deluded, but I’ll have to wait next Independence Day to prove it – when I’m determined to go up there again and finally capture it. Except that I know, really, the pictures in my head ARE the best ones.

La Puri is nice, but no fairyland. It’s pretty and quiet and ordinary and the air feels sweet. It’s got lots of the kind of shops that sell everything – fruit and sweet things in packets, bread and biscuits and cans of coke and bottles of drinking yoghurt – with awnings onto the roadside and cool, dark interiors, and lanky dogs flopped wherever they fancy.




















What it doesn’t seem to have is taxis, at least on Sundays. I was quite proud of myself when I worked out that I could take a bus and boldly flagged it down on the least blind bend I could find. All the way home I was fascinated by the enormous chrysanthemums that wobbled in tiny vases stuck to the side of the bus, in front of a small, murky crucifix.

This is what happens when you brave the big smoke

I am going to keep posting my adventurettes in chronological order, and hopefully catch up to the present, otherwise I think it will be just too confusing.

I do, however, feel the need to share this:

I went to Mexico City. I didn't get robbed, which is good. I DID get GROPED, which is really quite weird. I'm not distressed, but I'm kind of creeped out by the whole experience.

My First Grope. Just another of life's little milestones...

Social fuckwittage

I am so full of self loathing this evening.

I was just coming to the end of a long day of shopping and errand-running in Texcoco today when I ran into some people in an unexpected place. They were people from the centre, two of whom I have met once and liked very much, and two of whom I haven't met yet.

One of them said hi, another of them said hi, I said hi, and then felt really awkward and afraid and shy and stood there looking at some signs in Spanish and then ran (wandered) away.

So not only have I wasted an opportunity to chat, maybe even hang out a bit, start to get to know these people (and it would be REALLY good to get to know some more young people that I can do stuff with)... no, not only that, but now they think I am an aloof, unfriendly cow.

Great.

I hate being such a social cripple. It's not like I am always a social cripple any more, so people don't realise and make allowances. No, it's just sometimes that this paralysing terror of other people floods over me and so I look unfriendly or weird or boring.

Non fuckwits will probably think I'm making a big deal out of this, but I really find it so hard letting go when I feel I've screwed up with people. So now even though I'd been in a good mood, I'm not just pissed off about that, I'm thoroughly godawful miserable and everything looks bleak. Stupid brain.

Bah, humbug

The back of my neck is peeling off in the most disgusting and uncomfortable way

I am Not In A Good Mood.

The two things may be connected.

(Be thankful I spared you a picture.)

Candy houses and bauble trees

It seems that pictures are considered A Good Thing, even if they're not exactly stunningly interesting. I finally got round to taking some pictures of where I live, so here are a selection for your viewing pleasure (appearing in a totally weird order and layout for no reason I can fathom and not as I attempted). First up is the housing area. My apartment is the first floor window on the end of the blue building that you can see on the left. I think it is a fine thing to live in a house the colour of the sky (I have been influenced in this by Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart, by Alice Walker, which is a wonderful, beautiful, profoundly moving and altering book, or it was to me, and I recommend it) but I also like the warm colours of the other houses. Apparently each building got to vote on their colour when they were repainted from white a couple of years ago (which seems like an aesthetically dangerous strategy to me, though it's worked well) and it's still causing ructions...
















Here is the view from my front window. You can just see the mountains in the background, and in the foreground the football pitch. It's kind of fun watching the guys play football, only I have to try to not look like a net curtain-twitching weirdo.
















There are a number of these trees between house and office, and I like them very much. Apparently the lots of little pink fruits are some kind of false pepper (they have a peppery smell) - they make me think of tiny Christmas baubles.
















The main office building - with the corner of a maize plot in the foreground.
















The view from my back window. Nuff said.

Adventure #2: I’m with the band

So Mike is a small town rock star, and he had said that I should come along to see his band on Saturday evening. And then on Friday I reminded him to give me the name of the bar, and he was a little surprised. It transpired that he’s going to be playing there every Saturday night, and I felt kind of stupid and overeager, but I’d already said I’d go.

This was my second trip into Texcoco, the first on my own, and my first entanglement with a Mexican bus. My adventure did not begin auspiciously. I walked a deceptively long way down the highway to get to an underpass where cars can get to the other side and where I knew there was a bus stop on the other side. I have since vowed never to set foot in the underpass again, and have nominated it My Least Favourite Place in Mexico. It smells, it is lit by a sickly yellow light, across the ‘road’ flows a filthy stream. Which is fine if you’re a car, but not so fine if you’re a person. There are a couple of tiny, untrustworthy-looking stepping stones leering up at you, but in the end I opted for a kind of tiptoeing wade where it was ‘shallow’.

Later Mike told me you can just flag the bus down by the side of the road. Doh.

