Track day

Blogger is making me nuts. In "Compose" I can insert paragraph breaks. In "HTML" I can add photos. I can't do both in either mode, and I can't switch back and forth. Anyway, here's a photo from my track day at Oregon Raceway. If I can get things sorted out with Blogger, I'll write up a bit more. Right now, I'm looking for another way to host a blog online.

GoPro at the barn

I bought a GoPro camera at the motorcycle races at Laguna Seca last week,at a terrific discount.  Fun, but challenging to learn how to use the camera and even  more challenging to learn the editing software. 

For anyone not familiar, GoPro is a very small video camera in a waterproof case made for filming action sports.  I'm planning to use it on my motorcycle when I do a track day at Grass Valley in North-central Oregon next week. 

Here's a brief clip of Mary and her horse Woody, plus a few friends at the barn.  This is all practice.  It looks like Mary has helped me solve the problem with paragraph breaks and posting links in my blog, so I hope to be writing and posting more often to Midnight Sun.

Barn visit

Apologia

I have no idea why Blogger no long allows me to insert paragraph breaks, even though they're there in the documents I paste in. I'm working on it. I think it wants me to write the draft here in Blogger, which is cumbersome but which I could adjust to. Still, writing in Word then pasting into Blogger used to work, so I'll spend some time trying to figure out why it doesn't any more. In the meantime, thank you for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

Oh happy day

Yippee! We now, finally-- unless a future Republican Congress and President strike it down-- have a system of access to universal health care. It's an achievement that has eluded us since Harry Truman first proposed it sixty years ago and which has been in effect in virtually every other modern democracy in the world for decades. "Why don't you believe in America"? we should ask the Republicans. If all those other countries can do it, what makes us so dysfunctional? Well, now we're not. Obamacare is an unnecessarily complicated and often confusing law because it preserves private insurance companies, a burden on both individuals and businesses. I currently have a $13,000 hospital bill for a one-night stay which my insurance company is giving "further study." If they deny the claim, I'm screwed financially and will have virtually no legal recourse. As long as a national right to health care is based on a profit-driven market, it will be needlessly expensive and often punitive to individuals. But it's the best compromise that was available, and it holds out the hope that now that we've cleared the first and highest hurdle, the program can be refined and improved. I'm no lawyer, but I've wondered all along why universal health care is any different than Social Security, a system that only works so long as people start paying into it at a young age when they first begin working. We can't wait until we start thinking about retirement, usually some time in our fifties or sixties, to start paying into the system. If that were the case, people would wait until the last minute before opting in and Social Security would completely collapse in just a few years. The same holds true for health care. If the Obama administration had called the individual mandate a tax from the beginning, that aspect of the law would have been far less controversial. Ironically, Justice John Roberts went along with the tax argument even though government lawyers never raised it. Good job, John. I'm happy to learn we're eye-to-eye on this. I never thought I'd see a Black American elected president. I never thought I'd see a system of universal access to affordable health care in this country. Now, as the cartoon character used to say, I've seen everything. But then he'd shoot himself in the head, which I have no plans to do. I'm far too happy and proud to be an American right now to spoil such a lovely morning.

Obamacare revisited

Suppose the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate this week. The mandate requires that all people not currently covered by other insurance, usually provided by their employers, buy insurance on the private market. It’s the most controversial component of Obamacare, and by my rough guess, there’s better than a fifty-percent chance the court will rule that it’s unconstitutional. If that happens, Obamacare collapses. Without the individual mandate, and with the guarantee that preexisting conditions are always covered (a very popular component of the plan), there’s nothing to prevent people from going without insurance until they get sick, then opting into a policy. Young people especially believe they will never get sick or injured, or at least not anytime near future. But without paying into the system as they go, there’s no money to pay back to them if they need it. This is how insurance works, whether it’s a private insurance company or a national system. So, what to do if the Supreme Court rules as I suspect it will? Actually, the answer is simple and should satisfy even the most hardened opponents of Obamacare. We allow, let’s say, a one-year period for people to shop around and decide either to buy in to the system or to risk it on their own. Those who choose not to purchase insurance then lose the protection for preexisting conditions. This is the epitome of individual freedom and free-market economics that conservatives most revere. Once you’ve made the choice to opt out of available coverage, you lose the right to opt back in anytime you actually need it. Choices have consequences. Now we have what might best be called optional universal coverage. The system is financially sustainable and health insurance is available and affordable for anyone who wants it. The sad part is that we’ll still be seeing posters around town or posts to Facebook announcing pancake breakfasts to raise money to treat somebody’s nine-year-old girl who has brain cancer. This is the tragedy and the travesty of our current system, but now it happens to people who never had a choice. Under free-will Obamacare, it will only happen to people who made a bad choice. Or to the children of people who made a bad choice. It’s an ugly and cruel alternative, but it might be the only alternative we have. It’s the consequence of trying to design a universal health care system that is still based on free-market principles instead of the single-payer alternative that never had a chance in a Republican-controlled congress. And we can always hope that after a few more years, or decades, of pancake breakfasts, we might have a congress ready to support true universal coverage. In the meantime, I love pancakes.

Again with the almost-cancer

We haven’t made it to the desert with our trailer this year because I’ve been stuck in town with a series of doctors’ appointments and tests.  It takes forever to get in to see a specialist, even in ours, the greatest healthcare system in the world.  Resulta que I haven’t been able to move forward and get this thing taken care of, but I also haven’t had enough time between appointments to head south, even for a few weeks. 

