The Final Countdown

Our time in Mexico is finally coming to an end; on Monday evening we fly back to Stockholm and on to our apartment in little old Uppsala. The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster of emotions, firstly coming to terms with the fact that our time here is almost up, then for quite some time looking forward to getting the hell out of here, and for the last few days sadness about all the people and places we're going to miss. First however there's time for one last blog post, where I'll look back at some of the highlights of our trip.

By the time we leave we'll have been here 175 days, which equates to 47.95% of 2017, or 252,000 minutes, apparently. It took us all a few days to get settled in at the beginning, but after finally moving to our apartment in Cocyoacán a few weeks later and settling in to a daily routine, life began to feel somewhat normal, at least as normal as anything can be in Mexico City. 

We went on three trips, firstly to 'northern' Mexico and Mazatlán in February, my main memory of which now is eating disgusting quantities of seafood for breakfast. Towards the end of April we flew to the insane heat and intense beauty of Havana, Cuba and shortly afterwards a well-deserved break in classic seaside resort Acapulco. I wrote a few words about those trips here. 

As well as taking advantage of my parental leave to spend lots of time with my son (when I was able drag him away from his grandparents for a couple of hours), I managed to get out and about every now and then in the city, visiting several museums (the Leon Trotsky Museum, the National Watercolour Museum and the Museum of Memory and Tolerance to name a few), exploring bars, cafés and restaurants in Coyoacán and La Roma, going to events such as the rock festival Vive Latino 2017 and as always spending inordinate amounts of time watching football, including a trip to the Estadio Azteca to see a World Cup qualifier between Mexico and Costa Rica.

My time here was also dominated by classes; by my reckoning I gave 31 English classes to family and friends, took 28 Spanish classes over an intense six-week period towards the end, and 34 times dragged myself to 7.30am swimming lessons, despite some of the initial difficulties in getting hold of the necessary information.

Of course writing this blog was also a big part of my time here; my 18 posts thus far have a total of 3,916 views at the time of writing. My personal favourite post is the Pram-pusher's Guide to Mexican Pavements; I still regularly find myself with the uncontrollable urge to take photos of bizarre pavement fails, I've probably got enough material to write a sequel. I have noticed more recently that the phenomenon depends very much on the area of the city; on a recent visit to Polanco I was amazed at the smoothness of the walkways (that's the kind of thing I pay attention to these days). 

There were a few ideas that never quite developed into posts: the fact that almost all transactions still take place through cash, forcing you to regularly withdraw huge chunks before somehow making it home a nervous wreck; the fact that you're regularly scolded for not having the exact change, as if paying for something that costs 36 pesos with a 50 peso note were completely outrageous (where the hell are you supposed to get the change from in the first place if you always pay with the exact amount?); the fact that Mexicans seem to think that a plate of plain rice constitutes an acceptable dish in its own right between the starter and main course; the list goes on.

As for the future, I'll be starting a new job as a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University in August. In the months leading up to our trip here I went through the interview process at Google, with a view to a job as an analytical linguist in the Zurich or London offices. Unfortunately the team I was going to be working for decided at the last minute, when my application was just about to go to final review, that they couldn't fit the job within their budget at the moment. After some initial disappointment we're delighted to be returning to Uppsala instead, our home, and I'm excited to be working in the Computational Linguistics group on a fantastic project known as Universal Dependencies. 

So it's goodbye, or adios, to Mexico for now. Our time here has been nothing if not memorable and I'm sure it's going leave its mark on me and my son for the rest of our lives. And of course we'll be back; perhaps not for such a long period next time, but there'll be plenty of Christmases and other reasons to return. Perhaps Noam will even choose to live here one day, and have to put up with visits from his parents, almost certainly slightly longer and slightly more often than he would like.

Family Fiestas

Undoubtedly one of the best ways to get a real taste of modern Mexican customs and culture is to get yourself invited to someone's family birthday party (or a wedding of course, if you really want to shoot for the stars). Fortunately my family-in-law is huge, so during my time here we've been to several such gatherings, and to top it all off we recently organised our own event for our son's first birthday. Our attempts to keep it low-key, picking and choosing only our favourite traditions and adding our own touch to the proceedings, were completely in vain by the time various family members had their say, and we ended up with an archetypal fiesta on our hands. In this post I'll go through some of the crucial ingredients for a successful Mexican party.

1. Tacos/Tamales

It goes without saying that the first question to ask is what kind of food will be served at the party. Fortunately this is also probably the easiest question to answer: people are going to expect to see either tacos or tamales or both. I'm going assume that everyone knows what a taco is; a tamale meanwhile consists of a corn-based dough steamed in a banana leaf and filled with meat, vegetables or chilies. They're extremely filling and delicious when done right; in the wrong hands they can be bland and extremely dry.

