Waiting on a bed

Satori, notes — Stephen on January 15, 2008 @ 10:12 am — 0 comments

Today I am waiting for a bed to be delivered.  I have been looking into all the mundane things that one looks into when one moves to a new place, except that in a different culture, these things don’t seem mundane at all to me.  Yesterday I took a walk around the neighborhood, got a haircut, bought a SIM chip for my phone, checked out a local gym and had a meal with my roommate.  Here are a few of the things I have noticed:

- Mexican mobile phone rates are ridiculous. In fact, they are the highest I have seen anywhere in the world. This seems mostly due to the fact of a near monopoly by Carlos Slim. There is also a highly confusing system of dialing between mobiles and land lines, and for dialing in and out of the country. It is also the case that sometimes the receiving party on a mobile will pay part of the cost of the call. Whew.

- I was noticing that there is a ton of beautification work going on in my neighborhood with respect to parks and walkways. When I asked Julio about it, he told me that the current mayor of Mexico City lives in this neighborhood. Aha.

- My ability to express myself in Spanish and to understand others fluctuates a lot during the course of any one day. Some people are a lot easier to understand than others. Pues, poco a poco.

Notes on Indiana: Separation of Church and State?

Satori, notes, the midwest — Stephen on November 19, 2007 @ 2:55 pm — 1 comment

Notes on Indiana

Satori, notes, the midwest — Stephen on November 17, 2007 @ 12:52 pm — 2 comments

As I will be back in the land of my birth and upbringing for the next few weeks, I will try to note what strikes me as different or unusual here. It will be as if I am a tourist (albeit one with 17 years of experience here). Here are a couple of things I have noticed in the last couple of days:

- It seems that everywhere I go, things are sold in JUMBO size. I went to get shampoo and toothpaste the other day and the only size was gigantic. People in the midwest enjoy value as represented by quantity. They are also clearly not as transient as I and so probably don’t worry about having to lug a gallon size jug of Head and Shoulders around from place to place.

- Seeing as this is November and we are miles and miles away from any warm, growing climate, fresh fruit is sparsely available and expensive. The other morning I ordered the “fresh fruit” with breakfast and was confronted with this:

I guess by “fresh” they meant “freshly opened can”. blech.