. . . spend a year there, carry on business, and make money

Originally posted Friday, July 25, 2008 at 7:33pm

Part the Second of my reflections on my month in Guadalajara.

On my first weekend here I went downtown twice, once on Saturday with a tour for the international students, and the next day on my own. On Sunday, I went to San Juan de Dios, which I have heard is the largest covered market in all of Latin America, and spent a few hours there. The market has three levels, and you can buy all kinds of everything there. I bought several things and ate some tasty food that may or may not have been sanitary. Unfortunately, I forgot that you are supposed to haggle with the vendors, so I probably ended up paying what we may affectionately refer to as "stupid American tourist prices."
I also went to a mass at the big cathedral since I was already downtown anyway and I couldn't locate a Protestant church here if I tried. (I have tried, actually, and while they do exist, I can't locate them.) Now, there are a number of beggars who congregate in front of the cathedral looking for handouts. Most of them seem to be women with babies or small children. The women all seem to wear gray shawls, because I guess it helps them look more beggarly. The children run around with stickers and try to stick them on people without being invited to do so, in hopes of being rewarded with a few coins. Most people would flee these sticker-wielding children and run in the other direction, but I actually like stickers, so on Sunday I went and bought a couple; the cover of my notebook now sports a sun wearing sunglasses and a bumblebee giving two thumbs up. This transaction probably confused the beggars more than anything.

It is sad, when you think about it. Where do they sleep? What do they eat? Do they have family?

In the evening, dozens and dozens of mariachis congregate near San Juan de Dios. They look kind of like matadors, except a little less fancy, and will play a song for you for a small fee. I have not yet stayed downtown late enough to hear them play; as I was leaving on Sunday, they were just starting to come out of the woodwork, although for some reason they didn't seem to have any instruments with them.
Now, I had gotten downtown without too many problems, but as I am going home, I decide it would be a good idea to take a random city bus without looking where it is going. This probably ranks as one of the top five dumbest things I have ever done, although I am not sure, because I refuse to make that list. Such a list would be funny for you, dear reader, but depressing for me. Anyway, the bus drives for over an hour from the city out into the middle of nowhere. I think at one point we went through a marsh.
So, it turns out the bus has driven all the way to the airport, which is to the extreme northeast, outside the city. My house is on the WESTERN edge of the city. Problems.
Now, the city buses can get crowded at times. At one point on the ride the bus is standing-room-only, and there are wall-to-wall Mexicans hanging all over me. But by the time we reach the middle of nowhere, also known as the airport, I am the only real passenger left. The driver looks at me and says, "¿Qué haces?" (What are you doing?) I tell him I thought the bus went around in a circle. Apparently it doesn't. He gets out and talks to a few people outside a nearby building for several minutes; they are probably laughing at me.
Eventually he heads back in the opposite direction and drops me off somewhere, I'm not sure where. I wait and wait for the bus he told me to wait for, but it never comes, so eventually I ask another driver, and he tells me a different number. So I wait for that bus and get on it, hoping to get to Avenida Patria, a major road that I use on the way to the university. The problem is that Patria is an enormous road, and the stops really aren't marked so well, and I'm sort of enjoying seeing the city, and I'm kind of shy about speaking Mexican since I have a hard time understanding people, so I just sit there for a while. Eventually I ask where Patria is, and the driver tells me, "Ya pasamos," (We already passed it), so I immediately get off and flag down another bus with the same number going the opposite way.
After I get to Patria, I eventually find another bus which is supposed to go to the university, so I get on, but the bus drives and drives and I never see anything I recognize. It gets to be 10 o'clock, and the driver makes everyone get off for the evening. I ask where the university is; apparently we have already passed it. Apparently the bus doesn't stop at the university per se, it only goes by it. My backpack gets caught on the seat. I start yelling at the bus driver in Spanglish. The driver says he is sorry in that voice that people use when they don't actually mean it.
Long story short, the taxi ride home cost 52 pesos, and it got me there fast enough. By contrast, for only 5 pesos, a mere fraction of the cost, dear reader, you can board just about any city bus you want and ride for hours and hours without getting anywhere.
I did get to see a lot of the city this way. I can now tell you that the city of Guadalajara has at least three Wal-Mart Supercenters, a million and a half Oxxo convenience stores, a million and one government-owned Pemex gas stations, a small army of street vendors, and several El Pollo Pepe restaurants, among other things.
I like to tell my Mexican roommate that all the El Pollo Pepe restaurants are calling his name, wanting him to eat them, because he's never been to one. Their advertising slogan is "Tenemos el sabor que más se lleva." Loosely translated, this means that their food tastes the best, all the cool kids are doing it, and your parents will never find out. (Apologies to Isaac Freeman for stealing his joke.)

(Update: I have finally located a Protestant church, but I had to pull a few teeth to do it. I think the population is something like 97% Catholic here. Also, there are at least four Wal-Mart Supercenters in Guadalajara.)

