Here, dudes and dudettes, is a summary of what I did in Mexico that I wrote to my good friend Kristi in an e-mail upon return from that glorious land of beauty.
Well, I recently got back from the good old country of Mexico, and I think you would have been very proud of my accomplishments in my first excursion outside of the country. Most of my time was spent teaching English words to an Argentinean named Sebastian, a lieutenant in the Argentinean military who wore purple shorts and was very found of loudly stating, "I am not GAY!" Other entertaining Sebastian phrases were, "Sorry please!" "For please!" and "In my country..." Trying to teach him to say the word "joke" was quite possibly the most memorable time of the trip ("shoak...choak...yolk..." - Sebastian).
Other times were spent (but possibly not in this exact order): sleeping on the floor of the tour bus after getting kicked off of the back seat by two guys on my team, downing three Mountain Dews within a four-hour period, asking the Mexican IHOP waiter what state we were in (after waiting 30 minutes for our food), playing a very intense, nearly two-hour chess match while being questioned on the game's rules by a freshman girl, acting very quiet and inconspicuous while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border (besides taking pictures of the very disappointing Rio Grande), drinking such items as Beat, of which a main ingredient is "concentrated Beat," and Nuevo Mountain Dew, which tastes not nearly as good as what we have in the States, barfing up Mexican burritos at around 1:30 AM, moving adobe bricks, fighting off a local stray dog who was wont to bite you ferociously on the ankle if you got him excited, desperately trying to remember all the stuff crammed into my brain during three years of Spanish class (and often failing to succeed), trying to go to the bathroom without a toilet seat, forgetting that toilet paper went in the trash can instead of down the toilet (and having to retrieve the paper already stupidly thrown into the bowl), keeping a journal which more or less flirted with the fringes of clinical mental instability, viewing the posters of political candidates, many of which looked as if they had recently escaped prison or desperately needed a good shower, using hand sanitizer at every possible moment, standing under the sun all morning and in the rain all afternoon (I'd never enjoyed standing in the rain so much before), eating crazy go nuts bread with pecan candy on top of it, breaking what were believed to be a man's cinder blocks and then walking away suspiciously when he came over and started noticing that some of them were broken, mixing cement with a shovel, hacking at bushes which had thorns approximately one (1) inch in length on all of their branches, wading up a river in flip flops and blue jean shorts while carrying the local stray dog (which we appropriately named El Perro Diablo, a.k.a. The Devil Dog) only to find that the waterfall promised at the bottom of the river was really just a few wimpy puddles at the top, collecting approximately sixteen (16) rocks in said river, and then leaving them on the rental vans when transferring back to the charter buses on the trip back to Madison, buying something to drink at every convenience store possible, since most food products were approximately sixty (60) percent of their price in the States, spending hours upon hours in repetitive prayers in the curiously not-as-hot-as-expected Mexican sun, becoming slightly-to-very annoyed with the resident 14-year old missionary kid who obviously is in dire need of some American interaction, going to the market and buying a 15 peso ($1.50) postcard from Monterrey and a 220 peso ($22) sombrero, losing my favorite free mail-in coupon Marines recruiting sunglasses, celebrating July the 4th in Mexico by eating hamburgers and potato salad (the first American food I had eaten in a week), helping some people on the trip prepare their meal of one (1) crawfish (which they had personally caught that morning) and watching them suck out the brains at approximately 12 AM, sleeping in a cabin with a 40-year-old single man who snores at a volume previously unknown to man, using $7 to last lunch, dinner, and the next day's breakfast (all but under a dollar spent on McDonald's food, five double cheeseburgers and a hot and spicy McChicken sandwich, since they were both on the dollar menu), and spending a second lifetime on old tour buses trekking from Madison, Alabama to Monterrey, Mexico, during which ride a) such movies as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (now clearly recognized as a commentary on hallucinogens), James and the Giant Peach (ditto), Tarzan, and Gremlins (more of a comedy than a horror story, though the part where the mom totally owns three of the evil Gremlins right in her kitchen was wicked gruesome) were shown, b) the card game Mafia was played over and over, c) a variant of Mafia now known as Gospel was invented, involving Jesus as the sheriff and Satan as the Mafia, with other characters getting cool Bible skills, d) summer reading book 1984 was attempted to be read with very minimal success, and e) general insanity began to develop within the weaker-minded people who went on the trip.