come on sunshine!!

Oh, we are soaking soaking wet. It’s been raining for five days solid here in Guanajuato — shoes are soaked, jeans soaked, no more dry socks, backpacks & books pretty well all more or less wet. But this afternoon, while getting ready for the next leg of our journey I braved the rain to go to a little shop where I’d seen a couple of lovely sun dresses and dreaming of sunshine and warmth, I bought one. Oh I hope I get to wear it this weekend at the beach.

We are all packed up and ready to leave this sopping wet mess of a city (although it’s really still so lovely). It’s been almost three weeks here in total — the first week coooold but sunny, the second week lovely and warm, and this last week wet, wet, wet. But overall, we’ve loved being here. The people are amazing — both native Guanajuatinos and the travellers we met at the hostel. The city itself is incredibly beautiful, with so much going on all the time. I’m very, very temped to make this our home for at least six months when we return in 2011. We shall see, I guess…

Now we are heading to the coast, and hopefully some warmer, drier weather. It will be a bit of a luxury vacation — since Tab A is going to join us, we’ve decided on a bit more upscale accommodations — a bungalow on the beachfront! It’s pretty expensive by Mexico standards, but still pretty decent for the four of us.

In any case, I expect that it will be a fitting background for my beautiful new sundress, which I intend to wear while sipping margaritas on the terrace at sunset with Tab A swooning over my loveliness… (*giggle*). Ohhh, can’t wait!

On fluency and space (or the hard way to learn a language)

Oh, to have the language learning capacity of an infant. I think I’ve hit a bit of a plateau this week, and it is so frustrating. I know learning is like that — you absorb a bit, feel some progress, and then you plateau for a little while. The thing is — I wish I had just a little bit more competence with which to plateau. I mean, I still feel like a three-year old trying to communicate in Spanish, only with less vocabulary. Come to think of it, I’d be lucky to have the language learning capacity of a three-year old. Doh.

Frustration with my lack of langauge ability aside, the love of Guanajuato continues — enhanced no doubt by my love of our hostel and the people we’ve met here. Last night a few of us sat up on the terrace for a couple of hours, and one of the residents here — an American who teaches Spanish — has promised tonight to help out with a couple of my sticking points in the classes this week. I’m having a fantastic time with the kids, but it’s nice to have other grownups to talk to as well.

Our conversation on the terrace last night was interesting, sparked in part by the book I am reading right now — David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. It is the first I’ve read substantially of Harvey’s writing, and it is blowing my mind. I am going to try to write about it on the research blog, but there is so much going on that it’s hard to know where to start (and I’m only about 2/3 of the way through the book).

Anyway, it’s funny how everyone and his dog has an opinion about marx and marxism — often based on not a lot of substance. We had a great conversation about what money is (something I have long wondered about and still have not a great grasp on), and about capitalism in general, and I heard a lot of the standard arguments about how without capitalism we’d have nothing that is good about the world today. Hm. Uh, not necessarily so. It was a great conversation, though — with good spirit and mind at work, and so even in the disagreement that emerged it felt amicable and exploratory. I like that.

Right now Harvey is writing about space and time — how these are both  socially constructed and acted out in material ways that structure lived experience. Even before reading this section of the book, however, it had struck me how different social space in Guanajuato is from what I am accustomed to in Lovely City. Here there is so much more social contact — people are out walking, sitting, visiting, selling, scoping, just hanging out. Everywhere, at all times — people on the street and in the plazas. I’m sure it has something to do with climate — where I am from the weather is usually so inclement that hanging around outside is not an option. But even in the beautiful summer months, we just don’t have that in the north. In comparison, we live such compartmentalized, individualized and isolated lives.

In some ways, it makes me sad to think of that. As much as I try to learn the language here, I will never be able to be a part of this social, integrated cultural space. And I think we miss something large because of it — that sociality seems so rich and warm, but it also seems something that either you are born into, or you are not.

I don’t underestimate the vast other privileges that come from having fluency in English and cultural and social capital as an educated north american person. But when I look around the culture here in this city, it hits hard — the realization that fluency in Spanish is not all that I’m missing here.

