Guadalajara & Tequila

Sandra came for her Spring Break, and rather than going to Cancun or Puerto Vallarta and getting shit faced and sun burned like most gringos would, we decided to go to Guadalajara, Mexico, the second biggest city after DF with 4 million people. We took the ETN bus, which is pretty much like flying first class. 

The Zócalo of Guadalajara with the iconic church. This church is super iconic for Guadalajara and taxi drivers would have just the outline as a bumper sticker, two triangles connected with an arc. People in DF don't like people in Guadalajara. This seems typical of any two big cities in close proximity: London and Paris, Barcelona and Madrid, New York and Boston, San Francisco and LA, Shelton and Olympia...

Mercado de San Juan. HUGE market with clothing, food, leather, house hold supplies, everything.

At the mercado, we tried the Guadalajara typical dishes, Torta Ahogada (drowning sub sandwich), birria (goat stew), and carne en su jugo (meat stew). Below is the birria. The goat gave it a very strong flavor, but I really enjoyed it. Sandra, not so much.

One of the musts in Guadalajara is the Hospicio Cabañas museum. At first we were like, "what the eff?" as there was a bunch of crappy modern art like these newspapers on the ground,

Or this guitar string nailed to a wall...

But then we got to the crown jewel, the murals painted by José Clemente Orozco who painted the walls and ceiling of a chapel. The Michelangelo of Mexico. The murals showed the history of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. It showed the Spaniards are robotic murder machines and was pretty gruesome. Sandra was surprised to see her country cast is such light.

This mural was painted on the interior or a dome. Therefore, depending on where you are standing, the perspective of the figures completely changes as different characters get larger and smaller and change orientation. Here the man/devil on fire looks like he is walking, whereas on the other side of the chapel, he is laying. 

Couldn´t resist

These murals were also done by Orozco, but at the Palacio Municipal, not the chapel. These murals show Mexico´s fight against Nazism. Also extremely impressive.

After feeling accomplished and culturalized after our day of seeing downtown Guadalajara and the museums, we went to Tequila, Mexico. We hired a guy to take us in his personal car. He picked us up at 10 am, and it was literally just us, him, and his girlfriend until 8 pm. He explained the whole process starting from the agave fields (below):

This one was new for me. Horse parking:

More agave fields. Plants take about 5-7 years to reach maturity.

To the Jimador. Yes, that is a brand of tequila, but it is referring to the guy who cuts open the piñas, or agave hearts, for harvesting using a sharpened spade. The spade is extremely sharp and the jimador sharpens it after every 3 plants or so. 

To the horno, where they cook the piñas with steam for several hours.

Ummm... I thought I had some more pictures showing the distillation process, but we started drinking tequila samples so... you can refer to my post from 2013 showing the process:

http://leroyinargentina.blogspot.mx/2013/12/guadalajara-tapatio-y-tequila.html

The proper technique to taste tequila is:

1) Absolutely no lime or salt. Sorry. This is to mask the flavor of shitty tequilas.

2) Taste a few drops of the tequila to get your mouth ready for the tasting.

3) Put the tequila in your mouth and swish it around for between 3 and 10 seconds, kind of like Listorine. The goal is to get it to touch all parts of your mouth.

4) Swallow tequila. Don´t open your mouth. Inhale deeply through your nose and exhale slowly. 

5) Open mouth.

6) Perform a loud Mexican yell. Aiii Aiiiiiiiiiii AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII (optional).

This sign says "Baby on Board", but then you read the subtitle "(but with moderation)" and realize that it is actually saying "Drink on Board."

Mural in downtown Tequila.

And eventually we got a little tipsy, and this photo happened. We only bought one bottle of tequila for about $12, so we didn´t go too crazy. Not like some of my friends when we would go wine tasting in Napa who would buy $300 of wine futures.

Typical market with spices in downtown Tequila.

Overall, Guadalajara is extremely nice, and it is shocking that I am the first Fulbright to have traveled there this year.

Cock Fighting

A few weeks ago a friend of mine went to a cock fight. He told me all about it and gave me his pictures, so it´s almost as if I were there. Mexico allows cock fighting and bull fighting as they are considered cultural heritage. All other forms of animal fighting or abuse are outlawed, including dog fighting as portrayed in the film Amores Perros. 

The arena:

The weigh in. All cocks must be weighed prior to fighting. Most of the cocks were around 1.5 kilos. Prior to fighting many of the feathers on the cocks´ back are removed so as to prevent over-heating. This particular type of fighting is not with razor blades, but rather with artificial claws. The fights can last from 3 minutes to 30 minutes. With razor blades, the fights are usually over within the first minute. 

