Back in Mexico

Ik-Kil Mexico—Friday, February 20, 2009

We had a great time doing unusual stuff today. We earned this pleasure by a bit of work getting here yesterday. We flew to Cancun, rented a car, and drove to Ik-Kil. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The map we received from Avis was one notch better than useless, and the Avis lady’s description of how to get onto our toll road left out an important detail that led us to drive all over creation before we finally got under way. We created some problems of our own too, primarily because we shot through the airport without getting any Mexican money. I really should have gone back inside when we circled back after figuring out where we really wanted to drive. I won’t tell you about all the troubles this caused, so you’ll just have to imagine.

Our difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that most of my Spanish language skills fled since I started studying Russian. I expect my vocabulary to come back any minute now, but it definitely hasn’t happened yet.

We did arrive successfully at Ik-Kil before the manager went home for the night, and he sent us to a huge and sparkling cabin with a thatched roof and colorful garden. It’s got a “king sized” bed, but the royalty here must be a little shorter than up north. Alla compensated by building an extension on my side of the bed with a luggage table and a pillow. We both slept very well and woke up only when the birds started singing in the morning.

Today made up for all of yesterday’s travail. We drove down to an archaeological site called Ek-Balam and bought a couple of admission tickets. As we turned to walk into the site, a guy behind a desk deep in the office asked us in perfect English if we’d like an expert tour of the site. He said that he was a leader of the archaeological team since 1994 or 1998 and he offered to show us around for a little more than $20 U.S. We’re really glad we said yes.

His name is Juan Canul. Juan warned us that some guests find him a little long-winded and he wanted to know how much time we had. Alla offered him as much time as he wished to offer. So he said to stop him if he talked too much. He did talk a lot, and I worried at the beginning that we’d be bored too. But Alla got right into it and started asking him questions, memorizing statistics, and egging him on. Our tour lasted two and a half hours. I gave him a 33% tip but I still feel a little sheepish about getting such a bargain. The reason he’s leading tours is that the government only funds archaeological work about ten weeks each year. He continues to supervise three guards and oversee the site and its maintenance, but he is seriously under-employed.

He read the hieroglyphics to us, corrected the misinformation we’d received in last year’s tour at Chichen-Itza, and regaled us with stories of which archaeologist made what discovery and when. (The Chichen-Itza misinformation relied on early archaeological theories, discredited by more recent research.)

On our way back from Ek-Balam we drove through a little town where we thought we might be able to buy lunch. A local police officer sent us to a restaurant we didn’t find appealing so we headed out and figured we might just buy some fruit to tide us over until we could get to a bigger town. Fortunately, Alla noticed a clothing store she wanted to visit, and when we turned around we found ourselves facing a tortilla factory. This place ground its own corn and cranked out tortillas. I bought a stack about an inch high for three pesos; less than 25 cents.

The still-warm tortillas tasted great and we were filling our faces with them as we walked toward the clothing store. We saw a meat market and looked in. Not realizing that they had cooked meat, we turned to leave. The owner called us back and said that some smoked pork would be really great with our tortillas and he cut us a sample. Wow, was he right. So we bought a hunk of meat and the owner took us back to see the huge smoke oven where he was cooking another batch of food. We sat on a bridge and ate our food with great pleasure. I think the whole lunch cost about a dollar and a half. It made our breakfast seem particularly ridiculous.

Our last adventure took place when we bought gas. The guy at the station engaged me in conversation and assured himself that I was a tourist. Then he pulled a little trick. I gave him 200 pesos for gas and then fished a coin out of my pocket because the total bill was 210. He pointed out that I’d only given him a five-peso coin instead of ten, so I fished out another five-peso coin. Then he pointed out that I’d only given him a 20-peso note instead of a 200-peso note. This was surprising because I organize my money by size in my wallet and I gave him the note at the very back of my wallet, knowing that I’d just gotten a bunch of 200’s at the ATM.

