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Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Prospero Año y Felicidad….I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas, I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas, I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart!!!!

OK, now that I have that annoying song in your head, I do want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

It is interesting how religion and culture are so intertwined.  A perfect example of this is the nativity scene that we saw when we were in Merida last week.  This has to be one of my all time favourite Christmas photos!  If you take a close look at this picture, you can see that there are three wisemen on the left and two Merideños on the right.  The Merideños are dressed in their traditional festive outfit of white pants, a white guayabera shirt and a white panama hat.  Behind the wisemen you will see a Merideña wearing her traditional huipil dress and carrying fruit on her head.  If you look closely inside the manger, at the back you will see a hammock.  There are also different animals than you would expect in the traditional Canadian nativity.  There are two turtles, a frog, a monarch butterfly, a mayan dog (near the Merideña) and a duck flying in the background.  These animals are all very significant to the area, so it is not a surprise that they show up in the scene.  So, next time you see a nativity scene, take a close look, there is more to it than just the religious meaning..

Today is the last day of classes until the New Year.  We have changed our plans and have postponed Chiapas until a later time.  It gets pretty cold out there in the mountains so we are going to wait and visit San Cristobal later. 

Instead, we are heading off to Merida.  It will be slightly cooler there (around 28C) than it is in Salina Cruz and it should be a pretty good time to visit. 

We will be back in Salina Cruz on the 24th and then we are heading off to Huatulco on the 29th of December to visit with the Bork clan for a week.  It will be great to see everyone, but it will be strange to be on a resort in a town that we know so well. 

My posts will be sporadic until I return to work on January 8th.  So, Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año!! 

Here is a poem that was sent to me by a fellow English Teacher.  It makes me smile….

‘Twas the night before Christmas y por toda la casa,
Not a creature was stirring-Caramba! Que pasa?
Los niños were tucked away in their camas,
Some in long underwear, some in pijamas,
While hanging the medias with mucho ciudado
In hopes that old Santa would feel obligado
To bring all children, both buenos y malos,
A nice batch of dulces y otros regalos.
Outside in the yard there arose such a grito
That I jumped to my pies like a frightened cabrito.
I ran to the window and looked out afuera,
And who in the world do you think that it era?
Saint Nick in a sleigh and a big red sombrero
Came dashing along like a crazy bombero.
And pulling his sleigh instead of venados
Were eight little burros approaching volados.
I watched as they came and this quaint little hombre
Was shouting and whistling and calling by nombre:
“Ay Pancho, ay Pepe, ay Cuco, ay Berto,
Ay Chato, ay Chopo, Macuco, y Nieto!”
Then standing erect with his hands on his pecho
He flew to the top of our very own techo.
With his round little belly like a bowl of jalea,
He struggled to squeeze down our old chiminea,
Then huffing and puffing at last in our sala,
With soot smeared all over his real suit de gala,
He filled all the medias with lovely regalos-
For none of the niños had been very malos.
Then chuckling aloud, seeming muy contento,
He turned like a flash and was gone como viento.
And I heard him exclaim, and this is verdad,
Merry Christmas to all, y Feliz Navidad!

We are in the middle of the windy season here in the Isthmus and man, it gets really windy here.  It is so windy in my office, that every piece of paper I have, is weighted down with a book, bottle of water, scrabble game, whatever I can find.  Otherwise I have to chase my tests and exercises down the hall and rely on the kindness of my colleagues to catch them for me.  I have been locked out of my office when the wind slammed my door shut and took the cinder block that was keeping it open along for the ride.  Fortunately, a very chivalrous colleague of mine offered to climb through my window to let me back in.

Whenever the wind picks up, it leaves behind a layer of orangey-brown dust on absolutely everything.  You can’t escape the dust, you just have to live with it and wait until the wind calms down and you can wipe everything off–and this is only good until the next round of wind picks up. 

The wind is actually a good thing here because it helps keep things cool, which means that it hovers around 30C.  When there is no wind, it stays around 35-37C and I can’t wait for another El Norte, to come through. 

