ROTARACT
Rotaract is essentially a Rotary Club for people of 18-30 years of age, and there is a great Rotaract Club here in Monterrey. I’ve been participating as much as possible; they meet every Wednesday night and discuss various service projects, and I had the opportunity to participate in their “Noche de Lonche” one Sunday evening, where we made sandwiches for patients at a local hospital who are not from the area.
Read more about the Rotaract Club on their blog (in Spanish):
http://rotaractmty.blogspot.com/
ASOCIACIÓN ESTUDIANTIL POR LOS PUEBLOS INDÍGENAS (AEPI)
I’m still regularly attending meetings with this student organization at Tec that encourages awareness of indigenous people’s rights and situations. It’s really an amazing way to be exposed to more of Mexican society, which was essentially founded upon the indigenous culture, and to see how proud Mexicans are of their history and culture.
AEPI continues to be a part of the program Creando Espacios de Inclusión, in which we get together with indigenous youth in Monterrey on Saturdays and discuss a different topic every week, to make friends and to learn more about each other’s culture. My favorite session was one in which each person talked about the community he or she came from – so not only did I get to learn about various indigenous villages in Mexico, but there was one AEPI member from Uruguay! And I got to share about my home state of South Carolina, and everyone loved hearing about that.
BEING A GRAD STUDENT AT MONTERREY TEC…
…is a lot of work! I have a new respect for everyone with a Master’s degree, as well as all Mexican students:). I have a semester project for each of my four classes, and since we only have a month left of the semester (so hard to believe), it will be down to the wire soon! It’s good though – I’m learning the way the educational system works in Mexico (at least at Tec, it’s very research-oriented and group-project-focused, which is a great way to get to know the students in my class and practice my Spanish).
WEEKEND TRIP TO REAL DE CATORCE
Although I’m being kept pretty busy, I’ve made sure to give myself time to see more of this beautiful country. My boyfriend Zack came from South Carolina to visit me for a couple of weeks, and although I spent a lot of time showing him around Monterrey (places such as the Cola de Caballo waterfall and the Grutas de Garcia caves, which I described in previous posts), we also went away the first weekend in October with some of my friends here to Real de Catorce, a little colonial town in the mountain about 5 hours from Monterrey in the state of San Luis Potosi.
Have you ever seen the movie “The Mexican”? It was filmed in Real de Catorce. If you haven’t, Real can be described as Mexican western cowboy meets Mexican indigenous hippy. We decided to drive my car there, and it was a smooth, peaceful ride on a Friday afternoon with incredible views:
…until my car got stuck halfway up the mountain, at the top of which is Real de Catorce.
We were incredibly lucky though, because right then some natives were driving by. They stopped and came over to help us try and figure out what was wrong. We realized it was a problem with the transmission, because it wasn’t changing gears, so they put in some transmission fluid that they had handy. I also happened to need oil, so they took us to a little convenience store a little bit further up the mountain, and that was enough to get me to the top.
In order to get to Real de Catorce, you have to park your car in a dirt parking lot and walk through a tunnel about 2 km long. Since it was dark at this point, the tunnel was particularly spooky. In fact, Real is known for being a ghost town, although at the particular time that we were there, there was a festival going on called Fiesta de San Francisco, during which time 150,000 pilgrims come to see the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi in the church there. But even though there were people around, it was still very eerie walking through that tunnel:
It was also a very long tunnel, so about halfway through we hitched a ride with a horse and cart.
At the end of the tunnel was Real de Catorce. We came out and immediately it felt as if we had jumped back about 100 years. There were cobblestone paths and vendors on the streets, selling delicious-smelling tacos, religious souvenirs and little knick-knacks. The air was fresh and crisp and literally everything about that town was in stark contrast to the big, loud city of Monterrey. I love Monterrey, but it was a welcome change.
