Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city

Originally posted Monday, July 21, 2008 at 9:40pm

A few people have been asking me how Mexico is. The short answer is, it is Mexicotastic. For those of you who know me well, I hope this both violates your expectations and fulfills them at the same time.

I am taking taking two classes at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, a grammar in the morning and conversation afterwards. It's pretty exciting that I am actually an international student here; I even have a student ID and everything. But for some reason my name was copied down wrong on their official list, and my ID card would have said "Tomonthy Graf" if I hadn't stopped them. Why did I stop them?
Also, for some reason my host calls me Mateo, but I don't mind as long as I can remember who I am. (But if you are my sister and you are reading this, you are still not allowed to call me Timothy.)
Besides my academic classes, I am also doing a few other activities here: a Mexican cooking class, a couple of piano and singing lessons, and what is officially described as a salsa class but seems more like Latino aerobics.
Our first full day we had an orientation on campus and had to listen to several different speakers tell us mostly unimportant things. Included in this orientation was a short video about the university. The voice-over man was some Mexican person who spoke pretty good English, except that we got to hear him mispronounce the words "integral formation" two dozen times. Apparently they're pretty big on their integral formation here at UAG.
One of the speakers was representing the University of Texas Houston. They have a research program here at UAG to study genetic factors involved in whether travellers to Mexico get Montezuma's revenge or not. I am getting $60 or $80 to participate in their study by providing a couple of blood samples and filling out a daily log of symptoms, and if I get sick, I think I will make a lot more money than that. The sad part is, I think their program actually provides an economic incentive for contracting diarrhea.

En route to Mexico I had to fly from Manchester to Philadelphia to Chicago to Guadalajara. My first two flights were on US Airways and my third was on Mexicana. At Chicago O'Hare you have to take a little train from Terminal 2, the normal part of the airport, to get to Terminal 5, the international terminal. In line to go through security for Terminal 5, the security guard informed me that I needed a boardng pass and suggested I get back on the little train and go to Terminal 2 to get one from the US Airways ticketing area. However, the US Airways agent suggested I go back to Terminal 5 to get one from the Mexicana ticketing area. Long story short, I boarded my flight two minutes after it was scheduled to depart, but they must have really wanted me, because they were calling my name plaintively over the intercom. The plane was almost half-empty and didn't leave for another 15 minutes.

Guadalajara is the second-largest city in Mexico and the capital of the state of Jalisco. It is home to the director Guillermo del Toro, a number of Jose Clemente Orozco murals, and mariachi music. There is even a special Spanish word, Tapatío, which refers to Guadalajaran things. Also, the city has 3 top-flight professional soccer teams. The biggest team in Mexico is Club Deportivo Guadalajara S.A. de C.V., better known as Chivas. They share a stadium with F.C. Atlas A.C. And finally, there is the Club de Futbol Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, also known as UAG or Los Tecos. The Tecos are owned by the university and play on a field called Estadio 3 de Marzo. For reasons that I may never fully understand, UAG also has some sort of American football team, which plays inside Estadio 23 de Octubre.

Incidentally, I'm thinking about starting a Society for the Abolition of Gratuitously Long Soccer Team Names, and Possibly Also for the Abolition of Other Kinds of Gratuitously Long Things As Well. We'll call it SAGLSTNXPAAOQKGLTAW for short.

My host is a Mexican woman who doesn't speak English, hereafter referred to as "the señora." I believe she has 4 sons, all of whom are married and live elsewhere. About 20 minutes after I first arrived, a whole horde of people, including a pregnant woman and several small children, barged through the door. That kind of freaked me out a bit, because the house is not that large and there are already five international students staying here, but fortunately they were only visiting.
I'm sure I had all sorts of preconceptions and stereotypes in my mind of what Mexico would be like, but so far I have only seen one person sleeping on top of a car. And I mean, really, if that's what you find comfortable, more power to you.
I think my host makes a career out of hosting students. Two of us are from the University of Oklahoma, two others are medical students, and all of us are American except for my roommate, who is a Mexican from the state of Sonora and doesn't speak English. Javier here likes to watch television while sending an endless stream of text messages to his girlfriend, or as he likes to call her, his "novia." It is amazing how many American movies and TV shows are dubbed into Spanish here. Last week Javier and I watched part of "The Longest Yard." It was about American football, and it was in Spanish, which means neither one of us fully understood what was going on.
The house is small but cozy, and about a half-hour walk to the university. It does make me appreciate all the things I take for granted in the US, like Catholic churches that don't ring their bells all the time directly across the street from my house, or freight trains that don't blow their horns all the time 200 yards from my house. On the plus side, there is a churro stand nearby, which is great if you want a delicious churro with any one of three delectable fillings, but sort of irrelevant if you don't want a delicious churro. The señora feeds us three meals a day on weekdays, and her food is pretty good.
Also, the señora has a lot of English-language coffee-table books about various places in the U.S, probably from previous guests. As a result I have been learning all about Little Rock, Arkansas, more than I ever dreamed possible. Every prominent Arkansas business imaginable is covered in this book, including banks, real-estate agencies, and wastewater treatment firms.
I'm also reading a short book my sister bought me in Costa Rica called "Carta de Santiago," which is a commentary on the Epistle of James. At first I thought this book had the worst page numbering ever, because after page 16, there is a sequence that goes 21, 18, 19, 24, 17, 22, 23, 20, 29, 26, 27, 32, 25, 30, 31, 28, and 33 before returning to the sequential order that we all know and love. As it turns out, however, all of the page numbers are on the right pages; it's just that whoever bound the pages didn't know what they were doing.
Seeing all those numbers almost makes me feel a little wistful. I'm no mathematician, dear reader, but sometimes I think it's sad that I'm not studying to become one, because if I were a mathematician, then all the natural numbers could be my friends, and then I could have infinitely many friends, each one greater than the last.

As always, a bit of Scripture:
James 4:4 You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

John 3:17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Here is hoping that I can be "in the world without being of the world." Your faithful servant,
Tomonthy