Darkness in my heart

There are many aspects in human coexistence. There are different opinions, characters, temperaments, points of view. For my part, I try to endure other people’s stupidity by looking at it as an opportunity for a good harmless time.

It may sound mean, but there are people who are just dumb and they don’t realize it. They point out the obvious in a very boring, unfunny way. They also tend to narrate what they do step by step: I am walking now, I am hungry so I am eating this apple, hey! Did you arrive? – to me walking through the doors… (No! I am just an illusion!! Finally the Jedi times have arrived and you can talk to me through those very cool devices!)

The worst part of this whole situation is having to control my very snide, mean comments. My favorite is the kind where I make fun of them and they don’t realize it (hence the harmless description above mentioned). It requires a high level of intellectual play and coolness of mind to blurt out well elaborated insults that seem like totally innocent comments.

On a personal note, my very dark heart experiences a contradictory moment every time one of these chances becomes a reality: should I make fun of this slow-witted individual who annoys and tortures me with mind-numbing verborea, or should I let it slide and be the bigger person. Well… I’m short.

As of now, I found myself a new victim…

Germany

so... I'm back

Ek - Balam: Round 2

After my fantastic Ek-Balam family adventure, I wanted to go for round 2 and experience the sporting activities the o place offers.

I called up some people and in the end we were 4! On a quiet Saturday morning we took off to the roads with some drinks in the cooler, swimsuits and tennis shoes. 

We looked around the place, went up some of the buildings and basked on the glory of good weather.

After a somewhat easy negotiation with the tour guys, we took to our bikes all ready and with a nice adventure package for the four of us. We rode 2 km in the middle of the Mayan jungle and some people of our group that party too much and don’t visit the gym, starting to feel the weight of the last year of the 20’s. We shook it off with some laughs and deep breaths.

We changed and strapped on the zip-lining gear. We had two goes with it. It was exhilarating, fun, fast. The coolest part is that when you zip above the cenote, the people swimming down there cheer you on!

After that, we took some stuff off and put some new one on. I don’t exactly know what, but suddenly I was wearing rappelling gear! So we got around one gigantic tree whose roots went all the way down to the cenote, that was... what?... 30 meters below? I know, not much, but still... it is a cave of water. So I jumped around the tree on into the void with nothing but water, roots and a very nice German family.

After those exciting experiences, we needed to just float around the water in the cenote. We did some swimming, drifting, swaying and so on; we even jumped into the water with a rope. That was unwise, but fun.

Finally we headed back, stopped for some lunch and coffee and finally made it home around 5pm. 

It was a great day, full of fun and thrilling experiences. I am ready to repeat!

Ek - Balam: family adventure

There I was, having some good family time at the Caribbean, visiting my sister in Cancun. Aunt Candy was with us from Kentucky. We went to so some tourism and some delicious sea food by the sea, with all its colors, flavors and odors. And suddenly…BAM!!!! An idea invades my mind: let’s have a Mayan Adventure!!!

There is this Mayan city, Ek Balam (black jaguar, also called panther) that lies in between Mérida and Cancun. Needless to say, I haven’t been there even if it is very close by.

This is a medium size site; it has a religious pyramid, some random buildings like houses of important people and such, a gigaaaantic sort of temple, which is more of a palace. That palace is the tallest structure at the site. I climbed it, against the strong wind, vertigo and running children. It was a challenge! But I made it. From the top you can see Coba, another site about 150km to the south.

This was a very hot day and I was starting to get hungry and I wanted some mango. It is customary in Mexico to just eat chopped fruit of the season with chili powder, salt and lemon. There was this woman with a bag of chopped fruit (mango and jicama) the size of a carry-on bag and I could not help myself, so I asked her where she bought it because it looked so delicious. To this simple question I got the worst answer possible: I brought from home!!!! Oh no! – I thought – all is lost! I can never get one of those. But then, to my happy surprise, she extends the bag to me and asks me to please, oh please, take some fruit. She walks over to my mom, pregnant sister, and heated gringo aunt and offers them too. Frankly, we were scared by this nice gesture, it is not normal for people to be this nice. Still, we took some fruit and gorged on the pulpy deliciousness of its tropical flavor: IT WAS DELICIOUS!!!!

The best part about this Mayan site is that 2km away (by bike) there is a cenote (water well inside a cave that has an opening to the surface) where you can swim and do diverse sporting activities. Needless to say I was spared the joy of these adventurous undertakings by my sister’s pregnancy, the heat and my aunt’s and mother’s age.