Blinded by the sun

I am sitting on the rooftop terrace of our hostel in Guanajuato. The late afternoon sun is low, and on this west-facing terrace, I’ve had to manouver to find a bit of shade so I can see the screen — unfortunately with my back to the incredible view over the city.

So this is new. We moved to the hostel yesterday afternoon — after deciding that $100 extra pesos a night would be worth the better (cleaner) room with a private bathroom and this amazing terrace right outside our door. There’s also a full kitchen off the terrace, a place to do laundry and the resident landlord is grandfatherly and kind. We looked at a lot of places last week, and after having another look at the second-nicest (and $100p cheaper) place, I decided to take the leap on the better, cleaner place. Well worth it. And there are a lot of great people here as well, so it’s social (although not social in spanish as much as would be optimal for my language learning, unfortunately).

Ok, so the last time I wrote was Thursday. Friday afternoon was the mall. Jordan, the awesome 17 year old at our homestay, showed us the way to walk out of the historic centre of town through a tunnel leading to the *other* Guanajuato — big box stores and a giant, brand new mall. Yep, the lovely and quaint historic centre that tourists know as the city of Guanajuato is not the whole story. Modern capital has penetrated here, just like every other corner of the globe.

Saturday morning we kicked around el centro and I bought a pair of sunglasses for 400 pesos (about 38 amercian). Steep, but  worth it. In the afternoon we drove way out of town with our homestay family, to the home of our homestay mama  Dulce’s sister and parents. Think dirt yards, broken-down vehicles and barbed wire. Also, el bano with no toilet seat, nor flushing capacity. But the people — brilliant, lovely. And amazing food. The kids had a great time playing dodgeball in the yard, and I listened to as much of the rapid-fire conversation as I could, for about 3 hours. Sometimes, when they wanted to ask me questions, they slowed down enough that I could actually understand. Most of the time, though — a million miles an hour. I caught a word here and there.

Dulce’s sister was lovely, however (it was all women — three sisters and the grandmother), and she insisted that we come out again for verdad comida mexicana next week. So on Saturday we go again, for another meal and perhaps more dodgeball and nintendo for the kids.

Sunday. Tour of the mines with Armando, the historian from Universidad de Guanajuato who we know from our several meetings on the street. Such a nice guy. The mines were interesting — ach, the lives of the slaves who worked them for centuries! Heartbreaking. And the wealth — mind-boggling. A long day of walking (acutally, we were finished by about 1:30), then the kids and I had a great lunch. Then we tried to go back to the homestay (remember, 10 minutes up a HUGE hill), only to find that we were locked out. Went back down the hill to kill time and then tried again 3 hours later — still locked out. It took Moon climbing the gate and squeezing through a tiny space above it to discover that we were locked out only by our own incompetence — the gate was secured by a metal bar lower than the one we were trying to open. Gah!

Yesterday, classes and then moving into the hostel. I had an amazing 2 hour nap in the afternoon (on a bed with great pillows, omg!). Today, more classes, and then the museum of mummies. Not even kidding –  real exhumed dead bodies, mummified through some chemical-geographic anomolie. It was… um, creepy.

Rushed now because we are starving — skipped lunch and so it’s time for us to go eat our one meal out of the day. Mmmmm, enchiladas!!

Guanajuato update

It is Thursday today. I can’t believe that this week is almost over… with no time markers to keep track of where I am, I feel like I’ve lost track of this week entirely. I keep intending to blog, but on top of having no sense of time, I’m also completely exhausted by the end of the day.

So let me work backwards and drop a few bloggy breadcrumbs along the path of this week. Today, like every day this week, was mostly taken up with classes. We start at 9 am, and each class is 50 minutes long. I have four classes a day, and the kids only have two, so for my third class (just before the lunch break) and my fourth class, the kids are just hanging around.

