After the cold rush

Hi Carolyn,


If my voice sounds a little higher it's because we are 1851 miles further north than the last time I was  here.  We are back at the homestead, albeit a number of days later than expected ( one of those another story for another time things... )  Everything here seems to be shipshape after having endured   " the coldest winter on record " around these parts.  No burst pipes - and boy, did I have all of my crossable appendages crossed about that one as we were making our way home!  , and no ice dams on the roof.  Insert huge sigh of relief here, as well!  

Speaking of surviving and surging forward, your physical digit recuperation adventures, and your press on regardless approach thereto continue to be inspiring. I guess you'll have a renewed sense of appreciation for those ten little fingers once you have gotten  them all back into fully operational mode, eh?  I've had a wee bit of that same experience in the last few days as I managed to smush a couple of fingers in the door at the back of my LSBH's vehicle that we were retrieving from our daughters place on the outskirts of Toronto. There was blood and bandages but no broken bones, thankfully.




It's clearly nothing like your situation but it pointed up to me just how any limits on mobility can be most upsetting ( my polite way of saying a  ....ing pain in the ... )  Suffice to say, though, Carolyn, you, and your situation, are certainly fingering into my thoughts even moreso now - sorry, I'm a total sucker for puns....!







Also, your observations on trying to get the hang of the SEO stuff for your online course on marketing struck a more basic chord with me as a fellow teacher. Taking someone through a difficult concept " patiently" is certainly the essence of the teaching experience. It can't fully be replicated by someone on Skype or on a screen. I was reminded of Asimov's short story, " The Fun They Had "  He wrote this story in 1951. It put us in touch with youngsters whose education was home based and computer generated. Their dismay at learning about how schooling once was a person to person experience is cleverly exhibited in the title. Apparently it was the most anthologized of all of his short stories ( and there were certainly a wackload thereof )


The most amazing aspect of it, for me, was that he could have come up with such a premise and written a dead on prescient  story about it in  the year after I was born!  It was also kinda cool that it was on the junior English curriculum in Ontario, Canada in 1979 when this fellow first stepped out as a teacher in front of a class of grade six students. Totally nifty stuff!



Anyhoo, the 50 plus days spent lollygagging  about in Mexico are now a memory, albeit not a dim one yet. There are lotsa things that stick in my head as memorable for one reason or another. I'll just noodle on about a few here, today, though. It's pretty well a guarantee that in the next while I'll be back to visit other touchstone moments, though.

* Mexican Soap Operas.  We found ourselves in bus stations and in a number of other places where a TV was blinking and blaring away in the background or on the edge of ones peripheral vision. Of course I expected there to be soccer games on, but I didn't realize until this year here that soap operas are out there incessantly as well. My Spanish is still Neolithic, and most of the time the surrounding noise would have made listening impossible anyhow, so the visuals were what carried the impact. The " dramas " I caught snatches of were amazingly cartoonish.  Hyper-exaggerated facial expressions, over the top coiffures, and settings that would make Beverly Hills look like a slum in Mexico City were more than enough to carry the story. Do you suppose that in a few hundred years our ears will become almost prehensile if we are continuously bombarded with this simplistic image heavy stuff ??






** Mexican Drivers/Driving . Yes, it's pretty well cliché for we North American drivers to wax on about how Attila The Hunnish drivers are in this or that country. I've only been to Eastern Europe once, so my world-wide experiences are limited. My frame of reference in Merida was also limited to a few jaunts in a sardine sized rental car and in taxis

 

 

 

 

 My good friend who taught in Saudi Arabia for two years tells me that drivers in the rest of the world are positively saintly  in comparison to that country. The person who gets to the next corner first is the winner, is how he put it. Still, I wonder why, in most cases, they even bother to put lanes lines on the multi-lane roads in Merida. It's amazing how these drivers can make their way through traffic in the city or on the highways without seeming even the slightest bit nervous even though they are usually in cars the size of small  refrigerators and within mere inches of vehicles eight times larger. In fact they are anything but nervous. They're fearless five inch matadors  facing twelve foot bulls. Hot-blooded, indeed.








***  Merida's Bus System . Being right in the heart of old Merida we got to walk streets that were constantly bus-ridden. The bus system in Merida is quite different than we would expect in a city of just under a million. There is not one overall bus authority. There are, instead, seven or eight different private bus companies who share the task of moving folks around this medium sized metropolis. Some of them are systems that take people into and out of the big city to the surrounding villages. Others are those who ferry folks about within this city and maybe to some points just outside the city limits.

 

 

 

  It's a most incongruous setup and there isn't a definitive schedule you can obtain in printed form. All of the buses have their main stops posted on the front window. This seems pretty straightforward except that the buses whip past so quickly that you can't read beyond the first two or tree of what are often ten or eleven different places. The folks who travel these routes daily know the bus they want but the rest of us just have to toss the dice a lot of the time. It's cool and frenetic at the same time.  The plus, from an economic standpoint, is that it cost about 60 cents to get on a bus and ride just about anywhere within Merida and its immediate environs. 


 And the " Adventure " element has to be just about priceless.!



There are lots of other observations I wanna share but not tonight. I'm back to putting on socks and shoes and long pants and coats and boots, so I feel I've re-acclimatised myself reasonably.


Back soon with more....

Don