I’m back in North Carolina, after a year and a half in Mexico. Why? It was just time, for reasons that are a little too personal to post here.
It was an amazing experience living down there. I plan to visit Tulum before too long. But for now, I’m here in the American South, settling in and catching up with friends I haven’t seen in over a year.
And this time I’m car-free.
It’s only been a week, but so far I don’t think my plan to live without a car is turning out to be too crazy. I’m living in Chapel Hill among the four-lane highways and shopping centers temporarily, and so far I’m managing things pretty well with my bike and the bus. I plan to move to Carrboro in a couple of weeks, where town is actually walkable and bike-able, so it should be easier then. But it’s doable even from here.
Things I’ve learned so far:
- Just like in the tropics, when it’s really hot and sunny here, it’s best not to be outside at all during the afternoon hours.
- Just like in the tropics, got to have a hat, sunglasses and water.
- Even from my house on the north side of Chapel Hill in a suburb, it’s possible to do all kinds of errands on a bike
- It’s possible to stay almost completely off of busy roads
- I have the same childlike irrational love for biking around as I did in Mexico
I’m going to try to stay car-free. Since I work at home, and will be living in a small town, and the weather here is mild year-round, and thank God I’m healthy and strong, I don’t see why it can’t work. I’ll keep you posted.
[Warning: the following is a rant.]
My local Mexican supermarkets have some ways which are really annoying to someone trying to live a non-wasteful lifestyle.
For example, the way they have to make it really hard to get my groceries home. It almost seems like that’s what they’re trying to do.
I don’t own a car - purposely - and instead ride a bike. So I need to carry home my groceries in a backpack. I don’t need any plastic grocery bags, or a “bagger” to throw my stuff into them.
And I’ve always hated those plastic grocery bags, not just because they’re an ecological disaster, although that’s plenty enough of a reason. But it also annoys me that they are such a terrible way to transport groceries. They’re flimsy and break easily; items can’t be stacked in them, so delicate things get mashed; and they can’t be carried in the arms, but rather the full weight has to be borne by the wrists. They’re just a terrible invention, in every way - except for maximizing profits for the supermarket.
So imagine my surprise when just this week, one local supermarket has replaced those common plastic bags - with smaller, weaker clear plastic bags!
Mostly I’m just astounded, because I didn’t think it could get any worse.
So you’re thinking, why doesn’t Patty just get some reusable grocery bags and bring them to the store? And of course, I do. In my case, it’s the aforementioned backpack.
So, you probably think I can just pay for my purchases, load them in my backpack and go, right? But nooooooooo!
Because on the way in, a uniformed, armed guard stops anyone who is carrying any kind of a bag (other than a small purse) and makes them walk to another part of the store, find some change, and rent a little locker to keep it in while she shops!
So when I check out my groceries, the nice ecological bag I brought along for carrying my groceries is securely locked away, and I’m forced to watch while a “bagger” randomly loads them into (as of this week) small, paper-thin clear plastic baggies! And, for doing something I wish he wouldn’t do, and which he does badly, the “bagger” expects a tip!
And then, I have to go to the locker area, fish the key out of my pocket, open the locker, get out my backpack. Then, find some place to put all the bags down and load the items into my backpack.
Pretty ridiculous, isn’t it?
The icing on the cake: on the way out of the store, I have to be eyed suspiciously by an armed guard. Because they have a severe problem with their regular customers shoplifting, and because they refuse to invest any of their profits in security cameras, I have to be treated like a criminal.
Yes, I can try and buy groceries from the smaller stores. But it’s pretty hard to entirely avoid the supermarket, and it just makes me sad that it’s such an unpleasant experience.
Okay, I’m done ranting!
I recently read up on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Pacific Trash Vortex), the giant swirling island made entirely of plastic trash which floats in the northern Pacific ocean - with an estimated size of at least the area of Texas (and some say much larger). I had been aware of it before, but now it’s firmly impressed on my mind, and I can’t forget it. Each time I throw away a plastic straw, a drink bottle or plastic bag, I think about the millions of them in that floating garbage dump, and I really want to be sure I’m not part of the problem anymore.