I drove away sure that I’d just let myself be cheated. Alla made me stop the car and re-count the money in my wallet. Since I’d been broke shortly before and had then gone to the ATM, I knew that either the ATM gave me a 20-peso note instead of a 200 or he had pulled a switch. Alla wanted me to go back, but I despaired because my Spanish is so weak. Still, she was firm and I complied. I asked the guy to re-count his money. He said simply that my 200-peso bill had fallen. I started to argue and then realized that I was happy to pretend to agree to his claim. So I held out my hand and he gave me a 200-peso note. It seems I made 20 pesos on the deal.

Culture shock

When I got home I experienced a bit of culture shock. About twelve hours after getting home I headed out on the subway to visit a friend who lives out of town. For those who know Boston, I was on the Green Line, which admittedly isn't our fastest. In fact, I found it incredibly slow and I'm convinced that at its top speed it was still slower than a Minsk subway train is running before its last car leaves the station.

Now let's talk about who was on this train with me. I felt that the only colorful clothes I saw didn't fit properly, and the few people wearing tailored clothes wore extremely plain and drab colors. Apparently you can have color or fit here, but it's unusual to find both. I'm going to shape up and stop dressing like a slob when I go to the gym.

Some of my return-home contrasts were much less jarring. My health club, for example, offers a dazzling array of facilities in a clean and modern environment unlike anything I saw in Belarus. And I sure did enjoy riding high-tech bicycle I keep at home. I don't know where I could have bought anything even approximately like it in Belarus.

On the way home

I wasn’t sure I really knew Minsk all that well yet, but as we left the city I realized how much I recognized along the main road leading toward the airport. My subway line runs under this road and I recognized pretty much everything all the way from our apartment as far as the State Library. I watched it all go by with considerable nostalgia and longing to return. Of course I will be back; I’ve already filed my application at the University.

Alla and I are trying to speak Russian to each other now. It’s surprising how much I can talk about, and it’s also pretty painful to struggle many minutes to say something simple.

Now we’re in Frankfurt. During the cold months there’s no afternoon flight to Boston so we booked a hotel here. When we emerged into the main railway station we saw vividly the scope of choices in the western world. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it except by contrast to the place we just left. We were amazed even by the variety of sandwiches laid out at a fast-food takeout restaurant. You don’t get nearly so many choices anywhere in Belarus.

We’re enjoying our little foray into Frankfurt. We found our way to a pleasant restaurant beside a church, and we arrived just as the church bells began ringing. I wonder how many bell-ringers it took to play the change-ringing we heard before entering the restaurant. All I can say for sure is that they got our attention and stopped us in our tracks.

Having gone to bed rather late last night and still awakened at the usual time, we’re feeling pretty tired tonight. This is probably a good thing because we guessed wrong about the room we chose at our hotel. We went for a room on the first floor because the upper room facing the quiet courtyard seemed small to us. Unfortunately, the municipal services people chose tonight as the optimal time to jackhammer the streetcar line outside our window. Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that the hotel has filled up and it’s too late now to change rooms. The woman at the desk assured me that the city workers promised to stop jackhammering after an hour. I hope they keep that promise. Looking out the window, I’d guess I’ll be wearing earplugs all night.

Cars per capita

I saw a news report today on an official government web site bragging that car ownership is growing and that Belarus now has more cars per capita than a few small countries in Western Europe. The article went on to project that at current rates Belarus would catch Germany in the foreseeable future.

This is not good news to me. One of the things I like about Minsk is that the streets aren’t choked with cars and the air isn’t particularly polluted. The city is served by an outstanding public transit system and I like the fact that so many people here seem to live well without cars.

It made me stop and wonder about goals in general. I wonder how often we set goals based on what we see working for other people without stepping back to think about the bigger matter of what works for us. Setting the right goals are key to living a good life.

Maybe I should have taken my friend Marc Wey’s course on goal setting after all.

Excursion to Polotsk

The University offered two free excursions yesterday, one busload going to Grodna and the other going to Polotsk. Knowing nothing, I chose Polotsk because one of my classmates had chosen it. We traveled yesterday and I had a great time.

