Mexican food revisited

Nearly 2 weeks ago, I attended a Mexican-themed potluck holiday dinner. It was fantastic. There were many wonderful dishes, and lots of effort was put into authenticity. As I was cooking my contributions (chicken mole and esquite), I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. It wasn't an ingredient I was searching for (though I made some minor substitutions to reflect what I could get), nor was it the wonderful weather of Mexico City (though I would have preferred it to the icy conditions outside); I was mostly just lost to be cooking Mexican food without one of my beloved balls of fire in the kitchen. My current rental kitchen might not be fabulous, but in over 3 months of using it I have not yet had a single fireball shoot out of my oven. Strange.

Sadly for my chicken mole, it was served in the kitchen with the other crock pot foods. This was a bummer, since everything else was served in the dining room and attendees mostly forgot about the second room of food. As a result, Keating has been eating chicken mole steadily for nearly 2 weeks (I spent last week presenting my Mexican research findings at a conference in California). I think he's ready to put aside the Mexican food again, fireballs or no.

The buildup to the conference kept me fairly busy, so I have taken longer than intended to post more stories from Mexico. Over the holidays I will try to post about our Buffalo-Mexico-Saint's Day-4th of July in between hours spent with family and spent polishing up a research proposal I'm working on. Happy holidays!

I'm still standing

Hmmm... December 4. Yeah. September, October, and November were good. I've been busy at the new job, which largely includes writing new papers, editing old papers, applying for my next job (seriously, that's considered an acceptable work activity), numerical modeling, and overseeing an undergraduate research project. I've also been enjoying having an American kitchen back, including an oven that has not once thrown a fireball at me. (On the flip side, I succeeded in giving myself chemical burns on my hands one night thanks to a misguided evening cooking with hot peppers. I can apparently do dumb stuff in any country.) Keating has been doing well also. He managed to find a full-time job shortly after arriving and has enjoyed spending time with his family here in Western NY. We're both thrilled to have our beastie back; Asher is asleep next to me, saving his energy to demand another early morning walk tomorrow (Keating gets up with the dog. I flail my arms and mutter gibberish.)

I still have stories to tell from Mexico, plus new adventures here in New York. On top of that, it's good for me to keep writing something that doesn't include 50-cent words like "phreatomagmatic." (Dad read that word in my most recently published paper and wanted to know if I made it up. Answer: nope.) That said, it's time to recommit myself to updating my blog. Here goes.

Goodbyes

Tonight is my last night in Mexico. Trying to get everything ready for the move back to the states as well as complete work down here (I spent this last week in the field) has been hectic enough that I've failed to update this blog for a month. Fortunately (or not?), I have a stash of stories yet and will continue to make updates for a while. Who knows -- maybe I'll even change the "Life in Mexico" part of the title and keep writing. We'll see.

This past spring while in Cancun, my friend Jackie asked me what I missed most about the US. My mom was sitting with us and chimed in with "Her dog!" While I miss my puppy wildly (thank you again Mom and Dad for taking care of him!!!), that was not the answer that was springing to my lips. Family and friends, while greatly missed, weren't my top item either. The number one thing I miss the most about the US: flushing toilet paper. It is so nice when it just goes away after you use it instead of letting it collect for a few days and then having to empty the trash. Unfortunately, Mexican plumbing (like that in much of the world) is unprepared to handle flushed paper. I think that flushing some TP might be my first act back in the US, shortly after crossing through Customs and Immigration. I don't care if I don't need to use the facilities; I will simply walk into a stall, rip off a square of toilet paper, and merrily flush it away. It will be good.

In honor of leaving Mexico, I wanted to make a quick list of things I've missed about the US and things that I will miss about my temporary homeland, Mexico. In no particular order:

Missing the US:

1) Flushing TP. Yup... still number one.

2) Friends/family/dog.

3) The freedom of having my own car again.

4) The stars. The light and air pollution here is such that you can't see them in Mexico City.

5) Road berries. My mom gagged when I mentioned this one to her, but it' snot nearly as revolting as it sounds. When I was visiting Michigan in July, I had a wonderful time picking and eating wild raspberries along the side of the road while I walked my dog. There were at least 3 varieties, and they were all delicious.

6) Really good desserts/chocolate. Most of the desserts/chocolate down here are very bland and end up tasting a lot like processed sugar. I have not seen a single fudgy/gooey/caramel-y/decadent dessert down here.

7) Buffalo wings! Watch out Duffs! I'm coming back!

Missing Mexico:

1) Friends down here. They've been great. The people as a whole have made the entire experience worthwhile.

2) Public transportation. It can be scary at times and quirky at others, but it can also be a lot of fun. At the very least, it's pretty empowering knowing that you can competently maneuver around this city on public transit. It's like, "If I can do this, I can handle anything. Bring it!" And then I wave my jazz hands.

3) The food. Oh, tortilla soup, pozole, tacos al pastor, pambazos, elote, esquite, etc, what will I do now that you won't be a food cart away???

4) That amazing sense of (self-indulgent) coolness that comes from living in a foreign country. It's pretty darn cool. This alone is enough to get me past the occasional melt-down day when I just wish everyone down here spoke English. It feels great to do something that feels so different, and to be doing it in a foreign language.

5) My garden. It is scary-easy to grow plants down here, and my lilies, impatiens, ivy, mums, bougainvillea, etc. are absolutely thriving under my diligent neglect. I actually feel like an accomplished gardener!

6) The complete surreality that exists down here. I can round a corner and find myself facing a 6 foot tall bush molded into the form of a duck. Or my bus might stop in the middle of a 5 lane road and all of the passengers have to do a Chinese fire drill and board the bus behind us. Or accidentally finding a tarantula in the wild. Every single day has some hidden gem down here.

7) Looking up on clear days and being surrounded by majestic volcanoes.

While I'm moving back to the US for a new job, I will always have a part of me in Mexico. I've got a conference down here in November, continuing field work in March, and every intention to continue to work with Mexican volcanoes in the future. They certainly haven't seen the last of me here! For now, though, I'm tired and ready to see Keating again. He's been in the US for the last couple of weeks sorting out our new apartment, job hunting, etc. This time tomorrow, I'll be asleep in our new place, catching a few hours rest between my midnight arrival and my 8 am job start. Nothing like cutting it down to the wire, huh? That said, I'm off now to catch a couple of hours of sleep before my early flight.

Hasta pronto.

Weekend touring

On Sunday, Keating and I decided it was time to run down to Taxco to check out the famous silver markets. We got up early(-ish) and hopped a pesero to the city's southern bus terminal to get our tickets. Ten minutes later, we were happily situated on a very nice Greyhound-style bus enjoying our free beverage and watching Changeling in Spanish.

Living in Mexico has been great for me. It has taught me to let go of some of my embarrassment and sound like an idiot in questionable Spanish and to eat things that would otherwise not cross my lips (anyone up for some local corn fungus? It grows on the corn cobs and looks, well, vile.). More than anything, however, the buses of Mexico City have affected how I handle transportation; riding the peseros to work daily has been like a vaccination for my otherwise miserable motion sickness. I've even become sufficiently acclimatized that I can occasionally read on the bus without thinking that I'm going to die. (Betcha can't tell where this is going!)

Despite this, however, the 2.5 hours bus ride to Taxco through the mountians was waaaay more than I could take. I almost made it all the way there -- we were within Taxco city limits, even -- when I finally lost it. As I clamped my hands over my mouth, Keating dashed to the bathroom at the back of the bus to grab me a barf bag (he had been blocking me in). Finding it locked, he sprinted to the front of the bus, where he proceeded to use broken Spanish and pantomime in a desperate bid to get the driver to understand what he needed. Fortunately, a woman in the front row not only figured out what he meant but also knew where the bags were stashed (they are apparently normally passed out with your free drink at boarding). Keating ran back to me, his hands filled with baggies and paper towels. It was just in time. Moments later, we pulled into the bus terminal. I have never in my life seen people get off a bus that quickly.

Once I felt well enough to walk under my own power again, Keating and I began to explore Taxco by finding a cafe and a pharmacy that sold Dramamine by the dose. Taxco is a beautiful town built into the sides of the mountains are reminds me of the Mexican interpretation of those famous Greek villages with tiered white homes with terracotta tile roofs stacked on upon another up the slopes. There are random arches and second-floor elevated walkways connecting buildings. The streets are cobbled and narrow, and many give up on the pretext of being a road and have entire patches of winding covered stairs connecting drivable stretches. Doorways open intermittently off of the street/stairs, leading into various silver shops and markets.

I'm not much of a shopper, but I have a weakness for jewelry. Keating, who hates shopping, is thrilled to know that he is already covered for our anniversary, my birthday, and Christmas, not to mention Christmas for most of his relatives.

