A day in San Miguel

Two weeks after I arrived here, my blog is finally in San Miguel. My fan can rejoice. That’s you Zoe. Oh yea, and you Dad. Two! I can use the plural. I have aficionados, fans. How wonderful. But really, what’s kept me so busy?

Well, days here are long. They start at about 7 a.m.—a healthy, wealthy and energy-wise hour to rise. And accomplished with the help of just three alarms: my cell phone, a small battery-powered clock and the sun. Each morning I turn the first two off, climb back into bed, and the third gets me up in time to make 8 a.m. desayuno.

My nearly daily meal is a bowl of fruit—papaya, apple, bananas and sometimes mango or kiwi­—sprinkled with granola and a few hefty dollops of yogurt. It’s often washed down with pineapple, grape or peach juice, or, every now and then, fresh squeezed orange juice. Yup, I get all my daily fruit servings right there at the kitchen counter.

Once finished, I walk the three minutes down the hill to the school and begin eight hours of classes. First up: pronunciation. For nearly an hour, the lenguas of my classmates and I slur through vocales—both fuerte and débiles—twist into diptongos and flubber over guturales. Repeat with me our daily opening anthem: aeo, aiu, aeo, aua, aei, eui, oua, oai. No, I won’t make you do it all. The biggest mistake I ever made? I once drank a chamomile tea with breakfast. My tongue slept all through class. Never again.

After the oral weight-lifting, I head to three hours of general Spanish, now grouped by ability. I’m in level four, taught by Paula (pronounced Pow-la), along with three other students. (For the first two weeks, there was just one other, but we added some bodies midway through the four-week session.) Class discussions include the conditional verb form, the best way to cook tenderloin—in a pressure cooker submerged in cerveza, apparently—how to give commands, and the current state of Mexican politics—caliente, hot, according to Paula.

I have learned a number of things in my next course, Twentieth Century Hispanic Literature. First, I recognize a lot of words. Second, recognizing a word doesn’t mean you can remember what it means. Third, even when you remember what the words mean, that doesn’t mean you can understand the sentence. Fourth, even when you understand the sentence, or even the paragraph, you never understand the story. Fifth, never read poetry in Spanish.

I walk uphill to my home with head pounding and confidence high. I am, during that walk, confident I will never learn Spanish. The more I learn, the less I know, to paraphrase Socrates. And then there's the pain between my eyes. Consequently, comida, as lunch is called in Mexico, is usually a silent meal. I groan to Lourdes ‘Me duele la cabeza’, ‘I have a headache’, and tell her the name of the culprit of the day: Pablo Neruda, Rosario Castellanos, Jorge Luis Borges. She nods; she's seen nine years of dispirited lunchtime students.

Fortunately, lunch is the largest meal of the day in Mexico, so there is plenty of work to be done that precludes conversation. Typically, comida starts off with a sopa, or soup, of boiled vegetables or puffed corn kernels. The main dish varies widely. I’ve had bean and cheese tacos, American-style spaghetti, rice and a calabaza-carne de vaca (squash and beef) mix and the well-known chile relleno (stuffed and fried peppers). It’s all washed down with jugo (juice) or occasionally one of various atoles: canela, arroz, chocolate. The cinnamon, rice or chocolate drink is sweet, a bit thicker than a typical hot chocolate and, happily for my lactose-discriminating stomach, light in milk.

After lunch, I retreat to my room and collapse on my bed, felled by this soporific combination: a bellyful of food and a head full of Spanish. Yet as sleep seldom comes to me in the middle of the day, especially as my mind continues obstinately to translate every piddling English thought to Spanish, it is a short-lived collapse. I often end up reading an old sixth grade Spanish exercise book. I don’t understand that either, but it has pretty pictures.

To be continued...

Not the land of Gideon

In 1823, an American hotel received a stack of bibles to be distributed to each their rooms. Nearly two centuries later, about 450,000 bibles are distributed each year, most courtesy of the Gideon Society. The result: a bible in every room.