I don't think I've ever been to a party in Mexico without at least one of these two dishes present; I strongly suspect there's a law of nature that says that whenever half a dozen or so Mexicans congregate they spontaneously appear.

2. Birthday Cake

In Mexico they have this thing called a 'Birthday Cake'. It's like a special delicious cake that you only eat when it's someone's birthday. Crazy right? Ok, yeah so it's pretty much exactly the same as everywhere else. The only difference is the compulsory accompanying song: surprisingly not just a bastardized version of Happy Birthday in Spanish, it's a completely original tune, with it's own melody and lyrics and everything. It's called "Las Mañanitas" (The Little Mornings). I've heard it about 40 times and I still struggle to remember the words. There's actually a whole motorcade of songs to guide you gently through the cake cutting and eating process, from the classic opener "Queremos Pastel" (We Want Cake) through to the final chant of "Mordida, Mordida" (Bite, Bite). Seriously.

3. Piñata

No Mexican birthday party is complete without a piñata: a hollow papier-mâche capsule normally filled with sweets, hung from a rope and jigged about while guests take it in turns to smash it as hard as possible with a small bat in order to reveal the hidden treasure inside, all while wearing a blindfold (although small children are normally allowed the privilege of full sight). The thing is normally pretty sturdy; each person gets several turns before it finally breaks apart. There's yet another song, or chant, to accompany the proceedings; each turn lasts as long as it takes the crowd to get through it. It's all pretty good fun. Apparently in olden times the piñata was made from clay rather than paper, adding a whole new level of menace to events. It's not completely without danger even now: at our party recently one child ran directly into the line of fire as soon as the sweets started to drop, while the blindfolded teenager whose turn it was kept swinging frantically away for several seconds, unaware the piñata had fallen.

4. Drinks

Even at a child's birthday party at lunchtime on a Saturday, you can count on people to get through a significant amount of alcohol. I had thought that 120 beers for 60 guests, plus bottles of tequila, rum and whiskey, was going to be overkill at our son's first birthday party, given that a good chunk of those were children and there were plenty of non-drinking adults, but I needn't have worried. It was looking dodgy at about 8pm, most people had gone home and there were still probably 40-odd beers left, but a small group of dedicated drinkers managed to get through the remainder by the time we finally called it a night at 11pm (I refuse to disclose if I was part of that group myself). For the non-alcohol drinkers, flavoured water is the standard offering; hibiscus water (agua de jamaica) is always a favourite.

5. Guests

Any good party needs plenty of guests of course; just not necessarily those you invited. There are two complementary phenomena at work at any Mexican party: firstly, a decent chunk of the people you expected won't show up; secondly, a load of people you didn't will. The next-door neighbour of a friend of your aunt will be there with bells on, your childhood friend will get stuck in traffic and turn home after an hour and a half in desperation (or so she says).

If you're from Europe you might expect there to be some serious mingling at these events; if you're Swedish you'll assume you're going to spend the whole event purposefully placed at a table away from your friends and partner all in the name of socialising. For better or worse that's not the way things are done in Mexico, here you arrive and make a beeline for your group of closest companions. If you were hoping for some precious time away from the in-laws, you'll be bitterly disappointed. Of course if you make it far enough into the event, just like at the World Series of Poker, there'll be a moment when someone suggests the remaining stragglers get together round a single table and polish off any remaining drinks late into the night, falling one by one by the wayside until it's finally game over (see point 4 above.) This is the part of the evening when you might actually have some fun.

6. Entertainment 

Even a relatively small family gathering is likely to have some kind of (semi-)professional entertainment. The classic choice is of course a Mariachi band, guaranteed to get uncles, aunts and grandparents up on the dancefloor, shouting out horribly obscure requests which the band inevitably know by heart. Otherwise another solid entertainment choice is a guy with a keyboard belting out Spanish language pop classics, normally singing pretty well but not as good as just listening to the record of course. He'll often want you to partake in some kind of choreographed dancing, a conga or hokey cokey type thing, every sane person's idea of a nightmare basically. Once that's over it's time for the inevitable karaoke, hopefully by this point you're drunk enough to make the whole thing bearable.

7. The goodie bag and the doggy bag

No Mexican party, particularly if it's a child's birthday, would be complete without a goodie bag filled to the brim with chilli-flavoured sweets (I still can't get used to these), some little toys and souvenirs from the day. Of course half the guests forget to take theirs with them, so you're guaranteed to be left behind with 30 of these carefully curated gifts, with enough sweets to last a lifetime (or till next Wednesday, depending on your sweet-consumption habits).