We finally worked our way up through the maze to the central plaza, with its stunning 240 year old Spanish Baroque style cathedral. It was a beautiful, sunny day so we decided to sit on a shady park bench in the plaza and relax while we drank some water. This was a splendid plan for a good 8 minutes, or right up until a bird pooped on my leg. Keating helped me clean it up, laughing at me for my bad luck. Sure that lightning (and poop) never strike twice, we decided to sit for a little longer (to be fair, the bird appeared to have left). Maybe two minutes later, that f-ing bird pooped on my shoulder. As I howled indignantly, Keating snatched the remaining paper towels out of my hand: the bird had managed to get his nose! Thoroughly grossed out but laughing hysterically, we abandoned our shady bench and wandered back into the markets in search of a money clip for Keating and some ice cream to take away some of the emotional pain from the bird attack.

At 6:30 pm, we boarded our bus back to Mexico City. We happily took our seats, free soft drink and peanuts, and Dramamine (well, I did anyway), and settled in for our movies on the return trip (much longer due to Sunday night traffic entering the city). We had our gross-out moments, but it was a wonderful day trip. We've already started discussing how much fun it would be to go vacationing with some friends or relatives, hopping buses between beautiful colonial Mexican towns and ending up with a relaxing weekend at the beach. Any takers? We promise to not let you sit on the magic park bench, and I swear I will take my Dramamine (the drugged trip home was wonderfully uneventful). In the meantime, we're already planning our next weekend escape to Acapulco.

***** Note: True to form, Keating and I both forgot our cameras at home. These pictures were totally stolen off of the web.

Back in the kitchen

Last night I decided to have some fun in the kitchen. I've learned the trick to sweet-talking my violently combustible oven and I refuse to use the grill after Keating's exploits, so it was a low-key event. I made up some stone-fruit pie 'cause I'm a geologist and that's the sort of thing I do. The pie was filled with an amazing combo of fresh nectarines and red plums, seasoned with brandy, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and featured my first attempt at a homemade crust. For dinner, I decided that I was too lazy to follow my normal obsession of stuffing food inside of food and decided to turn my pear, sweet onion, and edam cheese stuffed chicken breasts into a layered casserole served over seared portobello mushrooms with fresh green beans on the side. Very Mexican, I know. Despite it not having a single chili pepper in sight, the dinner came out AMAZING. As in, it was so good that Keating and I immediately divvied up the rest into jealously guarded Tupperware for today's lunches.

Now, as proud as I am of last night's dinner, I realize that it makes for terminally boring blogging. I am writing it mostly in an attempt to convince my parents that I really CAN COOK. You see, the kitchen gods hate me when it comes to cooking for my parents. In recent years, I have repeatedly set off the smoke detector (which was really awesome since I was cooking so that my mom could lie down with a migraine), overcooked chicken into shoe leather, nearly ruined my mom's pans, and accidentally got drunk while cooking the dinner at which Keating and I were introducing our parents. On this last trip home, I managed to put all that to shame.

I was trying to recreate a recipe I had made up down here and had completely wowed Keating with. I coated chicken breasts with breadcrumbs, fresh ginger, raw oats, and a dash of nutmeg and then baked them. These were then served with a homemade mango-chipotle salsa. The whole effect was sweet-and-tangy with a mildly nutty flavor. It was great. What I made for my parents was not. I shaved the ginger wrong (lengthwise) and over-baked the chicken, resulting in what looked like dusty turds covered in hair. That was nothing, however, compared to the salsa: I'm pretty sure it qualified as a chemical weapon. I don't know whether the problem came from using a different brand of canned chipotle peppers or if I somehow absentmindedly quadrupled the number of peppers I used, but it was hot enough to literally take my breath away despite having been eating Mexican-grade spicy since December. As soon as I could breath again, I gasped a warning to my dad before he could take a bite. Sadly for him, I think he assumed I was joking and took a nice, large forkful. I will never know quite how he managed to keep from spewing it back out, but he managed to not only swallow it but try to smile as though it wasn't actually as bad as it was, all while huge tears welled up in his eyes. It was at this moment that my mom walked into the dining room, having just finished a phone call with my brother. Fortunately for her, Dad and I were able to convince her to scrape all of the sauce off of her chicken without even trying it. Perhaps we were more convincing because we were both still choking and crying a little bit. Keating was spared the entire event as he was still in Mexico at that time and didn't arrive until I had already been informally barred (yet again) from being "helpful" in the kitchen.

Given my track record, I think I need to stop trying to cook for my parents while I'm ahead. They may never be convinced that I really do make some great food, but they will also never be able to blame me for a nasty case of salmonella (I think I gave Dad chemical burns, though). From now on, I think I'll just have to rock the pizza delivery option when offering to take care of a meal while I'm visiting.

P.S. - I swear that this is not the reason why Keating has lost ~40 lbs since we moved here. That's all exercise and fresh fruit/veg. I swear. Back me up on this, Keating???? Please????

Keating visits the dentist

While we were in Michigan, Keating and I both went in to the dentist to get our teeth cleaned. This was significantly scarier for Keating than it was for me because of who our dentist was: my father. (That's right savvy readers: my dad, the die-hard hockey player, is also a specialty dentist. He also has been known to stash chocolate covered caramels in his underwear drawer. Never fear, he still has all of his teeth.)

I can imagine that there are few things more unnerving than sitting down in the dentist's chair and looking up into your new father-in-law's face, except maybe if it is your girlfriend's dad instead of your FIL, but I haven't subjected a boyfriend to that since college (sorry Andy!). Dad was very kind to Keating and didn't even take advantage of his opportunity to mess with his head. Instead, they decided to mess with mine.

I was in the front of the office hanging out with my mom and a couple of the staff when Jeanie, who was assisting Dad, popped in to ask me to come back to the operatory room where Keating was. As I stepped into the room, I saw Dad using gauze to stop some bleeding in Keating's mouth and a bloody scalpel on the tray. WTF??!? Fortunately there hadn't been nearly enough screaming to make me think something bad had actually gone down, like some fraternity hazing taken too far.

It turns out that Dad, whose specialty is gum surgery, had cut away some excess tissue on one of Keating's front teeth. The tooth in question is slightly recessed anyway, and the extra gum tissue made it look far more recessed than it actually was. With one quick flick of the wrist, Dad had done wonders to Keating's smile, making it look as though his front teeth had been straightened overnight. Keating's smile looks even more fantastic than before, and he can now brag that he survived losing a knife fight to his father-in-law. Boys have the strangest ways of bonding.

UFC: Michigan

My parents are probably two of the toughest people I will ever know. My dad, for instance, in pushing the big 6-0 and still plays ice hockey year round. Right now, he has a double header scheduled for every Monday night, and a couple of weeks ago ended up playing in a triple header when one of the teams scheduled to play after his last game asked if anyone could substitute for them. All this was while still getting over being sick and having to be at work early the next morning.

Dad's crazy dedication to hockey pales before my mom's latest test of will, however. On 4th of July weekend, she took a spill on the boat thanks to an unfortunate wave and bashed up her left knee. The next morning, with her knee now the size of her head and unable to bend more than 5 degrees, she decided to stop by the ER to have it looked at. Her knee was too swollen to get a good look at it yet with an X-ray, so she was sent home with an ace bandage and the recommendation to call the local knee specialist to make an appointment for later in the week. When she was the specialist a couple of days later, he couldn't find anything in her X-ray and asked her to keep limping around on it until she could bend it to 90 degrees for an MRI but told her that he thought it was most likely a deep bone bruise. I had already arrived in Michigan by this point, and Mom refused to let something as minor as a swollen peg leg get in the way of spending time with me; my first day in town she insisted on taking me shopping for a new pair of jeans since mine were miserably ratty (Thanks Mom!!!), not to mention about 6 other errands. She continued to go to work each day, walk the dog in the morning before I woke up, etc.

The day before I left to return to Mexico, we got a call from her knee specialist: he had just gotten back the results on the MRI and wanted her in there ASAP since it turned out that she had broken her leg in her fall roughly 2 weeks before. The angle and location of the break prevented it from showing up in the X-ray, but it stood out brilliantly in the MRI. My mom had just spent the last couple of weeks wandering around on a broken leg, and I'm not even sure if she bothered to take more than 2 Advil the entire time. She will now spend the next 6 weeks in a leg brace and using a cane (it was already clear to everyone that she wasn't going to hold still long enough to bother with the crutches. Plus, she was too short for the adult sized crutches they had available.).

My dad likes to claim that the only two things in the world scare him: flying monkeys and my mother. Given just how scary-tough she is, I think I might have to add Mom to my list, too!

(For even more background on just how tough she is, my mom refused to let the doctor tell her she had broken her foot until after my wedding last fall so that she wouldn't have to wear a cast to the wedding. About 8 weeks ago during a minor surgery trying to sort everything out on that same foot, the doctors realized that she had been wandering around with a nearly completely torn ligament in her ankle. She had been taking the dog on 2 mile walks. Daily.)

Get well soon, Mom!

Adventures in grocery shopping

I have been absent from the blog for a couple of weeks while I enjoyed being lazy up in Michigan with my family. The university is closed for most of July, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get out of town and escape the rainy 65-degree weather. We got back to Mexico City early Thursday morning, returning to an apartment with little more than crackers and cocoa mix left in the cupboards. Today was grocery shopping day.

