January 22, 2009

So, I didn’t actually write about today on today, but one day late still counts as close enough, and you’ll see in the end why there was in fact no writing on the day of.

It started out simple enough, went to school, 10 am class, only not really. Apparently we gringas didn’t get the message, but there was no class again today. I’m not entirely sure why but I’m not complaining. Instead we spent about an hour talking to another gringa from Mississippi about the peace corp and traveling around Mexico. So that was fun.

After that, I didn’t have class until 3, so I just spent the time working on homework in the library which allowed me to accomplish a pretty good deal of stuff. The homework for the next day and all that jazz.

In Spanish class at 3 we watched La Misma Luna (aka Under the Same Moon by the English title). It’s an excellent movie that I like quite a lot and would highly recommend to whoever. It was neat watching it with people who hadn’t seen it before to hear little guesses in the plot or gasps, and then, in the end, to turn around and see all these wet eyes. Hehe, it was cool. We also watched it in this movie-theater type auditorium on campus so that was pretty sweet. Get the whole big-screen effect going on.

In the evening I stopped by Plaza Fiesta to see if I could possibly find a migration novel but ended up turning up empty handed….until I went to the panaderia and bought some sort of really good chocolate cookie-cake thing which I’m going to plug under the “cultural enrichment” part of my trip.

That evening, as decided earlier, Chelsea and I went out (now, attempting again to make it via taxi). Her host family actually has some sort of preregistration thing signed up so that it wasn’t nearly as difficult. We just had to give them the number of the house phone.

We went to Mambo Café which is a really nice looking place. There are lights up on the ceiling and that sort of thing. Very tasteful. No cover charge either. (So at this point you’re thinking, wow, that’s really nice). Yeah, it is, until you get a bill. Apparently it’s super expensive if you actually want to order anything there, so we didn’t spend a whole lot of time there. That being the case, we kind of split up and some of us went to Envy.

Chris and Joe actually have a taxi-friend. They have his personal cellphone and they called him up to get us from Mambo to Envy. So that was pretty cool and made for a pretty quick transition all things considered.

At Envy there’s a cover charge of 60 pesos for girls. I don’t remember what it was for guys (seeing as how that wasn’t particularly applicable). In there it was super-smokey though, and when we first arrived I thought I was surely going to have to leave en seguida. It’s like a million Castrignanos all lighting up at once (since I was “cloning” him earlier this week I figure I might as well put that one in there too… which is very similar to the lines along which I was thinking when we first got there but that’s beside the point). And if the smoke didn’t kill me, then the strobe lights were certainly going to which in and of themselves are a little disorienting.

In the end, I ended up hanging around, dancing and such there til 2 at which point I went home and fell asleep sometime around 2:30 in time to get up 3 and a half hours later for my 8am class. Woo. I think I get to mark off the dancing in a night club from my list of a 100 things to do before I die though, which is a pretty sweet deal. And thus ends January 22, 2009.