El Otro Lado

I am having a lousy day, which is probably proof that it can happen anywhere. Hay un lado oscuro, siempre.

I am tired of getting up at 7:00 every day and being tired all the time.

I have not had a shower in over two days because the water is all screwed up in my house. (Actually, the water is all screwed up all over Oaxaca. There is only public water available two days a week, and if you don´t have your own private cistern and/or a neighborhood well, that´s all you get. Which makes my two days without a shower seem like hardly anything to complain about, but nevertheless, it´s making me cranky.)

I have an enourmous, disgusting cold sore covering half my face, which is something I´m pretty sure I´ve only had once in my life before. It is hurting me quite a lot, and presumably is why I´ve been waking up in the middle of the night with low-grade fevers. Oh, unless those are caused by what I imagine is a spider that is cohabitating with me, who bites me to pieces while I sleep, and who is also making me very cranky.

Today, someone in a store gave me a bill that has a tiny tear in the center of it, the kind of thing that in the States we wouldn´t think twice about. But apparently here they ¨don´t like¨ their bills to have tears. This is the phrase I have heard, ¨We don´t like them like that;¨ hence no one will accept the bill, and how exactly do I argue with them about it? In New York I would just say ¨C´mon, it´s money, you have to take it,¨ but even in New York... if they really didn´t want to take it, what could you do? I am told that I can go to a bank and trade it in for a more aesthetically-pleasing, and hence acceptable bill. (In fairness to the small businessmen and women who have refused it already, I am also told that this ability to exchange torn bills is new. Until very recently, any torn bill was simply the possessor´s loss.)

Today I am a little lonely also, and feeling guilty about being away from work, and childishly resenting some of the representations made to me by my Spanish school prior to my arrival. My ¨friends¨ have all left town in the last couple of days, and the student population of my school has dwindled to 2. The city still seems crowded with tourists to me, but they say it´s nothing compared to what it was 2 years ago, before the uprising, and I guess perhaps my school is struggling a bit, at least this week.

On the other hand, in general, when I talk to strangers, they seem to understand me much better, which I suppose is ultimately why I am here. We´ve come back around to the subjunctive again, and this time I kind of get it.

I just realized that I never followed up about the saintly priest. Suffice it to say that I didn´t end up meeting him. I did have one brief adventure at an orphanage for girls, but more on that some other time. In the meantime, tomorrow afternoon I´m going to visit a preschool to see what it´s like.

I wonder what it would take to get the kids in Hierve El Agua back to school, and whether or not that is a feasible task...