Cuernavaca

I just realized that I haven't yet posted anything in detail about Cuernavaca itself. This blog is mostly for the benefit of my friends back home, but I'd like it to be useful to anybody else who might be traveling to The City of Eternal Spring.

Cuernavaca has, I believe, around 500,000 residents. It is the home of more Spanish-for-Foreigners schools than any other city in México, perhaps in Latin America. It is really beautiful.

Cuernavaca is a city of fortress-gardens. Outside of el centro, which is pretty typically urban, most houses and apartment buildings have walls. My house, which is larger than most, has both a front courtyard (guests staying in the four guest bedrooms have to walk through the courtyard to get to the main house - or maybe get to) and a backyard, which has a pool, a hot tub, and a gazebo. All the plant life is very lush (courtesy of the nightly rains, which go through October) and well-maintained (courteous of the plentiful gardners). That's a notable difference between here and Ames - back home, about all that most people care to do is keep their hedges halfway trimmed and out of the way of cars and pedestrians. Here, trees, bushes and hedges are all neatly trimmed (if they can be associated with a house, business, or institution). There are a huge number of plants growing wild, but a much greater portion of the vegetation is well-kept here.

As I've mentioned, UNINTER itself is much smaller than ISU, which is nice yet a little suffocating. It's like it's own little world, walled off from the rest of the city. Beautiful plantlife, naturally, and several fountains and reflecting pools. It's incredibly peaceful when there aren't many people here, but at least a quarter of the school seems to be on break at any given time. The restaurant here is fantastic, cheap, shaded and next to a reflecting pool.

That reminds me: there are essentially no "winter accomodations" in Cuernavaca, because they just don't need it. If it ever snowed here, half of the city's businesses would have to close because they don't have roofs, or have only roofs without walls. The weather simply doesn't get bad here, unless you count the nightly rains. But to me, a place with no rain has bad weather.

Even Mexicans don't drink the tap water here, if they can avoid it. Office-style water coolers are everywhere. The Mexiquivalent of the Culligan man must make a killing here. There's probably also a landfill full of little paper cones somewhere. I need to buy an easily-portable cup, so that I can avoid using so damn many of those things each day.

Many of those fortress-gardens are iced with concertina wire - one building even had some extremely nasty-looking glass shards glued to the top of its wall - and businesses are frequently guarded by "vigilantes" (private security). Almost every window is barred, even my bedroom window inside the wall. Despite this, the only crime I've noticed was when a cabbie ripped me off by five pesos because I still have trouble telling which coins are which. It's an interesting situation - clearly, there must have been some serious crime to warrant all this security, but now that it's there, you'd have to be insane to try to commit anything more than petty theft. So if the crime isn't there, why do people continue to hire the security? It makes sense logically - it'll keep the crime from coming back - but someone almost always slacks off, starting a series of desescalations until the crime comes back. Not here, apparently. Eh. All the concertina wire and walls creep me out a bit.

Well. I need to get to the gym so I can wheeze on some 1500m, super-thin air. If anybody has questions, you know, post them. I'll try to answer, and maybe even put some thought into it.