And now, more

Friday was a working day for M, so I tried to get some stuff done also. I'm working on some technical stuff for CDM - moving to a different email host being the main thing for now - but I also found out that I'll be shooting and editing (gulp!) some video for them, which I've never done before. If you have any ideas, do let me know...

It was rough day as far as food goes. It may sound strange, but I had a hard time figuring out what to eat. I managed to find a yogurt drink that took the hunger edge off, but ended up walking around for a couple hours looking in windows, not knowing what was ok, what was not ok, and what…the heck is that thing?? Again, my lack of Spanish being a huge factor. Finally, faint with hunger and frustration, I ended up back at the office where a bunch of people were about to get a late lunch of tortas – sandwiches. Having eaten nothing all day, the sweetish roll with melted cheese, mustard and jalapenos was pretty much the best thing ever. And it wasn't fried, which was nice. It seems like everything is fried here. There's a general rule about what is cool to eat – packaged, peel, or piping hot. Of course, I don't think this includes street food, which has led me to another rule to add – portal. That is, if the place has a door, it's probably ok.

So far, so good.

Or so I thought…more on this later.

After the life-saving torta, I headed over to the Hostal Villa Colonial, the local International Hostel, uh, hostel to talk to them about possible apartment rentals. As I said before, the hostels are the places that usually own furnished apartments. The owner, Ernesto, is a really friendly guy who speaks perfect English, which was nice. We talked for a bit about what we're doing here, and he, like everyone we've met so far, knows about the CDM and all the people who work there. It's cool, because they all (hostels, hotels, language school) give discounts for people working there. He invited me to chill there anytime I wanted, to use their free wifi, borrow books from their little library and drink cheap beers (redundant in these parts) on their roof. I climbed the 5 flights to the roof to check it out, and was met with an awesome view of Zacatecas. Check out the pics in the link on the top right.

Hung out up there for a while soaking it in, and then headed back to the hotel. Right outside the hotel is a really nice park-like place (there's a theme here it seems – everything is really nice) and I sat for a while people-watching and relaxing. M called, and we met up with some of the interns for drinks back on the roof of the Villa Colonial. The interns are a totally cool group. There are some more interns coming, and a couple I haven't actually met yet. Then, off to dinner at one of the Italian restaurants. Pasta, pizza and caprese salad were all perfectly fine – the fresh mozzarella was actually one of the best I've ever had. Dinners here are definitely more extended affairs than back in NYC, at least. No one's in a hurry and it's all very relaxed. Food is shockingly cheap – dinner came to about $12 each including the wine, and this is at one of the nicest places in town.

After dinner, we did a little bar-hopping. Again, beer is crazy cheap here, and people seem to drink a lot more of it. One of the places we ended up is called Huracan. Seems that's the name of once of the great Luchadors or wrestlers. It was basically a shrine to the guy – see blurry picture below. There was something in the news recently about some "little people" luchadors that were killed by some prostitutes. There's a huge market for "little people" wrestling here. I think that political correctness isn't as popular here as in the US.

A couple too-crowded bars later, and we headed home. Back at the hotel, that massive room key you may have seen in the pictures decided that it was done working after 300 years or so of use, and got stuck in the lock. The front-desk guy got out his speedwrench (or hammer) and whacked away at it for about 20 minutes, finally ripping the lock apart, and we were in and asleep in minutes. Unfortunately, it was many, many minutes, again, due to the streams of cars honking, music blasting, whistles blowing and people singing outside on the streets.