(In fact, Mary and I made a break for it last Sunday and were headed to Death Valley for ten days or so, but at our first stop in Fallon, Nevada, we couldn’t get the slide to work on our trailer.  We decided to drive back home and get it taken care of at our local dealer.  Turned out to be a loose wire.)

Like my run-in with prostate cancer a few years ago, I now have an “inconclusive” test result indicating I either do or do not have thyroid cancer.  And as with prostate cancer, it doesn’t much matter.  Early stage thyroid cancer is almost completely curable, but if it turns out to be benign, they often recommend surgery anyway.  In my case, they’ll probably remove half my thyroid and biopsy that.  If it turns out to be malignant, I get a second surgery to remove the other half.  I assume there is no discount for the second surgery. 

Fortunately, thyroid surgery is considered minor and I should be out of the hospital the next day and back to normal in a few days rather than weeks or months.  This my doctor assures me.  Easy for him to say. 

This is all good news: the early CT scan and ultrasound indicated only that I had a mass somewhere in my throat, which could have been one of the bad ones.  I had to wait a month to see the first specialist, who assured me this was all about the thyroid and I could relax.  I managed to not think about it too much during the month, although I had to fight against blaming myself for my near-lifetime battle with nicotine addiction, which is generally summarized as twenty-five years of heavy smoking, fifteen years of non-smoking, and now another fifteen or so of occasionally smoking. 

Again, I blame my parents.

At any rate, the thought of losing my voice and/or breathing through a hole in my throat got my attention, and I think this time I can actually stay off the fags.  Thank you Jesus for nicotine patches during the rough patches.  Also, gum. 

To be honest, though, I did spend at least some time thinking that this could be it and asking myself if I’ve had a good life, if I have any regrets, if I could face this.  The answers were all positive, but then the question wasn’t yet real, was it?  

Is the sun setting on Midnight Sun?

 A few weeks ago I signed up on Facebook, mostly to keep in contact with some jazz fans and musicians I know electronically from around the country.  Of course, I also quickly Friended up with a bunch of politicos who mostly share my leftist leanings. 

I’m finding I love Facebook because of the rapid-fire interchanges and the frequent opportunities to jump into a conversation.  Most posts are links to something else on the web, much of which I find interesting.  I don’t really care what someone had for dinner tonight.  (I actually slow-cooked some ribs in my Crockpot with a sesame-ginger marinade last night, but I don’t consider that newsworthy.  Although, I must say, those were some killer ribs.)

The possible downside to this is that I haven’t felt any impulse to write more extended, thoughtful pieces for my blog.  It’s a tradeoff, I guess: I like to write, and the blog is a venue for getting published, although I’ve never had more than a handful of readers.  Still, that handful has sometimes been very appreciative, and it’s gratifying to spend a day or more on a single piece and then hear back from someone that they enjoyed it. 

In the end I suppose it comes down to what I feel like doing.  If I can say it in less than fifty words, it goes on Facebook.  If it takes more than an hour or so to write, it goes here.  Since I’m fundamentally a lazy person, I’ll probably be posting a lot more to Facebook than I will here. 

Sign up and let’s be Friends!

Keeping up with Spanish

No real surprise that I’ve found it difficult to keep actively learning Spanish since I’ve returned from Mexico.  I try to meet once a week with my conversation partner Leticia, but an hour a week is lame compared to the five hours a day I spent in class in Guanajuato.  Not to mention that when class was over—hello!—I’m in Mexico and almost no one speaks English.

What seems to be working the best right now is watching Spanish-language television, which is actually the place to go for many immigrants trying to learn a new language.  I can say that my listening comprehension has improved dramatically.  I thought I would never be able to understand much unless the speaker slowed down for the Gringo, but it seems that a combination of concentration and passively letting the language wash over me has its good effect. 

I try to watch one or two news programs a day, but my favorite two programs are ones I would never watch in English.  Caso Cerrado (Case Closed) is a mock courtroom where litigants come before a faux-judge and present their cases on any possible conflict they might have with each other.  These can be tragi-comic, but the program seems to bring a bit more dignity to the proceedings than some of the US programs of the same general format.  Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.

The other program is Una Familia con Suerte (A Lucky Family), a soap opera/sitcom with a great cast. Here I only laugh.

My comprehension ranges from mas o menos to nada, but I find that the more I watch, the better I understand.  Fortunately, there are so many Spanish/English cognates that I can often generally follow dialogue that I would otherwise completely miss.  I could never learn a non-Romance language, like, say, Urdu. 

The other good thing about TV is that it’s fun, whereas memorizing vocabulary and practicing verb tenses isn’t.  For now, it’s the only source of daily practice I have.  The other strategy one of my guidebooks to Mexico recommended—get a Mexican girlfriend—is not an option for me.  

Send the boys back

A few days ago I wrote a piece on the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq.  It was long, bitter, and angry and I decided not to post it.  But it concluded with “we told you so,” and it’s a conclusion I stand behind. So then I published it anyway.

Michael Tomasky has written a better piece on why the right will soon start to publish accounts of how we actually won, and why it is Bush who should get the credit, not Obama.  It’s worth reading here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/16/michael-tomasky-the-republican-whitewash-of-the-iraq-war-to-come.html

Or, if things go bad, it’s Obama’s fault.