As previously discussed, grocery shopping is probably the single most consistent stressor in my relationship with Keating. Today it was for different reasons. Our plan was simple: Keating would call me after work (yeah, he teaches on Saturdays) and we would meet up at the Superama on his way home. This would have worked out wonderfully, except that I didn't realize until after his call that I was locked IN the apartment. I have locked myself out of places plenty of times, the best example being the time I had to break back into my house in Buffalo and got stuck halfway through the large, street-facing window in my living room and my neighbors all decided to neither help the mysterious flailing legs nor call the cops (either would have been appreciated). This was the first time I've accidentally locked myself in. I ransacked the whole apartment, but couldn't find my keys anywhere. This was doubly bad because our landline is a complete POS and has never once successfully dialed a cell phone and I have refused to get a cell phone. Not only was I trapped in the apartment, I couldn't even call Keating to tell him. For his part, Keating was waiting for me at the Superama, reading under a ledge to kill the time and escape the downpour. After a couple of failed attempts, I was finally able to get through to Keating's cell phone using skype (Mexican cell phones use different location codes than landlines) to ask him to rescue me. Checking his pockets, Keating realized that he had both sets of keys and agreed to come home to let me out. Unfortunately, he then wandered inside the Superama to pay our gas bill and left his umbrella behind. By the time he realized that he had left it, his umbrella was gone and he was faced with a long, wet walk home. I'm pretty sure I've seen him drier when stepping straight out of the shower!

Fortunately, in the end all turned out well: I was freed from the food-less apartment, Keating eventually dried out, and we bought food and a new umbrella. Given the frustrations with just getting to the store, the actual grocery shopping was a complete cake-walk! Now we're just hoping that the rain stops long enough to allow us to do our post-trip laundry (our clothes dry on a line in the garden).

Letters from the field 4: Dangers and Kidnapping

Dear Future Self,

Mexico is all over the American news right now, with two high profile assassinations and a 21-dead drug gang shootout all taking place this week. More disturbing than these reports, which really only focus on a small group of people in a small area, are the comments posted below them by readers. If I can believe the posts under CNN articles, it would appear that many Americans are taking the current Mexican violence to indicate that all Mexicans are violent and barbaric and that the US is better off coming up with a way to cut off all ties with our southern neighbor (not to mention expel all legal and illegal immigrants). To this mindset (who aren't reading this anyway, but whatever), I offer the following experience from field work:

The team had been driving 4WD "roads" in the rural hills beyond Lake Catemaco. The area there is sparsely populated, and ours was probably the first car to drive down that particular track in years. Needless to say, there are no road maps and no road signs -- why bother with road names when there are so few to bother naming? At one point, we spotted a small hut set back from the path and decided it would be worth asking directions. After a short conversation in which our team leader introduced us as a team of geologists from the university, the lady of the place loaned us two children to guide us. The boys, Fernando and Diego, were 10 and 8 years old, respectively and were best friends. Their families effectively live together following the death of Fernando's father 2 years ago, leaving him to be the man of the house. Wedging all 7 of us into the Jeep Wrangler, we set off in search of the path we were looking for.

The boys led us up hills with the enthusiasm and energy of kids who have not yet learned to look at the topography to gauge the easiest slope to climb. They taught us about the edible berries growing on the slopes. The berries, apparently called tejote, are shiny and black-ish blue, and taste a bit like overripe blueberries. Even more entertaining, the berries have an incredibly strong pigment that quickly stains one's mouth anywhere from deep purple to black depending on the number of berries eaten. Fernando and Diego told us about life on the ranch and how they milked the cows and helped to make cheese. Neither attended school, since their ranch is so remote that it would require a 2-3 hour hike each way to get to the nearest school; also, their help was needed to keep the ranch running. They were excited to be trusted with the important job of carrying rock samples (and we were relieved!), and they were absolutely euphoric when handed the rock hammer and entrusted with breaking up big rocks.

Diego and Fernando, our trusty guides.

About 6 hours after we took them, we returned them to their homes and thanked their mothers. Both Fernando and Diego happily joined us the next day as well, cracking jokes about the cow chips dissolving in the persistent rain. To thank them and their families, our team gave each family a bag of nonperishable foodstuffs that would otherwise require a long journey to the nearest store, as well as bags of candies and t-shirts for the boys ('cause no 10 year old boy is going to be excited about receiving dried beans). The families invited us in and served us coffee while we watched the end of the Mexico-France World Cup game.

Can you imagine a similar situation playing out in the US? Less than a year ago, it made news when concerned adults called authorities when they saw an 8-10 (?) year old boy walking the few blocks to his sports practice alone. Can you imagine parents giving their child (not to mention the neighbor kid) to complete strangers and watching them drive away?

Another example, this one not from the field exactly: Due to the impossibility of actually finding our street, we must ask taxis to pick us up on a street corner a couple blocks from our house. Normally this is not a problem, however, it is fairly eerie when we have to stand out there at 4 am to get a ride to the airport. We had to do that again last week when the Awesome Assistant took off to return to the US. Both times that I have been out there waiting for a taxi at that hour, someone from the area points out that hanging out on dark street corners isn't the safest move in a city, asks to make sure that we are OK, and offers to stay near us until the taxi comes. The first time, we were watched over by a taxi driver who we had already assured that we had previously called someone from another cab company to meet us. More recently, it was a car full of young men (about 20 years old, perhaps?), one of whom had clearly been studying his English and saw this as an amazing opportunity to practice the language and do a good deed at the same time. Both times, our guardians waited until our taxi arrived and could convince both us and them that he was our prearranged driver (passwords and such). Both times, our guardians were pretty much the only people that we saw out there.

Mexico is very sensitive to the real and perceived violence within its borders. While there are truly bad places to be (anyone remember Cabrini Green in Chicago?), for the most part Mexico is a country full of some of the most generous and hard-working people you will meet.

Hell, I basically kidnapped a cabbie last night while picking up a friend from the airport. Four hours, a traffic jam, two terminals (nowhere near each other), a delayed plane, and getting lost down a restricted hallway of the airport later, he was finally able to drop us off at my corner in front of the ice cream shop. He was gracious and entertaining the entire time, and it was great practice for my Spanish to spend those hours discussing geology, geography (he is working on his MS), sports, travel, etc. Thank you, Miguel. I'm glad I had enough money still on me at that point to give you the generous tip you deserved.

In short, three cheers for Mexico!

Cheers,

Shazta-of-the-present

Letters from the field 3: Yeah.

Dear Future Shazta,

I know that you haven't forgotten this field trip I just got back from. You really ever won't, short of a massive head injury. If that happens though, see if you can selectively forget the following things that I was unable to write about until now ('cause I kinda needed to calm down first):

1) This was the trip where you got a shock as to just how out of the loop you are with your team. After noticing some unusual bookkeeping practices, you started asking some pointed questions and found out that the grant was out of field money. No one had mentioned this to you before. Which means that for Year 1 of a field project, you have 2 weeks worth of field data to work with. Awesome. Especially since you didn't design your field work with this knowledge in mind. Associated with this, try to forget the extra beers and desserts purchased with the grant money, despite the lack of funding. Remember that you are not in the US, and there are different cultural norms at play here.

2) You also may have gotten into a standoff with one of your team members on a random Mexican hillside with competing GPS units, arguing over which way to go to find a pond you were searching for. For what it's worth, you were right (not difficult, since she insisted that you were standing IN the pond already, despite all evidence to the contrary). At any rate, you never did find the f-ing pond because, after the "debate," it was universally agreed upon to be too far away to hike to it while carrying an inflatable boat.

3) Ok, so to be honest, you may just want to completely block out all memories of that one colleague. She manages to get under your skin in ways that defy logic and leave you a frothing mess of resentment in the back seat of the truck (though you finally got to sit in the front seat a couple of times this trip. That's because she wasn't along on those days, having taken the other truck.). Just forget about her frequent use of "Chhh-chh-chhh" to get your attention the same way other people get the attention of their dogs (when they are misbehaving). Also forget about how hilarious she thought it was that a local boy said he couldn't understand your Spanish, and how she kept repeating the story over and over to everyone, despite the fact that you had been speaking English to your non-Spanish-speaking assistant and there is really no wonder that the little boy couldn't understand your "accent." Etc.

Oh well. Not every trip will be perfect. And you have heard from independent sources that your one colleague is fairly universally difficult to work with. Just take a deep breath and appreciate that her contract supposedly ends in one month. That, and learn how to do geochemistry really slowly so that it will fill up your time for a while.

Cheers,

Shazta

Notes from the field 2: advising

Dear Future Self,

As promised, I will now remind you of the awesome joys of advising. I know, it hasn't always gone well. There was that time that you kept catching your undergraduate advisee drinking out of a ditch. Or that time when you couldn't take their energy any more and challenged two advisees (including the ditch-drinker) to push the pickup truck down the dirt road and see if they could get above a specific speed. Or how about the time you asked a different undergrad advisee to make a graph that would illustrate results in a data set he had been working on, and he gave up and wrote an ode to dirt instead?

Never fear, Future Shazta! We are learning!

