Bread Basket

Little History Lesson for today (sorry - I'm a history teacher, I can't help myself!)

In the U.S., at many restaurants, a free basket of bread is delivered to your table while you're waiting for your food. There is often butter in this basket. In Europe, bread is also often available, but no butter. At "Mexican" restaurants, we often get a basket of fried tortilla chips with salsa.

Most North Americans are often shocked to discover that Mexicans love bread and butter, too. In fact, we often get a "bread" basket full of rolls, butter, tortilla chips, and salsa - but the salsa is actually a sauce, not a chunky tomato dip.

This is the history part - the Spanish were sent to Mexico to look for gold, and while they did find some, what they found more of was edible gold - corn. Mexicans had survived on corn for hundreds of years. While the Spanish king strongly encouraged the colonists to Mexico to grow wheat, teach bread-making, and eat only "civilized" food, most of the colonists just couldn't do it. At their fancy Spanish dinners they would eat bread, but then after hours they would sneak into the "ghetto" side of town to eat tacos made from corn tortillas. The men were "slummin' it" in more ways than one!

Today, Mexicans just embrace both sides of their heritage - the Spanish part and the American part. The basket is just a small example of their Mestizo heritage.

Furniture!

We have a furnished house/ condo that we're renting here. The style is very beautiful. Lots of wood - exposed beams, wood furniture, wood cabinets, as well as iron drawer pulls (and some cold tile floors and ugly art, but we can't have everything).

Wooden furniture in Mexico is called "rustico" or rustic. Most Mexicans don't really like it anymore, bc they think it's old fashioned. So a lot of upscale furniture stores sell "modern" furniture full of leather and carved iron. But we really like the wooden stuff! Locals hand carved a beautiful bedroom set just for us and delivered it to our house for an amazing price. Not IKEA cheap, but definitely closer to Art Van clearance center than Amish furniture center. We can't wait to add a little Mexico to our MI house.

furniture

"Marianisma"

information from this posting is based on an article from THE NEWS, the English-language newspaper in Mexico city. For the full article, check here http://thenews.com.mx/articulo/womens-roles-polled-1038

A lot of North Americans have heard of "Machismo" which is the Mexican stereotype/ideal/legend of the "ultimate" man. Not so many have heard of "Marianisma" which is basically that every woman should be like Mary - pure but also a mother (hard to be both, but you get the idea). Every man wants his mom, wife, sister, and daughter to be modest and good at homemaking. Or at least, that's the idea.

In reality, most Mexicans are poor. And like poor women throughout history and across cultures, Mexican women do not have the opportunity to be a "stay-at-home-mom". They might stay at home, but they are working, making money however possible, and often sharing in running the family business. Women run small tiendas, work as housekeepers, hawk items in the street, run boarding houses and laundromats, and even run lunchtime restaurants out of their garage.

Perhaps it is this idea that explains the results of a study that an American found "surprising": 91% of Mexican women think women should work outside the home but only 42% do work outside the home. Most women want access to their own spending money, so that they can buy a book to read or shoes for their children or meat for dinner, rather than rely on their husband's infrequent and/or inadequate income. But not every woman has the option of leaving her house to work - there just aren't jobs available.

OTOH, 77% of U.S. women work outside the home while onkly 58% of women prefer working outside the home. In a country where staying at home means wealth rather than poverty, we'd rather show off our wealth.

BTW - March is women's history month, so I'm going to try to add some "women-focused" posts this month.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-03-02/news/17285004_1_stay-at-home-mothers-fathers-spend-more-time-suzanne-bianchi
http://women.webmd.com/news/20070906/women-prefer-working-outside-the-home

My own Happiness Project

2 years ago, I was begging for someone, anyone, to tell me what I'd be feeling right now. I was so worried about moving to Mexico (check out my first blog http://southernhospitality-mexico.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html ) I just wanted to know that in the end, we had made the right decision and these would not be 2 wasted years but instead 2 amazing years.
Years of discovery.
Years of growth.
Years of happiness.

And they have.

We knew, very strongly, that God had plans for us here, but we didn't really understand why. Why here? Why now? Why not?

Mexico has been my "Happiness Project". Kind of like a mini-quarter-life-crisis or pre-retirement. I got to see what my life would be like if I wasn't a slave to my job. If I wasn't busy every minute of every day. If I wasn't freezing half the year and sweating the other half. If I read more books and watched less TV and learned to blog. If I shopped less. If I met different people. If I stopped doing housework. If I caught up on all the things I was going to do "whenever I got the tiem". If I finished writing the book in my head. If I focused on eating delicious food rather than losing 5 pounds. If I soaked up Vitamin D every day. If I backpacked in Europe and climbed a Volcano in Mexico and walked the streets of Japan.

Turns out, doing all of those things has made me a better person. (I think.) I am more happy with my accomplishments, more comfortable doing "nothing", more confident in my personality, more aware of the big world around me.

Seems like I've got this Mexico adventure all wrapped up.
I'm ready for a new adventure now.

Happiness Project

Living in Mexico has given me a lot of extra free time. Even working full time and driving up to 3 hours per day, I'm still working fewer hours and those hours are less busy than what I was doing before I came here. So, I've been reading a lot - books, blogs, webpages, ebooks, audiobooks... well, you get the idea.

