exam week 3

Classes here are all organized in the same template, there are 3 partial exams and 1 final exam.  This coming week is the last partial exam week.  Its really starting to set in that i don't have very much time left here!

dog
This is actually a story from a while ago that i keep forgetting to post on here.  I was walking down a street with my host mom a while ago when a stray dog walked up to us.  As we were walking my host mom started to tell it to go home, that we weren't going to feed it ect.  The first thing that entered my mind when she started talking was "doesn't she realize the dog can't understand her?  She's speaking in SPANISH to it".  Somehow the idea that dogs only speak English had gotten put in my head :)  I told my host mom and she thought it was hilarious.  Now when dogs come up to me i talk to them in spanish and its kind of fun :)

Insane thermo teacher
The newest chapter in my teachers insanity opened last week.  He spent the first 15-20 min of class reviewing what we learned the day before which was fine.  Then in the middle of his impassioned introduction to the days material a student opened the door and started to walk in late.  The teacher told him to please leave, the student asked why, the teacher said because he was late, the student said why does it matter if i just sit down, the teacher said leave, and the student left.  It was a bit of a tense exchange but i thought we were fine after the student backed down and left but i could not have been more wrong.  The teacher rounded on us and proceeded to explain the implications of what had just happened.  His explanation covered a wide range of topics including education, history, society, respect, family, authority, the use of projectors as instructing tools, the proper use of textbooks and his popularity (or lack thereof) among students.  The entire thing lasted just over 20 minutes and there were 5 times when he said "in conclusion"(i got my hopes up each time).  I felt really bad for him when he was talking about his unpopularity, he was saying he wished students would smile at him or even hug him in the halls but he sacrifices that popularity to mold us into better students.  Some parts of it were a little crazy though like when he attacked the use of textbooks and projectors in the classroom.  Anyway by the end of it all he had made himself pretty emotional and he canceled the rest of class.  I listened the entire time with rapt attention (as much out of fear as anything else) but when i got out of class and the door had shut i couldn't stop laughing.  I could not believe that the entire class had been ruined by a student trying to enter the classroom and talking back the professor once.

Salsa
My salsa class has moved into a new phase.  I knew when i signed up for the class that there was a final presentation at the end of the year but i had thought it was a small and optional kind of thing.  I didn't really have any interest in dancing salsa on a stage in front of people so i figured i would just opt out at the end.  Two weeks ago though we officially ended regular classes of dancing and learning salsa and started choreography for the final presentation.  I didn't want to miss out on a full 3.5 weeks of class so i figured i should participate.  It has been pretty fun so far, my partner is a mexican girl named gabby and we have a lot of fun in each class.  It was only recently that the scale of this production hit me though.  We are presenting with a bunch of other classes in a production put on by the whole theater department.  It is held in the main auditorium (which is huge) and we do two shows.  Apparently we are also getting costumes (i got measured at the last class).  All that was pretty intimidating but i figured i could just end up in a corner somewhere and not have to worry about anything.  In the last class we set up where everyone would be on stage during the production.  When we were told to find places gabby and i meandered over into the corner of the mob (she feels the same as i do) and planned to stay there.  The class kept having a problem of sliding sideways as a group during the dance though so the prof decided to fix it.  He put a mark on the center of the stage and moved gabby and i to the center front.  It is our job to stay centered on the mark and everyone else can space themselves based off of us.  I think its still going to be fun but we are both a little uneasy about being in the front.  We generally do pretty well but when we start to mess things up its usually a train wreck :)  We have decided to just hope for the best and have fun, but i still think i would be happier that corner.

Weather
The weather has just recently moved past perfection and is now on the cold side.  Some people here are already complaining but i still love it.  This week was the first time i wore a sweater with my shorts and flip flops walking to class.  Last night it even got cold enough that i slept under a blanket.  In some ways i really like having to wear a sweatshirt again.  Often when it is hot outside the air conditioning gets turned up inside and we all end up freezing in the classrooms.  Largely because of that there have been people wearing long sleeves and jeans since i got here but i was always more than willing to trade extra cold for less heat.  Now though i can spend the whole day perfectly comfortable, outside and in :)

Daylight savings
Daylight savings recently started here so now i am only an hour ahead of all of you on the pacific time zone (at least until your daylight savings).  Im not very happy with how it has affected things though.  I was really enjoying playing tennis before the sun came up and now it starts getting in our eyes around 8am.  I suppose it is good practice but it can be a little annoying.  I also don't like that it gets darker earlier now.  It is pitch black outside pretty soon after 6 pm.  It doesn't bother me that much, but usually i barely notice daylight savings, this is the first time it has bothered me.