Personally, I think the campaign has already started.  Iraq’s government is splintering, violence is on the rise, and people in and out of the country are talking about a new civil war.  And John McCain says its Obama’s fault.  He should have left behind a few thousand combat troops.  In another nine years, we can take another look.

Mary made me do it

I had actually decided against buying another motorcycle, but Mary talked me into it.

The week before, I had a CT scan to follow up on a chest x-ray my family doctor had done as part of my routine physical.  Also, I still haven't completely recovered from the horrible cough I got in Mexico.  Although he was “absolutely comfortable” with what he saw, he wanted me to have the more detailed scan to determine if I might have lung cancer or not.  He saw something in the x-ray that caused him at least some concern.

I was never too worried about it, though I certainly had it much in mind as I reflected on my twenty-five years of heavy smoking and the occasional relapse even now, twenty years after I finally “quit.”

Even when I started smoking in 1965, we knew we were at risk for lung cancer and various other life-threatening conditions, but I did it anyway without a second thought.

I blame my parents.  They were smokers, too, and statistics show that children who grow up in smoking households are vastly more likely to smoke themselves.  I also blame my brother, who conveniently left packs of Pall Malls lying around so I could steal them now and then.  This is probably why we haven’t spoken for almost thirty years.  He was really pissed off about those cigarettes.

I certainly don’t blame myself since I’ve always had low impulse control, which is not my fault.  The devil made me do it, and if I had to have lung cancer, I didn’t want to carry around a lot of guilt about it. 

Anyway, it was a tense week waiting for the actual test and then the results, and if I wasn’t particularly worried, Mary was.  Shortly after we got the good news, she said I should go ahead and buy the bike.  Might as well do it now rather than wait too long and have to put it on a bucket list. 

Thing is, I already have a large collection of things I decided I should do now, including my recent trip to Mexico.  The trick for us seniors is always to try to guess how long we’re going to live.  The goal is to go broke the day we die and freely indulge all of our big-ticket-impulses up to that final minute.  It would be just my luck to live ten years too long and have to actually live on my pension for all that time.  I’m doing my best to keep spending at a relatively high level so I won’t have to face that grim reality.

In the meantime, “no one knows what tomorrow may bring,” as the old hymn reminds us, and for me, that’s an invitation to live like I might die tomorrow.  Or preferably, some time ten or twenty years from now, but still with a couple bucks in my savings account.

In the meantime, “beat the bucket.”  That’s my motto.  

Welcome Home

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Iraq yesterday to say job-well-done to the last American troops coming home.  President Obama met with soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was warmly received as he thanked them for their service.  I can only add my own humble “thank you for your service,” though it always sounds hollow to me.  Only “I’m sorry for your loss” might be more empty and pointless to the families of the fallen. 

Personally, I prefer “welcome home” to those who made it back.  It was only a few years ago that a counselor I was seeing was the first person ever to say “welcome home” to me as a Vietnam veteran, and to my own amazement, I burst into tears.  Forty years after the fact, I’m not looking for any thanks, but it’s nice that someone recognizes I was even gone.

There’s a deafening silence on this last day of our war from the likes of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the dozen or so other neo-cons who pushed us into the abyss nine years ago.  No claims of victory from them.  Are they playing golf today?  Are they ashamed of what they’ve done?  “Possibly,” and “certainly not.” 

I was so amazed at the time that still so soon after Vietnam, most Americans didn’t recognize the same mix of outright lies and gross distortions of fact that got us into that earlier pointless, doomed-to-failure and far-away war.  Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations about “weapons of mass destruction” would not have got a search warrant from a local district attorney and it failed to get an endorsement from the UN, but in we went anyway.  I couldn’t believe this was happening again, but it was, and so few others seemed to see the parallels.  The press at the time failed utterly to report on the wealth of evidence demonstrating that the neo-cons’ case was a house of cards. 

But maybe not utterly, and maybe not so few.  There actually was a large and vocal opposition to the invasion, but it got precious little coverage and it certainly never got equal time, let alone a full hearing.  At least Oregon’s congressional Democrats voted unanimously against the invasion.  They had no effect, but it mattered to me and my friends and colleagues who stood amazed as the Bush administration maneuvered public opinion over the course of months to the point where they could say they had a majority of public support.  I have never in my life seen such a distorted and intense propaganda campaign.  At the time of the invasion, a large majority of Americans believed we had an endorsement from the UN, although the best Bush could patch together was a rag-tag “coalition of the willing,” many of the willing being tiny, weak countries who depended on American foreign aid and who sent at best a handful of advisers then pulled them out a few months later. 

Four-thousand, five-hundred Americans have died, tens of thousands seriously wounded, physically and mentally.  Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from over one-hundred thousand to one million.  In any case, lots and lots of dead Iraqis.  Are the Iraqis better off now that Saddam is dead?  Is the region in any way more stable?  Have we “projected American power abroad”?  What a total fuck-up, the whole thing. 

And still, I feel enormous pride in our fighting men and women.  They were over-deployed and bore the whole burden, about one-percent of Americans at war while the rest of us sat home and were never called upon to make the smallest sacrifice. 

To those who fought the war, Welcome Home.  Thank you for your service. 

To no one in particular, we told you so.  

