Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Qué le pasa a Lupita?
For the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was Monday, there were fiestas in all the pueblos named after the virgin.
On Saturday night, a few of the teachers and I went to the tiny town of Santa Maria, the home of kindergarten teacher Cristina. The daughters of the teachers went on the expensive but crappy kiddie rides, and we drank beer and micheladas (beer with salsa and lime) and danced banda. (Only us girls danced together. It seems sketchy to dance banda with guys you don’t know, and anyway we had to entertain the toddlers.) Banda is pretty boring if you just watch it, but if you dance it you really tire yourself out having a grand old time. I’m out of shape, so after one song I was having trouble catching my breath.
When my friends kept trying to get me to dance, I said I didn’t know how to dance banda. Rocio said to me, “Es fácil; brinca como una loca y ya!” (“It’s easy; jump around like a madwoman and that’s it!”) And she was right.
Cristina’s family was lovely, and we had fresh cow’s milk at her house. Santa Maria, all four or five blocks of it (haha), was also lovely. Even the tiny towns have a huge, elaborate church in the center of town, usually with neon crosses on its multiple steeples. People in the towns are usually very religious as well, especially the women. (But absolutely everyone in Arandas, when passing any church, makes the sign of the cross. I found this odd at first because we would be in the middle of a conversation and people would just all of a sudden be making the sign of the cross. None of the Mexicans I knew in the States ever did this, even when they were in Mexico. Now it’s just normal to me—so normal, in fact, that I have to make an effort to stop from doing it myself. Maybe in a few months I’ll be doing it involuntarily. How odd, because, as my family will remember, I used to want to be Catholic when I was a kid. They laugh and say it’s because I ate a few pages of the bible when I was a baby….) When we entered the cathedral in Santa Maria, all the women immediately knelt and prayed at the pews, while the men stayed standing at the door waiting. I also knelt because otherwise I’d feel left out.
Aracely then said to me that whenever I enter a church for the first time, I can make a wish in my prayer, so I made a wish in my own non-Catholic way.
A friend of mine in Taiwan once told me a funny story. She knew someone who had gone to a fortune teller because a family member was very sick and going for an operation in the States. The fortune teller told her to pray, obviously, to the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, but while she was in the States to pray to Jesus, because that’s in his, hmm, how should we say it, jurisdiction. He’s closer there and more available to help. We found it very amusing to think that all the gods and goddesses around the world coexist and have their own precincts. Not that they can’t do anything in other precincts, but it’s just that they can’t be as available. This got me thinking about the similarities between Guanyin and the Virgin Mary. I have a beautiful picture of Guanyin back in the States, which I had on my wall in Columbus, and it occurred to me that both she and Virgin Mary cover their heads with long, flowing material, and though their hands are always in different mudras, they kind of stand in the same way. I don’t know, just having a random, digressing thought.
On Monday I got myself up early and went to mass with the students. They sang songs and brought roses to the virgin. That night I went to Capilla de Guadalupe, another pueblo, with kindergarten teacher Aracely and her husband and two daughters. There was a huge parade with lots of fancy floats and school marching bands and charros on horses and dancers doing Indian dances. I loved the horses—there are so many around here I’ll probably be able to get myself on one of them, one of these days. The floats had religious themes and very detailed replicas of the basilicas in Mexico City and the Vatican, complete with people posing frozen for a very long time. The marching bands were interesting to me because almost all the drummers were girls and all the trumpeters were boys. We ate garbanzos and nuts and I drank another michelada and got sleepy. There were no fiestas in Capilla, because the city government wouldn’t allow drinking in the streets or bands playing music. The reasoning was that the holiday is religious and should be observed religiously.
The cathedral in Capilla was decorated marvelously, with huge butterflies hanging from the ceiling and drapes all over, but there were too many people going to mass so we couldn’t even get in. We sat around in the crowds eating snacks and buying trinkets but got pretty bored so we left.