When I lived in the U.S., I recycled absolutely everything possible. Here in Mexico, until now, I haven’t done very well in this respect. In some places, there simply aren’t recycling programs; in some places I never managed to figure out where to bring the stuff.
But I’ve resolved, seriously, to kick it up a notch. I’ll keep you posted.
The other day in Spanish class, I was trying to understand some sentence the teacher had put together, one that was a little complicated. We don’t speak much English in this class, but occasionally they allow it, so I asked her if the sentence meant such-and-such in English. But she interrupted me halfway, saying (in Spanish) “You have to stop translating into English.”
I’ve heard this a lot. The Rosetta Stone courses - and I took all 3 levels of the Spanish course several times each - are based on this idea. It’s supposed to be a given that one learns a language better if he literally never uses his native language to understand the meaning of phrases and sentences in the new language. So I realize that this is taken as gospel truth by a lot of people. Maybe there is even scientific fact to back it up.
But I’m not convinced. It seems to me that they’re confusing two different principles:
- “If you want to learn a new language, you have to speak it all the time and stop falling back on your native language” - which I totally agree with - vs -
- “When trying to understand something in the new language, you must not try to translate it into your native language for the purpose of getting the meaning straight” - which I question.
The sentence which I was trying to understand in class was something like this (except that it was in Spanish):
“If Juan had had the books when he arrived, we wouldn’t have needed to buy them for him.”
By trying to translate it from Spanish to English, I was just trying to understand the concepts behind the sentence. And what I’d like to ask the “never translate” people is “How am I supposed to understand a concept without any words attached to it?”
If the Spanish words aren’t making sense to me, how can I think about something without attaching any words to it at all?
They may be able to get me to stop translating outloud, but I can guarantee there will be times when I translate silently in my head - because it’s pretty damn hard to think about something and not have any words associated with the thoughts.
Isn’t it?
I’m studying Spanish, as I have been for two years, but with even more ferocity than ever. I’m in school 5 days a week at Solexico here in Playa del Carmen, and I often spend another couple of hours studying on my own. It has been a long haul, and very discouraging at times, but I’m making progress.
I’ve been on the subjunctive for a week or two now. For most people, that word causes cringing and moaning; nobody is happy when they find out that Spanish has an entire separate set of verb tenses in the subjunctive in addition to the first nine or so tenses. And I’ve felt that way too. But today as I sat at the cafe table poring over note cards, I realized something: I like the subjunctive. It’s cool as hell!
First of all, it allows you to talk about actions that exist only in “the twilight zone”, as one favorite teacher puts it - actions that aren’t part of reality. It’s a bit like the place through the looking-glass, or Narnia, or Middle Earth.
Secondly, there’s that wacky conjugation scheme: take all the verb forms you already know, and just switch the last “a” and “e” (or “i”). It’s so simplistic and nutty that I find it hard to believe that it arose organically over thousands of years of language development. I have suspicions that a bunch of Spaniards got together over their beer mixed with lemondade, or some other bizarre thing they like to drink, and amid lots of laughter decided that there should be a “trippy” verb tense, in which all the normal spellings are switched just slightly enough to be kind of weird.
Probably that didn’t happen. But something interesting and quirky happened as the language was developing to cause Spanish to use the subjunctive the way it does, that to me points to a part of the human brain that I like.
Isn’t it beautiful? I’m thinking of buying it.
I was looking at t-shirts in the local San Francisco de Assis supermarket here in Playa del Carmen, and found some really funny messages in English printed on them.
I totally understand not having command of a second language. But if I were going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to have cool, clever phrases formatted by graphic artists and printed on t-shirts, I would at least have someone with more than a complete-beginner ability in the language check out the text.
Here are several of the texts. I wrote them down verbatim with the exact spelling, punctuation, etc. Keep in mind - these were in English on the t-shirts. There’s no translation involved here.
“Beautiful Butterflies. You can choose your favorite kind. Because they worth it. They’re so pretty. That’s why I wanna do it.”
What the hell? What were they even trying to say?
“Jeans Enternational. Girls sweet joung.”
Kind of creepy.
“High high high lady high. New attractive lady attractive attractive attractive girl attractive.”
I should have bought that one. :-)