For the record, this advisement activity went well. Your student was bright, motivated, friendly, and enthusiastic. You handled it like a pro when the equipment broke and didn't even curse in front of her too much. Great job! Now, here are a couple of things to keep in your pocket for the future:

1) No matter how wonderful a student is, she will have her breaking point just like anyone else. Done with style, it can be fairly (sadistically) amusing to find this point. Consider it helping her to establish her own boundaries for the future. If she manages to get through pulling 7 ticks off of herself in a 5 minute period with only a minor freak-out, break out the big guns: without batting an eye, translate for her (without lying) that the muddy pond she is about to row onto with you in an inflatable children's raft is actually infested with alligators. The poor girl will be too terrified to bother looking terrified. Watch for all of the blood to instantaneously drain from her face. With any luck, Future Shazta, you will also be offered the use of a larger and sturdier boat that must be driven in by the ranch manager since he's worried you might get eaten in the inflatable. This will sooth the assistant considerably, making you feel like less of a jerk for accidentally terrifying her. I'm just bummed that we didn't get to see any alligators in the end.

2) There is some inherent humor in taking a Mormon field assistant to Mexico. She was wonderfully chill with the tobacco (we were working in a major tobacco producing area that even exports to Cuba) and alcohol ('cause your Mexican colleagues don't think lunch in the field is quite right without a beer). It was the coffee that did her in. Apparently, Mormons can't drink coffee or tea for religious reasons. This only became awkward when we were being hosted by a family whose children we had stolen for the field (more on that another time) and who wanted to show us their hospitality by serving us boiled milk from on of their own cows, mixed with Nescafe. Rule of politeness dictate that we consume whatever our hosts graciously provide, so we settled in on wooden benches to drink our milk-cafe and watch the final minutes of the Mexico-France World Cup game on a 6 inch black and white TV that was the only indication of electricity in the area. I am not a milk drinker since I don't really like the taste and it tends to cause phlegm problems (I know you wanted to hear that!) and I'm not a coffee drinker due to mild caffeine intolerance (I'm assuming the rest of the world doesn't drink coffee because they like the feeling of their heart racing and their stomach churning, but I could be wrong. Is that what it's supposed to do??), but I manned up and drank my mug. I had totally forgotten about the Mormon coffee thing, and while I sincerely doubt that Nescafe can actually be classified as coffee it was causing an issue for my poor, sweet assistant. Whispering through clenched teeth and a smile, she told me that she couldn't do it. Being the awesome person that I am, I casually switched mugs with her and told her to keep sipping out of the now-empty mug in her hand. Two mugs of the stuff later, I felt mildly ill but very proud of myself for watching out for my assistant. Then we got back in the Jeep to drive back down one of the worst dirt roads in Mexico. I am proud to report that I did not actually vomit.

3) Being responsible for an undergraduate field assistant means making sure that they are reasonably safe. Even from those alligators. While it was a bit crowded when we wedged 5 adults into a Jeep Wrangler to travel hideous dirt roads, at least everyone had a seatbelt. My assistant was further stabilized and padded/protected when we stole those two Mexican boys, ages 8 and 10, and managed to fit all 7 of us into the Wrangler. One of them was even sitting on her lap, helping to prevent her from flying up and cracking her head on the ceiling during bad bumps. See? Safety first!

We didn't once have to pull her out of a ditch and explain that the green chunky stuff in the water she was drinking did not count towards her vegetables for the day. Nor did we have to worry about her chasing bears or accidentally destroying 20% of the data set by writing the numbers in the wrong order. These accomplishments may have had more to do with her general awesomeness and less to do with our magical advances in advising skills, but we will take what we can get.

In my next letter to you, Future Shazta, I will remind you of the proper way to kidnap children in the field, eating wild berries, and creative accounting.

Cheers,

Shazta (June 2010)

Notes from the field 1: pre-field

Dear Future Self,

Having just gotten back from the field, it seemed like a good time to write down some things to remember for the future. First, though, let's backtrack to things you should remember from before going to the field:

1) You are very allergic to something you ate down here. Fortunately, your throat didn't seal up or anything, but the rash that produced the Melanie Griffith lips and the Dobby-the-house-elf ears was not cool. Never eat that again. Good luck figuring out what it was. Also, local meds don't seem to help much; keep a stash of Claritin in the house.

2) Buffalo is awesome, as are your friends and family there. However, trying to eat your weight in one weekend is a bad idea. Do not do this again. (You may have been too hopped up on the Claritin and Nyquil to recall this clearly, but it will make you ill such that you yearn for the gentle comforts of Mexican food again.)

3) When picking people up from the airport, just give up and call a taxi. Yeah, you can get there for under a dollar if you use buses and the metro, but something will invariably break down and make the trip last over an hour. Like when you went to pick up your visiting undergraduate field assistant and the metro got stuck for 20 minutes. Thank goodness her plane was delayed so she didn't think you'd abandoned her in the Mexico City airport! Just suck it up and pay the $10 to get across town in a reasonable time.

Got all that? Great! Next edition, we'll go over the things you should try to remember from the field. Hint: undergraduates and alligators.

Love,

Shazta (version June 2010)

Back to Buffalo

Keating and I are busy excitedly packing tonight. Very early tomorrow morning we leave for our first trip back to the States since we moved to Mexico in December. We're headed back to Buffalo for our friends' wedding. Robin, the bride, was responsible for introducing me to Keating... and she even loaned me the perfect shoes for our first date! Keating asked me out at my birthday party, which is incidentally the same party where Rob met my fellow grad student "Manthew". Manthew (named such for early confusion over his name) is the groom this weekend. Keating and I are so excited to be able to celebrate their wedding with them this weekend!

As I pack, I'm giddily reviewing the delights to come: friends, family, Duff's wings (!!!!), American pizza, being able to flush toilet paper, driving, etc. Yay!!!!

And because everything somehow comes back to work, I will also be picking up a depth sounder for use in my field work down here. It should totally beat that rock tied to laundry line that I was using to measure lake depths last time. I'm headed back to the field shortly after I get back from Buffalo with my improved equipment. With me luck that neither trip, Buffalo or the field, includes more run-ins with tadpoles or free-range crocodiles.

Trout pout

I am currently the owner of a trout pout that would make Melanie Griffith green with envy, and mine came naturally. I have no idea what I ate the other day that did this to me, but my lips are swollen and sting like I lost out to some bees. It started out as an inflamed rash on my soft palate and emerged just before I began my hour-long seminar presentation at work. Awesome. Now the rash is gone, but it appears that I did something incredibly stupid: I managed to scratch my inflamed lips and then touch my right earlobe, thereby spreading the allergic reaction. Not cool. Keating has been an angel, running around to stores near where he works to pick up benadryl for me. On the upside, I've had extra time to read in bed and just finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Spanish. That at least counts as studying, right?

Earthquake?

I just got back into my office following our earthquake evacuation. It wasn't a drill, but no one felt anything to indicate that we were actually being hit by a magnitude 6 quake (it needs to be that big or bigger to activate the evacuation alarm). As of now, the assumption is that it was a false alarm triggered by a glitch in the system. Oddly enough, however, it turns out that the earthquake evacuation alarm is actually significantly quieter and far less obnoxious than the alarm set off by the in-building seismic stations every time they register anything. Really small stuff. Multiple times per day. Because it's apparently just too much work for the seismologists to just go check their machines every so often without announcing every earth-twitch to the entire building. Seems a little backward, personally.

Wonderful weekend

Sometimes, it doesn't take much to make a weekend wonderful. Such was the case with the weekend when Keating and I finally found cheddar cheese down here. This weekend was similarly low-key but wonderful.

For one of the first times since we moved here in December, I got to go shopping by myself. I'm not much of a shopper, so roughly 95% of my Mexican shopping experiences have been confined to grocery stores... as was this trip. For those of you concerned that I may have lost my mind to be so excited about going grocery shopping alone, let me explain. Keating is wonderful, but we are never more stressed with each other than when we are in a grocery store. You can actually watch Keating twitch just walking past a grocery store. It's amazing! While that should normally be enough for us to happily leave him out of the food shopping, we are stuck. Without a car, we have to carry all of our food for the half-mile hike home. It helps to have two of us along.

Without Keating along, I was able to read moisturizer labels (mine from the states was running out and the store doesn't carry my brand), find a yoga mat, and even pick up some exfoliating body scrub and a replacement lipstick. When I got home I had a wonderful time pampering myself and feeling incredibly indulgent. Spoiling me further, Keating decided to cook dinner so that he could work out a Buffalo Wing Pasta recipe he'd been thinking about. Pampering and Anchor Bar wing sauce? Amazing!

The next day, Keating and I made the long walk to the town's central plaza where we enjoyed amazing Mexican food. If you haven't tried tacos al pastor, you need to find yourself a legit Mexican restaurant. Get a side order of grilled baby onions and guacamole, and finish it off with a cold Victoria beer (Keating) or horchata (me). We wandered the local markets and visited a book store to buy Spanish translations of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Narnia: The Magician's Nephew to help us with our learning. The weekend reached dizzyingly perfect heights when we got to play with 2-month old chihuahua puppies in the plaza. Cuteness overload!

For dinner, we ate candy and read in bed. Come to think of it, Keating had eaten ice cream for breakfast (we were having a power outage and didn't want to see the ice cream go to waste). Isn't that one of the advantages of being a grown up: getting to eat junk when you want to? That, and staying up late.