Because it’s the last week of classes, there’s a ton of stuff to do. We had the pastorela (Christmas pageant) this evening. It kind of sucked. The kids were really unprepared, and hardly anyone sang. I had to sing “Silent Night” while the kids played it on their recorders. It was mortifying but also over quickly. The kids sang the first two verses of “Jingle Bell Rock” because they couldn’t do the whole song, and they were as stiff as rods up there in their costumes, which were exquisite. The only cool thing about the pastorela was their costumes, in fact. You can count on the parents of these rich kids dressing them well for an event like this.
The students’ posadas, or Christmas parties, are tomorrow. The teachers have a lot of work to do. They have to prepare little Christmas brooches (like the ones I helped make this afternoon for all the parents attending the pastorela) and Christmas cards for all their students, and they weren’t told to do so until this afternoon. The school is also giving the students presents for Christmas—little angels made of plastic containers filled with candy and peanuts—which means the teachers are making them. We were supposed to make one for each student—about 130—but we couldn’t do it all in just a few days, so they’ve decided to give the primary grades store-bought ones while the kindergarten teachers have to finish making theirs tonight. The teachers aren’t very happy, of course. Although Monday was a holiday, we had to go to school after mass to make these angels. Yesterday afternoon we had to go back to school after classes to continue the work, and we still weren’t making much headway, so several of the teachers had to take piecework home to finish that night. I volunteered to sew more arms, so I spent about five hours sewing about sixty-five of the stupid little things. It was a pain but at the same time I really enjoyed it. The other teachers would think I’m crazy for saying so, but I like that kind of mindless manual work on occasion; it’s a good break from what we usually have to do, and I’ve always liked to make crafts. The other teachers would think I’m crazy, but I haven’t got much other stuff to do anyway, and I don’t have a family to look after like they all do, and most of them aren’t paid as much as I am either.
But one thing that takes a bit of the joy out of making these things is knowing that once all the candy is gone, these silly-looking products of our hard labor are probably just going to go right in the trash. As one of the teachers said today, "These kids, they have everything already."
It’s a real shame that the school works the teachers so hard at this time. The boss is sort of my friend, but I was very irritated with her this week when she complained to me that the teachers are all very lazy. I said, but it’s a lot of work. And she said, yes, but they have to do it. I didn’t think it was fair; I was with her in Guadalajara a couple weeks ago when she was looking for things to buy for the students, and upon realizing that the things she wanted to buy them would cost the school a lot, she decided to have the teachers make the presents for cheaper, or rather, for free. And it also really bothered me that she didn’t tell the teachers earlier what they had to prepare. Only today she’s telling them they have to make cards and brooches for all their students, and they have to go to the pastorela and also finish making the stupid angels all in the same night. No, I gladly take on more work to help the teachers finish what they have to do, especially because it appears that I get special treatment for being the native-English-speaking English teacher and am not required to help make any of this stuff. (Maybe it’s because, from my experience teaching in Taiwan, I expect to have more annoying responsibilities as an EFL teacher during holiday and performance times, having to write plays for each class and to make all the costumes and props myself.) So tonight I went to Aracely’s house with Rocio and we finished making the angels while drinking micheladas and joking around.
This is the way things happen at the school. Another reason why I was really irritated with my boss is because she also waited till the last minute to apply for my work visa. My tourist visa expires this week, and she just got the paperwork in on Monday. Sunday night she calls to tell me the photos I took (on my own initiative) were the wrong size and had to be black and white. I was to go Monday morning and get the photos taken. She got upset at Rocio and me when we didn’t have them by the afternoon, because she had expected us to have them taken during our breakfast break after mass. I was pretty peeved at her acting like it was our fault that the paperwork was delayed, because she had an entire two months to do this beforehand.
