Guitar and Suit Day

For those of you unfamiliar with Guitar and Suit Day, it is basically a day where you put on a suit, pack up your guitar, and walk around a large city thinking you are really cool all day. Whether or not you are actually really cool is not so important. Come to think of it, you don't really even need to know how to play the guitar. You could probably get away with walking around with an empty guitar case. Anyway, if you can pull off bringing your guitar into the offices of a giant corporation and playing for some employees, all the better, no? Aside from how happy it made me to be playing Weezer on the top floor of an office building in middle of Mexico City, I think that the students really enjoyed the lesson and hopefully learned something.

I am really looking forward to my schedule not changing anymore. After having two classes cancelled and getting stuck with a four and a half hour Saturday class that the students inexplicably thought would be much improved if it started at eight in the morning rather than nine, I received a call from one of my several bosses informing me that they were giving me another class in Santa Fe. At this point, I flipped out a little bit, especially when they told me that they had to do it because I only had 19 hours when I knew full well that I had 22. So I told them they could have either the Saturday class or the Santa Fe class but not both. They chose Santa Fe, and I told them to write my schedule in stone, and ever since then they have stopped calling me every twenty minutes, and everyone is being really nice to me.

Not having to answer my phone every twenty minutes has given me more time to enjoy Mexico's little treasures, like the fact that sometimes there are holes in the road... and sometimes wee little cars get stuck in said holes. Sometimes these holes happen to be in the middle of an important intersection, creating a chorus of car horns which can likely rival any in the world. This pleases me.

But on a more serious note, I have also begun to take more notice of the poverty which is so prevalent here. I mean, just look at this poor, barefoot woman staring longingly through the glass at this zapateria... oh, wait... that's just Irene. Seriously, though, poverty's not funny, and it is everywhere here. It is to the point that you often can't even sit outside at some cafes because someone will come up to you literally every two minutes asking for money, and you can't give it to everybody.

I went to eat dinner at my friend Orly's grandmother's house the other night. It was amazing, and apparently she is under the impression that I am a bottomless receptacle for chile relleno. It is comforting to know that I now have a Mexican abuela nearby.

I have also become friends with some of my students and have gone out with them a couple of times. They seem to be under the impression that I am a bottomless receptacle for tequila, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad but always entertaining. My Spanish has improved tremendously, but I have found that it is exceedingly difficult to follow conversation in a bar with music and so many people talking at once.

Oh, I have one more funny thing. Check out these pictures of my current residence (top) and my parents' house in Austin. It's not quite an exact match, but those are some pretty similar color schemes. I was amused.

I have next Monday off, so perhaps I will get in some traveling now that I have rid myself of my Saturday class. And seriously, can someone explain to me why starting a class at eight in the morning on Saturday, before the school even opens, is a better idea than starting at nine, which is already a horrible idea? In what context does this make sense? Am I crazy here? I can't get over this. This really troubles me.