Can you please direct me to the time machine?

One day I was waiting for some friends outside of Tertulia, a popular bar in the historic center of Mazatlan, with two guys both named Sergio. I was just chillaxing, sitting on some metal electrical boxy like thing. The “Sergios” were chatting away and I was kinda not paying attention, because it’s just so easy to let your mind wander when you really have to focus to understand what someone’s saying in a different language. Then I understood something in Spanish without paying attention because it sounded oddly familiar. Someone asked us where the Time Machine restaurant/bar/disco was. When I looked up to see who had asked, I instantly realized why I had understood. It was an American! (or Canadian…..) It’s really interesting how accents make it so much harder or easier (in my case) to understand something.

One Sergio started to say that he didn’t know where it was, but I interrupted him and told the man that I knew where it was….in ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!! He looked at me quite shocked. He then asked if I was American. Guilty as charged I replied. He then pointed to one Sergio and asked if he was American, he said no…..But then I added that both of them were Mexican and I was the only American….*tear*……Finally I gave him directions to the Time Machine and he left with his group of friends.

After they had left the one Sergio asked the other one if he had understood what the American had said because he hadn’t even though it was in Spanish! Jejejejejejejejejeej……..The other Sergio had understood but had never heard of the place before. I thought I was quite funny that I knew where it was and I had only lived in Mazatlan for 3 months! Well, I had only known because my old boss had gone there and told me where it was because she liked it.

That is one of my favorite memories so far. I think it’s cool that someone thought that I was Mexican!....and in future posts you’ll see that this isn’t the only time someone’s thought that…..

Death by Shampoo

A couple of nights ago, I went to bathroom like I usually do before going to bed. As I was doing my business I decided to slide shut the shower door. As I was doing this I noticed a gigantic COCKROACH! I quickly shut the door. I decided to just leave it like that, since my host mom had told me that she sprays the place with “anti-bug spray”….(not quite sure what the proper name for that is….i’ve lost some English vocab since being down here)….so, even if bugs get in, they’re usually die pretty quickly. So I thought that it would die over night or crawl somewhere else.

The next day, I decided to take a shower, go figure. I got all of my stuff ready and I went into the bathroom. I remembered that I had left a cockroach to die in the shower the previous night, so I cautiously opened the shower door, carefully examined the shower and saw that the cockroach was nowhere in sight. So I turned on the water and waited until it got warm. I hopped into the shower, started to get my hair wet before putting in the shampoo, and felt something slightly feeling like tickling on my right foot. I thought it was just the water trickling down, but when I looked down I freaked out because there was my lovely pet cockroach just trying to get some love.

Needless to say, I jumped and let out a slight yelp. The cockroach was now on its back (with my many experiences with cockroaches here in Mexico, I have learned that they get stuck on their backs an astonishingly large amount of times). So I cupped my hands together to collect water and I poured it on the cockroach, hoping it would drown. I did this frantically for a minute, but the water never collected fast enough and I never got the aim quite right, so the cockroach got back on its feet and started scurrying about in the shower. I was jumping around trying to be as far away from it as possible but still trying to stay in some sort of strategic position to figure out how I was going to get rid of this monstrosity.

Finally, I cornered the cockroach….in the corner of the shower. It tried crawling up the wall. Since I really wasn’t into squashing it (I’ve had bad experiences with doing that here…) I did the next best thing I could think of. I grabbed my shampoo bottle and began squeezing the contents out onto the cockroach. Again, my aim wasn’t the greatest, so for a while I thought he was going to escape his gooey doom. Once all but one squeeze was left in my shampoo bottle, he stopped moving. The site of a dead cockroach covered in a white gooey substance covering a good portion of the corner of a shower is quite gratifying and disturbing at the same time. I finished that shower in record time in fear of it coming back to life or it dead body sliding eerily close to my feet. I can’t wait to get back home and not worry about cockroaches the size of my iPod nano…….

Yo Soy Gringa...

I know I said I would write about Carnaval….but there is just too much to tell and not a lot of time! My days begin at 6:30am and end at 8pm. When I get home I eat and sleep or if it’s the weekend I party! But in 3 weeks I will be done with work (thank goodness!) and then I will do a better job at posting!

So I will share an interesting history/word origin story for you! (Yes, I am definitely my father’s daughter…) So, Has anyone ever been called a “gringo”?!?!?!?!?? Well, I have. I don’t really care if that’s what Mexicans call us (sometimes) because I’m sure we can dish out some pretty horrible names right back at them! But I was recently enlightened as how we became known as “gringos”.