Attaching the artificial claw. Roosters naturally have a claw here, but it is shaved off and then this fake claw is secured with wax and string.

Just as with high school wrestlers, the roosters are fasting prior to weigh-in  in order to make weight. Once they weigh-in, they are put into their cages and they go to town on their food. One rooster was given a hard boiled egg, which seemed to me like cannibalism, but I guess there are other things that are more appalling about cock fighting than the pre-fight meal. Again, this is all hearsay from my friend. 

So anyway, the birds get introduced to each other and immediately start fighting. It is the natural instinct of two males to fight when they are in each other´s presence. Similar to beta fish. The fighting technique involves attempting to peck out the opponents eyes, these are like your jabs, followed up with round house kicks to the opponents face with your artificial claw.

Jab

Jab

Round house

It gets pretty bloody pretty quick. The roosters faces are quickly covered in blood from the various pecks and round houses.

Round house

It is not uncommon for one or both of the roosters to lose an eye or both. In one fight, both roosters were blind and could not find each other. After a few minutes, the fight was called a draw by the referee. If an owner can see that his rooster is going to lose, he can throw in the towel. Often this occurs if the rooster has gone blind. The owner values the rooster´s genes enough that he prefers to keep his blind rooster alive so that he can still breed back at the stable. Out of the 6 fights, 4 were called off, and in two, the fight was to the death.

It is a blood sport. This is the blood from a rooster whose owner threw in the towel.

This fight went to the death.

While I realize I should be more appalled by cock fighting, the tradition, culture, and pride behind it makes a powerful argument, similar to how the pageantry behind bull fighting makes it somehow acceptable. The owners took great care and pride in their birds and meticulously trained and bred them. They had extensive records of the genealogy of all their birds. Fighting cocks are trained like athletes and had regular trainings with dummy roosters and plain old conditioning. One owner described an exercise he called rooster burpees.

Anyway, my friend said he won´t go again, but he said it was a worthwhile experience once. 

Why I am going to graduate school

There is a blog called Stuff White People Like, that has a list of 136 things white people like. The list includes things like coffee, recycling, diversity, awareness, living by the water, apologies, co-ed sports, taking a year off, grammar, soccer, etc... The whole blog is basically a complete parody of my life. Recently I found #81, Graduate School, which I couldn't help but share. 

#81 Graduate School

Being white means to engage in a day in, day out struggle to prove that you are smarter than other white people. By the time they reach college, most white people are confronted with the fact that they may not be as smart as they imagined.

In coffee shops, bars, and classes white people will engage in conversations about authors and theorists that go nowhere as both parties start rattling off progressively more obscure people until eventually one side recognizes one and claims a victory. By the time they graduate (or a year or two afterwards), white people realize that they will need an edge to succeed in the cut-throat world of modern white society.

That edge is graduate school.

Though professional graduate schools like law and medicine are desirable, the true ivory tower of academia is most coveted as it imparts true, useless knowledge. The best subjects are English, History, Art History, Film, Gender Studies, <insert nation> Studies, Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, <insert European nation> Literature, and the ultimate: Comp Lit. MFA’s are also acceptable.

Returning to school is an opportunity to join an elite group of people who have a passion for learning that is so great they are willing to forgo low five-figure publishing and media jobs to follow their dreams of academic glory.

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

After acquiring a Masters Degree that will not increase their salary or hiring desirability, many white people will move on to a PhD program where they will go after their dream of becoming a professor. However, by their second year they usually wake up with a hangover and realize: “I’m going to spend six years in graduate school to make $35,000 and live in the middle of nowhere?”

After this crisis, a white person will follow one of two paths. The first involves dropping out and moving to New York, San Francisco or their original home town where they can resume the job that they left to attend graduate school.

At this point, they can feel superior to graduate school and say things like “A PhD is a testament to perseverance, not intelligence.” They can also impress their friends at parties by referencing Jacques Lacan or Slavoj Žižek in a conversation about American Idol.

The second path involves becoming a professor, moving to a small town and telling everyone how they are awful and uncultured.

It is important to understand that a graduate degree does not make someone smart, so do not feel intimidated. They may have read more, but in no way does that make them smarter, more competent, or more likable than you. The best thing you can do is to act impressed when a white person talks about critical theorists. This helps them reaffirm that what they learned in graduate school was important and that they are smarter than you. This makes white people easier to deal with when you get promoted ahead of them.