babies, the beach, & seafood

remember the toddlers at the orphanage who had hepatitis (A)? well, they still have it and are expected to be quarantined until at least april 2nd. it´s kind of disheartening to begin to get close to these kids and then suddenly just get cut off and have to work with a different group of kids every week (disheartening as in i didnt even really have any enthusiasm for going for awhile there).

but then, on thursday, they let me play with babies for 4 hours! oh my goodness, did i fall in love. i was put in a ¨(makeshift) playpen¨ with three babies who were teething and learning how to walk and falling over and making cooing noises and the little girl named camila even looked up at me and said ¨... mamá.¨ (then i realized that she hadn´t said anything coherent in the 2 hours i´d been with her and that none of the other babies had said real words and i hoped to god it wasn´t her first word because i definitely should´ve gotten more excited than i did!) normally i´d be completely overwhelmed by being alone with 3 dependent babies, but it was a blast! we played with balls and sang barney songs (in spanish, i rock) and played patty cake and did tons of other fun things. when i laid 2 of them down for naps, i was given two more babies to care for (these ones with obvious developmental delays, but they were muuuuch younger). i had to feed them and give them medicine (apologizing profusely - cough medicine tastes awful!) and was totally mommy-like.

i read the case summary of one of the little boys, miguel, and it broke my heart. he was put into the orphanage for protection (& he´s only 13 months old) and is in serious need of hug therapy and has a lot of development delays. he´s amazingly happy, refuses to go down for naps, and yes, he loves hugs. if you hold your arms out to him, he´ll crawl slowly over to you and then crawl up into your lap and put his arms around your neck and then you can hold him. basically i made sure that every baby got at least 20 minutes of hug / hold time while i was there. when i left, miguelito cried forever (forever as in i laid him down and then tried to comfort him for 20 minutes before leaving). this was also heartbreaking, because i feel like i´m going to be abandoning them in may. oy. anyway, i go back tomorrow and i´m super thrilled about playing with them again!

i´m currently reading about baby care on wikipedia (because i can´t seem to remember anything i´ve ever learned about this stuff!). any tips, mothers?

moving on to the weekend...

veracruz was estupendo! i slept a good chunk of the drive there (we left the udla at 6am!), but when i woke up we were driving through coffee country. big smiles! mountains upon mountains covered in banana trees with coffee beans being shade-grown beneath them. i wanted so badly to ask sally if we could pull the bus over, have every person pick a random house, and then go drink coffee with the campesinos and get to know them. in our VU sociology class, we´re reading a book about rural poverty, but we don´t actually get to have any interactions with the rural poor of mexico really. in that way, this is a very different experience than my other travels to latin america. oh and i forgot to mention that the final 40 minutes of driving there was right up the coastline. b-e-a-utiful!!!

our first stop was at the ruins of el tajín, which have tons of asian features. the ruins are very unique from anything else in mexico, but that´s what i was expecting: i´ve always been told that the structures on the gulf coast are very different than those we´re used to in central mexico. in tajín, we realized we were on the coast and were shocked by the wall of humidity and heat as soon as we exited the bus. it was fabulous and my hair curled ... a bit too much.

the first day / night was spent in the small fishing town of tecontlutla (i think?), where our hotel overlooked the beautiful beautiful gulf of mexico. i forgot to bring my bob marley cd, which was very disheartening. this was the first time i´d ever had a view from my hotel overlooking the water and it was superb! we slept with the windows open, por supuesto, and listened to the waves crashing in all night long. if i would´ve been smart, i would have set my alarm much earlier than i did to see the sun rise. no importa, i still got to sit outside and let my hair dry in the ocean air (read: curl lots) and read my book that morning. breakfast involved veracruz´s famous corn patties with salsa and cheese on top (yum + healthy) and cajun spiced beans! oh, i still love this food.

lunch was at a restaurant on the rio tecontlutla. (about 25 meters away, it ran into the ocean.) as an appetizer, they served us seafood salad with totopos (taco chips). it was divine - especially with lime squeezed on top, which is the only way i eat anything anymore. my meal was disappointing (except for the black beans and rice!!!), so i mainly ate the seafood salad.

after lunch we went on a boatride on the river to see all the native wildlife. this included seagulls (welcome to valpo?), blue herons, big seaturtles, regular-sized homer-turtles, crabs (causing us to sing ¨under the sea¨ from little mermaid), and sharks (they had already been fished and were laying in the back of a truck). then we went into a grove of mangroves, which was something straight out of ¨the notebook¨ or ¨the little mermaid.¨ our capitán let us climb around on the mangrove roots for awhile. in flipflops? yeah, fue una aventura!

beachtime came in the evening. kelly and i went for a run / beachcombing for shells. the water was un poco chilly but amazing nonetheless. then the sun went down and we headed back to the hotel pool for awhile.

dinner was comida corrida, from a vendor on the zócalo. the place we went had nothing but beef and pork (seriously?!), so i had to go to another place, get a quesadilla (always made from scratch), and bring it back to eat at the other stand. awkward. the food was amazing, though. the green salsa here is so much richer than in the states. (except i think javier has it right.) i love it!

saturday we drove 2 more hours down the coast and saw a ton of historical sites, including the first indigenous town that cortes´s men interacted with. from the top (well, top #1) of this huge mountain, we could look out over the gulf and see where cortes´s ships docked when he first arrived. the mountain we were on looked almost exactly like the highest peak of sugarloaf mountain in rio de janeiro. lovely lovely.

the city of veracruz seemed very american to me. the materials the buildings are made of are very mexican, but the structure of the city (the streets, the tall buildings) seemed very US american. it was also swarming with tourists (aka i saw like 20 other white people), which was weird. i´m pretty sure the restaurant owners and shopkeepers appreciated us a bit, since we were gringos who actually spoke spanish. lunch was on the zócalo, where we ate at a seafood restaurant. i had crab tostadas, which were absolutely delicious. i´ve never been a seafood person but i enjoyed the experience this trip!

we spent the late afternoon (lunch was at 4. did i mention the different eating hours here? lunch is 2 or 3 or 4 and dinner is 7 or 8 or 9 or maybe 10:30 like last night...) wandering around the boardwalk and eating shaved ice covered in syrup and chili powder. mine was guanábana flavor... a very yummy amazing tropical fruit. i´m in love with everything coastal and i absolutely must live on a coast in the near future.

while i´m thinking about it, veracruz reminded me alot of saint augustine, FL, probably because it´s so colonial. the boardwalk area reminded me of beirut (syriana-style), however, because of all the oil tankers docked there. it´s definitely an oil town, and the pemex headquarters are right there on the coast. i´m sure there´s a beach somewhere, but the entire coastline by our hotel was filled with oil oil and more oil. very different. (and it reminded me of matt weber, of course, with his plot involving oil ships and what he considers to be ¨ghandian¨ methods of conflict resolution...)

leah and i slept 11 hours on saturday night on accident. what started as a nap at 8:30 pm continued until 7:45 am. whoops!i had some really random dreams involving the red hot chili peppers and leah leaving for breakfast without me. however, i made it to breakfast, which was at a famous restaurant that serves the richest cafe con leche you can ever imagine. pre-sugared, which reminded me of nica. they are also famous for their black bean / scrambled eggs. yummy!!!!

the rest of the day was spent at small historical sites (forts and old jails and looking at gold that was found in shipwrecks off the coast and whatnot) and then we headed back to puebla, where it was chilly. boo. it was amanda´s 20th birthday, so we went out to dinner to celebrate. i´m going back to the coast (the pacific coast) on sometime early saturday. we have a very long 15 hour busride from puebla to get there.

oooooh, the fun times! :)