Read this and think about how you'd never heard of it before.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Thursday, January 04, 2007
So I forgot
All right, I didn't actually forget about blogging but after the snow storm, I didn't have time/motivation to post anything.
I am back from Mexico and I have many tales to tell. I don't really have any accurate impressions of the country though. We went to a tourist town and didn't see the real Mexico City, but I did have a few glimpses.
It was quite difficult to see a five-year-old child selling cigarettes to cars stopped at an intersection. How do I react? I know why he's doing it and he has no choice. There's very little I can do to improve his situation. If I smoked, maybe I would have bought a pack, it's hard to say. I find that I would much rather donate to an organization than an individual because I have more faith in the organization - you know that feeling you get that the person on the street is just going to spend the money on drugs. It's by the same token that I would rather buy them something to eat, but am too scared to even offer (not of them, but of people in general, most people who know me realise how shy I actually am). That's different than a child on the street, not necessarily a homeless child. I want to send him to school and I want to fix his country. It's a tough situation. I wasn't there to help, I was there to vacation and that's clear to me. Maybe some of those people are happy with their lives and don't want to change anything.
We spent three days in a town about five hours north of Mexico City called Guanajuato (gwana-chwa-to) and I got the impression that only a handful of the 110,000 people living there speak functional English. It's a popular tourist town, there were other English speaking people there, as well as Germans and Asians (from where, I'm not sure) and I feel that the town would prosper incredibly if services were available in English. Maybe they don't want their town to change and be popular with non-Spanish speaking people.
Like I said, I was there for too short of a time to be able to make any sort of judgement on the country. The people I stayed with are well off and so their love of Mexico is biased by their way of life. All I can say is that I enjoyed my stay there.
I am back from Mexico and I have many tales to tell. I don't really have any accurate impressions of the country though. We went to a tourist town and didn't see the real Mexico City, but I did have a few glimpses.
It was quite difficult to see a five-year-old child selling cigarettes to cars stopped at an intersection. How do I react? I know why he's doing it and he has no choice. There's very little I can do to improve his situation. If I smoked, maybe I would have bought a pack, it's hard to say. I find that I would much rather donate to an organization than an individual because I have more faith in the organization - you know that feeling you get that the person on the street is just going to spend the money on drugs. It's by the same token that I would rather buy them something to eat, but am too scared to even offer (not of them, but of people in general, most people who know me realise how shy I actually am). That's different than a child on the street, not necessarily a homeless child. I want to send him to school and I want to fix his country. It's a tough situation. I wasn't there to help, I was there to vacation and that's clear to me. Maybe some of those people are happy with their lives and don't want to change anything.
We spent three days in a town about five hours north of Mexico City called Guanajuato (gwana-chwa-to) and I got the impression that only a handful of the 110,000 people living there speak functional English. It's a popular tourist town, there were other English speaking people there, as well as Germans and Asians (from where, I'm not sure) and I feel that the town would prosper incredibly if services were available in English. Maybe they don't want their town to change and be popular with non-Spanish speaking people.
Like I said, I was there for too short of a time to be able to make any sort of judgement on the country. The people I stayed with are well off and so their love of Mexico is biased by their way of life. All I can say is that I enjoyed my stay there.
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