Eyeballs, extraterrestrials, and economics

I have successfully demonstrated my lack of blogging skills, and am trying to remedy this by writing a second (!) post. I thought that I had selected the option for “automatic update on my life” but I guess it doesn’t work that way.

I have worn high heels two (2) times in the three point five (3.5) months that I’ve been here. This is a personal record for me. I think in my whole life besides this year, I’ve worn high heels twice. I also bought a bag (not quite a purse, but with pretty colors and two little poofy things)! I might be a whole different person when I get back.

Novel things I have ingested:
~Eyeballs
…although I can’t actually say what they taste like, because we ordered a bunch of different types of tacos (some of them of unknown meats) and they all came wrapped up in little bags looking identical, so I don’t know which ones were the eyes. I opened each one up waiting for one to be looking back at me, but I guess it was ground-up eyeballs, so I couldn’t tell. Anyway, they all tasted good. And then they made me sick. Well worth it though.

This past week I have started to experience a strange phenomenon called homesickness, for the second time in my life. I think it means I have been thinking about my family too much (that’s a compliment!). I do love it here but sometimes I find myself counting down. I leave 8 months from today, and I’ve already been making a list (I don’t know why I love lists so much) of what I am going to do next summer.

Last week we attempted to go to the welcome party for the philosophy department. It took us three buses, 6 stops for directions, and an hour and a half wandering around in the rain to get there. When we finally arrived, we found hordes of students standing around smoking and drinking. So we stayed for 40 minutes listening to the music (less than half the time it took us to get there) and then left to go make pancakes.

I noticed that I have started to think a bit in Spanish. But I haven’t had a dream in Spanish yet, and I still can’t pronounce “extraterrestre” (my favorite Spanish word) even though I have been practicing for two years. I can’t figure out if something makes me stand out or not, because some people seem to know without even talking to me that I’m a foreigner, like the guy on the street the other day who asked me if I was not from here. But then I was talking to some people in my class, and One said to the Other “she’s american” and the Other seemed surprised and said he didn’t realize. But that was after I had demonstrated my not-up-to-par-with-native-speakers accent. To improve my knowledge of the Mexican culture, I went to a presentation on swears. And took lots of notes.

After three weeks of not understanding lectures, wondering when the professor was going to show up (sometimes they don’t—the other day, the professor came 15 minutes late, listened to a concert that was playing in the department for 45 minutes, and then left. We didn’t have class), and getting up at 6:00am, I finally decided on 4 classes: Mexican anthropology, cognitive psychology, history of economic thought, and philosophy of science. Sometimes I find it difficult to stay awake for the 2-hour classes, but luckily there is considerably less homework then at Wellesley, and for one class I even got to color! Among the classes that I ended up rejecting was a philosophy class called “problems of aesthetics,” and after one reading and two 4 hour long lectures, none of which I understood, I decided it would be better to wait. I mean, sometimes you just have to make sacrifices!