We’ve worked out a bit of a routine, however. While I have my third class, the kids are usually reading their books or (primarily Monk) drawing. What’s kind of astounded me so far this trip is the rate at which these kids are blowing through the books we brought. Monk, who is usually not a fast reader and would generally prefer to draw, as of this afternoon, has finished both of the books we brought for him. He’s now started on one of the books that Moon finished a couple of days ago. Thankfully, Moon brought two books from the series he’s reading, so if Monk gets into it (and it looks like he will, judging from his assessment of the first chapter), then he’ll have two 300-odd page books to get through. At the rate he’s been going, he’ll likely be finished both by the time we leave Guanajuato.

Same deal with Moon, but the problem is that I don’t have much else for him to read. He’s about 100 pages from finishing the second big book, and I think he brought one more that is quite a bit shorter. He can also read one of the books that Monk brought — so by all accounts we probably have about three or four days of reading material left for him. The good thing is that we’d heard about a bookstore in town selling english books, and after searching all over for it yesteday and today, we finally found it tonight. Unfortunately after it had already closed. At least we know where it is now, though — and I have to say, finding things in this city is no simple matter. On the other hand, everything is really close together, so eventually you start to learn the maze of streets fairly well.

Ok, so that just about sums up how our time is spent here when we’re not at the school:  we wander. Today our mission was the bookstore; yesterday it was the bank (to change money). As we wander around, we’re checking out all the hostels we run across (there are a few listed in the lonely planet guidebook, but we’ve only seen two of those in our wanders — compared to five or six others that aren’t listed in the book).

The reason we’re looking at hostels is that the classes and homestay ended up costing more than I’d planned for, and I refuse to go above budget (I’m also saving pesos for another, very much more exciting reason which I will get to in a minute). But when we first arrived at the school on Monday, I was assigned four classes a day, which is the standard schedule for students. I explained to the guy who is in second command (first in command reminds me of the queen — she is very regal and does not seem to get her hands dirty with petty admin details) that the price I was quoted through email was based on only two classes a day, but he kind of waved that aside and told me that we’d figure it out later. We did, the next day (Tuesday), and by then I’d figured that taking more classes in the first week here is not necessarily a bad thing. And when I added up all the numbers, I realized that we are paying something more than double for our homestay compared to what we’d pay in a hostel. I decided to pay for the extra classes and leave the homestay after one week, leaving us looking for a good hostel for the last 11 days of our stay.

Although I love the family we’re staying with, I’ll be glad to be moving to a hostel after spending a week here. It will be nice to have a bit more autonomy (ie., not having to truck up the enormous hill to get here for supper at 4:30 pm each day), and also to be closer to the centre of town. Like I mentioned, we’ve looked a what feels like a gazillion hostels (ok, maybe 5 or 6), and we’ve narrowed down one that is both clean and attractive, and not too expensive. We actually saw one tonight on our way home that was by far the nicest we’ve seen, but it was also $100 pesos more a night, plus we’d have to switch rooms halfway through our stay because the nicer room (the one with a window to the outside) is booked for the last half of the time we need. So tomorrow we’ll go check out the second-nicest we’ve seen — for the second time, since the first time we looked at it the room was occupied. Based on the rest of the hostel, though, I think it will be fine for our stay — a clean, well-equipped kitchen, clean bathrooms and a nice rooftop terrace. Plus I’m pretty sure that both private rooms have outside windows, which is a must as far as I’m concerned.

There are other happenings worth mention, aside from the school being great (in terms of small classes and awesome teachers, not in terms of the growing sense I have that it is a serious money-making operation that is quite a bit more expensive than it needs to be….). Our family is lovely, and they took us to the park yesterday so the kids could play soccer (pictures over there on flickr). Also yesterday, on our money-changing mission to find the bank, Moon led us on a great back-street route that took us up to the monumento el pipila and an amazing view of the city (pics also on flickr).