Anyway, we had a wonderful weekend. (Even though I didn't get to steal one of the puppies.)

Who are you?

It is commonly accepted that postdocs exist in a strange no-mans-land in academic life; we are neither faculty nor students, just researchers who don't fit well into the traditional boxes. While there are institutions and disciplines in which postdocs are so common that they have their own recognized identity, this is not my experience. At all. While most of my department faculty knows who I am, and some of the grad students can probably recognize me, I'm still an outsider both by virtue of language/nationality and academic position. I have been working here for over 4 months, and I still do not have a university email account and have not been added to the department email list. Important announcement? I better hope that my boss or my office mate, a PhD student, lets me know. I'm also still waiting to get a copier code.

Today, the department secretary stopped by my office to confirm the title of a seminar talk I will be giving next week. She then asked me for my school affiliation so that she could fill in her form. Perplexed, I stared at her. Did she want the name of where I got my PhD and did most of the research I would be covering in the talk? That didn't seem right. Turns out, she apparently didn't realize after 4+ months that I am actually employed here and not visiting from somewhere else. After she left, my office mate gave up on choking back his laughter.

This reminded me of a little snafu during my study abroad in northern Mexico back during my undergrad. It was during finals week, but one of my professors had decided to keep lecturing daily and planned to hold the exam sometime in the future (a little more flexible than US schools, no?). Once it became clear that he had no intention of holding his final before I needed to fly back to the US I scheduled a meeting with him to discuss alternate plans for my exam. When I asked him, he looked at me in complete bafflement and uttered those wonderful words, "Wait, you're enrolled in my class???" It wasn't that I skipped class or didn't take the midterm (he didn't bother with homework, so I can't really claim participation in that), just that he had assumed that I was sitting in on the class since my name had never appeared on his class list. Apparently, there were so few exchange students at the school (3 of us at a school of 30,000) that the university had decided it wasn't worth the effort to actually put us into the system for a semester. Fortunately, my classes all transferred back to my home university as pass/fail credits so my professors, who hadn't bothered to record my grades throughout the term, only had to decide if I had passed or failed. The professor who was still lecturing through finals week hadn't even written his final yet, so I never had to take it.

I'm thinking that I should get a little pushier about getting that new email address and being put on the listserv lest I end up another sort of ghost in the system. That, and listservs are great for scoring free food!

The problem with Saturdays

Yesterday was Saturday. Weekends and normally wonderful things, but Keating and I have noticed a serious trend here on Saturdays: the alley on the other side of our wall turns into the site of a wild street party. This wouldn't be that big of a problem, except that last night's gala went until 5 am and was louder than the front row at a metal concert, with the music and yelling. As a result, Keating and I got approximately 2 whole hours of peace last night. Why only 2? Well, that's because someone in the neighborhood invariably starts shooting off fireworks at 7 am on Sundays. The consistency is such that I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't part of the local priest's plan to get more people to early mass. Or maybe he's just that excited about Sunday mornings.

On the plus side, it is still far quieter here than it was at our last place. That, and we have yet to have been afraid that the fireworks would set fire to this apartment, something I can't say about our last place. Here, we only have to worry about our own problems with fire.

F-ing fire (part 4???)

Someone needs to get down here and take away our matches. Seriously. Keating and I, normally fairly responsible adults, apparently cannot handle fire.

We set the garden ablaze again.

Yup.

This time, Keating had set our little hibachi grill on the glass table in the garden so that he wouldn't have to sit on the grass to cook. He had done this before, and all had been fine. Anyway, all was going well until I arrived home with our dinner guest, a friend from my PhD program who know also works at the university down here. We had just finished with introductions when an amazing crashing sound came from the garden. Yup: the glass table had imploded and dumped the flaming grill onto the glass shards and yard. Keating and I managed to keep cool, and I poured wine for our guest and kept chatting with him while Keating successfully extinguished the yard but kept the grill going.

I think we deserve 10 points for style, but negative 15 points for setting our garden on fire for the second time in a month. Fortunately for us, plants grow like wild down here. In another two weeks, the burned-out patches of grass will be completely erased by new growth. Now we just need to figure out where to get a new glass tabletop.

Being Mexican

This morning, I became (at least temporarily) Mexican. While I was waiting for my pesero to work, a man actually stopped his car and asked me for directions to the Copilco metro station!!!!! (When I told them this, my work colleagues nearly spit their lunches out with laughter. I had to reassure them that I was the only one around for the man to have asked.) Joyfully and accurately, I gave the man directions to his intended destination. I was seriously proud of myself for now only knowing where it was that he wanted to go, but also for being able to concisely answer his question. Then, about 3 minutes after I boarded my bus, I realized that I had actually sent him to the M.A. Quevedo station -- same line, next stop. Without intending it, I had done something so quintessentially Mexican as to justify me declaring myself Mexicana for the day: I had helpfully given detailed, but woefully wrong, directions to someone who was lost. Fortunately, he was a Mexican himself and was likely using my boss' approach to asking directions in this country: ask 3 people, then average their response. For my part, I'm not sure when I've been prouder of such an idiot moment.

I'm back!

It's official: I can truly call myself a blogger. How do I know that I have officially joined the dubious ranks? Complaints! See the following email, copied in its entirety, from my brother:

Hey, you need to keep up with your blog better. Some of us want to hear about what is going on down there in little people land.

That said, let me quickly review what was going on during my absence. (You know, happening to me. Not like a recap of real news or anything!)

Right after my last posts, Keating and I ran away to Cancun for a belated Holy Week holiday with my parents and their friends Darrel and Jackie. Despite my fears that Keating would be "accidentally" fed to sharks by Dad and Darrel while the boys were scuba diving (boys!), he came home each time with happy tails of undersea life. That's not to say that there wasn't any good natured hazing: turns out that Keating is now affectionately known in some circles as "Chumly" since he vomited just about every time he set foot on the scuba boat. Since I really dislike fish, I enjoyed lots of time poolside with the girls. On the day that we all went to Xel-ha (an incredible natural aquarium. If you get the chance, visit it!), Keating and I worked out a brilliant strategy by which I lounged on top of an inner tube and held on to the (unfastened) between-leg strap from Keating's required lifejacket as he snorkeled -- it was like getting my very own custom lazy-river tour! Keating would occasionally point out interesting fish or rays, while I would point out the cool birds, lizards, etc, to him... and all without me having to actually get too close to the icky fishies. The six of us also enjoyed a trip to see the pyramids and Chichen Itza. In all, we had a wonderful trip. Unfortunately, Keating and I are both camera-impaired and the only photo from the entire trip the features people has us all so small that we're not really recognizable. At least the pyramid looks good! (We're the couple on the right, Mom and Dad are in the middle, and Darrel and Jackie are on the left.)

After Cancun, Keating and I had a little under a week to prepare for our next excitement: Keating's parents came to visit us for a long weekend. They were our first official house guests (Sorry Mom and Dad, but you stayed in a hotel!). My FIL's knee was acting up, so we opted to not do a repeat performance of the borderline elder abuse we committed against my parents by dragging them everywhere on crowded public transportation and taking them on the occasional mini death march dodging traffic frogger-style. Instead, we enjoyed a relaxing weekend in which we took a boat tour of the famous gardens of Xochimilco and took in a performance of Carmina Burana. Unfortunately, I had to disappear on occasion for work and even left town the day before my in-laws; I was scheduled to return to the field. (Note: if you are reading my mind properly, the words "I was scheduled to return to the field" should have been read melodramatically, with building dread, and underscored by an ominous soundtrack. If you didn't get that the first time, please try again.)

My previous field trip was not successful. At all. So I had alternately astronomical and mediocre expectation for this field work. Mostly, I just desperately wanted to get data points this time and not be crippled by a horse. Fortunately, both of these goals were met. Since actual research data is fairly boring, and outside the theme of this blog, let me just share with you some of the highlights from the trip:

1. The field vehicle we ended up with this time did not have AC or a radio. It turns out that that wasn't too bad, despite it being 95 F and 98% humidity. It meant that we could all roll down the windows and plug into our respective ipods for the long car rides, thus saving me from Barry Manilow.
2. Technologically speaking, I have fallen so very, very far. During my PhD, I was writing programs for Beowulf clusters (supercomputers). For this project, I was rowing to the center of ponds in an inflatable raft (labelled a children's toy, for use only in pools and under adult supervision) and dropping a rock tied to a rope overboard to measure water depth (the sonar depth-finder was broken).
3. I got to see a gigantic iguana chillin' in the wild under a mango tree.
4. I got a tadpole stuck between the two smallest toes on my left foot. Think about my love for fish, and then imagine the screaming and foot-shaking that ensued. Honestly, I still shudder thinking about it. Not cool.
5. My boss would argue that this one is worse that the tadpole, but I'm unconvinced. We had just walked down a steep trail to get to another of the ponds and had shouted out to the man net fishing from a "skiff" (really just a few logs tied together Robinson Crusoe-style) if it would be okay if we dragged our inflatable down the hill and took some measurements in the pond. He replied that we were welcome to it and would not disturb us at all. Almost as an afterthought, he added that we should watch out for the crocodiles. At those words, we notice a 4 foot croc slither off the bank 25 feet to our right and skulk away through the murky water. The man on the raft assured us that that one was just a baby and that many of the crocs in that particular pond were closer to 9 feet long. Shuddering, my boss paid the man on the raft to collect our measurements for us.
6. Ticks and other biting bugs. Apparently, this is the season. On the final day in the field, I removed 9-10 ticks from my clothes and 3 from where they were busy biting me. On the plus side, I have been assured that the ticks in that area are merely gross and not dangerous like our wonderful lyme disease carriers in the US. On the minus side, I came back from the field looking suspiciously like I had chicken pox. Fortunately, Keating believed me that they were bug bites and still gave me a welcome home kiss.
7. Ugh!!!! Seriously! A F-ing tadpole between my toes!!!!!!!!
8. We also managed to get the truck stuck, bottomed out on a broken concrete pipe sticking up through a dirt road. I hereby curse you, Nissan, for building a pickup truck with the power of a VW Beetle (original style) and the clearance of a Chrylser PT Cruiser. What the hell were you thinking???!?
9. Accommodations in San Martín Tuxtla were lovely, as before. Unfortunately, they didn't have any availability for some of our nights. Do not stay in Lerdo de Tejada. The hotel was... yeah. There were dead bugs already squashed into the shower walls, greasy head prints on the mirrored headboards, and the bathroom windows all opened into the "lobby."
10. Did I remember to mention that I actually got some data points???? And I wasn't even crippled by a horse! Nor did I vomit even once! Therefore, despite tadpoles, crocodiles, ticks, and car trouble, this field trip was definitely an improvement over the previous one!

Now I'm back in Mexico City and back at my office desk. Keating and I celebrated Cinco de Mayo yesterday with a splash of tequila in our iced tea (aside from school children and union employees, it isn't a celebrated holiday here. They kind of equate it with Columbus Day.).

(I'll try to add more photos later. I forgot to bring my camera in so that I could download my photos.)

Housepets

I'm totally over-posting today. I just couldn't leave for a week without mentioning our new pet. We found him (her?) while packing. Inside the house. Already comfortably moved in.

Fortunately, our new pet is not of the "large hairy spider" or "sneaky rodent" variety. Elmer is a monstrously large snail. (He's kind of sticky, so I'm naming him after the glue. I'm pretty terrible about naming things in general. You must all hope that Keating gets to name our future children so that they don't end up with idiotic descriptive names like "Female" (pronounced fee-mah-lay, of course. It's Italian.) or "Lumpy Loudmouth.") Elmer apparently climbed in through our window from our neighbor's garden and was comfortably chilling in the spare room. We have moved him to the garden, since chucking him out the window back into the neighbor's garden seems cruel. We'll have to wait and see if he's still with us when we get back from Cancun.

Losing weight

In honor of leaving on vacation tomorrow, I decided it was time to lose some weight. After getting home from work and kissing dear Keating, I marched myself down to the salon on the corner and got my first haircut in over 7 months. The end result: the best $2.80 haircut EVER! (And no, there was no sale. That was regular price.)

Vacation!

Mexico City pretty much closes down for Holy Week as people flee the city for the beaches/mountains/non-urban anything. Keating and decided, however, to bank that time off and use it this coming week when my parents will be in Cancun. Like the completely grateful moochers that we are, we will be happily crashing in my parents' suite with them for a week of sunshine and beaches. (And we've begged them to bring us more Swiss Miss. Fortunately, they still love us!)

Have a wonderful week and enjoy a couple of photos my mom sent me from their visit last month:

Us with our new friend the Aztec death god. He is pretty seriously creepy looking and could use a sandwich or something. Just look at those ribs! This creepy fellow lives at the National Anthropology Museum.

Built in the 16th century, thus church in Coyoacan's main plaza features incredible art. The plaza itself turns into a sort of gathering place and street fair every weekend.

And finally, a totally gratuitous shot of my baby (Asher). He has been living with my parents, and I miss him terribly. We would bring him down here, but something in his previous life as a stray has left him absolutely terrified of being crated, making it very difficult to safely move him here.

Grillin' in the garden OR More trouble with fire

Last night, I asked Keating to grill up some spicy sausages for dinner while I made up some spaghetti. Thanks to genetics, Keating is blessed with awesome grilling skills -- I'm pretty sure that a little bit of charcoal and lighter fluid runs through the veins in his family.

Our new apartment came with a small grill, so Keating happily set up shop in the garden while I went to work cutting tomatoes for the sauce. A few minutes later, I hear muffled obscenities floating in from the garden. Keating dashed into the kitchen, looked around quickly with a flustered look on his face, and ran back out. I don't enjoy cutting vegetables nearly enough to not wander over to see what all the fuss was about. As I nonchalantly rounded the corner, prepared to ask if I could help him with anything, I glanced out the garden door. And froze. The garden was quite clearly on fire, with bright little flames jumping up from the grass. I quickly grabbed a pot of water, but Keating had used his previously unknown (by me) locker-room-style towel whipping to put out the blaze before I could get back. (I lamely pored the water where the fire had been.)

It turns out that Keating had been having trouble getting the charcoal to light. This may seem odd, even disgraceful, for a member of his family, but he had a pretty decent excuse: the charcoal was Mexican-style, or untreated. When he tried to put some more lighter gel on the charcoal (couldn't find lighter fluid at the store and didn't want to siphon gas out of a neighbor's car), the gel lit. The problem was that it wasn't just the gel on the charcoal that went up in flames, but also the gel on/in the container. Keating's attempt to put out the gel fire only ended up spraying flaming gel across the garden and igniting a seat cushion and a large patch of grass.

Needless to say, the sausages were cooked on the stove and we are working on figuring out where to get the vinyl seat cushion reupholstered. On the plus side, dinner came out well and we were able to have a long laugh over it all... after a bottle of wine, anyway!

Ovens are still evil.

I whined several weeks ago about doing battle with my oven in an attempt to bake celebratory brownies. Little did I know the true terror of a Mexican oven! I made brownies again, this time to celebrate our move to the new apartment. Thanks to the resulting fireball, I singed off some arm hair and some hair from the left side of my head (you know those frizzies that never go away? Gone.), and my eyelashes on the left side are now half the length of those on the right. Part of what really sucks about singeing your eyelashes is that the burnt ends curl up and work like little velcro bits until they give up and break off, so I had about 24 hours of my upper and lower eyelashes sticking closed when I tried to open my eye.

Keating kindly pointed out that the brownies still came out great and I didn't burn any skin, so all is apparently still well with the world. I think it will be his turn to light the f-ing oven next time.

Rent!

Keating and I had our very first house guests recently. My parents flew down from Michigan to spend a long weekend visiting us in Mexico City. They were absolute troopers: Keating and I dragged them all over town (on public transportation) for three days, and they're still speaking to us!

Since they insisted on staying in a hotel (we only had a fold-out love seat to offer them), they

might not technically have been house guests. Regardless, they have helped us to define the "rent" we will charge to future visitors who stay with us (never fear, we now have a spare bedroom with a double bed in it). Want to enjoy a fun, cheap vacation in Mexico City, complete with manic guides? Simply peruse the suggested packages below:

A) Long weekend, comple

te with trip down to the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco, all the Mexican pastry you can endure, exploration of the Chapultepec war memorials, and one terrifying night-time taxi ride with a cabby who speaks no English and is horribly lost. Optional case of food poisoning, no additional cost. Price: two tins of Swiss Miss cocoa mix (with the little marshmallows... we like to pick them out of the cocoa powder and eat them), a box of tea (not chamomile or mint, for goodness sakes. That's almost all I can find here.), and a bottle of horseradish mustard.

B) Everything from Package A, plus three more days spent dodging insistent Mexican craft sellers, a climb up a pyramid, a long visit to the world-class Anthropology Museum (I guarantee that you still won't see half of it!), a performance of Mexican "fliers" swinging upside-down from a rotating metal pole while playing some sort of pan flute (Yes, it's strange and inexplicable. I don't get it, either.), and, as an added bonus, we will at some point promise to lose you in a crowded metro station and expect you to find your own way home (It's totally like and urban version of Survivor! Think how proud you'll feel when you make your way home!). If you're lucky, Keating will treat you to his now-famous fresh squeezed orange juice. Cost: a tea kettle, English-language cookbook, books you've finished reading, and Milky Way 100% caramel candy bars (at least 2).

C) For longer trips, we will likely eventually run out of local ideas and will ultimately pack you off to something a little farther out. We're looking for volunteers to help us explore the beaches of Acapulco and the markets of Taxco (the silver capital of the world). We have more pyramids within a couple-hour drive than you can shake a stick at. Looking for something truly unique to do on your vacation? Shazta is always looking for sherpas (uh, I mean "assistants") for field work in Veracruz (just don't read that other post too carefully, huh?). We might even let you eat some of the fruit from our uber-cool kumquat tree that we've got growing in our garden*. Cost: More Swiss Miss, more candy bars (That don't contain chili powder. We've already got that covered, trust me.), Frank's Red Hot (!!!!!), and maybe some beef on weck and sponge candy. If you can figure out how to smuggle us some Duff's wings, we will probably just let you move in for as long as you like.