I had a few errands to run, and wandering around Texcoco in the dark was kind of odd. Somehow exemplified by the deserted, neon-lit coffin shop, containing nothing but a number of coffins neatly wrapped in plastic. It seemed rather macabre, especially when I saw the SECOND neon-lit coffin shop. (Yes, it was definitely a different one.)

Meeting a whole load of people at the bar was my first introduction to Mexican etiquette, the rudiments of which can be summarised as follows:
- When someone arrives whom you know, or are introduced to, you either shake hands or kiss them (once, to the left), or probably both.
- Everyone says hello to and embraces and is friendly with everyone else, regardless of generation.
- Interaction is encouraged, especially smiling, laughter and general merriment.
- When you leave, you must say goodbye to everyone, even if you’re not entirely (or at all) sure who they are. You kiss, shake hands, or probably both.

It was all a bit intimidating at first, especially because hardly anyone was there when I arrived (10pm? Practically afternoon…). I was introduced to two very nice but non-English-speaking Mexicans and sat there feeling like a bit of a lemon. However, one of them (a man) did have an excellent enormous moustache displayed to perfection on a small and very smiley bald head, which required a certain amount of quiet, discreet and admiring gazing in itself, much like the better class of art gallery.

As the evening went on it got less scary and more fun, as more people arrived for me to meet and the band started their set. They play rock and roll of the fun, chair-dancing kind where Mike got to do that thing where you run your hand all the way up the keyboard and off the end in a flourish. The man can sing too. In fact, I suspect he can do everything. Pchah. I talked the drummer in the band, and a boy who seems to do an impossible amount of things, including a degree in making false limbs that move (not the technical name I’m sure), and first aid and some kind of civil guard and Very Serious Boy Scouting (which is Not At All Amusing).

Somehow, by the time midnight rolled round I was getting sorry to leave. But I had to, or I would’ve turned into a pumpkin.

Little grass is smiling slightly

I love this so very much (thank you Laura):

Chinese sign: Little grass is smiling slightly, please walk on the pavement.

Adventure #1: into the unknown (or, the supermarket)

My actual boss is David, the head of the communications team, but he was away when I arrived and I didn’t meet him until a week later. The man I often think of (affectionately) as (one of) my boss(es) is Mike, who is the science writer/editor and gives me more things to do.

Mike is Lovely. He is married to a Mexican and has lived here a long time, so he knows everything and everyone and speaks excellent Spanish. He is also, I think, possessed of real generosity of spirit, and is a nice man. He has answered innumerable stupid questions of mine, given advice, been my translation service, organised things for me and generally done me an awful lot of favours to help me settle in and feel happy. The greatness of Mike cannot, in fact be overestimated: for example, we are already trading friendly insults, and conversations about work things have a tendency to deteriorate into conversations about interesting things, like, today, poetry, with the result that we have begun swapping poems.

On my first Thursday in Mexico, Mike took me shopping, and being Lovely, he took me the scenic route so I could see a bit of the surrounding villages. The drive is windy up into the mountains, casually beautiful wildflowers by the road, and gnarly prickly pears.

And then we turned round a corner and into a fairy story. All the streets of La Purification, the village we were driving through, were festooned with bunting from Independence Day. But not just any bunting – it was every colour of the rainbow, beautiful, bright, vibrant colours, and it wasn’t just plain triangles – the flags were rectangular, and cut out in designs a bit like a doily. In amongst the coloured flags were strings of things like flowers made of cellophane and foil, which caught the sunlight. Looking down the street I could see what seemed like endless bright flags sparkling in the sunlight, into the far distance. I don’t really remember what the village was actually like at all, just that it seemed beautiful, joyful, a charmed place. There was magic in the air, and in an instant I fell in love with Mexico a little. Partly because it was beautiful, but also because people had wanted and seen fit to transform their village and make it beautiful. Of course, I didn’t have a camera.

In Texcoco Mike showed me important places, like the bus station and the shop that sells Twinings tea, and we went shopping in the market and the supermarket. I buzzed about looking at things, while Mike pointed me in right directions and carried bags and pushed my trolley in a manner which clearly indicated eventual sainthood.

Grocery shopping in new places is always kind of exciting, and there are a number of exciting things to buy in Mexico, including:
- Guavas. I love guavas so very much. And they are so good here. You can also buy guava juice, guava candy, guava squash, guava cake…
- Prickly pear leaves (or whatever leaves are called on a cactus?). Here they are a vegetable. Obviously I had to buy one, never having eaten cactus before. When you cook it it kind of oozes stickily, and it has a pretty strong taste all of its own. Or at least, the way I cooked it it did.
- Baked goods. You get a tray and tongs and you’re loose among the tasty morsels. I was quite restrained, considering.
- Dried hibiscus flowers, sold in big packets to make tea. I liked the idea of making tea with flowers very much… Mike waited til we got to the checkout to tell me that it makes you wee.