The Tiger revisited

1967 Triumph Tiger 650

2007 Triumph Tiger 1050

Two weeks ago I rode my Suzuki V-Strom 650 over to Hansen’s Motorcycles in Medford to buy a new hat.  Somehow I’d recently lost most of my baseball caps and thought I’d get one with a motorcycle logo: Hansen sells BMW, Ducati, and Triumph.

I found the Triumph cap I wanted and also got into a chat with the salesman about new bikes.  I like the line of Triumph 800cc triples but can’t afford the entry fee, so I told Russell I’d sure like to find a used Tiger 1050.  Then I rode back home across the Cascade Mountains, seventy miles to my house in Klamath Falls.  I was cold, but I had on good gear and the roads were clear.

The next week I saw on Craig’s List a 2007 Tiger 1050 at Hansen’s for $8,200.  It was the only Tiger I could find listed in the region, so I thought I’d go over and take a look.  I took my checkbook just in case.

There was snow in the passes by now, so I loaded up my riding gear in my truck last Saturday and drove over.  After an hour talking to the Hansen people and taking the bike for a brief test ride, I bought it for $7,900.

I got a good price: the bike has 24,000 miles and is in exceptional condition.  It has hard bags, a custom Meyer saddle, heated grips, and Triumph tank and trunk bags.  Non-ABS, which was a demerit, but I loved the bike.  It’s general set-up is about the same as my V-Strom, but it has an engine that just rips and an exhaust note that makes the bike worthy of its name. It''s way fast.

About 4pm I started thinking about riding it home, and Craig said, “You want to take it home today?”

Well, yeah!

I’d accidently brought my summer gloves, so Craig loaned me a pair of winter ones.  I had no way to plug in my electric vest so he installed a BMW accessory plug on the Tiger.  I was wearing light-weight socks but I had some toe-warmers, which I put into my boots.  Then I was off on the exhilarating but coldest ride I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some very cold rides over the years.

I crossed the Siskiyou Mountains and headed south towards Mount Shasta, a much longer ride home but over lower passes.  It was almost dark and the temperature was just above freezing.  I was riding faster than traffic at about eighty-five, but I wanted to get home as fast as possible.  Up to now I was cold in certain places but overall comfortable.

Once I got across the mountains, I turned towards home and rode up the east side of the Cascades.  The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and I could tell my core temperature was starting to struggle to keep up.  Since this is a good road, mostly straight and wide with little traffic, I was now riding at over 100 mph in the dark.  I did see one deer but figured hitting a deer at 100 couldn’t be much different that hitting a deer at sixty-five, the legal speed limit.  I just wanted to get home.  I took my chances with the deer and the cops and was lucky.

I rode in after three hours on the road and headed up for a hot bath.  Despite the cold introduction, I love the bike, although it has a few issues to sort out.  Part of the fun of starting out on a new bike again is getting it set up just the way I want it.

This now brings me full circle.  My first grown-up bike was a ’67 Triumph 650, and after a dozen or so other bikes over the  years, I’m now back on a Tiger.

Triumph is now a completely different company as the old Triumph went out of business in the 70s but was  resurrected in 1984 by John Bloor, who bought the name and the old plant in Hinckley, England, which he gutted and refit with modern manufacturing equipment.  Today, Triumphs are very competitive with Japanese bikes and completely modern.  They make a line of retro-styled vertical twin models, including the much-revered Bonneville, but also make a range of modern sport bikes like my Tiger, an inline triple that is designed for touring but will almost hold its own against the fastest and best handling sport bikes out there.  It’s a lot more comfortable than a full-on sport bike, and it’s plenty fast enough for me, At sixty-three, I didn’t want to end my riding years on a merely practical motorcycle like the V-Strom.  I ride motorcycles in part because they get my blood up.

I know I’m going the enjoy the new Tiger as much as I did that old classic.  And now I’ve got the bike to match my new hat.  

In which art imitates life

Last week Mary and I enjoyed the Toulenc Trio for the second time at our fabulous local theater, the Ross Ragland.  I hadn’t remembered Toulenc from their first visit two years ago, but I slowly realized that I’d heard them before as the concert went on.  This is happening with my brain more and more, and I’m keeping an eye on it, so to speak.

Poulenc is a woodwind trio made up of Vladimir Lande, oboe; Irina Kaplan, piano; and Bryan Young, bassoon.  They’re based out of Baltimore and are more or less typical of what I think of as the first-rate second-tier musical talent we regularly get out our way.  Which is to say, for example, Young is principal bassoonist with the Baltimore Symphony but probably wouldn’t make the cut for New York or Washington National.  Still, to our rustic ears, you’d never know the difference.  In many cases, I’m not convinced there is a difference.

Poulenc started with two pieces from the late-Baroque and early classical periods. I listened politely but failed to ignite.  After intermission, though, they came back with three pieces from the 20^th century, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed: French composer Jean Francaix; excerpts from a filmscore by Shostakovich; and two especially wonderful tangos by Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla.  Lande explained that these are not tangos to be danced to.

After the concert, we talked with the musicians in the lobby and bought a CD from them, Poulenc Plays Poulenc, which they autographed for us.  I was especially interested in the amount of travel such musicians do, and Lande briefly rolled his eyes and said he was just back from a twenty-concert tour of Latin America in which he conducted Shastakovich.  So immediately I thought of Guanajuato, and sure enough, he had conducted there for Festival Cervantino.

Is this a small world or what?!

