Thoughts on Chivalry

Is chivalry dead? Nope, its just gone to Mexico. While in the States people still open doors and pull out chairs its not a overly common act. A man might open doors for his wife or children but it doesn't extend much more than that. Over the past few months I've noticed how much more evident chivalry is in Mexico. Every morning multiple doors are opened for me by my students on the way to their offices. But its not just opening the door, they will open the door then stand back and wait for me to pass first. Even if the door opens inward, he will open the door, push it into the room then stand back for me to enter. Where I teach one morning a week we pass through some doors then out to a trailer type office that has a small 3 step staircase to get to the door. This morning the door (which is normally open) was closed. My student proceeded to go up half way, open the door then come back down to let me go through. This really surprised me and thus got me thinking about chivalry and if the average man in the united states would do this for someone who is basically works for them.

Another thing is that after every class I give my students always say thank you. "Thank you teacher, see you tomorrow" Its just weird for me to be thanked for doing my job, and not just like once a week or so, but multiple times every day.

Same ol same ol

So its been a month since my last blog and I guess I should have updated sooner. I have realized that I have become a total Mexican driver. Not in the sense that I am a bad driver, but that I get impatient with people after about 2 seconds. I am still not to the point where I will honk, but I just tell them in my head or out loud depending on my mood to hurry up. Also on roads that before I was frustrated by people making their own second lane where it was meant to be one large lane I tend to always be in the second non existent lane now. Not that I am doing anything unsafe, I am just getting used to the faster pace of driving. It is really ironic that people are in such a rush here while driving, because everything else is so laid back. Most my classes don’t start till at least 5 mins after they are supposed to start because the students don’t show up on time, and no one shows up early like they would be expected to in the states.

Speaking of work I have been getting more and more classes and am now up to a whole 20 hours a week and might even be bumped up to 22 depending on class scheduling. I have some group classes, some individual students and some children, I favorite are defiantly the groups and the kids, however one of my students is a 8 year old boy who has ADD, and if that wasn’t hard enough his mom doesn’t have the curriculum or the book he is working on in school so I have to do my own investigative work to find out what he has been learning in class that week and try to get a productive lesson in from what he tells me. But still, I think I’m up for the challenge.

Outside of class I still am pretty much being lazy in the daytime, which lead me to ask my dad for a gym membership for my Christmas/birthday present. There is a really nice gym a few blocks from my apartment that has two pools, a rock climbing wall, spinning, dance, and aerobic classes and of course a weight room. Hopefully I’ll find the motivation to go every day, or at least like 4 days a week. I really have no excuse because it’s not like im doing anything else with my time, other than catching up on every episode of extreme makeover home edition, Miami ink, the amazing race (so far they’ve gone through 3 seasons) throw in a few episodes of law and order and csi and you’ve got my daily schedule from about 9-5, that is if im not sleeping. I now have afternoon classes most days so that limits my nap/tv time from 9-3. I’m hoping that when I get the membership I’ll go to the gym in the morning, which will leave me with a few good hours to shower and sleep before afternoon class.

The past month has been pretty much uneventful, thus the lack of posting. My mom, bob and grandma susan came down for thanksgiving which was a lot of fun. Alejandro and I took them to a lot of places that I hadn’t gone to before, so that was fun. We went to Tonala and Talaquepaque which are full of hand made artsy things. We walked around all morning and did some shopping, then stopped for a nice lunch. On Saturday we went to tequila and took a tour of the Jose Cuervo factory, which came complete with a good amount of tequila tasting.

(grandma and bob enjoying some tequila)

Other than thanksgiving weekend everything has been pretty normal. Work, sleep, hanging out with friends. We went to a few more Chivas games, unfortunately they just lost in the semifinals, we were ridiculously close to making it to the final (which would have been played here) but were unable to pull it through. Sorry for the lack of excitement (especially if you have been religiously checking my blog-Katie, but you’ll just have to come back to gdl if you miss Mexico so much) Maybe I’ll have more exciting things to post on soon, and maybe this time It won’t take me a month to post.