Texcoco is intrinsically exciting to me because it is Mexico, but it is an unremarkable sort of place – I have not, for example seen postcards for sale anywhere. It’s a mixture of slick, modern shops and slightly murky little places stuffed full of their wares. Street stands sell all kinds of edibles, the traffic’s a little unpredictable and so are the pedestrians. Every vertical surface is painted: shop fronts are painted (although I did see an illuminated psychiatrist’s sign) and any wall that isn’t a shopfront is painted with advertisements or graffiti or both. I think I'll be happy here, or happy enough.

Bread of the Dead

Here's one I ate earlier - with a very British cup of tea. It's a little pan de muerte; they've been appearing in the shops in the run up to the Day of the Dead.

The raised bits on the top are supposed to represent bones.

Yum.

Taking it like a girl

What I said yesterday about being glad to have my emotions back?

I changed my mind.

My Life in Mexico

I’ve been in Mexico pretty much exactly two weeks and I’m sitting down to write about it for the first time.

Which is arguably pretty typical of my relationship with getting things done in general, so maybe I should cut straight to the actually-writing-about-it part. And miss a good opportunity for circumspection and self-examination? Nah…

So I’ve been feeling a lot of things, running the whole gamut of emotions from nervousness to terror in fact, and occasionally other things including happiness and miserableness and unease and excitement and loneliness.

But, in other ways I think I’ve been feeling not very much at all. And I think my brain’s been cleverly avoiding feeling very much by telling me I really really want, no need, to read trashy detective novels and watch TV, and that unaccountably I just can’t work myself up to writing any of my vast mental list of unwritten emails, or starting my blog, or reading poetry. But brain, I’ve got your number.

The kick that woke me up is that today I was in the most filthy mood – sad, lonely, annoyed with everything, hypersensitive. And I knew there was no real reason for it. There were reasons – tiredness, sunburn, hormones, faulty brain chemistry, that Monday morning feeling, the baby bird I found on the ground that ran off into a thick bush (I was then racked with worry that its parents wouldn’t find it to feed it and guilt and the unbearable sadness of it all)… but nonetheless I knew first thing this morning, walking across the dewy grass, that my emotions were something else on top of that, and that my feelings had been kind of blurred and blunted for a while, and that it was sort of good to have them back.

So anyway, sorry for being dead. I have also been taking up any and all vaguely sociable activities that get thrown at me, and feeling really tired, especially the first week – altitude I think.

So, Mexico…

It does weird things to time, travelling. A blur of finishing off, tying loose ends, the pursuit of the hallowed visa, packing, final goodbyes, no time at all… and then suddenly this big flap of time, meaningless in-flight movies in a big metal bubble… all garlanded with queues and queues and queues.

I arrived in Mexico exhausted, at the tail end of a Big Storm and my first (and so far only) impression of Mexico City was of darkness and bad air and flooded roads and long queues of traffic. Another guy from the centre was being picked up on the same trip and I chattered at the poor man most of the journey with the animation that I only seem to manage when it’s dark outside and I really need to be asleep, gazing out of the window all the while at darkness and lights.

And then, gates, and someone meeting me with a key and carrying my suitcase and bits of Spanish and bits of English. My reaction, when opening the door to my apartment, was somewhat like that of Dorothy opening the door into technicolour Oz. Actually, I don’t remember that bit of the film all that clearly, and there were no small dogs, but what I’m trying to convey is that I was quite surprised and excited and a little bit overwhelmed. My apartment is really pretty nice – a bit sparse and hotellish with that slight (70s?) timewarp feeling of the developing world, but nice. I have a double bed and my own bathroom and a big living room with a dining table and a kitchen along one wall with a slightly eccentric choice of gadgets (blender, icebucket, no kettle) and a big bowl of fruit waiting for me and a TV and even a sofa bed for visitors (hint). Also, wireless internet – woohoo! – though I only got that working this week. Anyway, if anyone’s desperately interested in my habitat I’ll post some pictures when I remember to take them. For the first little while or so I wandered about looking at things and opening cupboards (I have loads) and going Ooh. Then, in my state of extreme, near collapse tiredness, I decided I MUST (a) unpack and (b) check the itemised list of everything in the apartment (I know there is a proper name for this kind of list, damnit) for return to the housing office. So there I was, counting plates and wondering what a scratcher was (cheese grater!) and checking bedsheets until unable to actually stand. Go figure. It amuses me that I didn’t get a spatula, but a cheese grater is considered essential kitchenware. Mexicans LOVE cheese. Also sugar.

