La Vida y Los Picachos...

I already have a lot to write, so I´ll try to break it down into sections so people can pick and choose what they want to read.

SAN MIGUEL y LA CASA

Things are good here. The weather is hot during the day and cold at night. There is something going on every night and people stay out until well into the morning. I have also now seen Poppy´s house, Ozvanny´s house, and the apartment that this 23-year old Texan, Michael, is renting while his mom builds a house complete with pool table and massage parlor. Both Poppy´s house and Michael´s apartment are extremely nice. This weekend we went to La Feria; a fair with many less white people than I expected. It was alright, but I cut myself running away from something in the house of horrors and all the food was expensive. On Sunday Amanda and I went on una caminata (a hike) en los Picachos (some of the mountains outside San Miguel) with Miguelón from the daycare and four of his friends as well as his son, Josue, and his dog, Leo... more on the hike later. This weekend is the celebration for the feast of Saint Michael (San Miguel). Apparently the festivities don´t actually start until around 4am Saturday morning, so you really have no choice but to stay up until then drinking. Everyone from La Casa de Los Angeles will be there along with just about everyone else in the city. Hopefully that will provide some material for my next entry.

Yesterday (Monday) I had my first day in the little health clinic at La Casa de Los Angeles. The reception area/pharmacy plus the doctors´ office itself total about 250 square feet and there are already two doctors, a married couple named Sam and Cristina, so there isn´t really a ton of space or work for me. However, they let me sit in on both patient consultations yesterday and soon I´ll start taking the blood pressure of the patients who need it. The consultations were pretty interesting. I will now assume that since I am not a doctor nor a patient, doctor-patient confidentality does not apply to me. The first patient was a 29 year old man complaining of fatigue and an increase in his heart rate. I had a lot of trouble understanding him, as I do most people here, but the doctor spoke nice and clear and I found out later that I was guessing right. I even wondered to myself at one point if he had diabetes, and after he left the doctor told me she is worried he might be diabetic. Maybe I can just skip nursing school. The next appointment was a little boy with diarrhea. I understood almost nothing of that meeting, but the impression I got that there wasn´t really anything wrong with the kid also turned out to be more or less correct. The only thing I knew I was understanding was when the parents started asking about herpes.

I won´t be spending much time in the clinic, unfortunately, because there simply isn´t enough work. Our strategy from this point on is to have me work in the daycare until there is a patient, at which point the doctors will call for me and I´ll come and make some more patients wonder why the hell there is some clueless white boy in the room with them. The kids at the daycare are a lot of fun. Most like me because I am a white male... neither of which traits they see very often. One boy, Matías or Mathías, has taken a particular liking to me. His dad, an American, died recently, and we think he is comfortable with me because I resemble him to some degree. Matías arrived at the clinic a few days before me and when I showed up he was already famous for his day-long screaming fits. He cries and screams like something from Alien vs. Predator... except for when I´m with him. Apparently he finds me calming because he´ll fall asleep in my lap without a fuss and reaches for me whenever I´m in his site. Today he started crying and waving when it was time for me to leave. Maybe I´ll just marry his mom.

LOS PICACHOS

The hike... Pinche caminata... I had been looking forward to this hike, and apparently for good reason. The scenery was pretty amazing. We saw snakes, horses, donkeys, cows, some kind of giant bird, and tiny frogs, which seemed especially strange at the top of a mountain. I took pictures until the camera battery died, and I´ll hopefully have those added to the blog after I finish with this entry. Anyway, two of Miguelón´s friends served as guides for the hike, and dazzled me with what, at the time, I understood to be an intricate knowledge of El Picacho. We walked through woods and along fields that didn´t seem to have any sort of paths. We also saw some rocks painted some large amount of time ago. I guess they are famous or something, because all the Mexicans knew to get water from the nearby waterfall and spray it from their mouths onto the rocks to make the paintings visible. It was actually pretty cool. We were told to bring a lunch, so I had two pathetic PBJ´s and a banana that I ate on the way up. We shouldn´t have been told to bring a lunch, because the Mexicans brought a feast. They made a fire and brought metal trays for cooking chorizos, beef, and pieces of cactus they gathered at the top of the mountain. They also brought tortillas for tacos, some premade tacos, pico de gayo, two types of salsa, and probably some other stuff that I´m forgetting. It was incredible. We also ate the fruit from the cactus, called tuna. It basically tasted like watermelon.

Anyway, on the way down things took a temporary turn for the worse. We basically just walked over the side of the mountain, and of course I didn´t think anything of it because the way up was so smooth. I realized something was wrong when one of the "guides" started swearing, inexplicably, in English. Then when the slope only seemed to be getting steeper and the bushes taller and thicker, people started asking if we should go back up. That seemed slightly more impossible than going down, so we forged on. I had shorts on and my legs are still cut up. There were all sorts of plants that they kept telling me not to touch, as well as two different snakes that were apparently both very dangerous. People then created a guessing game called "What time do you think we´ll get back?" I don´t know who won, but it took us about six hours longer than expected. We eventually saw traces of horses or cows or something and realized we were near a way out. I had never been so comforted by feces in my life. We were finally led to a river, just like Bear Grylls would have wanted, and we followed it to a small pool of water where we all had a soak (word to Sweet Lou). It was worth it. I don´t know how many a buttload is, but the amount of pictures I took must have been nearing one before the camera begged for mercy. I´ll try to load them now...

I´ve been eating a lot of tacos and am having breakfast and lunch at the daycare in order to minimize the meals I have to buy (some things never change... even in Mexico). Really, though, this city isn´t that cheap and the food at the daycare is muy delicioso.

Hasta luego.