When we left, there was a market outside; they sell little curious and artistic things, from beautiful necklaces to huge jaguar heads carved on wood. There was a little explosion of colors attracting my eyes, asking them to come over and look… and so I did. It was all just beautiful in its own right and style. I didn’t buy anything, but I sure looked at all of it.With the heart full of Mayan pride and my stomach full of fruit, I parted with this gorgeous place only to be reunited with it once more… in the near future.

By this time we were seriously hungry, so we stopped on the nearest restaurant to have a late lunch, traditional yucatecan food J I had longaniza, which is the Mexican version of chorizo.

After that, on the way back to Cancun, we took the side roads instead of the highway. We had to make a caffeine stop. The only place with coffee on the road was a hotel. While we were waiting for my coffee to be made, we took a little stroll inside the gardens and to our delighted surprise we found that they keep peacocks!! This was the beginning of spring, so the males were all proud and feathers open courting the females, so we got a little show.

It was a very nice family day trip, full of fun and happy moments, unexpected events, laughs, heat, colors… Mexico.

Perfect Saturdays

To honor the fact that I do not work on Saturdays, I like to have little brunches in the backyard, under my avocado tree.

Sometimes, I even get present from the tree, like one of its little green babies landing on my fresh and cool water J

I like to sit there and eat my breakfast while I read and listen to the green parrots bicker with each other on the branches. My dog goes a little crazy with them flying around. It is part of the fun

Then the heat starts and well… I just move from the table to the canvas small swimming pool J

Life is good… specially on Saturday mornings.

Fighting the heat

 Mérida is one of the hottest places on Earth. Or so I believe.

Normally, my house has a swimming pool that is more like a lake. It has been the reasons for many a party and jolly gatherings. My house was called: GBL Spa&Resort. Was. Correct.

The lake-like swimming pool is… BROKEN!!! There is a huge crack on the bottom of it, right in the middle, it is so big, I am afraid to look and find I can say hello to the devil!

For economy related issues, the fantastic lake-like swimming pool will not be seeing better days of fresh water and happy laughs within its body, no… it will be filled up.

This caused such sadness in me, such heat driven delirium that I ended up buying a portable, canvas swimming pool. It is tinyyyy, 3x2m. ok, I know that is not exactly tiny, but I cannot swim in it!!!

Still, I console myself with what I can do J I soak myself like a wild beast in the jungle, with a beer and a book.

Happy tropical summer to all!

Unfriendly desk neighbor

Don’t you just hate it when people seem to have bad vibes for no reason? Well… this is the case of my former desk neighbor at work.

There I am, starting at the job, happily smiling to everybody that I am meeting. You know, those first days are always crucial. So I talk to people, ask them about themselves, genuinely interested in their lives, trying to get to know them.

And then I talk to this woman that ends up being my desk neighbor. Apparently I could not say anything right. She starts talking about how terrible it is for her and new men because she is so freakishly tall for Mérida. Ok, she is tall, but not thaaaat tall (I did not say that to her though). So I try to console her, tell her to just ignore the small minded men that think that her tallness is terrible, that there is hope for a good looking, smart, tall woman in this city; that I don’t really understand (because I am seriously vertically challenged), but that I know she is not alone in this sort of pain because my cousins are also tall and also like to wear high heels, and that they also suffer. Terrible they are, these short meridian men… not a good comment.

She talks about how much she likes shoes, and that nobody understands her love for them. So when I got these beautiful new smurf-blue shoes and showed her, tell her where I found them, she looks me up and down and tells me: I hate blue shoes.

Beautiful right?

She talks about how terrible it was for her as a woman to study mechanical engineering; that she had to get tough because the men were mean to her. When she asked me what I studied I said: industrial engineering.  She just spats (like… with spit flowing from her mouth) out at me: “well... that is not real engineering, there are more women there”. Let it be known that I never said otherwise, I believe us, industrial engineers, are turbo management. Then she starts to say how low that engineering is and all this crap about me. I got very mad now, so I turned and said: “well yeah, I know what you mean, tooootally right, because when I arrived to my masters, material science, I really learnt what it meant to study”. She turns around and says with this condescending look: “where did you study that? There is no such master in Mexico?” so I answered: “well… of course there isn’t in Mexico, I studied in Germany”. She actually Pfffed at me and said: “oh please, yeah right, like you did”. I looked her right in the eye and said: “yes I did, a European master in Germany, with labs, crazy experiments… the whole thing”.  And the list goes on and on.