Also yesterday, as we were looking for one of the hostels listed in our guidebook, a friendly fellow stopped and asked if we needed any help. I told him what we were looking for, and so he showed us, asking us along the way the typical questions about where we are from, etc. He mentioned that he knew people from Alma Mater U in Lovely City — as it turns out, he is a historian at Universidad de Guanajuato. We had a nice chat and I asked if he knew anyone who could speak to me about my research topic — and he said that yes, of course, he could talk to me about it. I got his email address and we went on our way, but then we randomly ran into him again this afternoon (walking down a different street) and we had another nice chat. He offered to go with us for a tour of the colonial mine here in town, so I think we will go on Sunday. Fortuitous meeting indeed — I hope that he can fill me in on some historical-type questions I have about my research topic.

Also this weekend we are going to a fiesta for the birthday of our homestay mama’s brother on Saturday. I brought with us some yummy smoked salmon for a gift from home, so I think I will break that out for a treat that folks may not have tried before. If there is one thing that is clear about the local culture — they love food! We’ve been eating quite well here, although I still haven’t quite figured out the system for food cooking/storage. There are often pots on the stove starting early in the morning (our homestay mama also works at the university, though I think in an admin-type job) — it seems like a lot of the food must be par-cooked early in the day, and then reheated or cooked more later. In any case, it is not fancy but everything is muy muy delicioso.

And…. now for the most exciting and awesomest part of this update: Tab A is coming to meet us for a week after we leave Guanajuato!! I am soososososss000 happy that he’s coming down — and for the best, most vacationy part of the whole trip, when we are going to a little surfing town just north of Puerto Vallarta for a few days at the beach. It worked out brilliantly — he’ll fly to Gaudalajara, and we’ll meet him there to spend the night before heading out to the coast on the bus the next day. Three nights and four days of beach lounging/surfing/sipping fruity drinks, and then back to Guadalajara for all of the boys to fly out on the same flight. The kids will stay in LA with my sister and dad, and Tab A continues on back up north, bringing the Mexican warmth with him to ward off our grey chills.

So, yay, this trip just got 1000x better!

And based on these first few days, I am so happy that we are coming back for a year (and not just because it will take me that long to speak spanish at least as well as a 5-year old). Next up: things that astonish (and please) me about the culture here, and how I might want to stay forever,

En Guanajuato

We are here! Arrived yesterday after an epic journey that went something like this: Friday – bus, ferry, bus, hostel; Saturday – up at 5 am, train, bus, hang in Seattle (went on the underground tour — very cool), light link, Seatac airport, plane, LA airport, plane (at some point it becomes Sunday) – arrive in Guadalajara, taxi to bus station, bus 4 hours to Guanajuato, another taxi, can’t find homestay address, homestay telephone not working, coffee shop, helpful people, find nearby hostel, sleep for 3 hours, get up and eat our first real meal in two days, feel like we have arrived….

The kids were truly heroic. They are turning out to be kick-ass little travellers. Moon works the maps — I credit him fully with finding us that hostel in the maze of tiny cobblestone streets that is el centro de Guanajuato, and Monk checks on our plans — what are we going to do now? did we get a hostel? do we know where we’re going? He’s duly impressed with my ability to muddle through conversations in Spanish (obviously, he has no clue how much I am butchering the language when I attempt to speak it…).

We’re all pretty much in love with Guanajuato. We have some friends who travelled here last year and declared it to be their favourite city ever, and now I know why. It’s hard to describe how lovely it is, with the narrow streets and old architecture, the little plazas everywhere, the grand churches. The city is built in a kind of circular basin in the hills, with houses and narrow little pedestrian-only streets built up the most improbable slopes on all sides of the centre. The traffic mostly runs below the city through long tunnels left over from the silver mines that provided the riches on which this city must have been founded. The relative lack of traffic makes for a city centre focused on the pedestrian, and there are people everywhere, at all times of the day and night.

Our days here will be spent at the school, trying to make the most of three weeks of Spanish instruction. I think the homestay will help a lot — with the exception of the 17-year old boy, no-one in the family speaks a word of English. There are two boys (17 and 15), and a little girl who is five. They are all lovely, as is the mama of the family (and the papa too, although I’ve seen much less of him) — and quite patient as I try to communicate with my limited spanish. I’m hoping the learning goes quickly — it drives me crazy to have to struggle so much to understand and be understood!