Park Visit
Last weekend i went and visited parque chipinque with some friends.  It is an ecological park where one can go hiking and look at the scenery.  It was a ton of fun and a nice break from being in the city.  Along the path there was a big slide made out of smooth concrete that we tried going down a few times and that was a lot of fun too.

  When we got up near the top there was a wooden circular path running around a little garden that people do yoga on.  It is a free program set up by someone, yoga classes run every 20 minutes.  It is a pretty neat idea, people hike up through the park in the morning, do yoga, and then hike down.  I took a little bit of convincing but we ended up doing the yoga there before going back.  I am incredibly inflexible and often unable to do things in yoga but it was still fun (especially the part at the end where you lie on your back :)

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is coming up soon and sadly i will not be able to celebrate it with family.  It is possible however that i will get to celebrate it twice with friends.  My friends at church and my friends that i went hiking with have decided celebrating thanksgiving would be a perfect way to send me off.  Its still a little too early to tell if things are actually going to pan out, but if just one works i will be pretty happy :)

Exam week 3
This coming week is the last exam week (not counting finals) and its crazy to think about how fast the time has gone.  I've been worried going into each of them but they have all turned out ok so far so i'm going to hope for the best.  I think that regardless of what i do my thermo teacher will give me a 70 and in chemistry and society i have good enough grades not to have to stress too much about the tests.  The one i'm always worried about is electricity and magnetism.  I just need to put in a good amount of time studying this weekend.  Typing of studying, i really should get back to doing it.

Thanks for reading everybody and wish me luck! :)

Ben Hamming

Sorry its been forever

I haven't updated this in nearly a month, which is bad, and now there is a ton to catch up on.  I made a little list of all the important and or interesting things in the last little while and i'm going to try to elaborate on them all.

Interesting Prof #1
I have always liked my professor in society and culture.  He is a young guy, looks like he is pretty fresh out of grad school, but really excited about what he teaches and really knows his stuff.  He always seemed a little eccentric because of how much he like art and culture.  He mentioned one day that he makes weekly trips to one art museum to sit in front of different paintings.  I don't think i could ever be that into art but i thought it was cool that he is.  He also organized a trip to a national history museum here in monterrey.  It was really fun to go with him because he knows so much about it all, all the questions i had got instant answers.  On that trip though i found out he is a lot more interesting than i thought.  He and a few students and i were talking when he casually mentioned something about when he was teaching 20 years ago.  Turns out he is not actually a young guy, he is in his mid 50's, which explains the breadth of his knowledge, but i was floored.  I have never been so wrong about placing someones age, and everyone in the class agreed with me.  I really thought he was just joking for a few hours, but later that day we went into a cultural art store and the owner mentioned that our prof had been coming in there for something like 20 years.  I'm still amazed by how young he looks and i have a hunch that he dyes his hair but i'm not sure.  He told us that for 13 years he has been eating one small meal per day.  Some kind of mixture of barely and beans i think, and he says that once you get used to it its all you need for a day.  I know for a fact that i could not live on one meal per day, i think the fact that he can is a testament to how little energy he expends during a day.  His claim that not eating has kept him young made me re-think some of the things my thermodynamics teacher is always talking about (he is going to be interesting prof #2).  It doesen't seem too far fetched to say that each person does not have a limited time to live, they have a limited number of calories to live.  The idea being that the more energy flows through your body the faster it deteriorates.  By lowering his energy consumption and usage my prof thereby extends his life.  I have no reason to believe that is true, it is just interesting to think about and is a random connection between two classes.