I guess she just didn’t like me at all from the get go. So there is nothing better than to be obviously ignored and be the target of rudeness 5 days a week, 10 hours a day; to arrive on a Monday morning, settle in front of my computer, and when she comes in (late), she says hi to everybody by name and skips me like a puddle.

After that, well… I started taking pleasure in the little things. Yes, I started doing things just to piss her off jijijiji. Like when she comes in, I say hello directly to her, so she has to answer. When she goes by me in the hall and (deliberately) bumps into me, I say: oh sorry, she ignores me, so I repeat (in front of everybody): (name) I’m sorry I bumped into you. Then her cellphone rings aaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the time to: oh, I just died in your arms tonight, like... 27 times a day and this is no joke; so I started singing it every single time and saying: man! I love that song. She finally put it in silence. Then she skypes with people, like… socially skiping with men that are in Iraq, during work hours; needless to say, when the boss is not there. But not everybody at work speaks English, but I do. So when she says a joke, obviously, I hear it, because I am next to her, so I laugh too and I don’t hide it. She stopped doing that too. She talks bad about me to the secretary and now she also hates me and doesn’t hide it.

They moved me to a different area with more space, and now I have to girls that report to me in a new project… oooohhh she hated that jijijiji.

Now she hates me more than ever, so I laugh, I make jokes with her boss whom she hates and hates it even more when he laughs back.

I really do not understand what I did to earn her dislike from the first hello, but now, I have a never-ending source of fun at the office. The very sad thing is everybody at work hates her. Oh well… those are the stories of the bad-vibe desk neighbor 

Pocket Superhero

Sometimes I feel like going through the city is such a danger!!! It is full with dumb people who drive slow, that decide that they can just zig zag whenever they need to shake things up!

There are also the people who think they can walk and text at the same time and that objects (maybe a person or two) will just jump right out of their way.

Do not forget the incredibly smart ones that think they can fly, or maybe they think they are ghosts and things can go through them; so they just go right on and walk onto the street to crosst it when the cars have green on street lights.

I think my favorites are the incredibly lighting bolt fast cyclists who think they can out pedal a car and cut in front of them whenever they feel like it... in the dark... with no lights.

For all these perils I found my solution!!! I got myself a pocket superhero! Now I take him in my purse with some vital data (whole 4GB of it) to defend me from all these would-be attackers!

Please do the same and take care no to clash in any important way with all these geniuses that plague our society.

Mérida en Domingo

My beautiful Mérida has eventful Sundays! I decided to give these Sunday plans a try.

One sunny, warm and delicious Sunday morning I woke up early,  put on my tennis shoes and headed for “Paseo de Montejo”, the most beautiful street in the city. on Sundays they close it and make a “bici-ruta” where people can bring or rent their bikes, or just walk and go up and down the street; they can bring their dogs and have lots of family fun. It is very cool to see families hanging out in this manner, just walking up and down the street on a Sunday morning.

I didn’t take my bike, because I do not have one on this side of the Atlantic, but I found one in the end, for free, from one of the phone companies. It was a crappy bike, but still, it was fun fun.

After a while, my mom and an aunt that was visiting from Mexico city, came and got me and we continued on to the city center where there settles a little market full of curiosities, crafts, clothes, jewelry and the like; most of them handmade, traditional looking and basically… just fun. We walked around, got some pearl items, some herbal teas and delighted ourselves on the show. Yes, there is a show!! We got to see some man singing “canciones rancheras”, which are the charro songs: big hat, boots with spurs, those tight pants full of buttons, mariachi like stuff.

The best part of these events is the food!!, as always in México. The Mexican food, I believe, is the best in the world! I ate marquesitas (like an ice cream cone in the shape of a crêpe with gouda-like cheese in the center), coconut sorbet, esquite (boiled corn with chili powder, lemon, soup cheese, cream.. delicious!!!).

After that, there was too much heat and we had to leave! So we moved into the comfort of the air conditioned car and back home for some fresh lemonade!

I love eventful Sundays.

Cocunut sorbet

Merida Fest

Mérida, my beautiful city, had its birthday, its 471th birthday! 

I celebrate my birthday with style: a birthweek; but Mérida makes it even bigger: the Mérida Fest!! it is a month full of activities: concerts, plays, expositions, talks, events... all sort of things!

Mérida by night

I love to participate in this city craze and attend to as many as I can, specially because they are for free :), So I bathe myself in culture and splash about in the beauty of the arts!

This year I attended several things, like the play "love letters to Stalin", by the National theatre company. It was a great show. The "best" part was that my friend César and I were engaged into conversation with an 80-something year old Professor of literature from another state that thought it was of vital importance to tell us about his entire life history :) it was quite interesting if I must admit


 There was also the opening of the Andy Warhol exhibition. From Mao to Marilyn. There were also other two show rooms with very interesting paintings.