In any case, I think it will all be very busy with our mornings and early afternoons in classes, and then I have work to keep up with as well as the homework we’re assigned. I’m going to have to sort out some kind of a routine, for sure.

But right now I am exhausted. Today felt like a very long day, and I think tomorrow will be more of the same.

The only thing that would make this trip 100x better is if Tab A was here too. Damn, I miss that guy.

In honour of P.K. Page

P.K. Page died today, aged 93. She was my favourite poet for a very long time, and although I don’t write much poetry any more, her work inspired me more than any other poet I read when I was just starting to write. Below is one of my very favourite poems, shared in honour and memory of a great, great poet.

Portrait of Marina
by P.K. Page

Far out the sea has never moved. It is
Prussian forever, rough as teazled wool
some antique skipper worked into a frame
to bear his lost four-master.
Where it hangs
now in a sunny parlour, none recalls
how all his stitches, interspersed with oaths
had made his one pale spinster daughter grow
transparent with migraines—and how his call
fretted her more than waves.
Her name
Marina, for his youthful wish—
boomed at the front of that small salty church
where sailors lurched like drunkards—would, he felt
make her a water woman, rich with bells.
To her the name Marina simply meant
he held his furious needle for her thin
fingers to thread again with more blue wool
to sew the ocean of his memory.
Now, where the picture hangs, a dimity
young inland housewife with inherited
clocks under bells and ostrich eggs on shelves
pours amber tea in small rich china cups
and reconstructs
how great-great-grandpa at ninety-three
his fingers knotted with arthritis, his
old eyes grown agately with cataracts
became as docile as child again—
that fearful salty man—
and sat, wrapped round in faded paisley shawls
gently embroidering.
While Aunt Marina in grey worsted, warped
without a smack of salt, came to his call
the sole survivor of his last shipwreck.

*            *            *

Slightly off shore it glints. Each wave is capped
with broken mirrors. Like Marina’s head
the glinting of these waves.
She walked forever antlered with migraines
her pain forever putting forth new shoots
until her strange unlovely head became
a kind of candelabra—delicate—
where all her tears were perilously hung
and caught the light as waves that catch the sun.
The salt upon the panes, the grains of sand
that crunched beneath her heel
her father’s voice, ‘Marina!’—all these broke
her trembling edifice. The needle shook
like ice between her fingers.
In her head
too many mirrors dizzied her and broke.

*            *            *

But where the wave breaks, where it rises green
turns into gelatin, becomes glass
simply for seeing stones through, runs across
the coloured shells and pebbles of the shore
and makes an aspic of them
then sucks back
in foam and undertow—
this aspect of the sea
Marina never knew.
For her the sea was Father’s Fearful Sea
harsh with sea serpents
winds and drowning men.
For her it held no spiral of a shell
for her descent into dreams,
it held no bells.
And where it moved in shallows it was more
imminently a danger, more alive
than where it lay off shore full fathom five.

RIP, P.K.

Exciting news

Yesterday in the mail I got my bankruptcy discharge letter. Wooooot!! No more income cap (like I ever reached it), no more paying $200 bucks and submitting an income and expense report every month, no more wolves at the door.

Nine months of bankruptcy went by pretty fast, actually. It is done — I am so relieved! Now to figure out what to do about the student loans….

Thinking about Haiti

I’m almost through reading Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – a Christmas present from Tab A and a great, typically Zizekian hair-on-fire kind of read. At one point in the book, he talks about the Haitian revolution as being inspired, of course, by the French revolution — ie., the  bourgeoisie revolution in the fatherland opened an ideological space in which the colonized/enslaved of Haiti (representing what Zizek calls the universal “excluded”) were able to assert their aspirations for freedom, and that this (capital-e) Event, in turn, inspired Hegel’s master-slave dialectics (Susan Buck-Morss has just published a book called Hegel, Haiti and Universal History – it looks fantastic).

