The President is coming! the President is coming!

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Hey everyone, didn't make a post yesterday because it would have been a bit of a filler as no 'Mexican experience' happened except for one little bit I initiated but I'll just put that in my 'Odds 'n Ends' section at the end. On another note... the night before yesterday, I had the embarassing moment of being woken by the sound of boards clattering. Oh snap... apparently displacing just one board was more than enough to result in the consequent result of a number of other boards either half falling down or completely falling down. Great... I hope it didn't wake anyone else up. I proceeded to make a makeshaft bed on the floor as I rather not displace any more boards in such a noisy manner.

However... the following morning on the way out of my room I was told something by my host mom. No entiendo (I don't understand)... my classmate came up and talked to the mom and proceeded to tell me that she requests that I left the door unlocked so that her husband can come in and fix the bed. -blushes- How embarassing...

Anyhow... . . . . The President is coming!!!... Ok, I'm done. :P

Ok, I should be shouting, "The President was here! The President was here!" since it's the end of the day and he already passed through, but it doesn't create the same excitement as anticipation of what hasn't come to be. It was pretty exciting, despite the fact I didn't see him (let alone know what he looked like so I had no clue what I was looking for).

The day started as any other day, a nice breakfast with my host family and the usual stroll to HQ. However, once we started nearing the Weaver's Market, something seemed different... very different. Military personnel and federal police galore, as well as barricades and checkpoints that even had the metal detectors you walk through (never thought I'd see the day I had to go through one of those outdoors as opposed to indoors). Whoa.

Now, we had two choices here; either we turned back and took a long way around or just go through with the security checkpoints. At the spur of the moment me and my housemate just went through with it and all went smoothly, nothing went missing from my purse. It was a bit interesting that at one search point, the lines were divided by gender (so of course, women on one side and men on the other) and at another search point I was waved through while my housemate had to go through the metal detector (wonder what makes him more suspicious :P)

Everyone at HQ was chattering about the vamped up security, wondering what was going on. Our coordinator (going to dub him G) told us that the president was visiting today (apparently he arrived by helicopter and of course swapped transportation on ground) to do a speech (details unknown) at the Santo Domingo Cathedral hence the vamped up security. He also mentioned that the military personnel had arrived 4 in the morning, swarming the place and setting things up and that we should try to avoid wandering around in the Weaver's Market in case anything happened* as the market is usually crowded and with the barriers it'd be hard to escape chaos. Lastly he told us that we should have our passports on us just in case we get randomly asked for it.

The news that the president was here got everyone excited, and everyone wanted to go see (him at the very least. we wouldn't be allowed to go in the cathedral). So, we split into two groups, one going with our teacher (whom I'll dub K) and the other going with G (we didn't want to draw too much suspicion on the way there). On arrival, we crowded in with the group of people crowding on the left side of the path up to the front entrance and it was pretty exciting to be there and to see various media personnel there.

Now I thought that we missed the president going in but apparently we didn't. It didn't help that I hadn't the slightest idea of what he even looked like and I wasn't fully paying attention to the actions of people going in, otherwise I might have noticed that one particular person being closely escorted (not by anyone in uniform so that didn't help). Irony is that out of about 18 of us (think we were missing a couple people), only one person (lucky me, it was my housemate) got a picture of the president and it was a complete fluke that it had the president with his head turned so his face could be seen.

I thought that was the end of things once the president had gone in but then a number of us started moving towards another entrance/exit to see if we could catch him on the way out but it didn't happen. One of my classmates (one of the two photojournalists) did try to find out from some of the media people there (who were English, or at least spoke English) but they didn't know any more than we did. We eventually gave up and as we headed down the stairs towards our HQ, I took a picture of the convoy and later on, when I had trouble locating my camera in my purse I started to panic thinking it got removed because of that. Fortunately I found it (usually my stuff don't go all the way to the bottom of a particular section in my purse, and when it does, I think I lost something).

This afternoon we went to the museum of a famous traveling (he does station himself on occasion at his museum to do treatment) unofficial doctor (self-taught) by the name of Sergio Castro who works with the indigenous people of Chiapas. Most of the injuries he has to treat are burns, as often in indigenous communities, people get some sort of virus from undercooked pork (as pigs are left to eat whatever they can which of course is a problem) that leads to a lifetime of seizures and if the person is unlucky, they'd be hovering around a fire and when it happens... boom! They're down and burned.

The museum Sergio owns is full of indigenous (and some non-indigenous stuff that gives me a bit of a chuckle) artifacts that have been given to him as a way of thanking him. My favourite room would be the one that is full of colorful indigenous outfits (there were other things hanging up on the wall above the outfits, such as bows and arrows ( I was so tempted to buy a bow and arrows a while back on the visit to Juan Chamula but there was no way I'd be able to get those through security). I'll be posting up pictures with this posting later so I don't have to describe every little detail about everything at the museum.

Oh, and another of my classmates is down for the count (while one of the ones that already got sick is doing better now. The other one is making recovery hard for herself as she's been breaking rules :P). Some of the others are starting to get a bit nervous, making it sound like it's an epidemic. No guys, the whole group is not going to get sick. Just some of us...

Ciao!

~Kedi~

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Photos

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Waiting at Cathedral for president

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The convoy in the background

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Sergio Castro!

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seen two of the outfits in here ;o multiple times. the center one and the one on the right of it.

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Kitties! at the museum.. that's their only connection :P