All in all, the Mérida Fest is a Huge deal for me J. This time I couldn’t go to many activities, but the ones I participated in  I truly enjoyed them.

Until next year 

Candy

Because life is fun :D

void valet

I go to the gym everyday. This gym is right next to a casino.

Here, the casinos are... weird. They are not cards casinos, or rulette casinos... no, they are slot machines casinos, because by law you cannot have "games of chance", they have to be ruled by a computer in order to have them truly random. Of course the machines can be jigged and what not. Still... they are bursting with people all the time. Due to this situation they have valet parking, which is quite convinient in this heat, and most of the people that visit fall in the older range of age, so a valet parking service is in order.

This particular casino is in a mini plaza, you know the type, 10 stores or so and the big one, they are the big one. The thing is that this casino reserves their parking spots with orange cones even though they are not supposed to given that there are other stores in the same place. These spots are the ones right next to the casino, they reserve like 10 or so within 10 steps of the casino doors. The funniest thing is that they are reserved for THE VALET PARKING!!!! I mean... if I want to go to the casino and don't want to use the valet parking, I cannot park in this "VIP" section, only the valet parking, making void the whole point of having them. The point of valet parking is to have them park your car so you don't have to walk or spend time looking for a spot, and they think the best solution for this is to reserve the closest 10 spaces for the valet. My question is... if they are gonna reserve this spots, why pay the valet? cuz the casino pays for it, so... me no get it

Terrasse du café le soir

I got this ravensburger puzzle that is no longer on the website, it measures 60x80cm and I think they are 1500 pieces... not sure

Anyway, I finally decided to put it together and after three weeks I finally did it!!! It’s done! I finished last Friday the 15th. this involved several late nights, given that I would start at 1130pm or midnight, to call it a night until 2 am or so...IT IS BEAUTIFUL!!!

Here is a video of the different stages

Enjoy

Tour of freedom

I'm getting married!! That was what one of my friends said. We all got excited and planned a killer bachelorette party.
 Three days before the party, wedding got called off! What to do with all the greatness planned? Well… turn it into something just as awesome: THE TOUR OF FREEDOM!! To celebrate timely made decisions.

We did a bar hopping tour. We started at my house with my traditional jelly shots. Usually we never finish them, but this time, they were gone in less than 15 minutes!!

Then we went to “El Gallo” for some beers. At this place you can find interesting things, like good Frida wall-frolicking with blue demon, star of the Mexican free style fighting. They seem to be sharing some tequila while they enjoy the view of the partygoers.

Then we went to “la Fundación – Mezcalería” where you can find good groovy rhythms to go with your 1L pitcher of a mezcal-based cocktail and maybe join Frida in the frolicking yourself. There we danced, drank, laughed, played with and ula ula ring, danced again, stalked the cute DJ a bit, danced and then… we were hungry.

We decided not to go to the next bar because the rumble from our tummies was so loud we couldn’t hear the music anymore, so we went for tacos, Arabian tacos: harbanos. They claim to be Arabian. However, there is the little suspicion that they are quite meztizos, like the dogs they most likely use as key element to put inside this deliciousness!!!

It was a great tour, it was a mission accomplished and at the end of the night, we had several satisfied customers.

A short dance

You advance and take the floor, extend me your hand and ask for a dance. I gently refuse. Dancing with you would be dangerous. I am sure I would like it. However, our rhythms won’t match, I know it. I will step on you

You take a stroll around the room and I do too. We find other partners.

We meet again. Again you ask. Again I refuse.

The songs play by and we are delighted in each other’s company while listening, I watch you dance and you watch me in turn. You are a good dancer.

You ask me again. We are friends, you say, it will be ok if you step on me. I go for it. But the song stops suddenly.

When you walk out of the room away from where I am standing on the dance floor waiting for the next song, you step on my foot instead.

Graffiti

The other day I was going to buy some stuff I needed, a Saturday morning, and all of a sudden I see a group of teenagers just spray painting this wall.

Two blocks away from my house there is this big big white wall that always has some crappy graffiti on it. Somebody hired these kids and gave them each a space of about2 or 3 meters long to make a mural, so there was this bunch of kids just freely expressing their minds with what they like best. It was so cool to see how happy they looked!! Usually painted graffiti on walls is illegal, but this time, they were HIRED for it! Just thinking about it I got in a better mood and it made my day!