Interesting prof #2
Interesting prof #2 is my thermodynamics teacher and he is much more interesting than #1, but in a bad way.  It was extremely obvious from the first day of class that he is very eccentric.  He is a short, slightly overweight, bald, mexican man who wears a fedora.  What makes him so unique is how much he talks and how impassioned his speeches are.  He either exaggerates compulsively or is patently insane.  When we learned about energy required to lift something he launched into an oration about space travel, how we are destroying the planet, and how the only hope for human kind is to colonize other planets (which we can only do if we understand the work required to lift something).  He constantly refers to friction as the greatest evil in the world.  He says that without friction we could live forever and never deteriorate and the world would be a utopia.  He has argued several times that perfection is the absence of degradation, degradation is implicit in change and so perfection can only be achieved by never changing (being at 0 degrees kelvin).  Then he generalizes that to how we can live our lives free of the pursuit of perfection and just be ourselves once we accept that truth.  You have to believe that i am not exaggerating any of this, there is a soapbox present in each and every class period.  He uses flowery language and emotion at all times.  Every number presented in a problem is preceded by an adjective "the impressive amount of 24 psi" "the absolutely incredible temperature of 35 C" ect.  Those are all the things that make him unique but don't make him a bad teacher.  Recently though i have started liking him less and less in class.  I have two major gripes with his teaching style.  #1 he won't answer hypothetical questions.  #2 he hates being corrected.  Both of my gripes came up in class today which is probably why he is on my mind right now.  Today in class the prof was working through a problem when someone asked him a hypothetical question.  When i say hypothetical i mean something like "if the volume wasn't constant could we still use that equation?".  They are questions that get asked all the time in classes i have had before.  His answer always goes along the lines of "how am i supposed to know, its not in this problem so don't worry about it".  Today though he said to the student "just like i have no right to ask you about things i haven't explained you don't have the right to ask me about things i haven't explained yet".  Then he proceeded to prove his point by quizzing the student on a few things we haven't learned yet to show how unfair it was.  #2 :In the past people have pointed out when the prof makes a mistake on the board and it has always seemed to me that it makes him a little mad.  It was never that obvious but i decided never to be the one to point out errors and i'm soooooo glad i did.  Today when finishing a problem on the board he forgot to copy one variable from one line to another, it was a simple mistake anyone could make.  When the problem was done one student asked if the variable should still be there (and indeed it should be) and the prof immediately looked away and asked if there were any other questions.  Then he said that if the student was so eager to correct algebra he could just go up to the board and do the next problem himself.  He wasn't joking and the student got sent up to the board to work out the next one, his friend next to him started smiling which earned him a trip up to the board as well (at least they got to work together).  When they were up there the prof told them "i assure you I won't interrupt you".  At the end of the class he kept us 10 minutes after to lecture on the importance of respecting his work.  He talked about how if we had a problem with his work we could take it up with the department head or the dean of the faculty.  He talked about how hard he has worked his whole life and how he didn't do it to come up to the front and tell lies.  He claimed that undermining his authority ruins the academic system because if we can't have confidence in him, where are we supposed to get truth from ect.  Anyway, in short, he is kind of crazy and eccentric.  Until recently i didn't mind his class but he seems to be getting more and more crazy and its getting harder to learn.

Hike to Cerro de la Silla 
Cerro de la Silla (translated saddle mountain) is a mountain that is right on the edge of monterrey.  There are houses that are built on the slope running up to where it gets steep so it is a very easy mountain get to.  It is called saddle mountain because there are two peaks and the ridge in between makes the whole think look a little like a saddle.  Since day 1 climbing it has been on the to do list, and now that it is cooler i finally did it.  I thought it was going to be a 3 or 4 hour trip so i just brought some snacks along but the whole thing turned into 7.5 hours.  Most of the time was because we had some slow people in the group and we spent a while at the top.  The view was absolutely incredible and the hike was great exercise.   When we got back i was pretty badly sunburned and really hungry but it was one of the most fun things i have done in the city so far.  I have heard that there is a trail that leads to the top of the other peaks as well and i'm looking for someone who knows the way and is willing to take me.  My favorite part of the hike was seeing what was on the other side of the mountain.  I didn't realize that we would be able to see both sides and the view of the other mountains ended up being a lot more amazing than the view of the city.