So when I open the drawer in my hotel room in San Miguel de Allende, a city known as ‘the heart’ of one of the most Catholic countries in the world, I am slightly taken aback. Yup, Gideon hasn’t reached San Miguel. Not that I needed a Bible, but the lack was emblematic. My comfortable and tastefully appointed room was strangely bare. Aside from two bottled waters, there was nothing in the place. Nothing in the drawers, nothing in the cabinets, nothing in the bathroom. Most distressingly for me, and for the Mexican family I was about to meet for the first time, there was no soap in the shower.

(I had arrived in San Miguel the night before. With the help of a friendly cab driver, I took a bumpy, weaving journey through the cobble-stoned streets of San Miguel to find an ATM—I was broke; then a hostel—full; then a hotel—expensive, but at 3 a.m., after almost 24 hours of travel, any price was acceptable.)

After a long, hot, soap-less shower, I head out to find my new home. I ask the clerk at the front desk for directions and she says something. For all I know, she gives me exact directions, but to me it sounds, bizarrely, like “go to the market.” I guess my Spanish isn’t getting any better. She does give me a map, with my house’s location marked. I walk down the hotel’s narrow private drive to the street, glance at the map and take a left. Two blocks later, as the heat and my overweight bag start to wear on me, I realize I turned the wrong way. Half an hour after starting, I find my street about three blocks from the hotel. According to the map, I need to turn right. Looking left, I see the market. Ah. She said “Go through the market.”

My new house sits on a steep hill overlooking the city. It is unremarkable from the outside: a dull red metal gate emblazoned with one of the city’s ubiquitous no parking signs rises to meet a small balcony decorated with a few plants and a Mexican flag. I knock and, after a moment, my mother for the next month answers the door. She is of medium height, with dark hair and a round nose in a warm face. I say what I’ve been practicing in my head all the way up the hill: ‘Buenos días’.

Though she wasn’t expecting me for about three more hours, Lourdes Montes is very sweet. Nine years of hosting students is apparent: she speaks slowly, she gestures constantly and, though she doesn’t speak English, she knows the words for the basics. We’re hundreds of miles from the U.S. border, but the Montes living room sits on cultural middle ground. Christmas teddy bears sit along the top of the overstuffed sofa and faux wreaths sit atop the red and green plaid tablecloth of the dining table. Yet over the sofa is a shrine to the Virgin Mary and on the walls hang a Diego Rivera reproduction and a surrealistic Don Quixote portrait.

Lourdes leads me up a white tiled staircase and opens the door onto an expansive balcony. It is enclosed on three sides by walls—respectively vivid green, burnt orange and brick—and above by a yellow roof along which runs exposed white beams. Plants crowd the walls, leaving room only for four doors, one of which leads to my room. A white plastic table and matching chairs sits centrally under the roof, and a second glass-and metal table and chair set sits under the sun in a smaller, exposed subsection of the balcony. I walk out to this area and look down, through power lines, to the city below. I can see the spiky pink shape of the Parroquia, the city’s most well-known church; the skinny stone tower of the Our Lady of Health church; the giant salmon dome of the city’s largest church; and the spires of half a dozen smaller churches. The door to my room is about a dozen feet away. Wow.

My room is equally spacious and nearly as colorful. From the bed spread to the curtains to the two red tablecloths, flower patterns dominate. The blinds are closed, but the room is bright with yellows: a deep ocher post stands off center in the room joined with beams at the ceiling, the walls are a mild lemon and under my feet are tiles with marbleized pattern in daffodil. By contrast, the toilet and most of the rest of my private bathroom is blue, with the themes meeting in the painted sink, where two blue fish swim in a yellow background. Parting the curtains, I see a view that nearly matches the one that took my breath away outside. The room is supplied with both a television and an enormous built-in bookcase. I ignore the first and scan the spines. I spot civil engineering textbooks, Reader’s Digest collections and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I also see two bibles: one English, one Spanish. No visit from Gideon needed here.

(Information about the curious history of drawer-based proselytizing drawn from www.straightdope.com)