Thursday - Day Six
Well, Thursday began with the typical reluctance to get out of bed, the note to self to go to bed earlier or take a nap, breakfast and school run. I am definitely not feeling my best but it really isn´t enough to make me want to go to the clinic. Maybe it will just go away if I ignore it.
Classes were about the same as always although my vocabulary and converstation class has gotten a bit more interesting. We are practicing substituting pronouns for direct and indirect objects plus a few reflexives thrown in for good measure. All of this makes perfect sense to me (thank you Latin) but some of the others have had trouble with this concept especially since Spanish does things differently than English and they aren´t quite sure how to explain it in English anyway.
Dee and I decided that we would go home for comida so as to be socialable but Melinda didn´t want us to eat very much becaue she was determined to go out and find a Japanese restaurant that we had found a flyer for in the street. Yes, the tasty looking food on the brochure convinced us to pick up this piece of paper off of the street even though who knew where it had been. We actually weren´t sure where in Cuernavaca it was but we thought it would be an adventure to try and find it.
Actually, it turned out to be not hard at all. Just as we were walking out of the house to walk up to the street to find a taxi, one of our roomates pulled up to the door in a taxi and asked us if we needed to go somewhere. We showed her the address from the paper and she asked the driver where it was. Turns out it is on the far side of the city and I heard him say that it would be a lot of money to get there. I was prepared for the worst but it only turned out to be $45 pesos ($4.50). We happily hopped in as Amanda got out and took off for the other side of Cuernavaca, both literally and figuratively.
The ride took us out of the freeway and we had a nice overview of the city. It really is a beautiful area! The driver took us past several dodgy looking areas but our destination ended up being in a much more upscale part of town. I figured that there must be parts of the city like this but still the newness and niceness of the buildings was a contrast to the part of the city that we are in, which is in the older more historic district. But the real surprise was when we went into the galleria (mall). The restaurant we had thought we would go to was in a different building, but we had to see what this humongous building was (Plus we had missed the next showtime for Pirates at the theater there by about 15 minutes). At first it looked like a parking garage, but there was a mall on the top two levels of it. There was a theater there too that had better show times so we decided to buy tickets for the next start time that was in English (you can watch movies in English with Spanish subtitles or dubbed Spanish). Then, since we had about twenty minutes for the show started, we decided to walk around the mall.
In all honesty (and realize that my experience may be limited) it was one of the poshest malls I have ever been to, especially when compared to the other places that I had seen in Mexico. The place was so clean, well lit, and it had AC! And, holy cow, the shops there were very nice with the big name brands in the US and lots of fancy Mexican stores too. Out of curiosity, I went into one of the bigger stores that reminded me of Dillards or something and checked the price on a little girls Barbie tshirt. I about died! $441 pesos for one shirt! That is like $45 dollars!! Obviously there are people in Mexico that make a very good living, more than I make for sure.
We wandered around until the movie was about to start, grabbed some popcorn and sodas (a mistake in a nearly three hour movie) and went in. It was a very nice theater with stadium style seating with big comfy chairs and very, very clean. It was one of the cleanest theaters I have ever been in. It was fun to watch the movie (although we had to run out halfway through to use the potty and then I fell and twisted my ankle on my way back in).
Afterwards we decided to go over to the OfficeMax across the street to see how much their SD cards or jumpdrives were. I´m getting concerned about having enough room for pictures and I´m really regreting not bringing Jo´s and Amer´s cards. However, while many things are cheaper to buy in Mexico, these particular things are not (at least if you buy them at this kind of store instead of in the fiuca (blackmarket)). The cards and jumpdrives range from about $250-$500 pesos ($25-50) and the one gigs are pretty expensive too. So we decided not to buy them and walked over to find Dee´s restaurant.
Neither of us were particularly hungry, but the place was empty at the moment and we stopped to look at the menu displayed outside. Before we knew it, we had been ushered in by four or five of the staff and seated at a cooking table, given an English menu, and asked what we want. There were several waiters hovering around us and Dee just started asking if they had different things: yakisoba, gyoza, tempura veggies and shrimp. Very soon each of these had been ordered and we hadn´t even had time to see how much they cost. I was beginning to feel a bit worried about how much this was going to be and said so to Dee. She had some money and so did I and we hoped that it would be enough between us (we hadn´t thought to bring a card with us), but both of us were a bit worried.
The food was quite tasty, but the best part was that they brought us a sushi roll made of raw salmon, cucumber, pinapple, with creamcheese on top and wrapped in avacado rather than seaweed. At first I wasn´t sure about this combination, but it turned out to be one of the best rolls I have ever had and Dee agreed too. The tempura was also very good and they gave us a lot more shrimp than I would have thought possible, like eight of them. It was a tasty meal, but it was overshadowed the whole time by the worries about the money. Fortunately when we communicated that we wanted the bill, it was only $300 pesos ($30) so we easily had enough. The manager came out to shake our hands and we got a clean, fresh menu brochure to take with us.
Soon after we caught a taxi and went back home. It was a fun experience. It was particularly interesting to see the differences between establishments for those with lots of money and those with little. Such a country of contrasts!
Laters, Nan