On an ordinary day, I wake up at about 7 a.m. if I have homework to finish or 8 a.m. if I don’t, and eat a breakfast of fruit, often fresh pineapple (yummy!), cornflakes, and yogurt. After breakfast I walk about 10 minutes to catch the bus to go to the University City, the larger, more concentrated campus of the university. I don’t go to a bus stop, though a few do exist. I just stand on the street corner and raise my hand when the bus I want approaches. Unless the bus driver is being grumpy, the bus usually stops just long enough for me to hop aboard before bolting off again as I try to keep my balance to pay the driver and find a seat.
Sometimes the bus I catch is a fairly ordinary looking, large, city bus, like the ones in the US, only often older looking.
Other times the bus looks more like a minivan or VW bus:
At first we were a bit hesitant to climb aboard these intimate vehicles, as they looked less official to us, but now we’ve grown accustomed to squeezing in with a bunch of strangers. And even the large buses are anything but “ordinary” on the inside. Some have plastic seats, others fabric, cushioned seats with most cushions in tact. Others look like tour buses with plush head high seats. Each bus has its own character and decorations. Usually a rosary and painting of Jesus’ face are present somewhere. Music at varying volumes is also almost a necessity. Cartoon characters, fuzzy mirrors, black lights, Christmas lights, family photos, and other trinkets are all common additions.
Upon arriving at the university, I either tell the bus driver where I want to get off or ring the buzzer (each bus buzzer has a different sound) and quickly hop off. The university buildings are quite varied and from different time periods. My morning classes at the CU (ciudad universitaria, or university city) are in the math and physics facultad and are either in a new, modern looking building:
Or in one of the older, half rundown looking ones:
(The building looks better in this picture than in real life)
If I have calculus that day, my professor usually arrives on time along with a fair number of students. His teaching style is comparable to that of math professors at Smith. He explains things in a fairly intuitive way and is open to any questions. Though most students arrive on time for this class or at least within the first ten minutes of class, there are those who continue to trickle in through most of the class.
If Math Methods is on the menu for the day, it’s not unusual for my professor to arrive up to 30 minutes late. We all hang around looking at our watches and wondering if it’s safe to go until either someone sees him coming up the stairs or there’s only a half hour left to the 2-hour class and we decide we can head home. When he does arrive (which, actually, is usually the case) he gives a decent class, which usually lasts until the scheduled end of class.
In the mornings I also go train for track, either before or after class. The trainers are there from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. so each team member just goes when he/she has time. It’s a great system. I head to the pool where I tell the grumpy guard woman that I’m going to change (I do this everyday and yet I still have to check in with her in order to get her grim nod of permission). I often meet my friend Lauren who also is on the team. After changing, we head out to our “track.” However, the university track isn’t one of those beautiful, rubber tracks with the white lines marking lanes and distances. Apparently one of those exists at the university, but about 5 years ago, the university decided to take it away and build a stadium around it. The stadium remains half built; I believe with the track still inside, but inaccessible to the track team. However, not having a track doesn’t stop the team and we still practice, running around a baseball field that is usually in disuse by baseball teams. It is approximately 400 meters around and now that we have left the rainy season, is relatively mud-less, though the varying lengths of grass and dry bumpy ground do make sprinting a bit more of a challenge (not to mention the fact that the city is at over 2,000 meters above sea level).
Still the team and trainers are great people and are patient with our slow progress. I still don’t know everyone on the team because we all go at different times, but the folks that go between 10 am and 3 pm are fun.
After completely covering ourselves in sweat from running (or jogging depending on our endurance that day) in the blazing sun (which it seems like there is every day here between 10 and 3), Lauren and I return to the pool to get the smile-less permission from our favorite pool guard to change. I then rush off to class, hoping it’s a day my math methods teacher is late, so I’ll be on time, or, if I had class before running, I head home to eat.
The view of the university coming back from the athletic fields.
My house.
The little garden in front of the house.
The living room
I arrive home around 2:30 or 3 pm. If it's a clear afternoon, which at least up until now has been rare, usually it's clear in the morning and then clouds up around 1:30 or 2 pm, I like to climb up onto our roof to see the view of the volcanoes that border the Puebla valley.
The volcano Popocatepetl as seen from the roof of my house.
I visit our dogs, Corina, the Pointer, and Kiriku, the Chihuahua, on the way up and down. They live on the balcony patio off the second floor of the house.
Corina and Kiriku.
The patio and part of the dogs' balcony (on the left) seen from the roof.