Unfortunately for my parents, we managed to fit a terrifying amount of those activities into their three days here. One high point came when we brought them back to our apartment for a home cooked dinner. My poor dad looked fairly perturbed by our ghetto-like neighborhood. Dad was a bit perturbed by the raucous party going on across the alley, which we could see and hear fairly well through the gaping holes in the neighbor's corrugated metal roof (we were on the fourth floor). The only thing capable of briefly overpowering the noise from the party was the occasional engine misfire or downshifting from the major road out front. Fortunately, the neighbors on the 2nd floor decided to not pick that evening to flood the building with heavy incense (the kind that no one has ever used for anything other than to cover the smell of pot). Dad definitely looked relieved to know that we would be moving the next weekend to the safest borough in Mexico City (we were on the fringe of the worst borough). Mom, for her part, was too ill to care much. It was after this charming and intimate dinner party that I placed them in a taxi with a cabbie who only pretended to know where their hotel was when I told him and tried to leave them at a hotel with a similar name in a different part of the city.

On the plus side, not only are my parents still speaking to us, they've offered to let us crash with them in a couple of weeks when they will be staying in Cancun. I suspect that they will be happy to enjoy some enforced relaxation with us instead of being pulled all over town by a couple of loving, though incompetent, tour guides (that's us!). In preparation, Keating and I have started stockpiling the rent that we will be paying them for the crash space: Trix, Honey Nut Cheerios, various pastries, etc. We might not be able to get some things we want (Swiss Miss!!!!! Why is there no normal cocoa mix here???!), but at least we have the inside track on basic groceries that are hard to find in resort towns.

P.S. -- We really do welcome friends to visit, and we really are out of the ghetto now and in a lovely apartment with a spare bedroom. It even has a bed. And sheets. We promise that we have learned our lesson and will not subject anyone to the "All of Mexico City in 3 days tour" again. Unless they specifically ask for it by name: "Packages A-C in 1-2-3."

* As a general note, do NOT try to catch a taxi while holding a kumquat tree you just bought from a nursery. Cabbies will actually FLEE from you the instant they see that tree. This makes it very difficult to get your lovely new plant home.

Butterflies

As mentioned in the last post, my reward for clawing my way back to my loving husband in Mexico City after a terrible week of food poisoning and horse-inflicted abuse in the field was to get up at 5 am the next morning to go horseback riding. Keating and I were bleary-eyed but awake and (mostly) dressed when the phone rang at 5:10 am Sunday morning. It was our friend Monica, who had been kind enough to make the reservations for the tour. She was calling because she had just realized that, being a Sunday, the public transportation system would not yet be running and we would have no way to get to the rendezvous point for the tour. Thank goodness that Monica is 100% amazing: she had already called a taxi service to come get us.

About 20 minutes later, Keating and I sat in the dark in front of our apartment building waiting for our taxi. Monica had stressed that the taxi would be a dark blue sedan and that the driver would know both our first names and the code number "98." (There's nothing like the Mexican taxi service to make you feel like you're either in a Bond movie or doing something illegal.) Keating and I watched the minutes tick away nervously as we scanned the nearly-empty streets. Finally, Keating pointed to a car down the block:

Keating: Have you been watching that car? Do you think maybe it's our taxi? It looks kind of like he's looking for someone.

Me: Yeah... he keeps driving in reverse down the block, then pulling forward around the corner. Really weird. It's a white compact, though, so it can't be ours. Monica said it's a blue sedan.

Keating: (simply staring at me for a moment) There have been, what 4 cars on the road? And one of them looks lost on our block? How many Mexicans do you think would be looking for an address on our block at this time of day? Maybe they sent a different car. Are you sure you understood her right? I could just walk over there and ask him.

Me: Don't do that! That guy has been driving like a lunatic. He's probably doing something illegal. I'll call Monica back to check.

Monica confirmed that we were looking for a blue sedan, and I continued to stare suspiciously at the white compact car. Moments after hanging up the phone, the white car ghosted forward and rolled down a window.

Driver: (translated) Are you Sara?

Me: No, I'm Shazta. (realizing that "Sara" and "Shazta" are pretty darn close to the same word in Spanish) Are you supposed to be picking two people up here?

Driver: I'm looking for Sara and .... (trails off to nowhere)

Me: We're supposed to wait for a cab that knows both our names and a security number. (I'm pretty sure this is our guy, despite the wrong car and wrong name, but I refuse to just get into an unmarked car with some man I've been eyeing suspiciously for 20 minutes because Sara sounds vaguely like Shazta.)

Driver: (Gets on radio. Mutters back and forth.) Sara. And Char-ley? (looks hopefully at Keating)

Keating: Well, I think that's the closest that anyone has come to actually pronouncing my name since we got here, especially after it's been broadcast second-hand through a radio. Get in the taxi, Shazta -- otherwise we won't make it to the rendezvous.

As I got into the taxi, still muttering about not having the securi

ty number and how James Bond wound know better than to get into the car without that number, the phone rang. It was Monica calling to tell us that she had phoned the taxi company to figure out what was going on and had been told that the driver was sitting around, confused, waiting for us. It was great that Monica called just then since our driver had completely forgotten where he had been hired to take us to and refused to believe me when I told him (most people aren't looking for closed metro stations at that hour). In frustration, I passed him the phone and let Monica (who is a native Mexican) explain to him that we were not crazy, stupid gringos. (Mostly, anyway.) He agreed to drive us to our destination, but kept repeating that he thought it was terribly strange and very likely a bad idea. I found this reassuring, as you can imagine.

This is how we came to be standing in front of a closed metro station in a semi-seedy part of town at 6:30 am, waiting for anyone else from our tour. At the stroke of 7, Monica appeared from one direction and our mini-touring-bus arrived from the other. Within moments, we were all loaded in and gone.

Our tour left the urban sprawl of Mexico City and wound through the surrounding mountains until we reached Valle de Bravo. At the butterfly sanctuary, we each paid our 3 pesos to use the facilities before mounting the horses for our ride up the hill. Unlike the work horses of my crippling experience two days before, these horses were outfitted with comfortable leather saddles and lazy dispositions appropriate for adult-scale pony rides. Each horse had it's own minder to make sure that the horse didn't suddenly decide to play the old game of "Ditch the Tourist." My horse was so completely indifferent to its prospects that it had no intention of either climbing up or walking back down the hill; my horse-minder had to actually drag the horse both ways. (I felt so bad I gave him an extra large tip.) We had missed the peak butterfly time by about a week, but the view was still incredible atop the hill. The air swirled with monarch butterflies making their final preparations before departing on their long migration north. Parts of the forest floor were carpeted in the orange and black wings of butterflies who had made the long journey south to die in the quiet pines and sunny meadows. It was amazingly beautiful.

Butterflies in the Valle de Bravo sanctuaries. My camera battery died, so I found this photo online to show you what it looked like. Credit: http://veryveryfun.com/index.php?Itemid=1&id=25&option=com_content&task=view

Following our visit to the butterfly sanctuary, we stopped at the nearby Bridal Veil Falls and the actual town of Valle de Bravo. The town, situated on a large reservoir and surrounded by mountains, is a favorite resort location for Mexico City's wealthy. It is a picturesque mix of grand haciendas, artisan's markets, public squares, and old village, with plenty of opportunities for hang gliding and boating.

Another internet-snagged photo, this time of Valle de Bravo's central square. Maybe next time I'll remember to bring spare batteries. Photo from: http://travel.webshots.com/photo/2122445550064444924wnGeZz

Keating, Monica, and I went in search of the main Artisan's Market which our guide had assured us was only a couple of blocks up a hilly street. After about 10 blocks, we decided to ask directions. I have previously complained that Mexicans use a strange and complicated conversion system when giving distances in their directions: "two blocks straight ahead" could easily mean "thirteen blocks north, four blocks east." Thanks to getting lost in Valle de Bravo with Monica, a real, live Mexican, I now know how to translate Mexican directions: go as far as the person suggested, and then find someone else to ask. I was still pretty sure that I was going to die from physical pain and exhaustion from my week in the field, but I refused to give up the search for the market -- I was on the hunt for a cool birthday present for my mom. At least 5 sets of directions later, the three of us finally crawled into the Artisan's Market. I found the gift for my mom, and Keating found a nice present for his dad (whose birthday happens to be the day before my mom's). Presents in hand, the three of us left the market and immediately got lost again.

Note: I use the term "lost" loosely. Geologists are never lost; we are simply exploring the area. (Even if we are confused as hell, holding the map upside-down, howling with frustration. We are not lost.)

Traffic jams on the way back kept us on the road a couple hours longer than planned, and we finally crawled up the 3 flights of stairs to our apartment at 11 pm. We were exhausted and dirty (and may have smelled faintly of horse poo), but we felt good. It had been a great day outside of the city.

Why my job is worse than yours:

This is a follow-up to me gloating about having an awesome job. Now technically, the following complaint is not about my job, per se, but I think it's relevant.