Anyway, I’m thinking about all of this while I read the devastating news about Haiti’s loss this week. I’ll be donating some money here and sending prayers to all the gods & goddesses of history and of heaven & earth.

ETA: This Guardian article on the ongoing history of intervention and exploitation in Haiti is well worth reading. An excerpt:

It is [Haiti's] poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more “natural” or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

New year, new everything

Everything? Well, that is probably a gross exaggeration. But, I am typing this in a coffee shop on a teeny tiny little netbook that the amazing Mr. P set up for me, and in a small handful of days I will be on my way to Mexico with the kids for 6 weeks. Other than that things are pretty much the same, I guess. Oh, except for the fact that Tab A & I are talking about making things official. Yep, big party next summer!

So new everything, kind of.

I guess since it’s the first post of this year I can get a little retrospective. Oh, 2009… You tried to be a good year, I know that. It’s not your fault that you landed at the very ass end of a kind of shit decade for the whole goddamn planet; I know that. Let’s not dwell on it, okay?  I will never forget those bombs raining down on Gaza, nor suspension of even make-believe democracy in Iran, Honduras or even for that matter, our proroguing asshat of a PM here in the frozen north…. but maybe there is a silver lining to all that crap? Maybe, just maybe, ordinary folks are starting to wake up a little. Maybe they are starting to get angry that banks get bailed out and wars escalated for no good reason while the icecaps continue to melt and millions lose their jobs and homes. Maybe the next decade will be the decade that people decide that they have had enough and it is time to take to the streets with demands for a better, more just future. I have high hopes for you, 2010.

On a personal level, 2009 was the year that I had to drop out of my PhD while waiting for funding to come in. It was the year I almost lost my shit-paying auxiliary government job and had to go into bankruptcy anyways because I couldn’t afford to both live and service my debt on my income. Making more than double minimum wage – I could barely afford to cover my rent, food, and the basics of everyday life, much less tuition and the visa bill.

It was also the year that the gamble (kind of) paid off, though. Sure, I went bankrupt and fucked my credit rating for the next decade (or more, depending on what happens when they come after me for my $75K in student loans, which the bankruptcy didn’t touch). But for now, I’ve won that chicken race with financial ruin. I stayed the course and the funding came in, and now I’m back in the phd with the end in sight. I’m in the middle of a directed studies course with my supervisor on the history of capitalism. I am about to sign a book contract for the project I’ve been working on with Dr. J. Both of these things are totally amazing.

So 2010 – the year of the phoenix. The start of a new decade all about rising out of the ashes. The last decade was all about walking through fire – at its very start I ended a devastating relationship with my husband and spent the next five years learning how to let go, heal, and become friends and co-parents.  Throughout it all I fought to stay in school and I finished a BA, MA and started a PhD while raising my kids from preschool to middle school.

I battled poverty, from near homelessness to subsidized housing to buying a condo and then gambling it all to go back to school. I almost lost that gamble, too, but for a stroke of luck after it looked like it was all going down. I started to learn how the system is broken, and I made it my project to understand the culture that keeps us all believing in capitalism even when the foundations are crumbling under our feet.

I’m starting this next decade in a much, much different place than I was ten years ago. I’m not alone any more. I have knowledge to back my sense that the world is not right, that things need to change and change drastically. I’m not afraid of the fire. I’ve walked through and come out on the other side, and there is a power that comes with that – one I didn’t have ten years ago.

I want this decade to be about claiming that power and using it. I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet, but it seems appropriate to start it with a trip to a new part of the world, to expanding my experience and understanding, and to doing that with the kids.

I’ll miss Tab A a lot in the six weeks we’re gone but it will also be good for me to strike out on my own for some time. It seems to be a kind of parallel to how I began the last decade, only in an entirely different dimension. In a way, it feels as though I’ve come full circle to a world I only dreamed about then – one filled with love and friends and strength and a passionate purpose in life.

I think I am going to like this decade.

strong statement on climate change by 56 newspapers in 20 languages

Really? This is fucking wow:

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.