Way back when, when we were fighting with the Mexicans over land and such, the Americans had green uniforms. The Mexicans soldiers would shout at the Americans to go home by saying “Green, Go!!!” So you try saying Green Go!, Green Go!, Green Go!, Green Go!, really fast…….what does it sound like?!?!? Gringo!!!!!!

Hah! I love it! Although now I’m not sure if I like being called a “gringa”….

Me Muero

Been really busy lately……My schedule consists of getting up, going to school, going to work, doing homework, sleep. I eat somewhere in there, don’t worry! :P
So, the other day I got one of the best compliments of my life…the Kristin glorifying went a little like this….jajaj……

I work for a company that is using some of the office space of a different company. They both happen to be friends. One of the owner’s of the other company works in the conference room, where the other intern and I futz around on the internet…..so, I work with this guy that I don’t really work with….jajaj…anyways this guy usually gets done at the same time as me so he takes me home, because I live kinda far away…..

Obviously, we listen to his music on the way home… but sometimes it’s bad….:P the other day he had been playing songs that described how he was feeling, which was depressed, so I played him songs that I had that gave him advice….great fun…..so I suggested that we listen to my music on the way home last night. He agreed….he really liked my music, so he asked if I wouldn’t mind going to a place where we could just park the car and listen to music. I had nothing to do, so off we went.

I had been playing all of my awesome techno music when he decided to browse through my iPod. He got to my “Spanish music playlist” so I played one of my favorite songs….i started singing away like I usually do and he had this strange look on his face. It looked as if he was perplexed or he was thinking super hard. After I stopped singing because of his facial expressions he turned down the music and gave me one of the best compliments ever. He said, “The other day when you were singing a song in Spanish I wasn’t sure if it was you that I was hearing, but now that I hear you now I have to tell you that you sing as if a Mexican were singing.” He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that I was able to sing like that. I told him I was very good at mimicking people when I sang. So I then sang a song in Finnish, Farsi, Russian, and Chinese. Since he speaks 5 languages and has a good grasp hearing the differences between sounds and such……he was very impressed with my very useless skill.

So now all I have to do is learn how to speak Spanish like a native. I can’t just go around singing random tidbits of songs and weave them into conversations…..okay, I could….and have…..but that’s not the point of being here!

So Carnaval started today….it’s going to be 6 days of pure craziness! Unlike most things in Mazatlan, Carnaval is actually like a 5 minute walk from where I live!!!!! I’m pretty excited. Don’t expect a post in a while…but I definitely tell you how it went ….and there will probably be pictures!!!!!! W00t w00t!

V-Day

so last night i witnessed one of the most romantic things ever....i tagged along with a couple of guys who went to some girls house to serenade her!

it all started at 10:30pm when i was picked up at my house by delfin 4. from there we assembled our all-star serenaders...all of whom had studied/are studying to be priests!!!!! i just couldn't help myself think about how well these guys would get along with lutherans.......seeing as i've been around my fair share of seminary students/graduates....*cough, cough* padre *cough, cough*

we drove to a little, itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, town about 20 minutes outside of mazatlan. after getting lost twice, we finally arrived at our destination. we met up with another girl at her house so that the guys could practice their guitar and singing skills before actually having to impress someone.

we then walked to the girls house. we (well, the others......although i very obligingly observed) sang for about 30 minutes right outside of her bedroom window.....no signs of life. we finally moved to the front of the house where she finally emerged. quite out of it...!

the enamored boy then gave the girl a card and a little gift wrapped up in the cutest box imagine able. the rest of us went around the corner of the house so that they could have some privacy...well, as much privacy as we could before we couldn't help but shout out KISS HER! KISS HER!!!!!

ugghhh.....it was soooooo romantic!!!! american boys should learn how to do this. :P

as we all know, tomorrow is valentine's day. here is mexico valentine's day is to celebrate both love and friendship. compared to my experiences of valentine's day in the states, they take it way more seriously here! you cannot escape it!

at school they played "here comes the bride" over and over again during the valentine's day "bazaar/fair"! i later found out it was because you could actually get "married"! they had like the whole altar thingy set up and the girls even got to wear veils!!!!

all of us international students had a good laugh over this....

side note: carnaval is less than a week away!!!!!!! i'm so excited!!!!

vanilla

so, i've been sick. other than that nothing too interesting has happened. i finally started my internship for real....yesterday was my first day of actual work. i'm excited and nervous. i'm not sure what i'm really supposed to be doing....but i'll figure it out.

