28 April 2007

Trash in Mex

I write this with only six weeks to go in Mexico.

:(

...and then,


:)

!!

So, I should take full advantage of my time here, and share some blog experiences while they are still interesting. After all, when would you see a parade of Lucha Libre wrestlers, the Virgen of Guadalupe and the Tasmanian Devil at the same time?


...wtf?


Anyway, with that, I would like to choose a topic of the day and write a little of it. Today´s shall be...


Mexican Garbage.

One surprising aspect of Mexican Garbage, or more specifically, Xalapan Garbage, is that it´s free to dump it. Every night except Sunday a truck passes our house, grinding it´s gears to the max and pumping out large clouds of black exhaust as we live on a steep hill, and collects a mountain of garbage, some in bags and some not, that get piled near a multilevel hospital parking garage. What you can find in the garbage differs from American garbage, as it contains 1. more fruit peelings and 2. used toilet paper that is unable to be flushed. As a whole, Mexicans waste less than Americans, or rather, -every one- wastes less than Americans. You go into a house and the furniture is old and smelly, the tiling ridiculously outdated, the fridge propped up by bricks as the pegs have broken off, the living room TV 13 inches and 20 years old. But it functions and there´s no real need to replace it. Obviously this is a much poorer country than mine, but as a whole I think there is more respect for the material, the people are less materialistic and it is not as important to have new things to impress others. There is at least one exception, however: cell phones. Many Mexicans, even the poor ones, often have nice cell phones, and are always sending text messages. To make a call in this country is absurd. It costs at least 3 pesos - 30 cents - per minute, even from a cell phone, and pay phones are even more. I think one big reason is due to the telecommunication monopoly, which is owned by the world´s third richest man, Carlos Slim.

Anyway, garbage. You also find a lot of it on the street. I´m referring specifically to Xalapa. Some places are disgusting. In the mornings, at dawn, you see workers out on the streets, using big brooms, the bristles made of sticks or flexible tree bark, sweeping away the accumulated rubbish, making the city clean for the next few hours, but later the litter comes back with the hustle and bustle. But it is irritating that there are very few trashcans. With good reason the trash is tossed on the street - the bins are inconveniently located and they always seem to be full. When I went to Costa Rica there were trash cans every where, many of them with beautiful painted designs. But in Xalapa such is not the case.


Another thing that irks me is the lack of recycling. I know of one recycling place, which is far from the center, and the garbage truck doesn´t carry seperate bins for the reusables. One good thing, however, is that plastic bottles and beer containers are almost always returnable for cash or more beverages. You are obligated to recycle when you drink beer or Coke.

The four of us (Stacy, Carlo, Ahmed and I) who live in this house have a small garden , or rather a large cement trough filled with dirt, where we throw all the fruit peelings and seeds instead of in the trash. The bad thing is, it attracts lots of insects, so the mosquitos get into the house and remind us that garbage is never free.


--Pic of the day--






Two lovers - or rather, one lover and one surprised woman - share an intense, romantically confused moment overlooking Teotihuacan´s Pyramid of the Moon, north of Mexico City one cloudy afternoon.

14 April 2007

Cluttered mind ramblings

I think I`ll post the third part later. It is probably the most interesting, but I need a lot of time to write it since it`s so massive. And a lot of time requires some dedication and patience, and I`m just feeling lazy right now, so instead I will post something I wrote three weeks ago, which is a different style of blogging. What I did was spoke into a voice recorder, grabbing my thoughts and then typing them out. It`s more candid, more honest and maybe even more interesting since writing can retard the thinking process, but it may be more difficult to read.

No apologies for bad grammar or misspellings.

....

Thursday 22 march 2007

6.00 p.m.

