I decided to start my Mexico experience with an immersion course in Spanish. I found a course in Cuernavaca that sounded good so I signed up for classes. I flew into Mexico City and took the bus south 35 miles to get to Cuernavaca. I was introduced to my host family and I settled in for a few months of Spanish lessons. I had one minor problem with the Spanish lessons. I was taking copious amounts of morphine and a side effect of morphine is loss of short term memory. It was very irritating to not be able to remember the things from my classes. I could do just fine in class but the next day it was all gone again. My teachers got a bit frustrated and probably thought I was really stupid or something. I tried to explain that it was the meds causing my learning problems but they just did not understand that. I just kept plugging away and slowly learned a bit here and there.
After classes I frequently went out on the town with the other students. Most of them were girls between twenty and twenty five. We had a blast. Despite the fact that I was doing so poorly in class I could actually communicate better with the locals than most of the students could who did well in class. I guess I just didn't care if I made mistakes in my grammar.
We went to bars and restaurants almost every night. We had dinner at our host families but we still ate out just for fun. A typical night out was happy hour at a local bar. Beers were cheap and came in buckets of ice. We would drink for a few hours and then go get some food to eat again and then head back to our host families. When I went out with them it was usually me and three or four hot young girls and maybe one other guy about twenty two or something like that. The Mexican boys were always looking for action and they figured that American girls were easy. They were always buying us beers and hitting on the girls. I got hit on a lot too but mostly by putas. There were not many nice girls out on the town alone in Mexico.
I had a lot of fun with a couple of girls from Texas. They were a couple years older than the usual students and we partied a lot together. One of them was a little tiny girl that could drink about twice her weight in beer and still be partying hardy. She took on all comers in drinking contests and any other challenge they could come up with. She could down a beer in a flash and won lots of challenges from the Mexican boys doing it. One day beers were two for one so she drank them one in each hand and sucked down both bottles at the same time. That sight just drove the Mexicans wild. I laughed every time I watched her do it. When the night was over and it was time to go home we would just walk out together and leave all the hopeful Mexican boys to themselves. Sometimes that pissed them off but such is life.
Most time when we got in the taxi one or both of them would start playing with me. The taxi drivers always liked the shows we gave them. We got a few free rides from them just because they liked the show. Then we would go back to our host families and sneak into our bedrooms alone. The next day there was never a single mention about us playing around in the taxis. What happens in taxis stays in taxis I guess.
My host family was very nice. I played Hollywood gin with the husband in my family almost every day after school for a couple of hours. He was very competitive and we had a lot of fun playing together. His wife always made good meals and kept the house immaculate. Her and I talked a lot. She taught me more Spanish than I learned in classes. She was always asking me questions about my life and my goals and my family back home. She could not figure out why I was traveling. I told her repeatedly that I just wanted to see the world and talk with people like her but she just did not understand.
We did some side trips to all the cities around that part of Mexico. We even went all the way to Acapulco a few times. Those were some wild parties that are a bit too adult for this blog. Every weekend we went somewhere on a field trip. We went to Mexico City to see the Frida museum and the main square of Zocalo with the museum and presidential building with the Diego Rivera murals in it. I enjoyed watching the native Indians perform in the square and the market around the edges. I cracked up though because almost all the tourist souvenirs were made in China not in Mexico. At night we were on our own and we hit the clubs for some crazy nights.
Mexico City is not a very safe place. We generally rode the public transport which was fast, cheap and safe. Almost all the taxis are crooks. They don't only overcharge and cheat you, they will outright beat and rob you then leave you with nothing out on the streets in some dark scary place. We were careful to always have a ride we trusted from our hotel. We would keep the same taxi all night. They would wait for us outside of each club or whatever we went into.
We went several times to the ruins just North of Cuenavaca at Tepoztlan. It was a climb almost straight up of several thousand feet just to get to the ruins. I loved that I could actually make it up a hike like that now. My health was continuing to improve. We always had ice cream treats when we finished our hikes to the top. There were several ice cream places with tons of flavors to pick from. I pigged out on it. Then we took the bus back to our host families to wait for tomorrow to start it all over again.
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