Biking and Birthdays

Friday night a couple of us went to Parque Fundidora after work to enjoy the nice weather. You can rent bikes there (100 peso deposit, and you get your money back when you return the bike), so we all took advantage of the 1-speed demons. They aren't very adjustable, so you can see me here ignoring the pedals and just pushing off with my feet...I managed to go just as fast pedaling this way as with the actual pedals...



Last night a coworker had a birthday party at his house. There is a tradition here of a mordita, or a little bite, where the lucky birthday person has to take a bite out of the cake before everyone else digs in. Of course, this winds up with the person getting their face pushed into the cake! I didn't get a great shot in the chaos, but you can see his friends helping out with the mordita here.



Also, the aftermath is below. It was a pretty cool cake made up of cupcakes, which is what you see in the face-imprint.

Latin Danza

Yesterday I had the chance to go watch a dance show funded by a government grant. It was really good! They mixed together various styles (like hip-hop, salsa, tango, etc.), with couple dances and choreographed pieces.



At the end, they even had a scripted, Bollywood style part where some "audience members" got up on stage and did a song with the cast! And I swear the song is a Spanish version of I Will Survive...

Peace Corps Foro in Querétaro

Last week I returned to Querétaro for some in-service training and a two-day Foro on Innovation and Technology Transfer put on by Peace Corps. We had done a Foro last year, but this year we had a much bigger and diverse audience--over 100 people attended! It was extremely well put together by the staff and received a lot of positive feedback. We had some amazing speakers cover topics about Myths of Innovation, what CONACYT is doing at a national level, FUMEC (a national-level technical agreement between the US and México), and panels on how industry currently works with academia and research centers.



In Querétaro I had the chance to eat dinner with my host family again, which was very cool. Their dog is a bit older and slightly better behaved!

Since it is the bicentennial and centennial of Mexican independence and the Revolution, respectively, the city of Querétaro is putting on a bunch of events (the city has played a huge role in Mexican history). Friday night I went to a concert at the beautiful Teatro de la Republica and listened to the Querétaro Philharmonic.

Birthday parties

I actually played in the office fútbol game last Friday, and it was another great game. Only 10-1! The rules of the league are no glasses, so I basically had to play blind...pretty exciting. I managed to deflect one goal (a slow bouncer heading towards our goal), so that felt good.

Saturday I went to a birthday party for a friend. It was hosted in one of her friend's house, and her parents are American / Canadian--so they had a tetherball pole set up on the roof!! It was the first time I had seen one in 15 years or so.



The party was pretty cool, we filled up a room with about 250 balloons and had ton of silly-string. I got to meet lots of other Mexicans and try to explain what I am doing here, in Spanish.

Office Futbol

So a group of guys in my office joined a mini-futbol league in town with a guaranteed minimum of 9 games in the regular season. They play on a smaller field, with 7 or 8 guys on the field at a time. So far, they have played in 4 games and have gotten completely dominated. The scores go something like 19-0, 9-1, 12-1, 17-1. Understandably, they are at the bottom of the rankings. Well, this week (Friday the 19th), they played the second worst team, which had lost its previous 4 matches with similar scores. This was our chance at victory! I went to watch the game and cheer on the team, so some shots are below. Unfortunately, we still lost, 7-4, but it was a really good game and we had 3 or 4 almost-goals...so very heartbreaking. I plan on playing in at least one of the remaining games...

10K Number 2 and Chinese New Year´s

Happy Chinese New Year´s to everyone! There isn´t a big Asian population here in México, so there aren´t a lot of festivities marking the holiday (outside of all the Valentine´s Day stuff).

This past week I formally signed up for acoustic guitar classes at the local Casa de la Cultura. There are community centers that every city has, and they offer things like dance classes, music classes, etc. Since it is a basic class, we have just done exercises so far with finger placements and chords. Hopefully he will teach us some songs before the class is over.

On Sunday the 14th, a group from my office and the other volunteer up here ran in the Imagen 10K with 2995 other racers. It was not quite as exciting as the previous 10K I ran (no cheering sections or bands along the route), but it was a good run. You can search for my results at this page:

http://www.asdeporte.com/evento.html?evento=2840&deporte=1&service=2

The worst part was that there was an uphill during the last kilometer...killed my plan to sprint the final leg...

Constitution Day

So Monday, Feb 1, was the official holiday for Día de la Constitución, or Constitution Day, which means I didn't have to go into my office. The holiday is actually Feb 5, but when Feb 5 falls during the week, the holiday is moved to the Monday beforehand. If Feb 5 is a weekend, well, I guess we lose out on a holiday...

As you may recall, Feb 2 was the follow-up day to the Day of the Kings, where we ate Rosca (the circular bread with little porcelain dolls baked in). The lucky ones who cut out the dolls had to bring in tamales. So, the 6 people in my office ordered up 300 tamales for a mid-morning snack. Here are the steaming containers after we polished them all off.