So, I had been wanting to get a haircut pretty much as soon as I arrived in Valle de Santiago. It was one of those things on my list of ¨Things to Do Before I Leave the Country¨ that I just didn´t get around to, which meant that I got to Mexico with a lot of dead ends. I´ve spent the past few weeks staring at them, with Bérengère as my witness to the thousand times I´ve touched my hair and said I NEED a haircut!
Now, the reason I hadn´t gotten one isn´t because I couldn´t find a barber´s shop. There are a lot of estética unixes and peluquerías where I live. There are even four on my 4-block walk from my apartment to my gym. But to put it simply, as an extranjera, I didn´t know which were good and which were bad. I lacked that knowledge that comes with knowing the terrain, the town, the country that you´re in. And I didn´t feel brave enough to take a chance on my hair, so I continued on without getting a haircut.
On Sunday, I went to a fundraiser that my gym coach´s fiancée was working. We said hi, bought food, and chatted, and just as we were about to leave, I decided to ask my coach´s fiancée where she cut her hair. She called over my coach to help her explain where it was. They then preceded to draw out a map of the city on a napkin for me, look up the name of the salon, call the stylist, and make an appointment for me for the next morning. After explaining the directions to me one more time, they told me to just come to the gym before my appointment and that they would drive me there (even though the salon is only 3 blocks from my apartment). So, the next morning, I walked to the gym, my coach´s fiancée drove me to the salon, and I got my hair cut – finally!
All of my dead ends are gone!! I haven´t stopped touching my hair since. In the U.S., haircuts are small things; I grab my keys, make an appointment, and drive. But here, it meant so much. In Mexico, when I´m lacking in the knowledge of how to do things, people have gone out of their way to help me feel comfortable. I´ve encountered incredible kindness again and again, and it makes me determined to pass it on in the future. So, thank you, Alex and Marlet, for taking the time out of your day to make mine 🙂
1. My route to and from my apartment and my school has two main bus stops – one located next to my apartment and one next to my school. However, people get on and off at all times – things seems a lot more flexible here. When you want to get off, you simply yell ¨Para, por favor,¨ or ¨A la esquina, por favor.¨ Through some sixth sense, the bus driver always manages to hear you, no matter how packed the bus is or how far back you are, and he stops, allowing you to get off. When you´re on the side of the road and you want to get on, you wave your arms, and catch the bus driver´s attention enough for him to stop the bus.
2. I mentioned this in a blog post, but these buses are also PACKED to the brim! Like, there are always people in the aisles, sitting on the dashboard, and standing on the steps of the bus as the doors are open behind them. Once, the bus driver couldn´t see to his right because of all the people there, so everytime he crossed an intersection, he asked the girls to his right if they could see a car coming.
3. When I pay for things, sometime, I´ll get extra money back. What does this mean? If my bus ride costs 4.5 pesos, and I hand my bus driver a 5 peso coin, sometimes he´ll give me 1 peso back, if he doesn´t have exact change. If I buy pastries that cost 11.5 pesos, and I pay 12, sometimes, I´ll get 1 peso instead of .5 pesos back. This has happened to me at bakeries, in the markets, from vendors – it´s less common in supermarkets, where there is usually enough change to go around, but in all other places, it seems a norm.
4. When I got my apartment, I didn´t sign a contract or anything! No lease, no signature, no official documentation to prove I live in this apartment. Talking to other Fulbright friends, this seems to be a fairly common occurence.
5. I also don´t have a specific day, method, or place to pay my rent. At the beginning of this month, I texted my landlord and asked him how I could give him the rent, and he said that he would stop by the apartment in a few days to pick up it up from me. When I talked to him in person, asking about whether he wanted the rent at a specific time each month, he told me ¨no te preocupes¨ (don´t worry about it).
*****The main these I´ve realized here is that Something I am constantly reminded of here is how much more FLEXIBLE things are in Mexico than they are in the U.S.! My roommate and I were discussing this and how Mexico differs from our home countries. How as American and French citizens, we long for the set stability of set bus stations that we´re used to, but here – there´s also a beauty in the unpredictable. I´ll watch my bus driver stop the bus five times on every corner because someone wants to get off – I feel like in the U.S., a driver would become infuriated, but the driver doesn´t get angry at all. Because the way that things are is flexible.
View from the bus when I go to school in the mornings
A few weeks ago, I was walking into the mercado (market) when I saw some small red circles in a line on the tile. I skirted around them – instinctively, I knew that they weren’t beet juice – and continued on my way. Twenty minutes later, I was waiting in front of a vegetable vendor’s stall when I heard someone behind me say, “Con permiso.” (with permission). I turned around, and stumbled back – I had almost bumped into a man carrying a bucket of intestines in one hand and two roughly severed pig heads in the other. I watched in a bit of shock as he kept walking through the market, leaving a trail of small red circles behind him. The eyes of the pigs were still open.