Slightly more unusual is the fact that guests normally take away large quantities of the party grub with them in a doggy bag. It's almost rude not to offer up enough food to get through to the end of the weekend at least. If you're going to a Mexican party make sure to clear your fridge out first; you'll need the space for all the taco fillings, sauces and bits of cake that will be hoisted on you before leaving.

Finally

Having written this list I'm starting to think that Mexican parties are not so different from other countries I've experienced after all. You basically can't go wrong with food, drink, and dancing wherever you are in the world. It strikes me that the line between a children's party and an adult affair is surprisingly fine here, but that may be more due to the fact that I'm suddenly being invited to an array of such events for the first time since I was a child myself. Perhaps all the adults were pissed back then, I was just completely unaware.

Unlearning Spanglish

As some of my readers will know, language learning is a big passion of mine. As well as going through the tortuous and mostly futile experience of learning French at secondary school back in Jersey, in recent years I've got pretty fluent in Spanish and Swedish, as well as spending hour after hour, drinking coffee after coffee, helping non-native speakers practise their English at language exchanges and tandems in Uppsala. Here in Mexico I've given numerous English classes to family and friends, and for the last few weeks I've been taking an intensive advanced Spanish course at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). As well as giving me a pleasant place to go for a couple of hours every afternoon and some new friends to hang out with, this has the added bonus of providing me with a valuable student ID, allowing me to pretend I'm 22 again, pay cheap entrance to museums and get 10% off some of my coffees.

While my Spanish vocabulary has undoubtedly grown during our visit (Swedish not so much), I find more and more that improvements come from understanding small subtle differences in the way certain words are used in English and Spanish. Take two of the most basic words imaginable: ir (to go), venir (to come). You learn these in Spanish 101, memorise the irregular conjugations, learn when to use subjunctive, and think you've got it nailed. You can formulate sentences in impossible tenses like "I had gone before you would normally have come". Then suddenly after five years you start getting corrected all the time: "you mean ir, not venir". As if I didn't know whether I'm coming or going. After several prolongated and prickly discussions you finally figure it out: "venir" is in fact used much more strictly than "come". In English, if we're in the supermarket buying ingredients and I say "What time's Dave coming?", it's pretty clear from the context that I want to know what time Dave's going to arrive at our place for dinner tonight, not what time he's going to arrive AT THE BLOODY SUPERMARKET. Obviously, no? Well not so in Spanish, apparently. If I enquire "A qué hora va a venir Dave?" I'll be told in no uncertain terms that Dave has no plans to join us on our shopping trip. A similar thing applies with traer (to bring), and llevar (to take). If you want to know what Dave's going to traer with him, you better be damn sure you're pretty much standing on the exact spot to which the bringing will be done, otherwise you'll get barked at that you mean llevar, idiot. N.B. Dave is a fictional character. Any resemblance to any real Dave, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

I've also started to realise just how cruel some of the tricks are that Spanish and English play on each other when it comes to pronunciation and its relation to the way words are spelled. One common misunderstanding is that the Spanish letter "y" is pronounced like an English "y". So English speakers saying "yo" in Spanish often sound suspiciously like Jesse from Breaking Bad (minus the subsequent expletive of course), when in fact the sound is more like if you were to say the word "jogging", stopping just before you get to the "g". Conversely, if you ask a Spanish speaker what their favourite colour is and get the answer "jello", it doesn't necessarily mean they've misunderstood the question. I normally advise Mexicans to pronounce words beginning with "y" in English to pretend they begin with "hi" in Spanish, so "yellow" starts pretty similarly to "hielo" in Spanish, which happens to mean "ice". To confuse things yet further, in Spanish the "h" is silent, while "j" is pronounced like an English "h". Confused yet? Add all that to the general insanity of English spelling and it's not hard to see why many foreigners have difficulties getting their pronunciation right. Incidentally, during one of my recent classes I came up with an explanation of how to pronounce the word "foreigner" in English: just say "forin" followed by the sound you make when punched in the stomach. A surprisingly large number of English words end with this sound, regardless of the vowel that we actually write.

To conclude, learning and perfecting a foreign tongue, whether it be English, Spanish or any other of the world's thousands of languages, is a tough challenge. I'm really enjoying my course at UNAM, even if I often feel that each new rule or tidbit we learn just opens up a dozen more questions and exceptions. It's easy to get frustrated and think I'll never understand everything or speak perfectly in any other language. But then I remember that no-one speaks perfect Spanish, nor perfect English for that matter, because such a thing simply doesn't exist. I can only hope to get a little bit better each day, and as months and years pass the distance between my Spanglish and the 'real' Spanish of a native speaker will get shorter and shorter. With that, I'm off to eat some jello.