I hate to turn this blog into a complaint depository, but this is the way things are with the roommate situation as well. Whenever I report her untoward behavior to my boss, she tells me to talk to her. But I am not her mother or her babysitter or guardian in any way, and now my roommate despises me and doesn’t speak to me, so I am not going to even try to tell her what to do. She got home last night at 3:30 a.m. (I usually know what time she gets home because she makes so much noise coming home.) I keep telling my boss that I am not going to take responsibility for her behavior, so it’s best that she move out as soon as possible, especially if her family doesn’t want her to get home late and associate with muchos muchachos. But she’s still living here, and might be living here a bit longer than I expected.
Fortunately for me, she is probably going home to her town for Christmas break tomorrow, and very, very soon I will also be on break.
Luis arrives in Arandas tomorrow for a few days’ visit before going home to Zamora for Christmas. I find it difficult to contain my excitement over his visit and, afterwards, my trip to the beach with my girlfriends. Meabh and Mika are going to Zihuatanejo, which I hear is a beautiful beach in the state of Guerrero, and I will meet them and Veronica there next week. I cannot wait for warm weather and the sun and the sea…. Meabh and I will then travel elsewhere, perhaps Oaxaca, for the holidays, because neither of us are going home for Christmas. Belfast is too far and the trip too expensive for her, and though Arizona is closer, it’s still pretty far and expensive as well for me. So we’ll be two very conspicuous foreign tourists wandering around random parts of Mexico over the holidays. It could be difficult to travel and find places to stay during this time, but we’ll definitely have fun.
Then we will return to our schools to teach, but during the first two weeks of January, Arandas will have its own fiestas. None of that barring of music and drinking like in Capilla, because Arandas is a tequila-producing town and it is determined to have its usual fun. I hear there will be bands and people dancing and drinking in the streets, and probably more than the usual share of muchachos on their horses hanging around town. A good time for all guaranteed.
Might not get to post entries over the vacation, so I’ll wish everyone very happy holidays right now. Make sure to make time for yourself to relax and be full of peace and joy (I know that sounds cheesy, but I think it’s important), because unfortunately at this time of year that is not always easy…. Love to all!
On Saturday night, a few of the teachers and I went to the tiny town of Santa Maria, the home of kindergarten teacher Cristina. The daughters of the teachers went on the expensive but crappy kiddie rides, and we drank beer and micheladas (beer with salsa and lime) and danced banda. (Only us girls danced together. It seems sketchy to dance banda with guys you don’t know, and anyway we had to entertain the toddlers.) Banda is pretty boring if you just watch it, but if you dance it you really tire yourself out having a grand old time. I’m out of shape, so after one song I was having trouble catching my breath.
When my friends kept trying to get me to dance, I said I didn’t know how to dance banda. Rocio said to me, “Es fácil; brinca como una loca y ya!” (“It’s easy; jump around like a madwoman and that’s it!”) And she was right.
Cristina’s family was lovely, and we had fresh cow’s milk at her house. Santa Maria, all four or five blocks of it (haha), was also lovely. Even the tiny towns have a huge, elaborate church in the center of town, usually with neon crosses on its multiple steeples. People in the towns are usually very religious as well, especially the women. (But absolutely everyone in Arandas, when passing any church, makes the sign of the cross. I found this odd at first because we would be in the middle of a conversation and people would just all of a sudden be making the sign of the cross. None of the Mexicans I knew in the States ever did this, even when they were in Mexico. Now it’s just normal to me—so normal, in fact, that I have to make an effort to stop from doing it myself. Maybe in a few months I’ll be doing it involuntarily. How odd, because, as my family will remember, I used to want to be Catholic when I was a kid. They laugh and say it’s because I ate a few pages of the bible when I was a baby….) When we entered the cathedral in Santa Maria, all the women immediately knelt and prayed at the pews, while the men stayed standing at the door waiting. I also knelt because otherwise I’d feel left out.
Aracely then said to me that whenever I enter a church for the first time, I can make a wish in my prayer, so I made a wish in my own non-Catholic way.
A friend of mine in Taiwan once told me a funny story. She knew someone who had gone to a fortune teller because a family member was very sick and going for an operation in the States. The fortune teller told her to pray, obviously, to the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, but while she was in the States to pray to Jesus, because that’s in his, hmm, how should we say it, jurisdiction. He’s closer there and more available to help. We found it very amusing to think that all the gods and goddesses around the world coexist and have their own precincts. Not that they can’t do anything in other precincts, but it’s just that they can’t be as available. This got me thinking about the similarities between Guanyin and the Virgin Mary. I have a beautiful picture of Guanyin back in the States, which I had on my wall in Columbus, and it occurred to me that both she and Virgin Mary cover their heads with long, flowing material, and though their hands are always in different mudras, they kind of stand in the same way. I don’t know, just having a random, digressing thought.
On Monday I got myself up early and went to mass with the students. They sang songs and brought roses to the virgin. That night I went to Capilla de Guadalupe, another pueblo, with kindergarten teacher Aracely and her husband and two daughters. There was a huge parade with lots of fancy floats and school marching bands and charros on horses and dancers doing Indian dances. I loved the horses—there are so many around here I’ll probably be able to get myself on one of them, one of these days. The floats had religious themes and very detailed replicas of the basilicas in Mexico City and the Vatican, complete with people posing frozen for a very long time. The marching bands were interesting to me because almost all the drummers were girls and all the trumpeters were boys. We ate garbanzos and nuts and I drank another michelada and got sleepy. There were no fiestas in Capilla, because the city government wouldn’t allow drinking in the streets or bands playing music. The reasoning was that the holiday is religious and should be observed religiously.
The cathedral in Capilla was decorated marvelously, with huge butterflies hanging from the ceiling and drapes all over, but there were too many people going to mass so we couldn’t even get in. We sat around in the crowds eating snacks and buying trinkets but got pretty bored so we left.
Because it’s the last week of classes, there’s a ton of stuff to do. We had the pastorela (Christmas pageant) this evening. It kind of sucked. The kids were really unprepared, and hardly anyone sang. I had to sing “Silent Night” while the kids played it on their recorders. It was mortifying but also over quickly. The kids sang the first two verses of “Jingle Bell Rock” because they couldn’t do the whole song, and they were as stiff as rods up there in their costumes, which were exquisite. The only cool thing about the pastorela was their costumes, in fact. You can count on the parents of these rich kids dressing them well for an event like this.
The students’ posadas, or Christmas parties, are tomorrow. The teachers have a lot of work to do. They have to prepare little Christmas brooches (like the ones I helped make this afternoon for all the parents attending the pastorela) and Christmas cards for all their students, and they weren’t told to do so until this afternoon. The school is also giving the students presents for Christmas—little angels made of plastic containers filled with candy and peanuts—which means the teachers are making them. We were supposed to make one for each student—about 130—but we couldn’t do it all in just a few days, so they’ve decided to give the primary grades store-bought ones while the kindergarten teachers have to finish making theirs tonight. The teachers aren’t very happy, of course. Although Monday was a holiday, we had to go to school after mass to make these angels. Yesterday afternoon we had to go back to school after classes to continue the work, and we still weren’t making much headway, so several of the teachers had to take piecework home to finish that night. I volunteered to sew more arms, so I spent about five hours sewing about sixty-five of the stupid little things. It was a pain but at the same time I really enjoyed it. The other teachers would think I’m crazy for saying so, but I like that kind of mindless manual work on occasion; it’s a good break from what we usually have to do, and I’ve always liked to make crafts. The other teachers would think I’m crazy, but I haven’t got much other stuff to do anyway, and I don’t have a family to look after like they all do, and most of them aren’t paid as much as I am either.
But one thing that takes a bit of the joy out of making these things is knowing that once all the candy is gone, these silly-looking products of our hard labor are probably just going to go right in the trash. As one of the teachers said today, "These kids, they have everything already."