In the past few months, I have gone through an interestingly discomfiting process of realizing how little I have been confronted with the fact that the meat I eat comes from animals. In the U.S., I have never been to a butcher’s shop – all of my meat is cut, cleaned, and neatly wrapped in plastic before I even lay eyes on it at Stop & Shop. Meat is a little more unedited in Asian grocery stores (as is everything, in Asian grocery stores). There, you’ll see chilled cubes of cow’s blood and chicken feet packaged for sale, along with more kinds of meat that look more like the animals they came from. But I’ve never before had to order pork as I simultaneously look at a pig’s head hanging from the ceiling, blood dripping from its nose and eyes still open. Sometimes, I’ll pass by butcher’s shops and see entire pig carcasses strung up on chains, split belly open, or pig heads immersed in a bucket of water. The other day, I saw men unloading pig carcasses from a truck, carrying two bodies at a time on their shoulders, and walking straight to the butcher’s shops where I buy my meat.
Now, I want to make clear that I am not presenting this imagery in order to say that I’m horrified by how these images are the norm here. Rather, I feel exactly the opposite – it’s a shame that I haven’t had to confront these images before, though I’ve been eating meat my entire life. Meat comes from animals. It’s such a basic concept, but in America, we very rarely have to confront this fact with our own eyes. As Americans, we’re very sheltered from seeing steak as a cow and a pulled pork sandwich as a pig. In Mexico, seeing these animals and their relation to the meat I am eating has given me a huge appreciation for my food. I’ve always known about the environmental and ethical issues surrounding meat-eating, but here I’m forced to face them literally, as I look as the animals I’m about to eat. As I look into their faces, I see them as breathing creatures. I think of my dog and his love for life, and I wonder if I should go vegetarian.
Now, if you’re vegetarian/vegan and reading this – you’re probably thinking, Yes! Give up meat! It’s that easy! But, it’s not that easy. Because for me, meat is also intrinsically tied to my culture and my memories. Korean barbecue is the food I have eaten with every birthday, every graduation, every Christmas, and every event that my family found reason to celebrate. In the winters, my mother makes gomguk, a soup made from slowly simmering beef bones until the broth turns milky-white. Growing up, I’d chase the scallions around in my bowl with my spoon until the soup cooled enough for me to slurp up. In the summers, we eat pork marinated in sesame oil and chili paste, wrapped in Korean lettuce so tender, it melts in our mouths. Before I left for Mexico, I ate galbi with my family, beef ribs soaked in a sweet and savory sauce, and my mother fretted about the next time I’d be able to eat Korean food. Korean foods like soondooboo and yookaejang and ddukguk and kimchijjigae are laden with chicken and beef and pork and seafood – all recipes that I grew up with.
More than a love for bacon or hamburgers, I can’t give up meat for this reason. If I gave up meat, I’d be giving up my memories. I’d be giving up my culture. I’d be giving up the food that my mother passed on to me, and that I want to pass on to my children. There has already been such a huge loss of Korean culture from my parents’ generation to my own, but food has been one thing that has been preserved. If I can’t teach my children the Korean language perfectly, I will at least be able to spoon the food of their heritage onto their tongues. I think meat is intrinsically tied to a lot of cultures, in this way, and I’ve seen the same in Mexican culture here. Sure, you could try making vegan Mexican tacos, but I think that if you tried to convince any taqueria in Valle de Santiago to replace beef lengua or costilla with tofu, you’d be laughed out of the city.
And yet – and yet – when I go to the market, I look at the bodies of the animals that give me my meat. I’ve realized that I can do – and I want to do – something to make my meat consumption more balanced. Whether that means eating vegetarian a few times a week (lentils are delicious), or making conscious choices to make my meat consumption more ethical, I’m going to try from now on to be aware that the animals I am eating are, in fact, animals. The plain truth is that I will never give up meat completely. But Mexico has given me a deep appreciation of exactly what I am consuming when I eat a steak or a pulled pork sandwich by pulling aside the veil on the plastic-wrapped packets of my American life. It’s a lesson that’s been well learned, and one I remember every time I go to the markets.
It´s been forty-six days since I arrived in Mexico, and I can say with quiet confidence now that I have now settled into a routine. On weekdays, I´ll wake up, eat conchas (Mexican pastries), oatmeal, or eggs for breakfast. Since it´s getting chilly in the mornings now, I´ll pull on a cardigan over my sweater and then walk a block to the bus stop. I´ll look for a blue bus that has a paper sign saying LINDAVISTA taped to the windshield. After saying buenos días to the bus driver, I´ll ask him if the bus va directo (goes directly to the university), and then hop on if it does. As the bus trundles onto to its destination, I´ll look out the window at the signs of the city slowly waking up to the day. Store owners, unshuttering their shops. Dogs, running in small groups on the streets. Chicharrón shops, boiling huge vats of oil and releasing billowy clouds of steam into the air.