Regrettably, he said, he hadn’t been able to enjoy the city because he was off the next day to the next concert.  Regrettably, I said, I hadn’t heard his concert, probably because I was at one of the jazz concerts instead.  I really should go back one year soon and study the program more carefully, because every night during the festival there are a dozen or more events worth going to see, and it’s limiting to stick to only one genre.

Still . . . .

So for some reason I felt a personal connection to Lande only because we’d been in the same Mexican city at the same time, but it once again led me to ponder over what are the motivations and rewards to the musicians who keep up the travel schedules that are typical for these troubadours.  What keeps them going?  After traveling to twenty Latin American capitals in about as many days and conducting major symphony orchestras, Lande and his two fellow musicians (one of them his wife) set off on a West Coast tour for which, I learned, they landed in Sacramento and rented a car.  From Klamath Falls, they were driving the next day on icy roads to Moses Lake, Washington for another concert.  If you’ve ever been to Moses Lake, you might share my amazement at this fact.

I chatted about this with bassoonist Bryan Young, and he said some of their best audiences are to be found in the smallest venues.  He mentioned Coos Bay, Oregon as a concert they still talk about.  And I must say, they got a very enthusiastic reception here, although there couldn’t have been a hundred people in the audience that wintry night. 

I suppose people like them have to perform and people like me have to go out to hear them. 

Art is like life in this way.  It will do whatever it takes. 

Hogar dulce hogar

Home sweet home.  I'm back in Klamath Falls where it’s cold and dreary, with lows in the low-20s and another storm coming in this weekend.  Quite a shock from the routine mid-70s and sunny skies of Mexico.

Once the Festival Cervantino concluded at the end of October, life in Guanajuato returned more or less to normal.  By this time, I was hosting a bad and persistent cold and cough and energy was down quite a bit.  With no great concerts to tempt me out at night, I usually got back up to my house by mid-afternoon and stayed in until the next morning.   Mary was with me for ten days, and she went home with a cold, too. 

Still, she loved it there as much as I did, and was out and about on her own while I was in school.  She was also picking up Spanish at an alarming rate, mostly from her conversations with Blanca, from whom I rented a room.  They hit it off like old friends, and I learned that Blanca actually spoke just a little English, although she only spoke Spanish to me.   

By the end of week four after Mary had gone back home, I started to feel a little bored with my classes and the whole Mexico thing and was mostly just waiting out the time until I returned home.  How much more Spanish could I learn in a week, anyway?

Fortunately, my attitude turned for the better for week five.  November 2^nd is Day of the Dead, and the Mexican students studying English at our school made an altar for a secretary who passed away last year. [See below] They prepared a little presentation for the rest of us in English, and we in return did the same about Halloween in Spanish.  One of my Mexican instructors asked me what a witch hunt was, and I explained a little about the McCarthy era to her and made it clear that witch hunts and Halloween aren’t related.  I was proud of how well I did until I realized my last words, “no son relajados,” mean “are not relaxed.”  Oops.  I meant “relacionados,” but it was too late.

The altars and ceremonies are very formal, including, of course, the macabre elements of skulls and dancing skeletons that we Anglos find a little weird.  I can only say I thought the combination of reverence and playfulness was a refreshing take on the whole death thing. 

I took Saturday as an extra day to get ready and make one last, leisurely walk around the Centro of Guanajuato.  I was being more careful about what I ate for the last week, so I had a so-so lunch in one of the better restaurants.  For really good Mexican food, I had to go into the small, seedy looking cafés with usually only two or three cramped tables and just pick something off the menu, even though I couldn’t understand much of what I had ordered.  I never regretted a decision. I also never had any stomach problems.

Sunday morning was sad as I finished packing up and then said goodbye to Blanca.  Elias, a driver from school, took me out to the airport and we had a nice chat about this and that.  As long as a conversation partner talked slow enough, I could follow pretty much whatever we were talking about.  I still need a lot of practice on the real Spanish that all native speakers use among themselves, but even here I’m starting to make progress.  Soap operas and movies when I can get them are the best practice for this, although as I said earlier, I can only take soap operas in very small doses.  Still, I made a huge language leap in five weeks, even though my Spanish can still only be described as limited and halting.  The challenge now, as always, will be in finding ways to continue to study in a town that offers little in the way of classes.  I’m meeting weekly with two conversation partners, Leticia and Antonio, and they are very helpful, but it takes a lot more than two hours a week to continue to make progress. 

Flying out from Guanajuato, I looked down on Mexico.  What I know about the violence and brutality that are so common in most of the country was in such contrast to the friendly, genuinely happy demeanor of almost everyone I met or worked with.  I don’t feel any particular desire to retire as an expat in Mexico or anyplace else, but if I did I can’t imagine a better place to live than Guanajuato.  And yet, there’s that feeling that no place in Mexico can stay free for long from the kind of terrorism that has affected most of the rest of the country.  I can only hope I’m wrong and things take a slow turn for the better rather than the worse.

Here’s the most important thing I learned in Mexico:  Mexicans are proud of their country.  They have so many reasons to be so.  If I were Mexican, I’d be proud, too. 

A few last pictures

Highlights of my last week in Mexico include the Day of the Dead celebration on November 2nd  and my "graduation" from school last Friday.  Here are a few pictures.

Claudia and Edith award me my diploma.  Despite Edith's Anglo appearance and first name, all the teachers were native Mexicans.

