Moving right along.

Waking up Saturday morning, I had a feeling something was, well, not right. That feeling was confirmed by the many trips to the bathroom. That pretty much set the tone for the day. I was having trouble imagining anything good to eat, much less anything local. It was starting to feel like a flu of some kind, but hopefully not a porcine one. The shakes, feeling cold and then hot, maybe even a little feverish. There was an intense weakness that was only exacerbated by not having anything to eat.

I had asked around for a local supermarket, and struck out to find it. It turned out the store was only a couple blocks away. When I went inside, I was much happier than I ever thought was possible to be about a food store. There were so many products that I recognized that I literally stumbled around, knocking things off shelves, loading my arms up with more bread, peanut butter and jelly than could ever be healthy.

Frosted Flakes, Smuckers, Wonder Bread, and Skippy – they saved my life that day, and would continue to do so for the next couple days. The store only sells dry goods, however, and I had to find a cremerie for milk.

After I scarfed down a couple plastic cups of cereal and some sandwiches, I finally felt slightly human. There wasn't much I could do except lay around and feel crappy. Maybe I wasn't totally human, but some sub-species of human that just wants a good slice of freaking pizza. Or a felafel. That's a strange craving I've been having…

So that was most of my day. Miriam was out and about taking care of business, but gave me a call that evening to see if I wanted to come to dinner. Again, I couldn't imagine eating anything but bread, but I just had to get out of the hotel room.

Short aside – we have been using our iPhones down here, thanks to some kind coders who have developed a way to unlock them for use with phone companies other than AT&T. We were able to buy pre-paid SIM cards (or CHIPS as they call them here) and pop them right in the phone. Works for data, email, everything. Of course using them for data sucks up the pesos, but that's the price of technology.

I met up with Miriam, Rachel, Jon, and few other folk from CDM (we spend a lot of time hanging out together…) at the Argentinean restaurant. Grilled veggies, empanadas, fried spinach balls (?), and some french fries were the order of the night. I was still pretty queasy, though thinking back about what I ate, I definitely should have been.

(damn, there's a lot of black-flies here – go away!)

I still had the chills on a pretty mellow evening, but hot tea helped with that. Like I said earlier, dinner is a long drawn-out affair, and this was no exception. Not in a bad way, of course, but I'm definitely used to stuff happening a lot quicker.

We had planned to hit up a club called La Mina, which is this pretty cool looking nightclub in an old mine under the city. For real. You take a train that goes for around 2000 feet (or something like that) underground, and there's a real club down there. Well, I wasn't up for it, so Miriam ran off with the interns for a night of partying.

As it happens, the line to get on the train was a bit long, so they didn't bother with it. Zacatecas is turning out to be quite a party town (7 universities!) and they had plenty of other choices.

I opted for a low-key evening with Tory (lawyer), Dave (husband), and Karl (a temp bookkeeper here for a few weeks), stopping for more tea at Il San Patrizio. Of course that turned in a few hours of hanging out there and back at their house.

Oh man, their house! It's amazing. This huge, beautiful place with a massive terrace, many bedrooms, and just awesome. All for around $400 a month. Back in NY, this place would be closer to $8000 a month, at least. For real.

Got home, crashed out and barely woke up when Miriam came in sometime after midnight.