Monterrey campus

I gave my plenary talk today.  I made a sincere effort to speak slowly and clearly, and apparently I succeeded, because I ran out of time!  I told my hosts that it was because there are no clocks anywhere.  After my presentation I was honored with a certificate and a gift, a beautiful coffee-table book called Un Oasis Verde: Campus Monterrey.

It's true, too.  The campus has made itself a haven for plants and animals that flourished here before there was a big city.  The first ones I noticed were the Mexican ducks.  These are maybe a little on the ugly side, and have irritable personalities (or so I hear).  There are also scrawny cats that hunt the ducks; I didn't document those.

There are also peacocks (los pavos) all over the place, and deer (ciervos).

I like the public art and the architecture a lot -- modern, big shapes, great use of color.  This building is called The Blender (la licuadora).

This one looks like two buildings but is actually one; it's two giant slabs, face to face but at an angle to one another.  It is called the Napkin Holder (and I don't know the Spanish.  Servilletero?).

Grad students

The Mexican graduate students took me to dinner tonight at the Sierra Madre brewpub, a big, very American-like place that served hamburgers and pizza, but with Mexican additions like guacamole on the hamburgers.  The beer was good and it was fun to go out with them.  I asked what life is like as a graduate student here, and one of them said, "Do you read PhD Comics? Exactly like that."  PhD Comics being an all-too-accurate sendup of the US grad school experience, I guess things are pretty much the same world round, or continent-round at least.

I also learned, just out of curiosity, that most of the grad students drink tap water and think nothing of it, unlike my hosts.  The only one who doesn't is from Veracruz, in the south of Mexico, where she says they "don't have the tradition" of drinking tap water.  I also learned that in Mexico City the water has the reputation of being less safe.

People say hello and goodbye here with one air-kiss on the right cheek, the way we would have a quick hug.  I find this charming but hard to remember.

Prehispanic foods

Monterrey people keep a schedule that is strange to me:  class starts at 9am (but the start time is very casual so people are still drifting in at 9:30-9:45), lunch is 1:00-2:30 (again with the extended return time), and we are back at work until 6pm.  The normal time for dinner is 8 or 9 pm.  My hosts have been taking me out earlier than that (right after class), and at 7pm the restaurants are still empty.  Even so, what with the traffic and the leisurely meal, I don't get back to my room until 10pm or later.  Fortunately I don't need to do any work to be ready for tomorrow.  When do people get anything done around here?  Answer:  3am.  Seriously.  They wake up then, put in a few hours of work, and sleep a little more before rising for the day.  Just like my husband.  I had no idea there was a whole city full of people with his sleep habits.

There are no clocks anywhere that I can see.  Not in the classroom, not in the hotel room.  I still know what time it is, from my computer or my disabled phone, but I can't glance around to see the time.  One of my hosts said now that I mention it, he has never seen a clock on the wall here; the other said "Oh, I have a clock I have been meaning to bring in, it runs counterclockwise." In other words not a clock that you could actually read, I said, and she agreed, seeming to think nothing of it.

Tonight's dinner was at a lovely, classy traditional Mexican restaurant.  My favorite dish was the little blue-corn tamales stuffed with goat cheese and poured over with zucchini flower sauce.  I also ate cactus (with oaxaca cheese, inside a crispy crust, so it was a little like a chili relleno), shrimp tacos, and a delicious spicy sausage rolled up in tortillas.  Those were the fairly normal (though exceptionally good) things.  Then we had to have some things that I would not have anywhere else, referred to on the menu as "prehispanic" foods.  Grasshoppers are well known here, prepared crispy, with salt and chiles.  There is also a larval worm.  I passed up both of these (my hosts are not fans of them either) but I did try the ant eggs.  These arrive in a little dish looking almost like small corn kernels, and you eat a spoonful on a rustic tortilla with guacamole and lime.  The flavor is very mild.  The other interesting food I ate was huitlacoche, corn fungus, also in a tortilla with embellishments.  It is unappetizing to look at (black and globby) but has a pleasant taste, like a mushroom.

The little goat

First day of class was great.  The participants are very hardworking and enthusiastic, especially the graduate students, and that makes it fun.  Here is a picture of everyone in the classroom.

For dinner my hosts took me out for roasted baby goat at El Rey de Cabrito, a very famous restaurant, everyone who visits Monterrey has to go there.  The goat was very tasty.  You are served a big portion of meat, more anatomical than I am used to, and you eat it like fajitas, on tortillas with onions and tomatoes and salsa and lime.  I am stuffed.

Afterwards, we were welcomed into the kitchen to take photos with the roasting goats.  These are in the front window of the restaurant so I think they are not actually being roasted.  The gentleman in the photo is my host; his wife took the pictures.  They have been very hospitable.

