brain crabs

April 10th and 11th

(Bec)
Monday was a pretty productive day. Jon spent a good portion of the morning on the phone with Cingular trying to get our cell phone situation worked out. I am sorry if anyone has been trying to call us without success. No one ever really told us what the problem was with the phones, but through a series of exclamations and, “Wow! This is messed up!” from the Cingular operators we guessed it was bad. I think we can both send and receive calls and text messages now. We’ll see.

After that fiasco, we met Allie and went over to the Instituto to sign up for classes. We got to meet some of Allies teachers like Elvira and Carlos. Unfortunately the class we wanted to sign for started in the beginning of April, so we bought two weeks of private tutoring until we can start a class in May. Our tutoring begins Monday the 17th. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also thinking of taking a Mexican weaving course in May. Allie’s friend Alice said that she saw some really beautiful rugs and tapestries that had been made in the class.

For lunch, we went with Allie to the gordita place by the biblioteque and gorged ourselves. It was so good! I could only eat one with nopales (cactus salad), guacamole and queso, but Jon and Allie each had two with mole and chorizo respectively. We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and into the library. We browsed for a bit and then Allie went off to tutor while Jon and I came back to the apartment for a siesta; an idea which, by the way, makes a lot of sense. It gets boiling hot here in the afternoon and we are still not acclimated.

(Jon)
On our way home, we stopped and procured a few essentials, one of which was the biggest, meanest can of Raid that we could find. We had a small can of mosquito-grade spray but it didn’t annihilate our small plague of roaches with quite the efficiency and decimation that this battle required. I mean, these are a few tiny roaches (not the big, foot-long ones) and they’re more of a gross nuisance than anything. But if you give them an inch, they take over the entire apartment and try to lay eggs in you. I wasn’t about to stand for that, so when browsing the considerable insecticide selection at the pharmacia, I was pleased to find exactly the kind of roach-killing spray that my arsenal required: Raid Max (with lightening letters). On the side of the label were a series of small icons of insects with crosshairs over them, indicating the breadth of species-wide destruction that the poison could wreak. I was happy to find that the crosshairs included roaches in the veritable menagerie of potential victims. However, I wasn’t totally sold until, further down the list, there was a big, red crosshair barely containing the even bigger, meaner silhouette of a scorpion. That’s right, motherfuckers: Scorpion Strength Raid. The lightening letters alone told me that this was going to make mosquito strength spray look like mild salsa to the roaches but the scorpion icon gave me visions of a sky-opening nuclear day of cucaracha-reckoning.
“Hell-fucking-yeah,” I said as I snatched the big gold and black can off the shelf. Needless to say, we were the Dark Angels of Ultimate Roach Slaughter that afternoon.

So, with no roaches left in our house, our neighbor’s houses, and the greater San Miguel region, we were ready for a nap. After a siesta, we met Allie and a number of her friends at the hotel by the square for the daily two-for-one margarita happy hour that they have. Mmmmm. It’s a gorgeous spot. It’s one of many old haciendas that have been converted into hotels with open-air restaurants in the courtyards. The place is usually dead except for a couple small groups of stuffy looking gringos. After a few too many, we went next door to Ten Ten Pie, a great restaurant where we had too much to eat. After dinner, I went and played some pool at a nearby pool-hall with Allie’s friend Nico. He was kind enough to drive me home on his motorbike (more of a scooter) but riding one of those hair-dryers through the streets of San Miguel was the closest to death that I’ve come since riding in a Beijing taxi.

April 11th:

Early today we hopped in a cab and took a ride up the mountainside to the Tuesday market. As you can probably guess by its name, it’s a market that opens every Tuesday. What its name doesn’t reveal, however, is the sheer enormity and density of this market. Imagine everything you could possibly need being sold by thousands of vendors occupying an area the size of a football field. We were so blown away by our initial visit that we could hardly absorb it. I took a couple photos that do very little to capture the experience. It’ll definitely warrant a second visit and, quite likely, its very own post.

This entry was posted by jon on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.