My friend David, a talented photographer and filmmaker.  David is over 70 and was in Mexico for a semester to brush up on his Spanish.

My friend Mike, a librarian from Portland currently intentionally between jobs.  After a semester in Mexico, he thought he might go down to Guatemala to study for awhile.  He didn't seem to like the idea of plans, but he was sure he wasn't going back to the library.

Juan Carlos, who taught most of my grammar classes and who was even more fun than he looks in this picture.

Two burros just outside the door to the school.  Burros are still used to carry heavy loads up the steep streets, much too narrow for cars.  This load was a little too big for a single Mexican laborer, but I also often saw workers carrying up sacks of cement or propane gas cylinders which had to weigh well over a hundred pounds.

The altar made by Mexican students at our school in remembrance of a secretary who died last year.  Everything on the table, including placement, had a practical or symbolic value for the spirits of the dead loved ones

.
Street art produced by public school students for Day of the Dead.  Materials consisted of various seeds, beans, flowers, and dyed sawdust and wood shavings.  These were all gone the next day.

Ultimo dia

It’s my last day in school.  I’m taking Saturday to get ready at a leisurely pace, then flying out Sunday.  I’m a little sad about leaving but looking forward to being home.  I guess that defines a good trip.

I have more pictures to post up, especially a few from Day of the Dead,, which was last Wednesday.  I haven’t uploaded them from my camera yet, so I’ll probably only get to that after I get home.  And I’ll probably write up a post-op.

And then a few weeks at home and we’re off in out trailer for the Southwest.

Vagabundo.

Immerse or drown

Since a few of my friends are planning to retire soon to Latin America, I thought I’d write a few comments on what to expect and what I’ve learned about Spanish immersion programs.  What’s good and what’s not so good:

First, it’s going to be very hard to survive anywhere in Latin America without at least some basic Spanish. 
Guanajuato is a university town that has an exchange program with Ashland.  There are about 20,000 students here and all of them study English.  Having said that, you’ll almost never meet anyone who speaks English, and especially not in the places you could most use the help: stores, restaurants, pharmacies, etc.  Even more importantly, without a year or so of university-equivalent Spanish, it’s going to be that much harder to get started.  At my school, there have been to a number of students with no Spanish at all who take two or three weeks of classes then take off for several months or a year of travel in Latin America.

Good luck.

There are some negatives about the program that I’m in, common, I think to any program like this, and all of them structural.  You can start on any Monday and take as many or as few classes as you want, including private classes.  You can stay for only one week or as long as you want.  This is a great convenience, but it also makes good scheduling almost impossible for individual students.  The mix of students changes dramatically every week, and trying to get every student in the classes they want at the level they need is nearly impossible.  I didn’t want to take any grammar classes since I need practice in listening comprehension and speaking.  I can and do study grammar on my own, but much of it is more or less absorbed through the skin.  Still, most weeks I’ve had two of four classes in grammar, and again because students come and go, there’s no coherence in the classes.  One week we’ll study one topic, the next week another.  It’s only next week, my last of five, that I actually have the right mix of classes that I’ve wanted all along.

That being said, the staff is without exception excellent.  At least they understand the grammar they are teaching very well, and since all classes are conducted entirely in Spanish, it’s good practice just to be listening to the target language, even if I do feel that other classes would be more valuable.  Generally, I think I’ve made huge progress in listening comprehension and speaking, good progress in building vocabulary, and, ironically, probably little or no progress in grammar.  I still more or less guess when to use the preterit or imperfect past tenses, two tenses in Spanish when only one will do in English.  Ditto between the two forms of the very “to be,” where English gets by just fine thank you very much with one.  Don’t even ask me about the subjunctive, which is evil and put there only to discourage gringos from staying for more than about two weeks.

On the other hand, living in Mexico, you quickly have to learn all the other tenses to speak about the past, present and future, and then  the compound tenses, such as “if I had known blah blah blah, I would have blah, blah, blah.”  Or the almost impossible, “If I [future] blah, blah, blah, I will have blah, blah, blah.”  These don’t come readily when you need them, but in class where they are patient and wait for you to put a sentence together, you can puzzle it out.

Here, immersion means immersion.  I pass four hours a day in class entirely in Spanish, and during breaks the intermediate students like me try to stay in Spanish as well.  Living in a Spanish-speaking household, I start and end my day in Spanish.   There’s very little homework since most students are here both to study and to go out drinking, but I can spend as much time as I want studying on my own.  And I’ve found one of the best tools to be television.  I can almost completely understand some programs, such as those on NatGeo.  Last night I watched a program on modern ice breakers and had no problem understanding almost all of it.  Wow, who knew about ice breakers?  The narrators speak more slowly than normal and they’re trained to enunciate very clearly.  If only everyone would speak that way I’d be feeling pretty, pretty good (as Larry David says).

What I call street Spanish is a different story.  Outside of the classroom, people speak very fast, and in Mexico they use so many idiomatic expressions that even if you can distinguish individual words, you still won’t understand much of what they say.  As a simple example, “Es pan comida,” translates as “it’s eaten bread,” but idiomatically it means, “It’s easy.”  That one’s kind of obvious, which is the reason I understand it.  There are about a thousand more that are used every day that simply don’t translate at all.  I have a list of a few hundred in Spanish/English and English/Spanish, but they’re a lot harder to learn than simple vocabulary.