It’s a real shame that the school works the teachers so hard at this time. The boss is sort of my friend, but I was very irritated with her this week when she complained to me that the teachers are all very lazy. I said, but it’s a lot of work. And she said, yes, but they have to do it. I didn’t think it was fair; I was with her in Guadalajara a couple weeks ago when she was looking for things to buy for the students, and upon realizing that the things she wanted to buy them would cost the school a lot, she decided to have the teachers make the presents for cheaper, or rather, for free. And it also really bothered me that she didn’t tell the teachers earlier what they had to prepare. Only today she’s telling them they have to make cards and brooches for all their students, and they have to go to the pastorela and also finish making the stupid angels all in the same night. No, I gladly take on more work to help the teachers finish what they have to do, especially because it appears that I get special treatment for being the native-English-speaking English teacher and am not required to help make any of this stuff. (Maybe it’s because, from my experience teaching in Taiwan, I expect to have more annoying responsibilities as an EFL teacher during holiday and performance times, having to write plays for each class and to make all the costumes and props myself.) So tonight I went to Aracely’s house with Rocio and we finished making the angels while drinking micheladas and joking around.
This is the way things happen at the school. Another reason why I was really irritated with my boss is because she also waited till the last minute to apply for my work visa. My tourist visa expires this week, and she just got the paperwork in on Monday. Sunday night she calls to tell me the photos I took (on my own initiative) were the wrong size and had to be black and white. I was to go Monday morning and get the photos taken. She got upset at Rocio and me when we didn’t have them by the afternoon, because she had expected us to have them taken during our breakfast break after mass. I was pretty peeved at her acting like it was our fault that the paperwork was delayed, because she had an entire two months to do this beforehand.
I hate to turn this blog into a complaint depository, but this is the way things are with the roommate situation as well. Whenever I report her untoward behavior to my boss, she tells me to talk to her. But I am not her mother or her babysitter or guardian in any way, and now my roommate despises me and doesn’t speak to me, so I am not going to even try to tell her what to do. She got home last night at 3:30 a.m. (I usually know what time she gets home because she makes so much noise coming home.) I keep telling my boss that I am not going to take responsibility for her behavior, so it’s best that she move out as soon as possible, especially if her family doesn’t want her to get home late and associate with muchos muchachos. But she’s still living here, and might be living here a bit longer than I expected.
Fortunately for me, she is probably going home to her town for Christmas break tomorrow, and very, very soon I will also be on break.
Luis arrives in Arandas tomorrow for a few days’ visit before going home to Zamora for Christmas. I find it difficult to contain my excitement over his visit and, afterwards, my trip to the beach with my girlfriends. Meabh and Mika are going to Zihuatanejo, which I hear is a beautiful beach in the state of Guerrero, and I will meet them and Veronica there next week. I cannot wait for warm weather and the sun and the sea…. Meabh and I will then travel elsewhere, perhaps Oaxaca, for the holidays, because neither of us are going home for Christmas. Belfast is too far and the trip too expensive for her, and though Arizona is closer, it’s still pretty far and expensive as well for me. So we’ll be two very conspicuous foreign tourists wandering around random parts of Mexico over the holidays. It could be difficult to travel and find places to stay during this time, but we’ll definitely have fun.
Then we will return to our schools to teach, but during the first two weeks of January, Arandas will have its own fiestas. None of that barring of music and drinking like in Capilla, because Arandas is a tequila-producing town and it is determined to have its usual fun. I hear there will be bands and people dancing and drinking in the streets, and probably more than the usual share of muchachos on their horses hanging around town. A good time for all guaranteed.
Might not get to post entries over the vacation, so I’ll wish everyone very happy holidays right now. Make sure to make time for yourself to relax and be full of peace and joy (I know that sounds cheesy, but I think it’s important), because unfortunately at this time of year that is not always easy…. Love to all!