We wandered through the crowds of pilgrims and vendors, up and down cobblestone hills, until we came to our hotel at the other end of the village (that description makes it sound far away, but the whole town was actually pretty small. In fact, there was essentially just one main market place, with a few side streets). After we got settled into our hotel, we went in search of food, of which the options were: tacos, burritos, and other versions of tacos and burritos with different names – all from street vendors. So, we ordered delicious pork burritos and wondered why they don’t make ‘em like that in the States!
Real already seemed like a great town, but with not much to offer for nightlife. So, we opted to go relax at the bar atop our hotel, where we found a great drum band playing an indigenous-style beat. All of a sudden a indigenous man (probably a Huichol, the primary indigenous group from Real de Catorce) walked out into the middle of the room, with his hair pulled in front of his face so we couldn’t see his face at all, body painted, and wearing a striped skirt.
He carried a decorated cane with a painted animal skull at the top. He began dancing to the drum beat in a rhythmic yet flowing fashion, as all eyes were on him. And then, slowly, everyone else in the room began to dance to the drums–and we joined in too! One of the things that Real de Catorce is known for is a plant called peyote. It is a Huichol ritual to walk to where the peyote plants are, cut them, take them back, and eat them for a spiritual “experience.” For this reason, Real is known for being a spiritual town, but it was also incredibly interesting to see the contrast between 1) Mexico’s Catholic religion, manifested in the many pilgrims there to pay homage to St. Francis of Assisi, and 2) the spirituality of the indigenous earth-focused religion of the people who are native to Real. From my participation in AEPI and seeing how the students in that group are trying so hard to make the Mexican people more aware of their indigenous roots, it was really refreshing to see these two contrasting cultures exist harmoniously that weekend in a little mountain town.
The next morning we relaxed at our hotel, which had breathtaking views of the valley below:
Then we spent some time wandering through the crowded streets of Real, looking at the items for sale and taking in the fresh air and incredible sites. Vendor stands lined the streets and they had everything from little St. Francis figurines, to random plastic toys for kids, to ponchos, to carved imitation peyote plants. They also of course had food, drinks, and offered a variety of services like designs painted on baseball caps (my friend Claire got “MEXICO” painted on a white hat in the colors of the Mexican flag).
There were also cowboy-looking men coming up to us asking us if we wanted to ride their horses, so we opted for that the next day.
Sunday was another beautiful sunny day in the mountains, and after breakfast we headed out to the center of town to find the man with the horses.
He said we would be riding the horses to the Pueblo Fantasmo (Ghost Town). It was a little scary at first, going up and down the little cobblestone hills in the town, but I was just crossing my fingers that the horses were used to it and knew what they were doing. As we got further out of town, though, I realized it was only going to get worse. It was then that it occurred to me that the Pueblo Fantasmo was at the top of another mountain, so we couldn’t avoid going up at a very steep incline. I’ve always had a little fear of heights, and it only added to the scariness factor that we were riding horses about two feet from the edge on rocky, unpaved pathways, where they could easily have slipped. The whole time up we were all thinking, “This is going to be sooo much worse going down…”
BUT we made it and it was definitely worth it. The town was abandoned ruins at the top of a mountain,
with views stretching for miles, including a bird’s-eye view of the little town of Real de Catorce.
The way back down was scarier and what we were all dreading. We had to ride the horses going down a steep incline about two feet from the edge on rocky, unpaved pathways. On the way up, we ended up drifting apart into two separate groups, but on the way down we were all clumping up into one group. To make matters worse, our guide was in the back and would whip whichever horse was in the back to get him to go faster! So it ended up being a traffic jam for much of the way down, as each horse scrambled not to be last, to our detriment. At one point I thought I was going to fall off because there was a horse so close to me that he pushed up against me and my horse and knocked my leg out of the stirrup!
But really, there was not much to worry about; the horses had probably walked that trek every day and it was a little bit of a thrilling adventure.
When we got back to Real, we grabbed our things and trekked back to our car, up and down the little hills in the town, and through the 2 km tunnel. Since it was Sunday, everyone who was there for the weekend was leaving, so walking through the tunnel felt like some massive evacuation due to some pandemic or impending natural disaster.
