Friday 16 July

Friday 16 July

So I got up at 5:45 to go to the club with Olga to exercise. The drive was amazing as no one was on the streets at that time at all! We got there before they opened at 6:30. The Club was called Club Mundet. Apparently it is SUPER expensive (try 1,200 DOLLARS every 3 MONTHS!!) They have a very nice campus (you would hope). So Olga likes to warm up before her Zumba class at 7. So we went to the gym and were on the machines for 30 minutes. Then we went to the class which was a LOT of fun. I really enjoyed it (although my legs were already numb from the machines) All it was, was dancing. So I just decided to go for it and that just made it fun. The teacher was Mexican (obviously) so he knew how to pick good music. We just did different kinds of dancing but it was just jumping for about an hour. I really really enjoyed it.

To cool down Olga likes to go back to the machines, so we went back to the gym. I was very tired. We had an appointment to see an apartment at 9:30 and we had to take a shower etc still. Olga decided to stop at the super market for that days comida. That was exercise in its self because Olga walks really fast. I almost had to run to keep up. We finally made it to the house and got ready for the appointment. Polanco has a large Jewish population and the realtor that we met up with was Jewish. I learned that they do not shake hands. He said it was because of religious purposes. You learn something new every day. After we saw the apartments, Olga dropped me off at the apartment because she had to run errands.

Then Rosalia, Sergio, Jose Luis, and I went to the museum of modern art and the museum of Rufino Tamayo. I really liked the museum of modern art. There was one exhibit that was all about environment conservation and it seemed very similar to what Yolanda has been up to lately like with the campito. The we saw a whole exhibit of Helen Escobedo. Some of her work was very similar to that of both Yolanda and Jon Geiger’s work. A lot of geometric shapes and working with the light and shadow. There was one piece that Yolanda had even mentioned to me before. A whole wall was covered with the Styrofoam pieces from electronics. It looked really cool because then all the electronics were on the floor. The other exhibit was famous latin American painters. So I saw Frida Khalo’s Los dos Fridas, some of Diego Rivera, Siquieros, Varo, and such’s work. So that was really cool. I had previously asked Sergio to take a picture of me with my camera when we went to the Castillo and he was very impressed on how good it was, so at the museum he kept wanting to use my camera to take pictures of me (I think he just liked using my camera haha). But some didn’t come out very clear ;).

So then we went to the Tamayo museum. I guess they were redoing different exhibits so only one was open which was kind of like a sampler of all the closed exhibits. I was not impressed. I like art and such but this was just pointless. Maybe with the big name museum, you expect more from it. But they had one Tamayo piece that was a small picture of just a canvas painted with different reds. It looked nice but I didn’t see the purpose. But I guess it was his expression and this is mine.

We made it back to the house and Olga had invited her other sister and their friend to eat with all of us. So we had pechuga with rice. Olga had two different kinds of tostadas: normal and baked fat free. So I ended up sitting next to Sergio when we ate. I asked him to pass me the tostadas and I grabbed one of each kind. He told me to grab more of the fat free ones. I told him no thank you so he put some on my plate. (Previously Rosalia told me that I had lost weight since I have been here then she told me that I needed to buy one of the shape up shoes so that I would lose weight.) I had not mentioned my weight to them at all, ever. So are they trying to tell me something.

I helped Olga serve and then clean everything up, but after when everything was picked up and we were just sitting at the table talking, I half fell asleep. I was having trouble keeping my eyes open because I was really tired after getting up early, exercising, and walking around the museum. Olga noticed my trouble and let me go take a nap. I took a nap and then got ready because I was going out for dinner with Marisa, Alvaro, and Luis. They were late picking me up because traffic was horrible. We ended up going to an Italian restaurant just down the street from the apartment. It was hard for me because pasta sounded so good. I settled for a Mediterranean salad that had green beans, red and green lettuce and hardboiled egg and tuna. It was really good actually.

Marisa says she doesn’t like Quatsawhere-ever-it-is. I guess it is a very very small town. Only people related to petroleum go there. She doesn’t like going to the beach and there is no blockbuster or anything there. So she ends up working everyday of the week to make time go faster. Luis didn’t really say much. They were giving me a hard time about not drinking alcohol and not having a boyfriend. I don’t need alcohol nor a boyfriend to know who I am. They just laughed. Olga and Pepe went out so I had a key to the apartment. I watched a movie (while kind of falling asleep) then went to bed.