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Playing catch-up...
Aug. 31st, 2014 10:22 pmToday was pretty hectic, which makes me want to slack off for a second day in a row, but I know that doing that will cause memories to fade, despite the fact I'm jotting things down in a small notebook.
Generally speaking, we're finding ourselves immersed in Mexico here. If there are tours of the city conducted in English, we failed to find them (not that we exhausted every avenue, mind you). The Spanish dictionary on my Samsung tablet turned out, serendipitously, to be monolingual, so that I have to pick my way through the definitions to achieve (maybe) understanding.
Thus, for me, it's sink-or-swim city. About half the sentences I've uttered since arriving consist of the words: Como se dice en español..., followed either by a single word or hand gestures. Or drawings. This afternoon, when it was clear Galina needed something along the lines of some small Band-Aids to cushion parts of her feet, I actually drew what turned out to be a venda adhesiva on a piece of paper in a pharmacy, which got instant results.
But I am so ahead of myself, it's not funny.
The flight down from Houston yesterday was pleasantly short—just under 2 hours—which compares with 1 hour for the flight (in an almost identical aircraft) from Durango, Colorado, to Denver, or 4 hours from Moscow to Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The flight lands in Léon, and I found the customs formalities to be interesting.
You see, in the U.S. and Europe (at least, the parts I've seen), you basically elect to pass through a "red" area if you have something to declare, or through a "green" area if you do not. The customs agents on duty apparently select people passing through the green area to inspect, just to keep things sharp. Presumably, folks in the green area are selected on the basis of random choice and/or hinky behavior (which might be described as "profiling").
At the Léon airport, on the other hand, after an interview with a customs agent establishes you have nothing to declare, you are asked to push a button that causes either a red light or a green light to turn on. If the red light appears, you go though an inspection, complete with x-ray and opening of luggage; if the green light appears, you're free to pass out into the arrivals terminal. I suspect the system may be designed to impose some kind of strict randomness in the way those with nothing to declare are sampled for inspection (or maybe there are other agents observing the proceedings on CCTV and jiggering the results if someone with nothing to declare is acting in a suspicious manner).
The cab to Guanajuato ran MXN500 pesos, which the company "converted"—as we had no pesos—to a charge of USD46 (whereas MXN500 at the stated exchange rate would have been a tad over USD38). No matter... we're on vacation, after all.
We got settled in at the hotel and I got busy making sure I had connectivity. Not only does the wifi work in the hotel lobby, but through a trick of geometry, it works in one corner of my bedroom as well! We then set off to visit the mercado downtown, where I bought a SIM card for the phone I bought in Kazakhstan last year and we wandered through the central market building. Galina and I were both struck by the architecture of the building, and by its staircase, which appeared to be almost identical to one we saw in a similar building in Costa Rica several years ago.
Veggie are cheap and eggs are sold by the kilo. I was on the verge of buying fungus that grows in ears of corn and is said to be a delicacy, but I got "the look" from my better half, so I put the package back on the counter.
A job came in this morning, and as the client wanted to make sure everything was copacetic with my setup, I spent the morning and the first couple of hours of the afternoon getting used to one small screen again, but I got the work out the pipe. The rest of the afternoon was spent on a tour of the city (in Spanish, which meant that I caught about every 20th word, and the occasional sentence, but hey! I'll do better tomorrow!) and a visit to a more modern supermarket on the way home.
Photos and stuff? Later. I am beat.
Cheers...
Generally speaking, we're finding ourselves immersed in Mexico here. If there are tours of the city conducted in English, we failed to find them (not that we exhausted every avenue, mind you). The Spanish dictionary on my Samsung tablet turned out, serendipitously, to be monolingual, so that I have to pick my way through the definitions to achieve (maybe) understanding.
Thus, for me, it's sink-or-swim city. About half the sentences I've uttered since arriving consist of the words: Como se dice en español..., followed either by a single word or hand gestures. Or drawings. This afternoon, when it was clear Galina needed something along the lines of some small Band-Aids to cushion parts of her feet, I actually drew what turned out to be a venda adhesiva on a piece of paper in a pharmacy, which got instant results.
But I am so ahead of myself, it's not funny.
The flight down from Houston yesterday was pleasantly short—just under 2 hours—which compares with 1 hour for the flight (in an almost identical aircraft) from Durango, Colorado, to Denver, or 4 hours from Moscow to Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The flight lands in Léon, and I found the customs formalities to be interesting.
You see, in the U.S. and Europe (at least, the parts I've seen), you basically elect to pass through a "red" area if you have something to declare, or through a "green" area if you do not. The customs agents on duty apparently select people passing through the green area to inspect, just to keep things sharp. Presumably, folks in the green area are selected on the basis of random choice and/or hinky behavior (which might be described as "profiling").
At the Léon airport, on the other hand, after an interview with a customs agent establishes you have nothing to declare, you are asked to push a button that causes either a red light or a green light to turn on. If the red light appears, you go though an inspection, complete with x-ray and opening of luggage; if the green light appears, you're free to pass out into the arrivals terminal. I suspect the system may be designed to impose some kind of strict randomness in the way those with nothing to declare are sampled for inspection (or maybe there are other agents observing the proceedings on CCTV and jiggering the results if someone with nothing to declare is acting in a suspicious manner).
The cab to Guanajuato ran MXN500 pesos, which the company "converted"—as we had no pesos—to a charge of USD46 (whereas MXN500 at the stated exchange rate would have been a tad over USD38). No matter... we're on vacation, after all.
We got settled in at the hotel and I got busy making sure I had connectivity. Not only does the wifi work in the hotel lobby, but through a trick of geometry, it works in one corner of my bedroom as well! We then set off to visit the mercado downtown, where I bought a SIM card for the phone I bought in Kazakhstan last year and we wandered through the central market building. Galina and I were both struck by the architecture of the building, and by its staircase, which appeared to be almost identical to one we saw in a similar building in Costa Rica several years ago.
Veggie are cheap and eggs are sold by the kilo. I was on the verge of buying fungus that grows in ears of corn and is said to be a delicacy, but I got "the look" from my better half, so I put the package back on the counter.
A job came in this morning, and as the client wanted to make sure everything was copacetic with my setup, I spent the morning and the first couple of hours of the afternoon getting used to one small screen again, but I got the work out the pipe. The rest of the afternoon was spent on a tour of the city (in Spanish, which meant that I caught about every 20th word, and the occasional sentence, but hey! I'll do better tomorrow!) and a visit to a more modern supermarket on the way home.
Photos and stuff? Later. I am beat.
Cheers...