Yesterday at a free department lunch (ok, that part was cool), one of the professors looked a little depressed. When questioned by his colleagues, he admit that he was bummed because his car had just been stolen from the parking lot. Someone had apparently tipped off the thieves that the security camera for that lot was down, and the security guard didn't notice anything to make him suspect that the car was being stolen when it drove out of the lot. Note: not only was the car in a guarded lot, it even had one of those theft-prevention devices on the steering wheel. Quietly, I asked my friend to my left if the professor had a thing for fancy cars -- it turns out that the guy drove a VW bug... of the "classic" (run-down) variety.

To make matters worse: this was the third time that that man had had his car stolen from the university lot.

You'd think that with a track record like that he'd learn to take the bus.

The Field

Evidence A for why my job is better than yours: I got paid to ride a horse through the rainforest, up a volcano.

Now, it might seem like I'm gloating or rubbing your noses in it. To be fair, I admit that I am. At the same time, however, I'll let you in on this little secret: while Evidence A is pretty darn awesome, I'm only gloating about it because the rest of the week in the field sucked. Really, truly, sucked.

To start off with, it's important to note that I have problems with motion sickness. I turn green and achy, and my best course of action is typically to just fall asleep. It turns out that it isn't easy to sleep in the back seat of a manual transmission pickup truck being driven Mexican-style on Mexican roads. Mexican drivers are very different from the American drivers that I'm used to, and really, they have to be. The roads here can be a wild collection of pits and speed bumps, and that's when they're paved. Survival driving in Mexico reminds me of what you might get from a 13 year old boy, hopped up on Mountain Dew, played Grand Theft Auto at 3 am (but without GTA's extra violence. Duh.). I bruised my right elbow from being bounced off of the door so many times during high-speed swerving maneuvers and bumps. The wildness of the ride was emphasized by the contrasting soundtrack: Barry Manilow and Manilow-wannabes, with a few forays into "It's not easy being green" by Kermit The Frog and "She-boom" by some bubblegum pop group from the past that left me wondering just how long the fall would be if we drive off of the next cliff. I had thought that my years of driving for Field Camp had fairly well inoculated me to hours spent listening to questionable music mixes; I was wrong.

Barry Manilow. He writes the songs. Would you road trip with this man?

I had 2 academic goals for the week in the field, and 2 non-academic goals. On the academic side, I wanted to look for some specific features on top of the main volcano and get some samples from a set of cones on the other side of the volcanic field. Non-academically, I wanted to swim in the hotel pool and ride a horse up a volcano. Of these 4 goals, you already know which one happened.

Academic goal 2 was undone by heavy fog that prevented us from even finding the sample sites. Non-academic goal 1 was undone by cold weather and a nasty bout of food poisoning that left me confined to the hotel for a day and prevented us from going down to Veracruz. The other two goals are related to one another and deserve a slightly longer telling.

I was ecstatic when I learned that we would be going up the main volcano on horseback, firstly because horses are just plain cool and secondly because I didn't really want to walk all that way. Previously, the team has rented horses from Don Tomás, a rancher up in the hills. Don Tomás didn't think he'd be able to help us this time, so he suggested we make arrangements with Don Guido. Don Guido has the ranch neighboring Don Tomás', but was down in the town below. Somewhere. As such, we spent a evening driving the back streets of the town (in the dark, of course!) asking people on the street if they knew how to find Don Guido.

Us: Excuse me, do you know where we can find Don Guido?

Man: Huh?

Woman: (just walking up to Man) Ah, Don Guido! He lives up in the mountains. Drive up this street until it curves right. Then look for the Corona sign. Or is it a Coke sign? I don't remember. Anyway, ask around for Señora Margarita. She'll know how to find Don Guido.

Us: Um... thanks!

With those detailed directions, we set off along unpaved back roads in the pitch black you get in an area where electricity is enough of a luxury that no one would dream of putting up streetlights. Miraculously, we not only found the correct curve in the road, but Don Guido happened to be there. He agreed to guide us up the mountain on horseback three days later, on Friday.

When Friday arrived, however, Don Guido had to back out of the plan due to an arthritis flare-up in his knees. Don Tomás, feeling bad for us, agreed to lead us up the volcano after all. He quickly rigged together enough equipment to saddle up four horses, and we started the ascent.

Me on Baya, just before we started the ascent. JM, my boss, is on the horse on the right. I only got to sit up this straight when we were stopped, thanks to the short reins.

As excited as I was to be riding a horse, I was also a bit nervous. I'm not a real rider, so I figured that I would have a very sore bum afterwards. I was also a little apprehensive about my horse, Baya, since I'd been warned that she had a habit of biting the tails of the other horses and pissing them off. Fortunately, Baya was very docile, particularly compared to the freckled horse given to Araceli (the other postdoc); that horse tried to rip down a small tree when Don Tomás saddled her. Within minutes of starting the ride, it was apparent that I would have an unexpected challenge in the saddle: my jury-rigged equipment included reins that were far too small. In order to let Baya walk, I had to lean forward across the pommel of the saddle and hold the reins with only 2 fingers. Since I was also wearing a backpack, this was doubly uncomfortable. All was going well, though, until Baya tried to walk between 2 very close trees and brushed against a branch on the right side. Slightly spooked, she danced sideways and bashed my knee into the left tree. The whole group got to pause while I cursed in a few languages and Baya shot me looks over her shoulder that easily translated as, "That's what you get for being a lousy rider. I have no desire to go up this mountain. I could have been back at home enjoying some nice grass." Shortly after that, JM's horse got skittish about stepping over a fallen log, backed up into Araceli's horse, panicked, and started kicking. Based on the muddy print left on her horse, Araceli came within a couple of inches of having been kicked in her own leg.

The forest around us was beautiful and eerie. It was the sort of place to make one believe in fairies and wood sprites, with curls of mist snaking between enormous trees and vines and Spanish moss dangling from branches. It was also strangely quiet, with little sound other than that of the horses steps as they climbed.

Finally, we reached as high as the horses would go. Don Tomás tethered them and then began leading us by foot up the trail. I am not a fast hiker, nor have I ever been, but I managed to leave my fellow academics in the dust. Don Tomás and I would forge ahead, then wait while the others caught up. This success for me became a little less impressive when I thought about it a little more: Araceli has a small child and JM is over 60. Plus, it turns out that JM was happily collecting orchids. And our guide, who I was so happy to be keeping up with as he used his machete to hack a path through the jungle, is well into his 70's and awaiting knee surgery. (But I am still cool!!!) Don Tomás kept reassuring us that we were very close, only 20 minutes, from the top. A couple of hours later when we stopped for lunch, the jungle was still tick around us and streams running down past us were a pretty good indication that the summit was still a ways away.

I finished my lunch (a tin of shredded turkey and vegetables, with a large roll) and looked around. The fog was closing in again, and the next part of the "path" looked nearly impassable. Despairing, I asked JM how on earth a particular naturalist had managed to climb the mountain in the 1700's during an eruption.

JM looked back at me a little confused and said, " Well, he went up the mule path on the other side of the volcano. It's a wide, smooth path that used to be trafficked a lot before they built the roads out here."

Incredulous, I gasped, " Then what are we doing over here???"

Looking even more confused, he answered, "I've already been up the other side before. I wanted to see what it looked like from this side."

That was as high as we got up the volcano. Despite Don Tomás' urgings that we were only another 20 minutes from the top, we decided that we had to start back down if we were going to reach the ranch again by nightfall. On the hike back to the horses, we discovered that the misting rain combined with our previous passage to reduce the trail to a steep mudslick. Where we had scrambled up slopes on the way up, we now were left clinging to vines and wild sugar cane to control our slide downhill. For comparison, imagine the scene from Avatar, where the characters use the huge leaves to bounce their way down from the treetops... now cover everything with mud and slime, and make it far less graceful. By the time we reached the horses, our legs were quivering from the effort of trying to control the slide down the muddy slopes.

We climbed back up on the horses and rode back ploddingly to the ranch. For the final hour, all I could think about was how badly I ached from being on the horse. My back and shoulders ached from leaning forward for the reins, and my armpits were clearly bruised from trying to lean through my backpack straps. My butt was sore. More than anything, though, my knees felt like they were on fire. They hurt so badly that I was unable to tap Baya with my heels to convince her to keep moving when she decided to gaze at flowers. I'm normally a bit knock-kneed, but I swear I was bow-legged by the time I got off of Baya back at the ranch.

The next morning, we started the drive back to Mexico City. For the next 8 hours or so, I had time to reflect on the week in the field while my aching body was bounced off of the door, Barry Manilow crooned, and I turned green. I had gotten food poisoning and was black from bruises, but I didn't have a single data point to show for the entire week in the field. When we finally arrived back at my apartment, all I wanted to do was collapse into Keating's arms and take a week-long nap.

Keating, my wonderful husband, had been busy while I was away. He happily told me how he'd worked things out with our friend Monica to visit the butterfly sanctuary the next day. I had known about the plans when I left, so I was glad to know that everything had been finalized. Except that we would be getting up at 5 am. And we would be going horseback riding.

To be continued....