Strangeness
One of the great things about living in a different country is that all manners of things happen that are very different from home and they would probably seem normal to people here, but are very strange to me.
For example:
Recently I went with some of the Spanish and English teachers out for Karaoke (safe in the promise that I did not have to sing). What was strange about Karaoke here is that it was not one person singing and everyone else making fun of them like at home. Instead the song lyrics were scrolling across a TV screen and everyone (except us three foreigners) was singing along heartily fueled no doubt by cerveza and tequila. Had I known the melodies and had I more energy, I would have actually sung as everyone was singing badly and no one would have even been able to pick my voice out.
While checking out new apartments (more on that below), a clean cut young man in board shorts (rare here outside of my apartment) stopped the landlady and they began an involved discussion about the outside wall of the potential suite. Since the wall was covered in graffiti, and they were talking about painting over it (as far as I could tell), I thought the young man was going to repaint the exterior. As we were leaving, he took out about six colours of spraypaint and proceeded to paint his own new design over all the others. (When I get around to taking a picture of the wall, I will repost this.)
One of the odd things about Mexico is seeing shops that are new businesses that have opened, but haven't received any of the products they are going to sell. The business is open and the employee is faithfully sitting in the desk surrounded by walls with bare shelves. Occasionally they have a small fridge with soft drinks and that is all they have to offer even though the business is meant to sell cel phones or shoes or whatnot else. Yet they are open anyway. When I asked someone why a shop would open with nothing to sell, he looked at me in surprise. Apparently it is self-evident why the shop would open.
A recent strange experience took place yesterday as I walked past the airport in Col. Teran (an area next to where I live). Looking out over the airstrip, I realized that it is the airport I first spotted on Google Earth when I checked out Tuxtla Gutierrez for the first time. It was strange to look at a real life example of something I only saw as a virtual image before (though at the time I knew it was real). This is not unlike the weird feeling I had when I first located my home in Cairo on Google Earth and could identify individual trees that I remember on the Ramses College property.
It turns out that Tuxtla, a relatively obscure state capital, actually has three airports, more than any other city in Mexico.
* By the way, I have not posted much as I am spending almost all of my spare time searching for a new place to live. My beautiful apartment with its lovely pool not only has very high rent, but we found out after a month or two that it has absurdly high costs for pool maintenance, security, water, electricty, gas and other services. Perhaps I will blog about the excitement of trying to find a decent place to live in a language that I am not exactly proficient in yet.
For example:
Recently I went with some of the Spanish and English teachers out for Karaoke (safe in the promise that I did not have to sing). What was strange about Karaoke here is that it was not one person singing and everyone else making fun of them like at home. Instead the song lyrics were scrolling across a TV screen and everyone (except us three foreigners) was singing along heartily fueled no doubt by cerveza and tequila. Had I known the melodies and had I more energy, I would have actually sung as everyone was singing badly and no one would have even been able to pick my voice out.
While checking out new apartments (more on that below), a clean cut young man in board shorts (rare here outside of my apartment) stopped the landlady and they began an involved discussion about the outside wall of the potential suite. Since the wall was covered in graffiti, and they were talking about painting over it (as far as I could tell), I thought the young man was going to repaint the exterior. As we were leaving, he took out about six colours of spraypaint and proceeded to paint his own new design over all the others. (When I get around to taking a picture of the wall, I will repost this.)
One of the odd things about Mexico is seeing shops that are new businesses that have opened, but haven't received any of the products they are going to sell. The business is open and the employee is faithfully sitting in the desk surrounded by walls with bare shelves. Occasionally they have a small fridge with soft drinks and that is all they have to offer even though the business is meant to sell cel phones or shoes or whatnot else. Yet they are open anyway. When I asked someone why a shop would open with nothing to sell, he looked at me in surprise. Apparently it is self-evident why the shop would open.
A recent strange experience took place yesterday as I walked past the airport in Col. Teran (an area next to where I live). Looking out over the airstrip, I realized that it is the airport I first spotted on Google Earth when I checked out Tuxtla Gutierrez for the first time. It was strange to look at a real life example of something I only saw as a virtual image before (though at the time I knew it was real). This is not unlike the weird feeling I had when I first located my home in Cairo on Google Earth and could identify individual trees that I remember on the Ramses College property.
It turns out that Tuxtla, a relatively obscure state capital, actually has three airports, more than any other city in Mexico.
* By the way, I have not posted much as I am spending almost all of my spare time searching for a new place to live. My beautiful apartment with its lovely pool not only has very high rent, but we found out after a month or two that it has absurdly high costs for pool maintenance, security, water, electricty, gas and other services. Perhaps I will blog about the excitement of trying to find a decent place to live in a language that I am not exactly proficient in yet.
posted by Glenn Kachmar at 6:09 AM
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