today i will have to take the city bus from school to work. i'm nervous. i've ridden the public transportation here, but only the "nice" buses. the nice busses cost 8 pesos (roughly 75 cents USD), are air conditioned and a good majority of riders are american/canadian/white tourists. the other busses cost 4 pesos (roughly 40 cents USD) and are very shabby looking.

the bus that i have to take doesn't really go by my workplace, but it gets me close enough. i'm nervous about how to get off. because everytime i have gotten off a bus it's been very awkward. i usually just get up when i get an inkling that the bus is going to stop or when someone else has pressed the button.

the buttons don't always work either. so then i'm afraid that i'll actually have to say something in order to get off! that would be terrible! jajaja....

i'm sure i'll be fine. but i tend to freak out.....

so, it's not a vacation after all.....

The other day I had my first meeting at my internship. After some confusion with getting the date and place right, I arrived. To my delight the office where I will be working is on the malecon. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that when I look outside the office windows I get to enjoy the wonderful ocean view! How sweet is that?!?!?! Another plus is that the office is located inside a hotel that I had done some research on before I got here. It was my grand and glorious idea to possibly spend one or two nights there with anyone who would want to come visit me…….anyone?!?!?! so, I am quite psyched about working in the hotel that I had my sights set on!

I decided to walk to the office for the first meeting so I knew exactly where it was, so that in the future when I take the bus I know where to get off. As usual, I overestimated how long it would take me to get to the office. I arrived 30 minutes early. So I sat on a bench overlooking the beach and tried reading a book in Spanish. I failed miserably.

At exactly 4:30pm I crossed the street and entered the building. the office was just recently set up so it looked a bit uninviting but the orange walls sure made this office exciting! Once the bosses got off their phones they told me to wait since the other intern hadn’t arrived yet. So I struggled through 20 more minutes of reading my book.

The meeting was intense. Since I’m sick, my brain doesn’t function properly and everything she was saying to me was jibberish. Ok, not everything. I do know that I am going to prepare and complete an online marketing plan to advertise new condominiums that are going to be built right next to the hotel. I would include the link to the website here but then I realize that I need to tell them where we put the links to the sites and I don’t really want them reading this blog…..it’s not like I’ve got anything to hide, it’s just not very business oriented. Although, I will be creating a blog for the condominiums so I might put that link up. maybe not. I don’t know how many of my readers are interested in owning luxury condominiums in mexico....... haha….ha.

Once the meeting finished, the other intern and I decided to have dinner and chillax at his place to get to know each other, since we will be working together for the next 3 or so months. We ate at this sushi place. It was good. That’s all I’ll say. :P after that we went to ley, a walmart-esque store. We looked around for stuffed animals that he could give to his quasi girlfriend. Don’t ask….. After not finding anything suitable to get her we headed for the beer. we picked out the only dark beer we could find. Aren't you so proud of me for not drinking that watery garbage padre?!?! We also bought toni col….i think that’s what it’s called. It’s basically the best kind of vanilla coke ever. Period. And, it’s also pretty much only available in Sinaloa, mexico (Mazatlan is a city in the state of Sinaloa…)

After chatting and watching 2 episodes of weeds at his crib, which is actually a hotel room, I left. I began to walk. I noticed that my feet were very sensitive. I figured I had probably developed a blister and wondered if I would be able to walk the 40 minutes back to my place. Once I got to the malecon I decided I could make it, although my body didn’t agree with me on that because 2 seconds later I felt my blister pop. I won’t describe it though, because I know I can tend to be a little too graphic with my descriptions of bodily functions……mother….:P

A few minutes later I hopped onto a lovely pulmonia and headed home. I think $40 pesos is a fair trade for a nice breezy ride through Mazatlan instead of walking for 40 minutes on a recently exploded blister, don’t you think? i thought so…..




So, you may or may not have noticed that my usual style of not capitalizing anything is not evident in this post. It’s because I am now using Microsoft word 2007 instead of notepad.( I finally found a free product key somewhere off the internet so I don’t have to spend $100 USD on validating my trial software that was running out of free uses! ) I do not usually advocate the illegal downloading of products but I feel that since Microsoft has disappointed me with their oh so stellar vista OS, I’m going to get something out of them that is worthwhile!!!!! so, back to my original point about capitalization. Microsoft word auto corrects everything and I’m too lazy to change it. Plus, it has spell check….and I’ve been having problems with bloggers’ spell check recently…..

Sayanara!