Well right now I´m feeling ecstatic because I just got a n email in my junk mail box actually and its from the editor of the austin post bulletin she told me that I had gotten the internship this summer writing news and this is good for several reasons. One because I need the intership to graduate. Two because there are few intership options availbe in Austin for mass comm. Majors. Three because itll improve my wrting. Four…uh..oh yeah, cuz i´ll be editor in chief next year at the msu reporter an award winning college newspaper. I´ll need more skills to help my writing improve. I guess this is similar to the third option. Yeah. But yeah. I´m frikkiin happy I got this internship. I applied for this internship last year as well but never got it. And I´ve been freelance writing for the Bust bulletin for two years now. Well just a few articles at a time: i´ve wrote se evn so far. And what else…uuhhh….lets see here…ohyeah i´m also happy right now because i´ve been drinking coffee all day and caffeine always puts me in a good mood. For some reason I don´t know why. It has different effects on other people. And….um…lets see. What was I gonna say. Yep some days I just wake up in a good mood. OIther days I don´t. And that just sets the tone for my hwole day I guess. And sometimes I wake up and it hink about my dad. And how he´s dead and how it would be like if he was still alive today. How we could´ve stopped him from dying. And just memories about him. And that happens almost every day in fact and I dunno why. I don´t have a lot of dreams about him but I usually don´t remember my dreams, just little fragments of them. And its likie when I wake up in the mrngn and I cant remember my dream. Its like in winter and you know those little puddles of water and …ok where was I …oh yeah…uhh….ok…anyway….when it´s the winter theres the little p’uddles of water and they start freezing from the cold and you get these thin little layers of ice and when I was a kid I always tried to pick up the layer of ice and throw it and it sounded like glass breaking and itw as pretty cool. And yeah,anyway. My dreams are like those, thin sheets of ice. As soon as you grab hold of them, try to get the sense of them, they break they shatter they fall apart they fall to pieces you don’t remember them anymore and that’s what its like when I dream. And I haven´t had many clear dreams of my father since he died. I´ve had a few but they were nightmjwares. And I don’t wanna talk about htem. I just don’t. And I think that’s interesting that he´s the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. And I guess its just a part of the healing process you know. And the whole days not like that I think I would go crazy if that happened. But I just like see thigns that remind me of my dad like in my room for example when he died I brought back one of his work tshirts. It´s an X X X X L size, which is four ex, and I guess I could probably cut the material up and use it as a jumper. That’s how big he was. Anyways black tshirt. He used it to when he went to work. He was a welder um and its full of holes, some big some little. Little pecks. And anyway uh it has small holes from the sparks when he welded and I remember when he used to wear this shirt in particular you could see the little hairs on his fat belly poking out of the shirt, the holes, and plus the shirt wasn´t even big enough. I mean four xl is friggin huge but this man was like well he was fat. And yeah the bottom of this shirt it reached a little below his belly btton bt nt all the way so you could see his uh..what do you wanna say…stomach cleavage…haha I know theres a word for th at but I can´t think of it right now but yeah anyway it was very attractive. And so. Lets move on to a different subject now. Xalapa. Xalapa xalapa. Xalapa is a small city stretched to the limits of a large city. That’s how id describe it. Cuz you have like the downtown which is like it looks like a medium sized city of 50 000 people but then having it stretched out to the limits and its kind of a mess becuz you have u h it’s the capital of the state and so many people are migrating here and it wasan´t designed to be a big city and it was a small city and you can see how much development is happening even now I mean like just getting to school in one of my classes in the university I have to take a bus there and it takes about 45 minutes walking from my house to the school and its just way out there but by bus it takes porbablyu 25 to 35 minutes and i´d say a good 5 or 10 minutes of that is just waiting in traffic and its that slow. And you have tons of cars and you have narrow, winding, hilly streets, and now imagine that and…yeah just imagine that and its crazy. And a lot of people say it´s a small Mexico City and I wouldn’t doubt but its just rapidly expanding, crowded, uh, polluted, uh…itsa surrounded by mountains, smoggy, the weather is…the weather is it´s nice. It gets hot but not too hot and it gets cold but not…well it gets cold some days I wish iw as back in Minnesota just kidding. But…what else can I talk about here…mmm…i´m still going out with MarĂ­a Fernanda my Mexican girlfriend 19 years student of law, uh she´s from Xalapa she lives by me about ten minutes from my house walking um…attractive, slightly resembles Scarlett Johansson, curvier, shorter, much darker, has, uh, changes her hair color once in a while, it´s always black but she has like tints like blond. The first time I met her it was purple the tints and since then it hasn´t been as crazier. Just red or brown or light black, dark blonde, stuff like that. Uhm, what else here. Today. I can describe what happened today. I woke up at about 7 am