One of my favorite books recently was "The Happiness Project" (you can check out other books I've read on www.shelfari.com). This book also has a blog, which is fun if you don't have time to read the whole book - although I do recommend at least borrowing it from the library and skimming it. http://www.happiness-project.com/

The blog for Wed. March 3 was about the 10 myths of happiness:
No. 1: Happy people are annoying and stupid. This is an automatic assumption that many people make.
No. 2: Nothing changes a person’s happiness level much.
No. 3: Venting anger relieves it.
No. 4: You’ll be happier if you insist on “the best.”
No. 5: A “treat” will cheer you up.
No. 6: Money can’t buy happiness.
No. 7: Doing “random acts of kindness” brings happiness. The emphasis here is on the word "random."
No. 8: You’ll be happy as soon as you… Falling into the "arrival fallacy" is something that many people (including me) recognize in themselves.
No. 9: Spending some time alone will make you feel better.
No. 10: The biggest myth: It’s selfish to try to be happier.

Maybe one of the reasons I liked the idea of a "Happiness Project" is because moving to Mexico has been my happiness project. Tomorrow my blog will be more about that ;)

Starbucks

I am off of school this week, which means lots of free time. I learned a long time ago that if Dave is working but I'm not that I need to use that time to do all the things I never seem to have time to do - lesson plans, scrapbooking, cleaning the house, etc. and reserve vacations and fun stuff for the times when we're both off. I also learned a long time ago that if I am in my pjs when Dave leaves for work, I'm still in my pjs when he gets home. :) So, this week I woke up and got ready for "work" with Dave and instead went to Starbucks for a few hours to work on lesson plans for 4th quarter.

Well, lesson plans and next week's chapel message.
Well, lesson plans and chapel and blog writing and internet searching and daydreaming and people watching.

What can I say? people watching is even more fun in a foreign country!

I know that North Americans love their coffee, and their coffee shops. But this is a new fun trend in Mexico, too. The coffees cost about the same, so there are only Starbucks in "rich" areas of Mexico. In central Mexico, that means most of the people here are pretty "white" looking. At the Starbucks in Santa Fe - THE upscale DF suburb - I can often hear more English than Spanish.

8am - 10am is mainly "business breakfasts" with people who work together meeting for coffee before work. They normally do not get their coffee to go, but it does happen occasionally, esp. if someone is buying for a large group.

10am - 12pm is a lot of prepa (high school) and university students, "studying" together. It's not uncommon for teens here to go to school only in the afternoon or to have a flexible schedule that's more like what we would have for community college.

12pm - 2pm is a slow time. Too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. The staff is cleaning and prepping for a busy afternoon. A few people like me, with laptops, "working" might be around.

2pm - 4pm is full of teens. These folks are already done with school for the day but don't want to go home and are rich enough to meet their friends at starbucks for a latte and a sandwich.

4pm - 6pm is a lot of babies in strollers with their moms and grandmas. Presumably visiting before Dad gets off of work. Also older teens/ university students (it's hard for me to tell the difference) on a date. Dinner dates are kind of rare for this age group who might be expected to be home by dinnertime (8pm).

6pm+ I'm normally not at Starbucks, so I can't be sure, but I have been there at this time and it's a common meeting place for families and friends and co-workers of all ages and sizes to meet for a snack after work. They'll go home for dinner at 8pm or so.

I've heard that U.S. starbucks are full of unemployed/self-employed people during the day (using free internet) and college students during the night (using free internet) with a wide spattering of rich and bored SAHMs. Can't be sure, but we seem to have a different vibe here.

Green Tacos & moldy tortillas

Most Americans have read "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss. The funny part of this story is that NONE of us want to eat green eggs or green ham! Veggies can be green, but not anything else. Definitely not meat.

Um... Mexicans eat green meat. In fact, it's a local specialty. Toluca (where we live) is known in central Mexico, for their "chorizo" which is a kind of sausage. Except that in Toluca, there are 2 kinds: red and green. Red sausage looks like, well, sausage. Green sausage looks kind of like... moldy sausage. This is a real food, bc I've seen it in the grocery stores and at meat markets since we got here.

Took me almost 2 years to work up enough courage to try it.
Sheesh.

The tacos pictured above are chorizo tacos - the two on the left are red tacos and the 2 on the right are green tacos. (the white stuff on top is locally made cheese.)

oh, wait, you're wondering what that blue stuff is?
It's moldy corn tortillas. :)
Those I've been eating for a while. They're delicious. :)
And officially, it's not a mold, it's a fungus.

Corn is from central Mexico. Mexicans lived off of corn ("maize") for centuries, developing the largest capital city and largest empire in the entire world while Europe was still in the dark ages. (Un)fortunately, the Mexicans did not have chemical pesticides. There was this nasty blue fungus that sometimes grew on the corn, and they couldn't find a way to get rid of the fungus.

Hmmmmm...

So one day a Mexican ate the blue fungus-riddled corn. S/he didn't die! S/he didn't even get sick! And, bonus - it was kind of yummy! So now, there are yellow corn tortillas and blue corn tortillas. (maybe some of you have seen blue corn tortilla chips in your local U.S. grocery store? the blue corn is real, whether or not any was actually used in the making of the chips is a different story, as I've also seen red corn and green corn tortilla chips in the states which are definitely NOT natural!)

So, on Saturday, Dave & I ate fungus tortillas full of green sausage. Delicious.