Cholula, Puebla, and Xochimilco

So last weekend was a busy one. On Saturday I went to Cholula and Puebla, two colonial cities about two hours outside of DF. And Monday I spent floating down the canals of Xochimilco.

But first, Friday night stories! So at the end of work on Friday, pretty much the coolest things that's ever happened to me happened. The Mexicans asked us to go out with them to a cantina! So Lauren, Eric, and I went with Luis, Marco, Arizbe y otros to a restaurant in Coyacán (Frida's neighborhood). We went straight from work to the restaurant, and then straight form the restaurant to a discoteca in tlalpan, a colonia way south of san angel. A couple drinks later, Lauren and I decided that the music was too loud, so we left after an hour or two and took a sketchy pesero with Eric back up north to the Perisur metrobus stop. It took forever to get home, but it was worth it.

Early Saturday morning, Lauren and I made the trip to Tasqueña to catch the bus to Puebla. I'd say the main attraction of Puebla is actually its neighboring town Cholula (like the hot sauce), where the largest pyramid in the world was built over 2000 years ago. Too bad it's been so poorly maintained over the years that it now just looks like a really big grassy hill. Cortés didn't even notice the overgrown brush as a monument when he arrived in the 1500s, selecting the spot to build the first of his many churches. Even though the pyramid isn't as much fun to climb as the pyramids at Teotihuacan, you can take a guided tour of the excavated tunnels underneath pyramid, which was pretty cool. Evidently, there were some major renovations thousands of years ago because there are now four distinct layers of the pyramid (which you can hopefully see in my pictures). After we walked under and around the pyramid, we had to take the hike to the top to see Cortés's church. The church itself is beautiful and offers pretty amazing views of Mexico, including a nice angle of the volcanoes Popo and Ixta, which after traveling Hawaii, hardly seem remarkable. After we finished at the pyramids, we grabbed a quick bite to eat and then hopped a pesero back to to the center of Puebla.

Puebla was ok. It's a pretty colonial town, but there's nothing that interesting there. We passed by the house where the Mexican Revolution started in 1910, complete with bullet holes in its facade, but the house was closed by the time we got there. We tried to look into the town's theater, one of the oldest in the Americas, but there was a show and we weren't allowed. And then we walked through an artists' alley, where we looked through windows of different painters and ogled the crafts of local artisans, but we didn't buy anything. After a couple hours in Puebla, we decided to head back to the bus station for the two trip back to DF. I was pretty tired when I got home, so I spent the evening doing laundry and watching tv.

Sunday morning, I met Lauren and her roommate Eric at Tasqueña, yet again, to catch a ride on the tren ligero (light rail) to Xochimilco, a colonia in the very southern part of DF. Xochimilco was an agricultural center a thousand years when local farmers decided to fill in parts of the large lake to create more fertile plots of land. The floating gardens resulted in a series of canals only navigable by small rafts. A thousand years later, the gardens aren't used for growing anything but local flowers, and the canals have been converted into a tourist attraction, filled with hundreds of boats carrying large families and European tourists. Along with all of the gondolier-driven rafts, there are also dozens of food vendors, mariachis, and craftsmen trying to sell their goods and services to water-trapped tourists...and man was everything expensive, three times the prices on land. Since we were also tourists, and we didn't go with a Mexican, it was really hard to tell how much we were getting ripped off, even after bargaining down the prices of everything, I'm sure we were taken advantage of. After the two hour boat ride, we went straight back to DF, and I spent the rest of the evening at home.

Last week at work was pretty typical. I've been spending a lot of time with Maca, the receptionist, categorizing all of the contacts in her Outlook, which haven't been touched in IMIFAP's history. Everyone once in awhile we come across some noteworthy person that Susan has met in the last 25 years, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Queen of Sweden, Sara Stuart (Martha Stuart's daughter), Carlos Slim (one of the richest men in the world), among other Latin American ex-Presidents and influential millionaires. But for the most part, it's a pretty arduous task.

On Friday, Susan asked to meet with me to discuss the time I've spent at IMIFAP. She asked me if I felt like I had learned anything, what I felt was missing from my internship, and what I planned on doing in my future. I told her that I had learned a ton about public health sector and non-profits, enough to consider pursuing a degree in public health. I also told her that I was happy that I've been able to support IMIFAP in the way that I have, but I felt like I hadn't been given the opportunity to do what I was told I would be doing when I arrived at IMIFAP: writing grant proposals and academic articles (even though I was given an interesting article to work on last week, about the valuation of life based on life lost to breast and cervical cancer, what a great combo of economics and medicine!). So she told me, ok, then let's get you some more articles. By the end of the day, I had two more academic articles in my inbox. Now all I need to do is find journals to get them published, and then edit the papers to fit the regulations of the journal, plus add a few sentences here and there, and then I get my name on the paper! It will probably take me longer than two weeks to get these done, so I'll likely be working on them when I get back to the States, which is a good thing since I have the entire month of August with nothing to do....except study for and take the GRE. Ugh. That was a recent development. Since I've started to consider applying to publish health schools, which all require a GRE score, I've decided that I have to take them before classes start since applications to those kinds of schools are usually due at the end of December. Fun.

Also, last Thursday, I went out with some housemates for a late dinner and drinks at a bar that recently opened up near ITAM campus, the university that hosts everyone's exchange program. The bar was great - not too loud, great food, and inexpensive drinks. When we finished, we decided to continue our evening at plaza loreto. Too bad plaza loreto is dead on Thursday nights. After entering and leaving two totally empty clubs, we ended up at King's Pub, which I've already been to. We finally headed home around 3am and I promptly went to sleep. It's a good thing I made it on time to work the next day to have that 9am meeting with Susan.

One last unrelated thing...In Mexico, you are never safe from street vendors. Wherever you go, there is someone trying to sell you something - candies, clothes, random chach-kis, dvds, cds, hammocks, body lotions, horseback rides, food. And literally everywhere, whether you're on a boat in the canals at Xochimilco, at the top of they pyramids at Teotihuacan, in the metro cars, relaxing on the beach, walking through the park, even inside your house. At all times of the day I hear random noises coming from the streets, from guys yelling to bike horns to steam-powered whistles to prerecorded tapes. It took me forever to figure out what the noises were, but I eventually realized that each one is someone selling something, and these branded noises are their way of letting people know that they should come out of their house and buy stuff. The only noise that isn't a vendor is a loud bell that rings whenever the trash trucks come by. Evidently they don't have set days to pick up garbage here, you just have to run outside with your trash when you hear the bell.

Ok. That's it for this week. Ttyl.