Firsts

Life is starting to settle into a routine for me, so while last week everything was a first time Mexico occurrence, now the new experiences are a little less frequent. Here are a few recent ones.

First Mexican haircut: My confidence in my ability to communicate was seriously put to the test when I sat down in the chair in front of Alfonzo, a three hundred pound man with impeccable fingernails, and the familiar buzz of hair clippers filled the room. He asked me how I wanted it, and in my broken Spanish I tried my best to tell him my simple vision for my haircut: 1cm 3.7 mm on the sides with a gradual grade of 17% up to the top hairs, which should be sheared to a length of 2 cm 3.8 mm, and a Nike swoosh shaved into the back. He went to town for a solid thirty minutes while I watched aerosmith music videos on VH1. At the conclusion of my cut, he insisted upon my looking at my own head in two mirrors for a solid five minutes while he asked me questions about his work, which I approved of from the start. Then told me it would be 70 pesos. I gave him a 100 peso bill. Then he gave me 50 pesos in change. Maybe he noticed that I noticed his nails...?

First house party: La casa azul, the house I moved into, is notorious for being a party house. Everyone kept warning me about this, imploring me to reconsider living there, at which point I would tell them that I am in a fraternity, and they would laugh, be surprised, and ask me if I had to drink anyone's spit at any point. The house has room for 12 and has always had only international students living there. Right now, there's four of us living here, which makes for quite the awesome deal as I have two toilets, two sinks, and three showers all to myself. The party last night consisted of lots of Tecate, more bottles of cheap tequila than I care to think about right now, a horrifyingly bad mix of french techno music, mexican ranchero, Spanish language rap, and lil wayne, and total and complete destruction of la casa azul. When I was cleaning up this morning I discovered that Mexicans are the absolute worst about finishing their beers. There were more dead soldiers than the day after Antietam, and I had to pour them all out, pledgeship style. I also found four french people passed out in a twin bed - something quite impressive in itself.

First time I spoke in class: This was big for me. Apart from having to say my name, where I am from, and why I took the class I was in on the first day, Thursday marked the first time I have ever sat through a class discussion and not said anything. Its harder to be opinionated in Spanish. I generally refrain from speaking in class in order to maintain my bay-boy image and avoid being labeled a gringo because, surely, the moment I speak people will get it. In my last class of the day, aka the last hour and a half of silence I would have to endure, the opportunity presented itself to answer a question in three words, so I decided to pounce. I ran through what I was going to say 3-4 times in my head to make sure it flowed well and then I pulled the trigger. "Es muy internacional," I announced, in the best Spanish I could muster. The professor said nothing at first, and I sat, sweating, in silence waiting for some validation or rejection of my comment. Finally, after what seemed like years, the professor opened his mouth to say "que?". I had to repeat myself, which was disheartening.