I wouldn’t generally recommend traveling more than three hours to get to Polotsk. It’s a nice town with some excellent churches and an important monastery, but there’s just not enough in the town to justify that much travel time. I enjoyed tremendously an organ concert in a big old church built in the shape of a cube. While the organ wasn’t as big as the one at Philharmony hall in Minsk, it suited the space perfectly and I preferred this concert over the one I’d heard at Philharmony.

Our tour included a bunch of other good stuff, including a tree-by-tree narration during almost the entire trip from Minsk to Polotsk. I didn’t understand most of this narration, but was able to take note of a few specific sights such as the ski area they made by piling up a lot of dirt and the ski jump that reminds me of a high dive because the top two-thirds of it or more is just a ramp in the air.

What I really enjoyed about the trip, however, was touring with students from around the world. We had people from China, Finland, Holland, Iraq, Norway and who-knows-where. I really liked the Iraqis, and found them very warm and outgoing. I was a little apprehensive about them because America has managed to make such a mess of their country, but here we were all just students on a trip together. The guy from Holland challenged me a bit about his impression of Americans and then apologized for challenging me even though I thought he was right in his criticism. In this little microcosm, we were simply colleagues and nothing more nor less.

I wish it were so simple on a global scale.

Pilotka (Пилотка)

In class today I was learning how to use the fifth padej. This is known in English as the “Instrumental case,” and it’s used, among other things, in describing that at which somebody works. There we were with a grade-school teaching aid, a chart with pictures of a bunch of kids playing at various professions. My job was to say what they wanted to do when they grew up, applying the rules of the Tvoritelney padej (Творительный падеж) to the names of the professions.

I did OK until we got to the picture of a little girl sitting inside a toy airplane. I didn’t know if the word “pilot” would be the same for both genders or if a female pilot would be called something like “pilotka.” Elena started to think about it and then announced that the whole thing was pointless because there’s no such thing as a female pilot. Obviously this little girl wanted to work as a stewardess. I told her that we have female pilots in the USA, that I know one and that I want this little girl to be a pilot.

Elena was very amused by the idea and commented that this must be an outcome of living in a free society.

Rō’ger

We had a little row in class today. The teacher was correcting almost everybody about our mispronunciations of the letter “O.” The letter is pronounced long in a stressed syllable but it’s generally pronounced as in the word “pot.” I was reading aloud a story about a bunch of foreign students, including a Spanish student named Lolita. I pronounced her name the way that was natural for me, as we hear it both in Spanish and in English. That was wrong, of course, because since the “o” is in an unstressed syllable Russians want to pronounce it more like “ah.”

Wanting to be a little ironic, I said “OK, this is a Spanish girl named Lahlita.” Tatiana insisted that that was the only way to pronounce that name. Frustrated, I reminded everybody that my brother’s name is Roger. I’d already been schooled on that one in another recitation, when I gave a report on my family to the class. It turns out that in spite of what I’ve been calling my brother his entire life, his name is actually Rō’ger. The O is long and first R is rolled though the second is not.

Sympathetic to my frustration, my friend and classmate Çağatay took the opportunity to tell Tatiana that his name is not “Chagatai,” as pronounced in class (sounding a lot like Chug-a-lug), but something like “Chaatai.” I haven’t mastered it myself, but I always try to get as close as I can. Tatiana told him that given the Russian alphabet he had to be “Chagatai.” “That’s not my name,” he objected, now in English and with supporting complaints about an identity crisis.

I thought the English-speaking world was uniquely offensive in mis-pronouncing the names of foreign cities, but now I see that this may be a wider problem. Perhaps folks in Western Europe do fairly well at respecting local pronunciation, but it appears that Russian-speakers, like English-speakers, may tend to convert pronunciations of foreign names. I wonder if Tatiana is right about this. I wonder if I’m even right about my idealized view of those Western Europeans.

Sorry Rog. I tried. I think we should all try to pronounce peoples’ names in the way the owner of the name will find familiar, and I feel the same way about foreign cities. Apparently this is a little odd.