So in the end, there’s a lot of classroom and more formal Spanish I can understand quite well, but a lot more everyday Spanish that might as well be Greek. One guidebook I have suggests the only way you’ll ever learn real Spanish is to get a Mexican girlfriend or boyfriend.  That not being an option for me, watching soap operas or movies at least helps me to process what I hear much faster than I would otherwise.  Unfortunately, most movies and all soap operas suck, so I can only stay with it for an hour or so.   

Also:  Mexican Spanish is what we learn in school and I’m guessing what is taught in programs such as Rosetta Stone, but the language varies a great deal from region to region, even in the same country.  Columbian Spanish, for example, just drops many syllables, and you have to have a pretty good ear to catch what’s being said.   Still, with a little practice you can pick it up, and if you can say it in Mexican Spanish, they can understand you in any region.

Finally, this is a very inexpensive way to travel and study.  My classes are about $120 a week, and my homestay is $27 a day including meals, although I still eat many of my meals in town.  If I do it again, I might take a room in a hostel just for the little bit of added privacy.  I’m not sure I gain much from the simple conversations I have in the home, but most if not all schools can place you in a hostel of some kind for a comparable price.  The school I’m attending has a very nice hostel with private rooms and baths, and I’d be very happy to stay there.  It’s also close to El Centro, as opposed to the long walk downtown from where I live and the punishing walk back up the hill.  Since I’ve been fairly sick with a bad cold almost the whole time I’ve been here, I always take a cab back.  There’s also a bus which only costs five pesos, about four cents, but I haven’t quite had the nerve to try it yet.  I worry that if I get on the wrong bus—easy to do—I might have a hard time finding my way back, and the cab ride is only about $2.50.

So, bottomlinewise, this is a great way to travel and a real jump start for anyone wanting to improve language skills rapidly.  If I could stay a year, I think I’d be approaching a level of proficiency if not fluency, but that’s way beyond my budget and way more time than I’d choose to stay away from Mary and home.  Too bad, because this is a great adventure and a wonderful experience.  If I were planning to actually to move to Latin America, I’d definitely start it out this way.  At the end of five weeks, you’ll be a lot more competent in the language and definitely know if this is a place you actually want to live. 

........ 

Today is the last day of Festival Cervantino, and I’ll be glad when everybody goes home.  I’ve been to several excellent concerts, all but one free, but last night was the traditional every-kid-from-Mexico-City-comes-to-Guanajuato-with-a-sleeping-bag-and-a-lot-of tequila end of the festival, and the streets were una locura.  I went downtown to eat and quickly turned back to a Swedish restaurant that serves good meatballs and is almost always empty.  It’s a refuge when I don’t want to be in Mexico anymore, which happens from time to time. 

Then I went home and watched some soap operas.  

Mary arrived Monday night ten days ago, and I happily met her at the airport with a very bad cold which had been coming on over the weekend.  Despite the cold, we got out in the city a little on Tuesday and had a good time exploring the many little streets and shops, but by that night I was really sick and worrying about things like pneumonia. At the least, I was worried I’d be sick the whole time she was here and pretty much ruin her visit.

Instead, of course, she got sick too, so we spent our ten days together coughing and sneezing and hocking up phlegm.  Not that it slowed us down much.  Our only real concession is that we always took a cab  back up to the house and I never had a chance to watch her nearly die climbing the hill.

Still, we had a great time together even if we were only running at about fifty percent. 

While I was in class, Mary went out exploring on her own and met me after school.   We tried a number of restaurants, from fairly expensive to the most humble.  Generally, humble was better.  We also caught some great concerts, including a free one in a plaza by an incredibly hot traditional/modern group called Sol del Monton.  I’ve got the DVD. 

Yesterday was her last full day, so I skipped school and we spent our time downtown checking off a few of the must-see locations here in Guanajuato.  Pipila is a statue of a hero of the Mexican war of independence against Spain, and although his most famous exploit, storming the gate of a Spanish fort in the middle of town, is probably a myth, there’s a huge statue of him on top of a hill across from our house.  The view from there is even more impressive than from my casa and it looks down on El Centro.  Then we went to the Diego Rivera museum and from there on to a historical museum, including some pre-Columbian art.  Guanajuato was founded in the mid-1500s, so there’s a lot of history to cover in a few hours.

We also went on a tour last weekend to the pyramid at Peralta, about an hour away.  It’s not Teotihuacán, but impressive enough in its own right.  After that, the tour took us to the largest tequila factory in the world.  Interesting in itself, although we had to pass on the tasting room.  We miss out on a lot not being drinkers.

Today I stayed out of school again to go with Mary to the airport.  Because of security, I couldn’t go with her even up to the ticket counter, so we said a quick goodbye, and now I’m on my own again back in our little room.  I trust her flight got out okay and she should be back in Klamath Falls at 11pm local time.  I’ll send off an email in the morning and try to call later.  [She made it without incident.]

There’s still a week to go of the festival, but like the locals, I’m rather looking forward to its end.  It’s not hard to imagine how crazy it gets downtown with tens of thousands of visitors, a fair number of them students from Mexico City who come up to drink and raise hell, and despite all the great, often free events, it will be nice to have our quiet little city back again.  I hope to spend the next ten days really concentrating on my classes and studying in my spare time, though I’ll also certainly try to take in a few more events and do a little more exploring. 