Exam week 2
I had my second exam week and it went pretty well.  I did really well on my society and chemistry exams and got mid 70's on thermo and EM.  Chemistry is turning into an incredibly easy class because a lot of what we are doing right now is just applying equations and doing basic math.  It is a first semester class and a lot of students are still struggling with algebra and unit conversions ect. so i have a huge advantage.  My EM test was largely the reverse of my previous EM test.  Last time i did bad on the calculation questions but aced the concept quesitons to get a 74%.  This time i did really well on the calculations but missed one concept question.  In hindsight i don't know how i missed it, and now i know to give those questions a lot of time.  Missing that one question cost me 16% on the test.  My grades transfer back as pass fail though so i'm fine with how i'm doing, and once homework and quiz grades are factored in i think i'm averaging an 80%.  I still don't totally understand what happened on my thermo test.  The teacher grades in a seemingly arbitrary manner.  Just like my first test, i got it back and there were x's through each of my 3 answers and 70% written at the top.  When he went through the test i realized that i had done two questions perfectly and the 3rd was wrong.  After class i showed it to him and asked him about it.  He just said, your right, i was wrong, i'll take that into consideration.  I still have my 70% though.  I was a little miffed because with 2/3 right i had 66% right there and i thought my 3rd problem was close enough to warrant more than 4 out of 33%.  I've heard that the teacher grades extremely arbitrarily but almost everyone passes his class so again i'm not that worried.  There is some kind of final project in that class that is entirely extra credit and can bump our grades up 15% so there is a big cushion.

Tennis
Tennis is going great, i love it.  Now that the weather has cooled down i don't sweat during practice as much anymore and the sun is never in our eyes that early.  I'm getting to be better friends with all the people on the team and i think i'm getting better at tennis too :)  I have also made several friends outside the team who play tennis.  One german i play with pretty regularly and this weekend i will be playing with two new people.  One person from church and one person i met on the hike up cerro de la silla.  I have no idea how good they are but it will be fun whatever the case.  Last week the team went on a trip to a tournament.  Practices were still held but just with the assistant coach and only 4 or 5 players.  In the first practice they all decided not to have practice that friday or the next monday or tuesday.  I never like it when the main team goes on the road because we often cancel practice and if we do play the assistant coach usually turns up late.  Today was the first day where everyone was back and playing.  I arrived early today and the second person to arrive was the coach so we started chatting.  What was really interesting was that later in the practice one player and the assistant coach asked me (at different times) what i had been talking about with the head coach and if he had asked me if we practiced.  I said that he hadn't and they told me that if he asks i should say yes.  Turns out that we are supposed to practice each day that the team is gone but i guess the assistant coach cancels them behind the head coaches back.  I am hoping the coach just doesn't ask me and if he does i'm just going to tell him that i couldn't go.  The whole thing really surprised me and made me see the assistant coach in a different light.

Coupons
At the start of the semester the school was handing out coupon books for free and i grabbed one.  I flipped through it and it was full of things i was never going to use.  I didn't really look at it again until last week.  Someone told me about these great coupons to the movie theater and i found out i have a whole page of them (12 in total).  Instead of being some kind of group price, or free appetizer they cut the cost of a movie in half (down to about 2$ us).  They are valid at the nicest chain of theaters in town too.  I was pretty happy to find those and went to see repo men last weekend with some friends.  Tomorrow i am going again to see some movie but i'm not sure what it is.  I have been making an effort to develop the mexican side of my social circle and its been working pretty well.  I still hang out with international students sometimes but as i get to know more locals it becomes easier to find a group of them to hang out with.

One month to go!
I cannot believe how fast the time has gone.  It does not seem like that long ago i was arriving on the first day and realizing how much i hate heat.  Now the weather is great, i have a handle on all my classes and a good routine nailed down.  Finals finish at the end of November and i am almost exactly one month from the end of classes.   Now when i think about anything left i want to do i have to fit it into a shrinking timeline.  Last week i got my host mom how to teach me to make salsa because its something simple i should be able to make at home.  Unfortunately some of my favorite things from here i will not be able to re-create at home.  The taco stands here are incredible and i have never seen anything like them in the us.  I also have never seen the kinds of meat the use in the tacos in the us so i wouldn't even know where to begin.  As i write this i keep thinking of more things i should mention.  This week there is something called expo tech going on where students from different places in mexico make food from their home provinces and sell it and it is a HUGE event.  When i first heard about it i thought it was a neat novelty but now that i've seen it and had the food i love it :)

Thats all i have time for, i have to go to bed now.  One month is WAY to long to leave this thing, i don't have a chance of putting in everything i did.  I will try to keep it updated more frequently and i hope this gives you some idea of what i'm doing here.  Thanks for reading!