So far I have yet to embark on a non-university-guided city excursion (or as I like to call them, a "crazy adventure") without having to use a taxi at some point, although I am getting better at using the buses. So far the taxis have been pretty fair to me, but one of my housemates told me that he and a few other international students had been significantly overcharged on one of their outings. Fortunately, Americans can afford to get taken for a ride.
A lot of people here have jobs that I am very glad I don't have. For example, I would hate to be the guy whose job it is to try to walk around and talk strangers into buying crap they don't want. I took a taxi ride home from downtown the other day and saw an old man walking between lanes on the highway, trying to sell flowers to the motorists. I kind of felt sorry for him. If I had a cute Mexican girlfriend, I totally would buy her some of that guy's flowers.
Sadly, no cute girlfriends at all, regardless of nationality. If you were to assemble all of my past and present girlfriends in a room together, it would be kind of like visiting the United Nations building immediately after an anthrax evacuation. If you were to place them all end-to-end along the circumference of the earth, they would converge at a point.

Guadalajara has a lovely springlike climate, but it sure does rain a lot here in the summer. I get wet sometimes.

This probably isn't what your Spanish dictionary will tell you, but here in Guadalajara, pies are pronounced the same way but spelled "pays." We were discussing the Rights of Children in my conversation class the other day and determined that apple pay was one of them. Also, that fringe on a sheet of paper after you tear it out of a notebook.
Then we read an article in that class about how Wal-Mart is the Great Satan because they exploit children in Mexico City. Apparently children can work as baggers there up until the age of 16 and make more than some adults make, but they have to follow all sorts of company rules and don't receive any sort of salary or benefits. I guess they make all their money off of tips.
Afterwards we were divided into teams and quizzed on the contents of the article. A rival team decided to call themselves Hillary Clinton, claiming that she used to be a top lawyer for Wal-Mart. Consequently, my team could not decide whether we wanted to be butterflies or Hillary's main political rival, so we ended up being Las Mariposas Obama.

At least in my neighborhood, the houses are kind of blocky and tend to have a gate and/or a wall separating them from the sidewalks. A lot of families have pet dogs which they keep behind the gates. The dogs like to startle me when I walk past them. Many streets here are named after famous people: Sebastian Bach, L. Van Beethoven, Luigi Pirandello, Victor Hugo, Jorge Santayana, Aldous Huxley, and Leon Tolstoi. Sadly, there does not appear to be a Leon Trotsky Street.

Incidentally, if any of you are pondering names for your first imaginary child, I suggest Cuauhtemoc.

I don't know if I'll get to play any sports here at all, but the university offers several, including tenís, frontón (kind of like racquetball), basquetbol, futbol soccer, and futbol rápido. Futbol rápido is basically what we Americans would call indoor soccer, except that UAG's futbol rápido field is outdoors. It must not be the futbol rápido season or something, because they need to replace the artificial turf on it badly.
I went to my first ever professional soccer match on Tuesday with my American housemates; UAG was playing a preseason warm-up against the famous Argentine club Boca Juniors. At the game I got a giant ball of fudge covered in pecans for only 15 pesos, plus a personal pizza for only 25. Lots of things here are served with sauce packets, like the bags of potato chips in the vending machines at school, and my pizza was no exception. It came with two packets labeled "Salsa Catsup," although the sauce wasn't really either of those things.
I must have spaced out while I was eating my giant ball of fudge and waiting for the game to start, because I thought the players were still doing warm-ups until I noticed that they were wearing different colored shirts and were passing and playing defense. I asked one of my housemates, who informed me that the game had in fact been in progress for the past eight or nine minutes.
The final score was 1-1, unless some other goals were scored that I don't know about.

(Incidentally, before the game started, I saw a couple of people sleeping inside the luggage compartment on the outside of a tour bus, and I have the photographic evidence to prove it. I don't care what you find comfortable; that's just weird.)

Call me crazy, but whenever I visit a new place, I love to go into any grocery or convenience store I can find looking for new foods. I also like eating food from tiny local taco shops and street vendors here for the same reason. It makes me feel more Mexican, and it's cheap. If the food is served piping hot, it's probably pretty safe, although I should try to be more careful about this in the future.
You can also get some interesting things from the vending machines here. The major purveyor of packaged snack foods here is a company called Bimbo, and their logo consists of a dopey, smiling white bear wearing a chef hat. The other day I got rebanadas, basically two pieces of hard toast with frosting on them, from the Bimbo machine.
So, many of the other international students are going to either Mexico City or Puerto Vallarta this weekend. I am going to neither of those places, because I, perhaps wrongly, did not want to spend the money. It all works out, though, because I became somewhat ill on Wednesday and wouldn't have felt well enough to leave on Thursday.
There is a special University of Texas Houston research program for such cases that pays $160, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through, plus a 50% chance you'll only receive a placebo. Besides which, they apparently don't let you do the program if you have a fever of 102.
But don't cry for me, Argentina. I'm starting to feel better, and I probably don't have any of those diseases that always kill people in Oregon Trail. And there are plenty of things I can do in Guadalajara this weekend.

Sometimes I wish I had a friend that would follow me around and tell me not to do stupid things, like a miniaturized, shoulder-mounted version of Anthony.

James 1:5-8
If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

I wish I had brought a towel.