Lunch here is the biggest meal of the day, so it’s no sandwich and fruit for me. My host mother is an excellent cook. The meal usually consists of some sort of soup, vegetables, or rice as the first item. Afterwards is the main course of a meat, usually chicken, but also sometimes beef or fish, delicious beans, either refried or soup beans, perhaps a vegetable or salad, or rice if that wasn’t the first part of the meal. Water, either plain or with fruit, not quite a juice because it’s made with water and the fresh squeezed fruit juice or pureed fruit instead of just the juice, is the drink with lunch. After assuring Rosa, my host mom, I’ve eaten enough and I couldn’t possibly eat more, I pack up my backpack and head to the center of town for dance or guitar class.
Taking the bus to the center of town is always a bit of an adventure because it’s a longer ride and we go on busier streets than when I go to the CU. After boarding at my street corner, and hopefully finding a seat so I don’t have to try to hang onto my guitar with one hand and the bus with another, we begin our Harry-Potter-night-bus-like ride through the city. We go whizzing through the streets, starting and stopping, accelerating, changing lanes, stopping suddenly for people on corners with raised hands who want to board, honking, pulling in front of other buses, slamming on the breaks to avoid hitting other cars driving in a similar manner, and generally driving in what seems to be a totally dangerous, reckless manner (though I must note I’ve only seen one wreck involving a bus since I’ve been here and the position of the car made me believe the driver was doing something absolutely ridiculous like trying to drive over a median or something so it probably wasn’t the bus driver’s fault). When the corner I want comes up, I squeeze through the often packed bus to reach the door and exit onto stable ground.
My classes in the center of town are in old colonial buildings, quite different from the CU buildings. Folkloric dance is held in the gym in the central administrative building, I think the oldest building of the university.
El Carolino, the central administrative building.
The tower on the chapel of the Carolino.
It’s a huge class of about 40 students. The dances are interesting, but extremely tiring (lots of hopping up and down) and the dance instructor isn’t exactly the positive feedback kind of guy. There is a lot of yelling and little actual teaching of how to do the moves. We do our best to follow the experienced dancers in the group. Wednesday classes are better because they are private, with just us Americans and the instructor. He’s actually a pretty nice guy in those classes: he teaches us how to do the moves, we work on trouble spots (or at least on the most obvious ones), and we are actually allowed to talk, joke, and laugh at ourselves, things which are strictly prohibited in the general class. Last week we even got him talking about the history of the dances and music and where they come from, what the names mean, the costumes, etc. It was great!
Guitar is in the music school, in a building typical of the downtown university buildings. It doesn’t look like anything from the street, just a huge wooden door, but inside the classrooms are on two levels surrounding connected patios.
My guitar and I in the music school building downtown.
I have guitar with two other students from our program. None of us have taken lessons before and our instructor is very patient. We’re just finishing a Mexican folk song with three parts; I play the melody and the other two the harmonies. The class is a lot of fun!
After guitar on Monday nights I either go home or to a coffee shop to study, depending on how tired I am (if I’m tired I go to the café to drink coffee and stay awake as I study). On Tuesdays and Thursdays after dance I have to head back to the CU for my anthropology class from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
Anthropology can be a frustrating class. The professor isn’t very clear with his questions, assigns a ridiculous amount of reading, and doesn’t really teach anything in class, and only about half the class seems to actually does the reading. Fortunately though it’s only an hour and a half and I have good friends in the class, both Americans and Mexicans. If nothing else, it gives us a good 10 minutes walking to the bus at the end and then about a 15-minute bus ride to chat with our Mexican buddies. And it’s the only class for which I have to read a lot, write essays and have discussions in class, so it’s helpful for my Spanish, even if I don’t feel like I learn much during the class itself.
Upon arriving home around 9 or 9:30, I usually chat/goof off with my host brother, Moises for a while, and eat a light dinner of quesadillas or a warm sandwich with Rosa, Moises, and sometimes the older brother, Fito.
Moises and I. We were "modeling" one weekend night before going out.
Fito and Kiriku.
The rest of the family that live in or close to Puebla: Macrina, our housekeeper who has been with the family on and off for years, Rosa (host mother), Adolfo (host father who works in Cuernavaca during the week and is home on the weekends), Anuar (host brother in law, husband of Minerva) and Minerva (host sister, who lives with Anuar in Cholula, about 20 minutes from Puebla).
Sometimes chatting and joking after dinner lasts for a while, depending on the amount of homework Moises and I have or how tired Fito and Rosa are. Before going to bed I do homework in my room.
My bedroom.
Doing homework here doesn’t consist of taking out my text books to read or find problems, but rather of taking out a binder filled with copies of pages of books and working from that. The copyright laws here are very lax so rather than have students buy books for classes, the professors leave the book or copies of the necessary pages at the copy store (each facultad has one) and we go make the copies we need. I finish my work or decide I’m too tired to do more sometime between 11 pm and 1 am. Then it’s off to bed to sleep for 6 to 9 hours to recharge for another day.
And that's a wrap: an ordinary weekday in the life of Rouwenna. I hope you enjoyed it. Sorry it took me so long to do this entry, Mom.
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