Archive for August, 2008

Never fear, bureaucracy is here.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Wuhhaa, you get your stuff together before you go to a different country, thinking nothing can be worse bureaucratic then Germany. But once you arrive to your destination you start to think…

Exactly that’s what happened to me right now. All of a sudden it feels like that Mexico was wearing a pretty mask and is taking it off - slowly - very slowly. Yesterday I’ve got a new letter from my University telling me that I most likely need to register at the “National Register of Foreigners”. Never heard of that before, but they were right, in my visa it says on the first page:
” … El titular debera dar aviso al Registro Nacional de Extranjeros, dentro de los 30 dias posteriors a su internacion al pais…”
The only problem is that I don’t speak Spanish and that nobody in the Embassy has told me, even after I asked, if I need go to some office in Mexico. But how did we always get told in school: “stupidity doesn’t safe from punishment”.
Does Obregon have such an office? No they don’t. If you want to register you either need to travel 4 hours to Hermosillo or two hours down to Guaymas. Smart as we’re, we will travel down to Guaymas spending - most likely - all day there.
Something very important is also that you need to be able to speak Spanish, because they don’t speak English.

At very last I want to share the list of the things that I need to bring to their office:

  • Subjects which I’ll be taking
  • Proof that I’ve paid my Semester fee - luckily I did that this morning
  • Acceptance letter from ITESCA
  • Passport
  • Passport copy
  • 6 picture of right side
  • 6 picture of front
  • Letter by the school telling me to register at the ‘National Register of Foreigners’. If it’s mandatory why do I need a letter?
  • Letter saying that someone pays 500 Euros per month. If I have a student visa then this was already asked and approved by the Mexican embassy / Government.
  • Student Visa
  • Letter from the place where I life ( Light or water bill)

Off we go to take some pretty, pretty pictures.

Adios and bye
Thomas and Estefania.

Just a quick update: I got my schedule for ITESCA.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Yes, finally one day before the inscription in the university ends I got my number and schedule. Which doesn’t even look too good, because one of my courses is at 5 p.m. at night and my first course starts at 7 – and is math. As soon as I find time again I will update a bit longer – and with some more details. After all I still didn’t show you guys the pretty pictures that we took at Nayarit (Ocean temperature over 18 Celsius).

Buenas noches

your Thomas

We’re back – isn’t that great. After a couple of weeks of vacation we’re back in Obregon.

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Hopefully, many people will noticed that we didn’t post anything over the past few weeks. It’s because none of us was actually on a computer. Yes, for the people that know me (Thomas) this might be a surprise, but I can live without a computer - at least for two weeks.

In this time our vacation took us to a couple of small village. One is actually located just two hours away from Obregon and is  called ‘la Esquina’. This city is an about 20 houses large and is home mostly to an ethnic group called the ‘mayo’.

While driving down from Obregon Sonora to that village, I saw the first time that people are actually willing to make their car dirty to save 30$ pesos. They did that by getting off the highway and driving on a mud-road, where you have to pay 10$ pesos when you enter and leave it. But this way you’re able to bypass the highway fee of 50$ pesos. When we drove the road down the first time it had rained before, so that there was mud and water everywhere - quite exciting.  To be honest, the most interesting fact was that even big trucks drive this part of the road down.

About an hour later, we to the last real road and then entered to a similar mud-road, that I’ve talked about above, only this time it was free. And there was luckily not too much mud. But because of the condition of the road you just couldn’t drive fast. I guess my Mitsubishi Colt from Germany would have long died, given up and totally broke.

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There finally, the village was at sight. Village? - Not really. I would call it more mud and a couple of houses.  Actually while we were in the city it has rained - just a bit. But it was enough to soften the mud and let me step into it so that my entire shoes were covered in, a tasty looking, soil.

Since, there aren’t any hotels in the village; we’ve stayed with a family member of Estefania, which does her social service there as a doctor. It was most likely the only house in the village with an air condition.

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And it was good to have it, since the weather wasn’t really gentile to us - for me it was hell outside. Walking was a pain and sitting too. Every little bit of shade felt like a cold winter - refreshing. Sadly there wasn’t a lot of it.

The weirdest thing that ever happened to me in my entire time in Mexico probably happened there. Because all the ‘little children’ - all children of the village. Seemed never ever to seen a person that actually has a different eye color then brown. And therefore, as soon as we left the house, they were almost all the time around us - giggling or showing their stuff to us (me) asking, if in Germany we listen to that music too, if we dance like that …  They also invited us to play with them at their ‘playground’, which is actually a crop field. But just after one game of ‘catch’ I was tired of the sun, full of sweat and looking for a bed. Really amazing was to see that they were all walking without shoes and still were able to run as fast as us over stones, plants, earth and more stones. I guess: you can get used to everything.

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I got many new impressions about Mexico. By that I mean actually seeing the poorer side of it - the reason it’s considered a third world country.  While taking a shower in the night, children fingers kept on knocking on the window, pushing it slightly aside. After we were done showering we actually went outside to see what happened and there it was: chairs standing in front of the window - so that those tiny kids were able to look inside. Now, we don’t know what they’ve seen - and why they wanted to see it. But fact is we felt uncomfortable.

The uncomfortable-meter changed to the worst. When a couple of minutes later, there was a knocking on the door. We opened  the door; there was a woman -looking all worried- telling us that her daughter was stung by a scorpion in the hand and she slowly was losing the ability to move her left side, and that’s why she wanted to see the doctor. The problem was that the doctor wasn’t in the house at the time so that the poor girl hat to wait about 30 minutes in the waiting room - slowly losing her senses. Luckily the doctor came back before it was too late and gave her some antidote, so that the little girl was fit again - without having anymore pain.

Enough I thought, I don’t want to be surrounded by scorpions. Let’s go! But did going away down to Nayarit really help? NO!

We’ll, or rather me, will write about that later, as soon as I get my mobile internet on my cell phone to work.

Greetings your Thomas.

Written and posted on my HTC wizard!