I had a bit of a weird moment when I found a contract I was supposed to sign agreeing to rent of over $700 a month, most of my salary. Now this threw me into a bit of a panic, and I was angry with myself for thinking I’d have all this money, and angry that I would only have just enough to live on and no money for having fun. I was in a really bad mood for the rest of the evening and resentful and questioning whether I should have come. It turned out the next day that I didn’t have to pay the rent after all, the paper was just to show the terms of my tenancy, but it illustrates how much control money and money-fear has over one’s/my happiness. Bah.

So the next day I got my first sights of the campus. The core of the centre is a big building full of lots of offices, the library, an auditorium etc – like any building but with that slight timewarp feeling, and lots of plants. Around that there are labs and the genebank (I’ve been inside – very cold, lots of seeds, weird being inside something built to withstand earthquakes) and big areas where seeds are stored and packed and distributed. Then there is a three-minute walk with trees and grass and the football field and you’re at the housing area. Where there are houses, surprisingly enough, and apartments and a block with rooms for temporary visitors and a posh old house for posh (old?) visitors. Also there is a big canteen and a room that turns into a bar on Fridays, and a playground and a tennis court and a small gym and a small swimming pool. Surrounding all this are fields and fields of wheat and maize.

It is a pleasant, safe place to live and work, so generally I think I ought to be happy at where I’ve landed. On the other hand, most people live and have lives in the surrounding villages, and the people who live here are fairly self-contained. It’s a ten-minute or so walk to the main gates, and then a short bus ride into Texcoco, the nearest town. Which is not inconvenient, but nonetheless I have the fear that I will end up living in a bubble and not doing things or making friends and watching a lot of Friends on the Warner channel. I know that it’s up to me to make that not the case, but none the less, I have The Fear. It’s uncomfortable not having proper friends yet and wanting the time that these things take to just get on with it, but on the other hand people are all very friendly. It’s also just a little unsettling being amongst such hardcore scientists who are fascinated by wheat diseases and genetics n’stuff.

The most terrifying thing about arriving here was whether I could be good at the work, or whether now would be that moment (you know, the one you’ve been waiting for all your life?) when I would get found out and my fraud would be exposed and everyone would know I’m rubbish after all. It occurs that I should probably clarify what I am doing: I am interning at an international agricultural research centre in Mexico for the next 12 months. I’m working for the communications team, so I’ll be spending my days writing and editing and proofreading and so on. I should probably be able to sum up what the centre does in a pithy sentence or two, but it’s late and if you're really interested I can point you at their website, which probably does it much better. Suffice it to say that it’s not all wheat diseases and genetics, the aim of the game being providing ways for poor farmers to improve their livelihoods.

Rules number one and two in the Big Book of Blogging must be “don’t give away personal information in case you get stalked” and “don’t mention your work in case you get sacked”, but, really, I can’t see this working if I don’t. Oh well. Please don’t stalk or sack me.

The build up to my first actual piece of work didn’t help my nerves, as I spent the first few days being shown round and given a computer and reading endless annual reports for background. And then my first assignment was pretty odd – interview one of the guys who works at the centre about him also being a chess master on the side, and write about it for the centre’s weekly internal bulletin. I was so very nervous – I’ve never interviewed anyone before – but it actually went well and was relaxed (I won’t go so far as to say fun…) and then Mike, the Proper Writer, really liked my piece. The relief and elation were enormous – I couldn’t stop grinning – and the guy subsequently asked for a high-resolution copy of the PDF so he could keep it for posterity! Since then I’ve edited/proofread a few things, and it seems that I can do that too, which is, again, maybe not a huge surprise objectively – I did think I could do this writing/editing thing, after all – but nonetheless SUCH a relief to know that, yes, this one thing, I can actually do.

This is clearly going to be the longest post in the world, and if you had any curiosity about My Life in Mexico, I’ve killed it nice and stony dead. Sorry. I promise subsequent posts will be shorter, if not more interesting.

Hello internet

So a few months ago I was asking google an obscure question about Lord Peter Wimsey, and I stumbled upon the amazing little.red.boat, and thence a number of other jewels-among-blogs, and so it began.

Being a person with a surfeit of words swimming about in my brain, and a penchant for blethering on, I began to think I might want a blog too. And the idea somehow got itself lodged. But I didn't actually do anything about it, telling myself if I were to have a blog, it must be a perfect blog, witty and interesting and thoughtful, designed by me just how I want it, with my own website n'all. And I (still) have no idea how to do that.

And then I got a job (alright, internship) in Mexico, and I thought a blog would be a good way to keep in touch. So, internet, I apologise that my Perfect Blog has fallen from grace and is going to be a blog-about-being-in-foreign-parts straight off the Blogger peg.

I also apologise that my next post is going to be an ENORMOUS thesis upon my first few days in Mexico. Watch this space...