Over the last week, I've been adjusting more and more. I've learned a bit about making photocopies. I went to the library and it took about an hour to get the reading for one class. My comrades in the program have had it worse than I, even. Nonetheless, I think if I organize myself effectively I can make this crazy system work a little easier.
Other than that, the food at my house can be a little trying. I'm a world away from the almost only whole food diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. In fact, there's hardly any of that. I get up and eat corn flakes for breakfast - unless they're out, in which case I might not eat anything at all! Other highlights include: bread, peanut butter with hydrogenated oil, pig products, a ketchup like tomato sauce that isn't actually ketchup, and a kind of fish that tastes really really fishy in a bad way. The almost total lack of fiber has really been hard on my digestive system.
Contrast that with what I did yesterday. I went to Los Dos cooking school
, which teaches Yucatecan cuisine and has been featured on the Martha Stewart show (click on Mérida Market). All students in the program went, and we learned about "traiditional" ingredients, history of food, and the Mayan diet. I found it a bit weird to hear a definite gringo using "us" or "we" to refer to both Yucatecans and Mayans, but the experiece was a big hit with me nonetheless. We went to the market, and saw lots of produce (yum!), meat (gross looking!), little restaurants (yum!), and other stuff such as shoes, hammocks, candy, and whatever else you can imagine really. (Finally! Now I can go back Habanero salsa
roasted habaneros, salt, sour orange juice -> blender
there to buy stuff!) Then we came back to the school and did some cooking. I learned how to make excellent tortillas (Emily will be jealous of this, but I'll tell her what I learned if she asks), tamales, and habanero salsa. I was excited to learn a few things about spicy foods:1. Capsacin, which is the chemical that gives hot foods their "heat," can only be sensed by mammals! Birds or fish do not react to it in any way at all.
2. Pure capsacin is valued at 15 milliion scoville units. The hottest pepper in the world is the Naga Jolokia, at 1.04 million scoville units. Habaneros are at about 350,000, and jalapeños at 8,000.
3. Humans can endure pure capsacin and live. This was part of the way Scoville created the scale - by extracting and distilling pure capsacin and giving it to people! (This has always been one of those 'what ifs' in the back of my mind.)
4. Capsacin causes the release of endorphins in the brain. Eating hot foods makes you happy! Likewise, it doesn't cause any actual pain in the traditional sense of how the human brain creates pain.
I could talk about hot foods forever, but onward and upward.
I've been having fun with kids in the program, as well. I went to a movie and to a karaoke bar this week. I even sang a song there! It was kind
of embarrassing because the words on the TV were tiny, and I could rarely read them. This lead to a lot of mumbling and nervousness on my part, but I survived. Finally, I'm getting a handle on the city, how to get from A to B and (more importantly) back again.
This week I'll have actual homework and all of my classes will start, including some of the ones I'm most excited about (Functionalism and Structuralism, and Hispano-American Literature Boom! 1962-75). My spanish is getting better, but is still a stumbling block pretty often. But, that's why I'm here.
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