On the other side of the tunnel, though, it was still sunny and my car was still there, so we thought that was the end to our weekend adventure.
Wrong. Not even halfway back, we pulled over to a Pemex gas station (the only gas station in Mexico – it’s essentially a monopoly) to fill up, and they told me they didn’t have regular gas so we left to go to the next one down the highway. That didn’t happen, though, because as soon as we left the gas station my car wouldn’t shift gears or go past 40mph, so we turned back around and went back to the Pemex we were just at.
I feel like my Spanish has improved a lot since I’ve been here, but I probably wouldn’t even know some car vocabulary in English, so I thought this was a hopeless situation. Fortunately, there was a man stopped to get gas who spoke both English and Spanish completely fluently, and he helped us translate the problem to the attendants. They couldn’t do much, but they said there was a mechanic in a town called Matehuala about 45 minutes away. Since it was already almost 7 p.m., we decided that the best option would be to just get the mechanic to come with a tow truck and take us back to Monterrey (about a 2.5 hr drive).
…He finally came three hours later. At least we had five of us to keep us entertained, access to the Oxxo in Pemex (Oxxo is the main Mexican convenience store – like a 7-11, which is also here), and the Pemex workers to keep checking in to make sure the mechanic came. When he finally showed up at 10 p.m., we discovered that he wasn’t going to be able to take us all the way to my apartment in Monterrey; he would have to leave us at a Soriana (the Mexican version of Walmart) right outside the city, because there were certain restrictions that prohibited him from entering the city limit. So when we finally got to the Soriana at 1 a.m., we prayed and prayed that my car would work to drive the next 30 minutes to my apartment, and thank god it did.
I think a true test of the mastery of another language, culture, and country is how one handles situations of adversity. Granted, at the time I was pretty upset and worried – anyone I was with can attest to that :P – but all you can really do is look at what you learned from the situation:
• I didn’t come here to be a tourist – I came here to live as much like Mexicans do as I could, to really get a grasp of their language and culture. Obviously, from time to time Mexicans have to deal with car breakdowns, so it was interesting to see how that works here.
• I learned a lot more about how cars work. When I was 16, my dad wouldn’t even let me get my license until I explained to him how a transmission works. Well, I’d since forgotten all of that, but it turned out that my transmission gears were just worn down from years of use, so I had to re-learn all about transmissions to understand what had happened to my car.
• I learned some new vocabulary that I probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise. For example, “cambios” refers to “gears”, and “camión remolcador” is “tow truck” (fortunately I always carry my dictionary with me so I could explain to them that I wanted a tow truck).
• I developed a new belief that there are genuinely good mechanics in the world. When we got back to Monterrey, we took my car to a transmission shop, and the mechanic there was so helpful and nice. For example, it was going to be 4 or 5 days for my car to be fixed, and although I asked him if it could be ready any sooner, he said he didn’t think so. However, he knew how badly I wanted it and so he got to it first and it was ready in 3 days! Also, when we went to bring it in, he saw us standing around afterwards looking confused (we were actually deciding if we wanted to go to the restaurant across the street), and he came up and asked if we needed a ride somewhere, since he was going home for lunch anyway!
• I realized how glad I am I did bring my car here. A lot of people thought that I was crazy, but like I said, I didn’t come here to be a tourist. Monterrey is not a very walkable city, so it’s so nice to be able to drive to places like Rotary meetings. Sure, I’ve gotten lost about as much as I’ve found my way, but that’s the way to really learn the ins-and-outs of the city.
• And last but not least, this story now serves as an excellent icebreaker when there’s an awkward language-barrier-invoked silence!
FYI: That is not a Huichol in your picture. Just a hippy dude.
ReplyDeleteHaha, thanks for the correction - it WAS kind of hard to see his face! :P Who wrote that by the way?
ReplyDeleteSounds like an interesting and eventful trip! One definitely learns fast in situations of adversity, even if they're difficult at the time. Plus they make good stories later :-)
ReplyDelete