This is Where I Live and What I Do

What a crazy week! It’s been full of travel, study, new sights, sounds, and a whole new language. I already have about 150 pictures and a book’s-worth of stories in my mind—not to mention at least 150 Spanish words there too! My mind is feeling full… so I’m very glad that today, Sunday, is a day of rest. I have the whole day free!!!

So I thought I’d take you on a tour of where I live and what I’m doing….

Of course, I’m in Mexico City-- a city built on a lake, in a southern “suburb” called Tlalpan. It’s a pretty large suburb of which I can find no comparison in the US. I’ve learned in my short time here that it is an older part of town and one that is mostly lower middle class. It also has some very poor parts in the south as you head to the mountains.

I’ll save most of my sweeping statements about Mexico City for future posts so as to be brief, but I will say that it is amazing to live at 7000 feet where the weather is beautiful every day (sunny and 70 for the high, 50 for the low). No wonder twenty-five million people live here! The city is a bustling one, and a congested one at that! Traffic is a mess, smog is a problem, and noise (both sound and visual) is like nothing I’ve before encountered. The number of cars, advertising signs, loud music, and taxi cabs leads me to a simple analogy: living in Mexico City is like living in Times Square.

[Notice how there are McDonalds here... and how Sex and the City is being advertised (sigh). There are also Wal-Marts here... just in case you need salsa by the bulk.]

Here at the Centro Cultural Interamericano, the place where I live and go to school, the air isn’t all too bad and the sound isn’t much of a problem. I live in a former mansion, built in the 1950s, that is currently used as a retreat center for priests and seminarians, as well as a quasi-university for visiting Spanish-learning students like myself.

The mansion is on a huge tract of land and is surrounded by a two-story stone and brick wall—which I liken to a kind of thing you would see in one of the nicer courtyards in London… or at the St. Louis Botanical Garden. Within those walls, the outside city hustle and bustle seems to disappear; there are rose bushes everywhere, finely manicured shrubberies, moss-covered walkways, and an occasional light post which reminded me of what I might see in CS Lewis’ Narnia.

The entire Center is fairly safe as not only is it surrounded by walls that would be fairly difficult to climb, but also because there is only one entrance to it: a door monitored constantly by a guard. In order to enter, you have to ring a bell and he opens up a slot in the door, checks to see who it is, and lets you in. It’s very Wizard of Oz like.

[The outside of the Center]

[The door to the Center]

[The entry to the Center... Note that underneath those bushes are carports]

[Looking back at the entry way, from the courtyard]

[The entry to the mansion house]

[Come in! I show you!]

Inside the Center mansion-house, there is a chapel and dining room, a living room with a couple computers, a few lounges, and several bedrooms. One half of the building overlooks the grounds (like a courtyard) while the other half peers over the wall and faces the street (I hear that this side is noisy, as my room faces the courtyard). It’s a good sized place for only ten students and a priest (all ten are seminarians, six of which are St. Louisans).

[As you walk in to the right, stairs to the bedrooms]

[The living room, from which the picture of the stairs was taken]

[Or, when you enter, you can go to your left and enter our chapel]

[Or would you like something to eat from the dining room?]

[Another lounge... this is where one class is taught...]

[And my bedroom... note the lack of a dresser...]

[And my desk with a view!]

[And what room wouldn't be complete without a bathroom? My, how the shower "door" is skinny!]

Outside of the house, there are other buildings as well: an auditorium, a couple small apartments (where the guard and some housekeeping seem to live), a kind of classroom building (with bedrooms on the second floor), and a giant tennis/handball court. Although there are classrooms in that building, all of our classes are taken at the house: since there are only ten of us, and since there are four sections of Spanish being taught, we have class in one of the various lounges throughout the house.

[There are plenty of roses in the courtyard gardens]

The days are pretty full here: days start at 7:45 with morning prayer, Mass, and breakfast before classes begin at 9am. (Woo hoo! Sleep in, baby!!!). Those go until about 1pm, which is when we have lunch. After which, there is usually a practice lab, where we go to a local school and invade their computer lab. There, we listen to Spanish and, well, … practice. By the time that is done, it’s about 3pm. Here, we either siesta for a little bit or do homework. Usually, it is homework. Dinner is then at 5:15 or 7:30, depending on what is going on in the evening. On a couple nights a week, we go out into a parish to visit the people in their homes, talk with them, and minister wherever and however we can. After all of that, we have evening prayer, adoration, and bed… at about 10 or 11.

Saturdays are days where we are tourists: we attend a lecture at the Center auditorium in the morning, after which we go to a tourist attraction in or around Mexico City. Yesterday, we went to the Anthropological Museum here—which is the best such museum in the world, I am told. I will post many pictures from that in short order. We return from such outings by about 7pm, at which point we have dinner, do prayers, and spend the rest of the evening chilling out (‘cause that’s a long week!).

Sundays are free… so today we went to a local parish for Mass, after which we did lunch here at home…. And then I sat and watched the EuroCup 2008 soccer match between Spain and Italy. Now, I’m blogging… and will do some homework after dinner…

So, yeah…. That’s where I live. And that’s what I do in the course of a day. I’ll post more about all of those trips, stories, and various and different foods/traditions throughout the coming weeks.