and since you are all wondering, yes, i did catch the score of the hokies dismantling of the lowly tarhoos. i like that combination. tarheels, wahoos, tarhoos.

i had a killer time in veracruz this weekend. i will write all about it and show pictures later this week, but i am dead tired right now (we got back to juchitan at 4:45am and back to ole ixtepec after 5:15, so i had about an hour of sleep after a fairly restless night on the bus and i am zoning out).

but i want to share a little story. this country is full of construction. everywhere you look there is a new building going up, while one right beside it is taken over by weeds and the roaming packs of dogs. the same is true on our uni campus. they are constantly building something, even though there are four buildings that as of now have absolutely no use whatsoever. the big thing is making concrete and brick sidewalks. they start a new one every two weeks or so (keep in mind the uni is less than 4 years old so everything is still in progress) and about a month or so later they finish one. that´s right, they start more before they finish one.

so as i have a little experience with concrete, i started chatting with the workers today after my class. in broken conversation i explained i had worked with concrete and we discussed drying times in the usa and here in mex. at some point in the conversation i said something which gave them the impression that i really liked working with concrete. they handed me a sledge hammer.

you see, in their haste, this is a joke really, nothing is done quickly, they forgot to leave an opening for one sidewalk to join another. so they were working with sledge hammer and sometimes a little chisel to wear away the concrete and expose the rebar (they make very neat and tight boxes, no slop in the reinforcement department, and i must say take great care in this part of their work). so as i watched them slowly tear down what they had spent weeks digging by hand, measuring over and over, painstakingly mixing concrete in a barrel and carrying 150 yards, i realized something about this university in general.

no one thinks too far in advance here. teachers get 6 months contracts and then dont know if they will get another one until one month or so before the next semester begins. there is so much pressure to produce that no one really pays attention to where previous funds have been directed. blatantly attempting to create some image of perfection, truly, the campus is immaculate (people spend afternoons picking little tiny weeds from between the tiles in walkways) and spending little time on the maintenance, other than the plants, of its investments, the school spends two months replacing a roof on the bathrooms that they built just two years ago because the tejas (these are the little curved orange colored stone tiles you seen in many houses in florida and of the ¨southwest style,¨ and as someone recently exlpained to me, this is also the origin of the state texas. on a tangent apart: nevada means snowfall; colorado, means redish earth, arizona means arid zone, all coming from spanish words. interesting? maybe not, but i thought so) were shoddy and leaked. then you have the nice bathrooms in my building that have never been used because the building has no water. more to the point, they built this prison of a university in a place with absolutely no water supply. had they done more testing, they could have found a much better spot just a few miles from here....

i could go on nipping at the foibles of the uni, but it is pointless. i imagine that wherever one works there are these kind of problems, but anywhere that makes a professor buy a book for the library because she underlined three words, is ridiculous. my friend accidently highlighted the three words, nervously returned it (where the boy meticulously scans each page) and then was summoned into the warden´s office. though there is not a bookstore for 200kilometers, she was forced to find and purchase a new book. they gave her two weeks. freaks.

anyway, read and feel good about where you work. it could be worse for me, it could be a lot worse for you. this example is why my blog title has not changed. just when you think you can begin expecting more, you glimpse the larger monster hidden behind the blinds in the climate controled cockpit of a flying disaster. yeehaw. enjoy your ride.