Ben Hamming

My Haircut

So my hair has been getting a little long so a friend here and i found a barber.  I thought the process would be pretty easy because i had pictures from when i arrived (they were taken for the visa process) and cutting my hair is not complicated.  I told her just a little shorter on the sides and showed her the pictures.  She picked up the clippers and said lets try this length.  Then she cut a strip that was as short as the rest of my hair now.  After that the only option was to just buzz it that length.  All in all though i don't mind, it feels really good to feel the wind on my head now so i kind of like it.  My friend who went after me learned from my experience and ended up with a haircut much closer to the one he was expecting.

 

A lot to catch up on

Its been a long time since i posted a blog entry so this one is going to be pretty long.  I didn't get a chance to post one last week because i was on a trip but my weekend just started so i have time to get this thing all caught up.

Exams
Last i had written i had just taken my exams so i am going to start off with how they went.  I got both grades back from my physics exams one right after the other.  The first was from the test i thought i had failed and it turns out i got a 74 which i was very pleased with.  Turns out the two questions i did really bad on were really two parts to one question so it didn't hurt me as much.  There were a lot of unhappy people in that class though i know a lot of people who failed.  One guy had studied a ton, he apparently did every practice problem in the chapter (there are a lot) and he got just under 50.  I found out the reason was that half the points of the test were tied into two sections of conceptual questions.  Those sections required little to no math skills but made you apply some of the concepts we had learned to figure out how things act that we hadn't seen before.  Those sections saved me and dominated my friends.  Overall i was really happy.  That test had been a worst case scenario for me and i still passed :)

Getting that test back put me in a great mood but when i got the test back that i thought i had done really well on i got a 70.  Its hard to tell why i missed points and i'm still not totally sure.  There were check marks next to the problems and then a 70 with a circle around it.  I had heard that he had an arbitrary grading style but i was still surprised that he didn't actually show where i lost points.  He invited us to come by his office and ask questions after we reviewed our tests.  So far i have only reviewed the first problem and i got it wrong for an ironic reason.  In Spanish the word for thousand is "mil" which always always always makes me think of million.  Every time i read the word i think million and then correct myself (most other words i just understand by now).  On the first problem one of the numbers given was 1 millón (million in Spanish) and i wrote it down as 1,000.  I'm very curious how i missed all the other points because i thought i had done well and none of it seemed hard but i passed so i'm not upset about it.

Trip
We all got thursday and friday off because of the mexican independence celebration the week after exams.  The international office here organized a trip that left tuesday night and returned sunday.  Both of my physics classes are on tuesday so i could go on the trip without missing them which was perfect.  The trip was a ton of fun but in many ways it was a comedy of errors.

The trip had just under 80 international students on it in all, we rode in two buses.  The first leg of our journey was made overnight, we left at 10 pm and got in at 2 pm the next day to Guadalajara.  There we toured a town called tequila where their primary industry is making tequila (as you might have guessed).  We got to see the whole process from what the plant looks like to the vats where it all ferments.  It was a really interesting tour.  We celebrated mexican independence in Guatemala.  There was a huge celebration in downtown.  We were told that the main event started at 11 but it actually started at 10.  By the time we got to where it was the entrances were all blocked off by military.  There were smaller festivities and street vendors for about two blocks running around the whole main event though so we got to tour those and it was a lot of fun.  We had to ask for directions a few times to find our way back to the hotel afterwords but we made it in the end.  We visited a few artisan towns and lots of flea markets where people could buy souvenirs.  I really enjoyed walking around in those and seeing the kinds of things that people make.  Probably my favorite part of the trip though was a tour we took through an old silver mine in a town called Zacatecas.  Apparently Zacatecas used to be one of the biggest exporters of silver in the world and the mine was huge.  I had been expecting it to be a lot of cramped tunnels but it was actually huge and open.  The ore was richest in a vein that ran almost vertical (maybe 10 degrees) down the mountain so that is the part they mined.  Most of the tour we were walking along paths constructed after the mine closed and we could see a long long way up along the crack and down to water.  The mine was closed when water found a path into it and flooded the lower levels.  I learned a lot about how mining was done back then and was really impressed with how much had been excavated.  At one point we ate in a diner where there was a live band, which would have been really neat but the band was close to us and really really really loud.  It was kind of funny how bad the whole experience was, you couldn't hear yourself think.  Also at two points on the trip our bus lost a tire but both times we just waited for a little while till it was fixed and then continued.  The trip was also my first real experience with mexican lateness.  In my school they are very very clear that people are expected to be at class on time.  On this trip though we were almost always a half hour late in everything we did.  It took some getting used to but once we understood the system it was fine.  If we were supposed to meet somewhere at 9:00 we would just find a leader at 9:00 and make sure we arrived whenever they did.  We figured if we didn't show up after the leaders we couldn't be late :)