Time has passed quickly, and although I’ve sometimes missed home or grown tired of living in Spanish nearly twenty-four hours a day, I’m already feeling a little sad about leaving.  I met a man at a little coffee house close to school, and he was talking obviously native Spanish to his wife.  And then he turned to me and he chatted awhile in his perfect English.  Turns out he’s a Puerto Rican now living in Denver, but he comes here every year for the festival. 

“It’s kind of addicting,” he said.

                                                        Picture of the Week

                                                      Harley riders are the same all over the world

If you had told me a year ago. . . .

that I would be sitting in an outdoor amphitheatre in Guanajuato, Mexico with an American classmate and two of my Mexican teachers listening to an absolutely first-rate jazz big-band from Scandanavia, I would have said,

“Really?  How cool is that?”

But that’s where I was Wednesday night for the opening ceremony of Festival Cervantino, a series of concerts, plays, and dance performances, plus street performers ranging from Mariachi to jugglers, that officially runs the last two weeks of October. 

Most of these could be considered world-class presentations:  Examples include the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, The Oslo String Orchestra, and the Chinese National Opera of Peking.  The Mexican National Opera is performing Il Postino, based on the wonderful Italian movie of the same name and written by the Mexican composer Daniel Catan.  There are a total of five operas, twenty-something classical concerts ranging from full symphonies to string quartets, and another twenty or so pop and jazz concerts.

Who knew there was a Norwegian blues band with an international reputation?  I’m looking forward to hearing an Afro-Cuban jazz band that’s actually from Cuba, and a variety of Afro-pop and regional musics from Latin America.  Many events are performed at the same time at various venues around the city, so there’s no way to see it all, but navigating the program is half the fun.

Festival Cervantino is the largest arts festival in Mexico, and I can’t think of anything of its kind in the United States.  Maybe New York City on a slow day, but otherwise. . . .

Guanajuato is designated a “Patrimonio Cutural de la Humanidad” by the United Nations because of its plethora of well-preserved and restored colonial cathedrals and museums, including, for example, the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo museum in the restored house where Rivera grew up.  (Been there.)  Magnificent paintings by both, but unfortuneately, there are no Rivera murals in Guanajuato.

So anyway, here I am sitting in the amphitheater back in the free seats, surrounded by mostly young Mexicans and listenting to one of the best jazz concerts I’ve attended.  I’d compare the band to Wynton Marsallis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.  The music is complex, technically about impossible to play, and a challenge to listen to.  Just my stuff. About a third of the crowd back in the free seats left after three or four numbers, but their seats were quickly taken by people who were waiting outside. 

The whole thing was magical.  How could a thing like this happen in Mexico, a country whose reputation now is almost entirely one of violence and terrorism, and how is it I happen to be here?  Life constantly throws suprises at us, and sometimes they can turn out to be among the best moments of our lives.

After the concert, there immediately began a long fireworks display, accompanied by very loud recordings of stirring classical music:  Handel, of course, and I think Brahms and Beethoven.  The whole thing was so spectacular and emotionally stirring it made me cry.  But then, cat food commercials sometimes make me cry. 

Afterwards, my classmate Eric and I went off on our own, and Eric, being a true adventurer, led me to another one of those crowded bars and restaurants I never would have gone into on my own, where he threw back shots of tequila and I, of course, had my usual Diet Coke.  We ate about a ton of tacos and the whole thing cost about four dollars.  I’ve found and been told by other students that the quality of food is usually inversely proportional to the cost.  Among the best are the food stalls in the street, and I’m still happy to report that I’ve suffered no ill effects to my digestive system.  I have a little cold, though. 

Did I remember my camera for any of this?  No.

If there’s a downside here it’s that my days have been very long and tiring between five hours of Spanish classes a day, trying to make it back up to my house for lunch with my Mexican family (the big meal of the day), homework (not much), and then back out again to explore and take in the various events.

Mary arrives Monday for ten days, and I’ll probably skip a lot of classes so we can get out more on our own and concentrate on being tourists.  I’ve held back on visiting many of the places I want to see until she gets here.

Enough for now.  More later. 

Saludos.

No, I don't ride a Harley

I've been making some format changes to my blog, something I've discovered is fairly easy to do and makes for a more interesting and inviting look (I hope).  I can't get it exactly the way I want yet, but I'm still working on it.

Since these are the first changes I've ever made, I got interested in my first post and went back and found it had the title I'm using again here. I still like the original post.  The only thing that I would add is that the best question to ask if I say I ride a motorcycle is not "What kind of bike do you ride?" but "What do you like about riding?"

 I notice that my blog is now a little over five years old.  It's a wonderful opportunity to write about anything I want, whether serious or comic, and I enjoy the thought that single-digits of people are reading me.  Actually, I can now track how many people are reading me and sometimes even who they are, or if they're only a web-bot out searching for prey.  Turns out I get a lot more hits that I thought, although most of these are probably the result of Google hits when somebody searches, for example, for Guanajuato.

Still, I get the occasional email with a comment.  Generally, I think most people don't like to add comments to the blog itself because, well, it's not their blog.  I feel the same way when I'm on other people's blogs.

I can spend a remarkable amount of time on one of these posts and usually I never know if I've written anything of worth or not, what poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "constantly risking absurdity" (in the poem of the same name).

"What do you like about writing?"  I'll have to think about it.  Back to you in five years.