Mexico Medical Student |

Sorry for being late posting, but as soon as we got back, I had to massively study for a physio exam on cardiac physiology. I hadn’t studied pretty much anything since Thursday night, so I was a bit rusty, but I figured rusty was all it would be. It wasn’t until I was well into studying that I realized, “Hey, I don’t remember seeing that!” and other such confidence uninspiring thoughts. Sooo…..here I am, two days later, trying to catch up with everything, so this will be long, but hopefully worth it. Pull up a beer, a chair or whatever.

Friday: Halo tournament. This was a BLAST! There were I think 12 people and we were split up among 4 XBoxes (and XBox 360s for a couple of lucky classmates) in three different rooms. I learned that my ADD is alive and well, thank you, since It’s damn near impossible to keep track of 6 teammates much less them and the other team in games like Capture the Flag. Slayer, or simply, “Red team kills Blue team and vice versa” is about all I can handle. I play the hell out the single player game, but multi-player is a different animal and I often have not the stamina for watching out for everything all the time.

Saturday: WAY late start to San Miguel de Allende after dropping of Lola at J’s (Thanks again!) and tending to last-minute affairs. Traveling through Leon was mostly autopista (toll roads that are much better, comparable to US highways usually) and uneventful, and we proceeded to Guanajuato. At this point it was dark and we had a decision to make: go the “short” way on the map, through Dolores de Hidalgo but have no autopista (we had wanted it to be light still at this point) or the much longer way, but have bigger, better roads. Being already late, we opted for the former.

Mistake. I don’t know exactly how long it is to Dolores Hidalgo, but it’s about 50km and took us over an hour, since I averaged about 30 mph. The roads were so windy, I don’t think there was more than 10 second stretches that I wasn’t turning the wheel one way or the other. Add to the steep grades and oncoming rigs on a two-lane mountain road with no guardrail, and the flexor compartments of my forearms were getting an extreme isometric workout. (Bonus points for integrating info from last semester…yay me!) We finally made it through, cursing the lack of info the map gave us (the State of Guanajuato has a weird habit of posting signs that say “Welcome to City!” and it’s really another 5-6 miles before you see anything, which made us concerned we missed something) and for taking the wrong way.

When we made it into San Miguel de Allende we hit hoppin’ Saturday night traffic. I phoned my classmate and friend A. whose mom lives there I was in town and she said she’d meet us at a particular church. It took us 10 minutes to go about 8 blocks. We then took a “tortuous” route (I’m on integration fire!) looking for the colonia where the B&B was, then finally just hired a cab for us to follow. (walking distance to the center of town, my ass!) B&B lady was pissed because we arrived late and that screwed up her social plans. Um, sorry, I told you to go out and I’d call your cell…but nooooo..you wanted to do it your way. We then find out that she no longer serves bkfast on Sundays in spite of saying so on the web page. She seemed entirely unconcerned about the fact that half of B&B is BREAKFAST and anybody who knows me knows that there are two things I need in the morning: breakfast and coffee, in that order of importance (not in consumption). We were shown to our room, which was very nice, typical B&B style, except the bed was a thin mattress on a wooden box. Unfortunately, this is not atypical in this country, but after such a hard road trip, I wanted more than essentially a futon to sleep on, but my head hit the pillow and that’s all she wrote.

(continued later)