I have found out that local people don't drink tap water; my hosts frowned and said "Oh no no no" when I asked about it.  They do, however, drink iced drinks, and eat raw fruit and vegetables, so it's not like when we were in India.  I am trying to play it safe.  The graduate students were more liberal about it; they drink bottled water because it is convenient and everyone does it, but they think it is probably okay for locals to drink tap water more than they do.  They explained to the older adults that in the US, tap water is completely safe to drink.  The adults looked very skeptical.  "They have stricter standards," the students insisted.  I backed them up, and said actually these days there is an effort to have people drink more tap water, because of the waste from all the bottles.

Rachel in Mexico

I am in Monterrey, Mexico on business for a week.  I've only really thought about the work part of why I'm here, which is super fun and interesting (teaching a three-day intensive course on qualitative video analysis to physics and math faculty and grad students).  Now that I'm here I'm more sort of realizing that I'm in a foreign country.  My Spanish is okay for signs and simple courtesies, but totally insufficient for normal talking.... I can sort of get the gist of what someone else's conversation is about, but not enough to respond, even if I knew what to say.  My hosts were kind enough to pick me up at the airport, and though I fancy myself a resourceful traveler I am very glad they did.  I didn't have to change money, find my way around, locate a taxi, tell a taxi where to go, worry if I was actually being taken there, etc.  Monterrey is very safe as Mexican cities go, but still.

Monterrey is a big, rich city, more Americanized (USA-ized?) than most cities in Mexico.  My hotel is next to a mall (I can't tell how big) with a Starbucks and a Carl's Jr.  I will still need to avoid the tap water; I don't know yet whether locals do that too, but even if they drink it, it might not work for me.  There is a liter of bottled water in my hotel room, marked $34, which confused me because I didn't know they use the same sign for the peso as we do for the dollar.  That turns out to be US$2.89.  That feels like a deal, but of course I have no clue what it sells for in a store.  The weather is what they consider freezing cold tonight, which is 60F and a little humid... balmy warm, to me.  A couple days ago it was 110, which is more what I was led to expect.  My hotel is on campus so getting to class in the morning will be easy.

On the drive from the airport I asked my hosts about regional foods and they said that much of the food is typical tex-mex kind of stuff, but this particular part of the country enjoys a lot of meat.  "Carne asada," they said, "I think to you it would be barbecue?"  They added, "The one thing that might be a bit new for you is the little goat."  I had read up on this (leave it to me to prioritize the food over the currency) and said I was looking forward to trying it.  It's called cabrito, it's slow-roasted, and it's an emblem of the city.  They were pleased that I was an adventurous eater, especially when I said I like spicy food just fine.  We'll see how I do.

Symbols

Last night we had one last (belated) Passover, with friends who were in Europe for the last half of April.  Jordan was feeling scholarly and impressed everyone with his knowledge about the holiday.  I was especially entertained by his explaining that this and that item on the seder plate are symbols that represent other things; he was being very pointed about the vocabulary, suggesting that the whole concept of symbolic representation is interesting to him right now.  Then on the way to religious school this morning, we had this interchange:

J: Infinity is not a number.
R: I would agree with that.  What are you thinking it is?
J: Infinity means that numbers never end.
R: That's what I would say too.  I would say infinity is a symbol.  It reminds us of that idea, that numbers never end.
J: Right.
R (walking on a little): I was thinking about our late Passover last night, and how you said the shankbone is a symbol.  Funny to think of infinity as being sort of like a shankbone.
J: Infinity even looks a little like a shankbone.  They're both round on the ends and thin in the middle.
(This cracked me up - the physical resemblance is so not what I meant.  But I didn't say anything.)
J: A color can be a symbol, too.
R: Oh yeah?
J: Like the pH thing we do with the fish.  The color of the water in the little tube tells you how much acid there is in the fish tank.

The pH indicator thing seems to me to be a different kind of thing than infinity or a shankbone.  The colors on the test strip stand for numbers, and that's probably what Jordan was thinking about - one thing standing for another different kind of thing.  But the colors on the pH scale are an indicator of quantity (of acid), pretty much just like the numbers they are substituting for; whereas infinity and the shankbone both indicate abstract ideas (of the nature of numbers, or divine protection).

On the other hand, maybe we live in such a symbol-laden reality that there's no point in making such a distinction.  Written numerals are symbols of mathematical objects (numbers), which are used to represent quantity; all language is symbols; etc.  When we arrived at religious school the kids were making an Israeli flag, which Jordan and I identified as a symbol of a country.  The six-pointed star, in particular, Jordan identified as being not only a symbol of Jewishness but also a symbol of the shield carried by David.  So I think that I will not try to get him to differentiate different kinds of symbolism.

Baby Moses Salad

We had friends over for Passover and for the first course of dinner everyone was invited to make themselves a Baby Moses Salad.  Everyone had a lettuce leaf to use as his floating basket.  From there things got pretty creative.

This one is mine, which I prepared as a demo.

Dale had a Baby Robot Moses.

Jordan had the brilliant idea to use matzah as a blanket.

Jeremy's should have been the least unnerving, since it actually had a face, and yet it wasn't.

Astonishingly, the kids ate more of their Baby Moses Salads than any other part of dinner.