Snapshot 9/6

It’s raining again.

I am taking a break from trying in vain to figure out the student health insurance website. I am on that lame website because I am trying to take advantage of the Internet working – it’s been up for maybe 10 minutes a day for the last week. I suppose it’s a good thing to break my Internet habit. I’ve been feeling a little addicted lately. (Except that emails mean the world to me these days. So I keep checking the connection anyway, addiction or not.)

Chris is not here. I have this vague recollection of her coming into our room, cheerily telling me where she was going, and then leaving again. But I cannot for the life of me remember what she said. (Don’t tell her I said that.)

I’m sitting in bed with the computer because I’m really tired. Reason #1 for being tired: We accidentally stayed up until 1 am watching my new pirate copy (picked it up off the street for 15 pesos, about a buck fifty) of El Senor de los Anillos: El Retorno del Rey and somehow totally forgot how long that movie is. At first I tried watching it in Spanish with Spanish subtitulos, but then Gandalf started going off about military strategy and with the combination of Spanish words and Tolkien words I could not figure out (or remember) what in the heck was going on. It’s been awhile since we had watched it…too long, it seems. So we switched to English subtitles. One step at a time…

Reason #2 for being tired: We did a lot of walking today. In the morning we found our way over to Coyoacan, a sweet little neighborhood that is about two steps less fresa (Mexico City slang for yuppie) than San Angel. We admired the ever-increasing red-white-and-green decorations for the fiestas patrias (the Mexican Independence Day celebrations that are coming up on September 15 and 16) that are everywhere and more these days, then stopped at a coffee shop so I could get some reading done. Classes, gulp, start next week. I had a café mocha with a serious Mexican-chocolate flavor (which among other things means a good dose of cinnamon) for half the price it would have cost me at Starbucks. I love that. It helped to lift my spirits in the face of the readings I had to do. A person can only take so much Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader at once (yes, we are reading them for seminary classes...Ethics and Economics...despite my usual leftiness I'm still a little ambivalent about how one-sidedly radical the readings are...anyway)…

Reason #2.1 for being tired: We had to be back by 1pm for the program-provided lunch, but we don’t exactly have the distance between Coyoacan and San Angel figured out just yet. So we had to walk/run fast for several miles to not get there on time. After arriving a half-hour late, we wolfed down some food and drink and then left for the programmed activity for the day (Reason 2.2), a(nother) visit to the Bazar Sabado. I was a little down on the idea when we left, but I forgot how nice it is just to walk around all the bright colors of the different paintings and beaded animal masks and lucha libre t-shirts and (my personal favorite) crazy-weird wildly-colorful sculptures of chupacabras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra).

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading about liberation theology (still not sure about it) while Chris read Glamour en Espanol (hey, she spends the rest of the week in the library).

Now, as I think I may have mentioned previously, I am sitting in bed. I am trying to decide if I have the strength to get up and figure out where Chris is. Wish me suerte (luck)…