The streets are empty in the morning as I wait for the bus
When I get to school, I head to class. Right now, I´m working as an assistant to three diferent classes, making lesson plans for two courses, co-teaching a course for professors, and hosting conversation clubs and office hours for students. I work from around 9-3 from Mondays to Thursdays. In the classroom, I’m giving small lessons, correcting students’ work, and supporting the professors. I love working with students, and after all the teachers who helped me learn the Spanish that I have now, teaching English feels like giving back. When I’m not teaching, I sit in the SAC (the language office), chatting with other professors, working on lesson plans, or writing little bits of the blog when I have a spare moment. When I’m not in the SAC, I’m in la oficina de vinculación (the office of external affairs), chatting with the staff members, eating lunch with them, or just hanging out.
Along with all the other students, I take the bus home at 3. By this time, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and I take off my cardigan as I wait amidst a crowd. When the blue bus arrives, with LINDAVISTA written on the front, I get packed in a group of laughing students as we try to squeeze as many people possible onto a single camión (bus). By the time the bus groans back to life, there are people in every seat, people packed into the aisles, people sitting on the dashboard of the bus, and people standing on the stairs, clinging to the handrails as an open door whistles behind them. Every time, I worry a bit that the bus will spontaneously tip over (I don´t think buses were meant to hold this many people??!!), or that someone will fall out the door (sometimes, I worry it´ll be me!). But every time, the bus driver pulls off miracles and effortlessly navigates to the city´s centre, where I´ll tell the driver gracias.
When I get home, my first mission is to find food. Some days I buy a torta (sandwich) and an agua fresca (flavored and refreshing water-based drinks) from the torta shop in the town center. Other days, I buy a spread of empanadas and savor the flavor of each one – favorites includes salsa verde with chicken, potatoes with peppers and meat, and cajeta (like dulce de leche, but made from goat´s milk). Many days, I cook for myself in my apartment using produce from the markets I bought the weekend before. Then, I´ll use the next few hours to do whatever I need to do – run errands, sit in the main garden, enjoy a latte, explore the city, take a nap, read a book, or work on lesson plans.
At around 5:30, my roommate, Bérengère will walk through the door of our apartment. She arrived last week, and is the university´s French language assistant, working 3-5 M-Th. She speaks French, English, and Spanish, is from Reunion (a French island near Madagascar), went to college in France, studied abroad in Spain, and wants to be a Spanish professor. We´ll greet each other and exchange funny stories about our day, about the students we worked with, and about the moments when we were culturally confused (stories usually involve misunderstood vocabulary or not understanding how the bus system works). It´s wonderful having a roommate after living alone the first month, and Bérengère is really lovely to live with.
At 6:45, we´ll leave for the gym together. I joined a week ago, and it´s what has helped me settle into a much more solid routine. When we arrive at 7, I greet the people I know with kisses on the cheek and ask the ones I don´t know for their names. We´ll work out for an hour, then spend another half hour stretching and talking and laughing. My gym is fantastically friendly! At the end of the night, we´ll say hasta luego, with the assumption that we´ll see each other tomorrow, and then Beregere and I will walk home. On the walk back, we´ll see the the city winding down. People taking down their stalls in the market, the fruterías putting away their fruit, shopkeepers mopping their floors. Oftentimes…we´ll stop for tacos at a late-night taquería before heading home.
When I´ll get home, take a shower, talk to friends and family for a bit, and clean or read a book or journal or just relax. Oftentimes, Berengere and I will sit at the kitchen table for a bit with a cup of tea or a glass of wine before going to bed, talking in Spanish, exchanging pieces of culture between our two worlds, and laughing when we get confused between our native languages and our learned ones. And when we say buenas noches, we go to sleep, and a new day begins mañana.
These calm days are punctuated with memorable events. Going to a food sale at the school where all the students sold traditional Mexican foods for a fundraiser and I happily ate all kinds of new food. Making friends at the gym (seriously, such a great thing!!!). Waking up to hear the news of the Las Vegas shooting and thinking for a moment that it couldn´t be real. Watching traditional Mexican folk dances and listening to banda at the celebration of my university´s anniversary. Meeting the families and friends of the Mexicans I´ve met. Doing small weekend trips to neighboring cities and pueblos. Turning off the news after listening to the way “President” Trump talked about the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico. Watching old couples dance to music at night in the garden, and slowly recognizing more and more of the people in my small city.