This week, the winds were so strong, that they actually blew two tractor trailors off the road and into the ditch as well as taking out a cell phone tower and cutting service to various municipalities.  At the point when the  truck here was blown off the highway, the gusts were reaching 120 km per hour.   The winds also took out a windmill (used to generate electricity)…Ironic, no?

I wanted to post a few things, but they don’t fit into any real category:

• I got my hair cut!  Of course it was at a salon in Huatulco with a guy that spoke enough English to make me comfortable, but nonetheless, I got my hair cut and it actually looks pretty darn good!  I am not bald, I do not have a faux-hawk and most people at work didn’t even notice (which is really, the sign of a good haircut).  I can scratch that off my to do  list…still working on the head tacos though….
• I ate the most amazing wood fired oven pizza when I was in Huatulco.  It was at a restaurant/bar called La Crema.  The outside of the place leaves something to be desired and it wins no points for decor, but the pizza was out of this world.  It was so good that I wanted to wait there until I was hungry again just to eat more!   We need an oven like that at the cottage!
• I was offered an extension on my contract at UNISTMO, so I will be sticking around until at least the middle of August.  After that, who knows?  If I do decide to stay beyond August,  I will have to go through the tenure process which I posted about earlier. 
• I was hoping to save this until I could make a Rotary meeting back home, but I guess I have to share now….  I am officially a “rotaria”.  I joined the Rotary Club of Salina Cruz two weeks ago  Got the pin, got the club golf shirt.  I would have to check, but I think that Don and I might be the only couple who are Rotarians from two different countries.
• Don and I are going to give Chiapas another shot.  My Christmas holiday break starts on December 16th so we are planning to go to San Cristobal, Palenque and possibly Merida (I know, not in Chiapas, but still a place we want to go).  Unfortunately, the situation in Oaxaca City has not yet settled down, so I cannot take in the annual radish festival which occurs on December 26th. 

Friday was Inauguration Day in Mexico, so we had a day off work.  It is a pretty special day because it only comes around once every six years and I was lucky enough to be here for it.  Oh yeah, and Felipe Calderon took office that day as well…

I took the afternoon off on Thursday to drive to Huatulco to meet Don as well as Jim and Erin Coffey from Esprit Rafting.  They were staying in Huatulco for a few extra days and it was great to visit with them.  It turned out to be good fortune that I left at 1PM on Thursday as there was a train crash in the afternoon.  UNISTMO is located about 1km from the highway and on this road, there is a new hospital, a few food stands, a water purification plant, a gasoline tanker dispatch station, the university and a private school.  There is also a set of train tracks that you must cross and this is where the crash occurred.

At about 4PM a tanker truck full of 60, 000 gallons of gasoline (for those of you on the metric system, 1 gallon is about 4L) was leaving the dispatch station.  The picture to the left is like the truck that came from the dispatch station.  The truck crossed the tracks but only made it about half way before it was struck by the train.  It is not known whether the driver did not look/hear the train or whether the train did not sound its horn.  (It should be noted that this set of tracks, like most in Mexico, does not have wig wags and is not controlled). 

  Fortunately, this was a relatively slow moving cargo train and there was only the conductor and one other person on the train.  The gas ignited immediately and an intense fire broke out.  There was  no electricity at the university and the teachers heard about 6 explosions (my understanding is that they were the truck tires exploding).  Unfortunately the truck driver and train crew members were killed.  The heat from the fire was so intense that it melted the glass from the windshield of a pickup truck that was parked nearby and they had to evacuate a wing of the hospital due to heat and smoke.

At about 5:30 the Vice-Rector decided to let the teachers go home because traffic was being rerouted through a tertiary road (read, dirt track through the desert) and they did not want people driving through this at night. 

There is a miracle from all of this though.  There is a lady who lived in a house about 5m from the tracks.  She and her family were fortunate enough to evacuate their house before the contents were burned.  The houses here are typically made with cement or cinderblock so, although the contents were lost, the structure is still there.  Here is a picture of the inside of her house the next day: