Xalapa and Veracruz

I arrived into Xalapa in the afternoon and met Geli there. We went back to her apartment where I met her mother and got to practice some Spanish again. I met her boyfriend Sergio and her friend Esther and we headed out to a local bar of theirs for drinks. Afterwards we got back to the flat and I ended up chatting with Geli until about 4am. The girl can talk. She can actually outgun me pretty much and thats a rarety but I enjoyed not having to carry the weight as normal. In the morning we grabbed breakfast and headed out around the town. Xalapa has a lot of nice parks and the university has been landscaped. Its in the middle of the cloud forests and the climate is therefore similar to that in the UK only with a little more mist. It was reasonably cold and wet for all of the time we were there, with spasmodic outbreaks of sunshine. About halfway through the day the Canadians Mike and Sarah arrived to stay with Sergio and we had our group formed for a few days. Both Sergio and Geli were really cool and what had begun as a short one night stay became four nights. Sarah had a budget of only 50 pesos a day which was going to prove very problematic, given that I had failed to stick to mine and it was around 320 pesos a day. We all went to Sergios place and we watched Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny. It was a good night and Esther was also staying over at Geli's. They shared a bed with Geli's mum and I felt a bit guilty as I had one bed to myself. I offered to take the couch but they insisted that I would do no such thing.

In the morning we dropped off Esther when they came back from the doctors and headed out to I think Coaltepec which is a specialist coffee town. My mum would have loved it. The coffee was really good and so was the ice cream as the area makes very creamy and smooth ice cream. The town is pretty enough and in the evening we got a tour around the rest of Xalapa and the parts we had not seen. It was originally founded through four communities on the hill and there are still explanatory plaques in each of the burroughs. Sergio showed us the house he wants to by and we discovered a new word. None of us Anglos had ever heard of a culvert (but apparently its a kind of outdoor wash basin). In the evening I played Wii for the first time and sucked awfully at the baseball. Fucking Yankee sports. I did ok at the bowling and boxing. I even managed to win one tennis game. That thing can actually keep you quite fit for a computer game. Afterwards we went to karaoke and had the whole place to ourselves. We must have sung about 40 songs between 4 of us, as Sarah only sang 3. We did a marvellous rendition of Everybody by the Backstreet Boys that has its own video and will apparently be up on youtube. It was here we decided to form our own boyband called Globe. According to Sarah I was the jock (great lol), Sergio the bad boy and Mike the sensative one. So all we needed was the closet homosexual and the irrelevant fifth member. Geli reckoned she could find them for us and we were off and running. I even tried some of my new found poetical songwriting skills on Gelis wall. She makes every guest write something and sign it with the profession they hope to achieve, so she has NASA directors, UN leaders and many nobel prize winners (I thought this one had lost its appeal lol). Geli and I will form a power alliance between the United States of Europe and the UN. Me and her ended up chatting again till half four in the morning and she insisted in sleeping in the rocking chair this time. I dont think many people got sleep as we were all blitzed the next morning.

The following day the lock broke on the door and Geli and Sergio were trapped outside for about half an hour before my deep sleep eventually woke up and let them in. We all headed down to the anthropology museum with the big Olmec heads, which Tim has informed he has tagged with my name lol. There were deformed and crushed skulls and an assortment of artefacts from the Gulf Coast that were really interesting, though the Spanish on the exhibits was more complex than on those in Mexico City. It also had a scale model of El Tajin and I though that maybe I should have gone there after all, but it was too late now. Sergio and Geli pointed out that it was quite late to head to Veracruz and we should stay another night, so we grabbed some Chinese and later some Tamales and played a bit more Wii. Geli's mum had a guest who gave me a list of Latin American authors and books I should read as I head south. May well do that so I gain a ood undertstanding. It was a really fun time and hopefully Geli and Sergio will come and visit. In the morning I showed them the option of teaching Spanish abroad and she said both of them and her mum would probably be interested. Though she was determined to go off to the Ukraine for 5 years to study as all of them were Physics majors.

We said goodbye at the bus station and I headed with the Candians to Veracruz. They were searching on the Woofing project for an organic farm to work for, but were gaving no luck. One of the phone numbers was wrong and I hacked it online (a skill I learnt at AIB to find x-directory numbers) and Mike rang them. It looked promising but his credit ran out. In search of more crdit most places were sold out. Eventually one Oxxo had some and just as he made the call a truck drove by with a megaphone drowning out the call. Despite all this they managed to secure some work on a farm nearby and Peter had arrived in Veracruz. Not sure what happened to him and obviously the Canadians now stayed. Veracruz was a port town similar to Mazatlan and I realised I was not bothered with coastal towns. One thing they have in common though is skankier women lol. We walked up to the Zocalo and around a fort. We grabbed lunch in a restaurant that was someones house, with the toilet in a shower. The food was great though and for all 3 of us it was cheaper than one course on the waterfront. We went to the Aquarium and spent the day chatting. The aquarium is cool and has manatees as well as open tanks and birds allowed to fly free which was interesting. They also have a feeding tank which you pay to descend in, but we saw it from the sidelines. It seems the sharks are quite graceful and eat off a stick like we would devour cheese and pineapple sticks. The barracudas are viscious however and tear at it. Would not want to be bitten by one of them. They would not give us a discount in the hotels for the Canadians and we somehow missed one of the hotels. Probably because of one of the billboards that was rather distracting lol. In the evening we met Eyleen and her friends and went drinking on the man zocalo. We got hawked by all sorts of salesmen, but we had a really fun time and it was just a shame it was only for a couple of hours. I should maybe have stayed but I was struggling for time on my way down to Guatemala. I got to practice a little bit more of my shonky Spanish and it was becoming second nature for the basic stuff but I need to step it up. The Veracruz water was not overly healthy on a sidenote, but you can see at least three oil rigs off the coast and I think they are the first ones I have ever seen. I said goodbye to everyone, did not see Peter and settled in for a night bus down to Oaxaca.