Una vida tranquila. That´s what a lot of people say when I ask them about their favorite part of living in Valle de Santiago. A tranquil life. A peaceful life. And that is what I´ve found here. As you can see, I’m not living a very glamorous life right now – I don´t chug tequila every night, and I don´t really go out (honestly there are no clubs in Valle de Santiago so there is literally nowhere to go out to). But living abroad, I need a sustainable life more than I need a glamorous one, and that’s the life I’m making for myself here. A simple, wonderful routine, that after all the ups and down of the first month, is most welcome in my life. Yes, it´ll change for certain, but I´ve gone from surviving to happily thriving in this place I now call home.
1. Many people carry umbrellas on sunny days to shield themselves from the sun (which seems a little more direct since we´re at a higher altitude, although that may be my imagination?). This may seem new to Americans (we do love our tans), but I know this is common in large parts of Asia, especially China, Korea, and Japan.
2. Additionally, most college students live at home. There are no on-campus dorms at my university, and most universities in Mexico. Again, this is something that may seem different to Americans, but is common in large parts of the world including Europe, Asia, and Australia.
****I think an important thing to take away from these two points is that for some customs, America is the exception rather than the norm. We may think, in our umbrella-less, dorm-lived lives, that other countries do things ¨strangely¨or differently,¨ but the truth is that America is strange, in these respects, compared to the rest of the world. Food for thought 🙂
3. Tap water here is largely uncomsumable for a combination of complicated reasons…I´m not qualified to talk about it in depth, but talking to other Mexicans, the main reasons seem to be a) the infrastructure for water is older and outdated in parts of Mexico, resulting in contaminated water b) some sewage systems also have older and outdated infrastructure, meaning that sewage cannot be properly purified before being returned to water systems, and c) much of Mexican rock and soil consists of sandstone or limestone, which is very porous and doesn´t filter ground water as effectively as other types of rock (for comparison, in upper North America, ground water can take years or decades to filter through rock, resulting in cleaner water by the time it reaches the surface).
4. Soooooo, because of this, people where I live use water bought in large containers called garrafones (water jugs). They hold 20L of purified water, and one container lasts me about a week. I use it for drinking and cooking. When I finish one garrafon, I bring the empty container to the grocery store and exchange it for a full one, which costs 33 pesos (around 2 American dollars). The empty ones are washed, disinfected, filled, and sold again.
5. Taquitos here are literally small tacos – not taquitos like the frozen ones that Costco sells that are in the shape of a rolled tortilla!
Fruteria stand near my bus stop, where I wait every morning
A common thing here is that cars drive around with speakers (huge ass) speakers on their roofs that project audio advertisements as the cars drive around the city. Interestingly enough, my parents said that this was also common in Korea, back when they were growing up! The cars are pretty loud, and will play advertisements at all times of the day, from morning to night, and you can usually hear them a few streets away. There was one that drove me a little bit crazy because it was advertising a horror show that was happening a town over, and the advertisement was scary, especially when I was alone in my apartment at 11 at night! Luckily, that one has finally stopped haha.
I´ve noticed that people here sit a lot outside a lot more than they do in the U.S.. In the plazas, on the benches by the side of the road, in chairs propped up on the sidewalk, on doorsteps. You may say to me, ¨But Catherine, people sit outside in the U.S. as well!¨ But we don´t really sit outside, not really! We sit on our phones outside, texting friends or surfing the internet. Here, people will simply sit, observing people walking by or simply observing. It´s an interesting change of pace for me as an American!
I usually don´t like papaya in the U.S. (texture is strange, no taste), but I love it here in Valle! Ivan told me it´s because when papayas are shipped to the U.S., they have to be picked green so they ripen by the time they hit grocery stores. Here, they sweeten on the plant before being picked ripened and brought straight to market – resulting in the sweetest, freshest papaya I´ve ever eaten. This is true for other fruits and vegetables like avocadoes, mangoes, and tomatoes.
On the note of grocery shopping, I really appreciate the people at the produce stands where I buy my fruits and vegetables. When I go to buy my groceries, I tell the stall owners what I want (dos aguacates, por favor, tres tomates, por favor) and then watch as they bag them for me and then tell me the price. It´s such a small thing, but every stall owner I´ve seen, when picking out my produce for me, tests it to give me produce that is perfectly ripened. They´ll pick up several avocadoes before finding ones that I can eat as soon as I get home. One fruteria owner handed me mangoes and then instructed me on which mango to eat today and which to eat tomorrow, based on their ripeness. In the U.S., I´m used to buying my produce green and waiting for it to soften in my kitchen, so it´s a lovely little change here in Mexico!
The microwave at my school has a button for reheating tortillas automatically – technology is amazing!!
Benches where people sit – it’s raining here, which is why the plaza look empty!
La Coreana Americana 