Today I got up for a 9:30am breakfast. However, I couldn't find Javier, but ate some chilaquiles. After I finally found him, we had a breakfast of tamales & atole (hot chocolate with cinnamon, but really thick). Then Javier and I drove to a school with his photography equipment.
As we walked through the door, all they eyes of the students who were on recess in the courtyard swiveled around towards one of the tallest blonde guys they had ever seen. The 5th and 6th grade girls quickly grouped together, started whispering, and then giggle and screamed like, well, little school girls. Some of the boys were more daring and came over to ask me my name, and then asked me things like if I played basketball and where I was from. And they all wondered if Javier was my dad. Sometimes I said no, and sometimes we played along together and confirmed a father-son relationship.
Javier set up his backdrop in a classroom and took about 5 students pictures, and then talked to a bunch of other ones to have them ask their parents if they wanted pictures. Sometimes the pictures are just for having, and sometimes they are for the certificate that they get upon graduating from primary school.
Traffic was horrible on the way to the next school. Well, maybe we just had one bad incident. We were on a one lane only road that twisted its way up a hill, and evidently they were replacing a traffic light somewhere up ahead. Traffic was not moving at all for about 1/2 an hour, and we finally made it to a side road that we could turn off on and twisted our way around several roads. We were too early to be at the school, so walked to a nearby park. At the bottom of a path leading down the hill there was a small river, which Javier said used to power dynamos to generate electicity for textile factories. Now the dynamo building houses government administration offices.
Then we went to the school, and it just happened to be recess again (probably this is what we were waiting for). Once again I became a major attraction, and spent the next half-hour translating various words from Spanish to English and fielding questions. Javier didn't take any pictures at that school, but spent at least an hour talking to students.
After that we went to a taco stand. It was apparently an all-pork place, and by all-pork I also mean all parts of the pig. I had two pig-cheek tacos, and one pig-tongue taco. I also tried a bite of some other kind of meat, but Javier wouldn't tell me what part of the pig it was. They all tasted fine, but I still don't think I'll be adding tongue to my daily diet.
Then we went to the third school, which was more of the same. This time a lot of the questions involved naughty language and things like "King of Lice," which they promptly used on someone who had had lice earlier. (The joke is actually on them, as they were calling a girl a king. They didn't know this because in Spanish, there is just one word for both king and queen.) By far though, the best thing was when I convinced them that I had green blood.
That was our last school, and we went to pick up Julia at work and Javier from his friend's house (where he went after school). After getting Julia we went to the grocery store and got a lot of things, mostly for breakfast. Javier was not at his friend's house twice when we went to pick him up, and a neighbor said they had gone to Office Depot. So we raced over towards Office Depot, and just happened to spot him as he was walking back. I was pretty tired by that time, so slept off-and-on for the 1/2 hour ride home. I finished the night off by going through my e-mails (which really sucks on dial-up) and then going to bed.
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