One of the most interesting parts of the trip was seeing how students from different nationalities acted.  The french chain smoked, and all of the Europeans drank a ton.  They all drank constantly.  The spanish tended to make a big deal out of problems on the trip and there was one pretty intense rant by a spanish girl about all the things that were wrong with the trip (she was talking to an organizer).  Apparently the stereotype that people know here is that Europeans smoke cigarettes and Americans smoke weed. Some people take stereotypes of Americans to be really true.  There were 4 of us (americans) on the trip and people always assumed that we were huge drinkers and partiers. 

Last week
I thought last week was going to be bad because i was up really late sunday night doing homework.  We were supposed to get back early evening from the trip but we lost a tire on the trip and didn't get into midnight.  Usually if i don't sleep well sunday night i'm just tired all week, which i was, but it was also a great week largely because of the weather.  It has definitely cooled off now, the highs are hovering around 87 but when its overcast its often in the 70's.  The weather this week has been my dream weather for tennis.  Its that temperature where if you slept outside with just a t-shirt you might get cold but its perfect for exercising.  I really like playing in the mornings because of how cool it is, and the sun never gets in your eyes (its not up).  Everything seems easier when i'm not hot.  Its easier to sleep, i can get some homework done at home instead of finding air conditioning to do it all ect.  This week has probably been the best one i have had here just because of that (i haven't had time to do anything fun).  The only minor downside is that it has started to rain.  I really don't mind the rain that much at all but it takes a while to dry once i am wet because of the humidity which can be annoying.  Just as i am writing this rain has started outside in earnest and i just heard thunder.  One day this week we had a torrential downpour for about 2 hours.  I had not seen rain like that since being in florida, nothing like it exists in the northwest.  I was exposed to it for about 20 seconds heading to class and i got completely drenched.  Some of my notebooks in my backpack got a little wet but they shielded my textbooks which was great.  When i got to my building i had to get a bunch of paper towels and dry off some and i was still dripping on absolutely everything when i got into the class (but so was everyone else). 
Fitness testing
One day it was raining in the morning so instead of playing tennis we did fitness testing during tennis practice.  I have never considered myself a good sprinter, i'm pretty good at running distances but i've always known that the average athlete can sprint faster than me, but i discovered that everyone on our tennis team is pretty slow.  We did 10m and 40m timed runs and i won both by a pretty large margin.  We also tested high jump which i was the highest in by a big margin again.  I'm not trying to brag, we did these same tests in tennis at whitworth and i am an average jumper and an average sprinter at best.  I was just really surprised that everyone here can be so good at tennis and not be very fast.  After those tests though we tested for situps in a minute and i got dominated by every single person on the girls and guys team.  To count you had to go from shoulder blades on the ground do elbows touching the knees and you were never allowed to move the arms.  I got somewhere in the mid 30's and i was the only one there not to break 40.  There is a workout routine that we all do three times a week and it has a lot of ab work in it.  They have also talked a lot about the individual strength training they do on their days off.  We never do any cario workouts at all which i always thought was strange but i guess they just focus completely on strength and it seems to be working for them.  It was a funny practice because i discovered that i am easily the fastest and weakest person on the team.

RR
 A very recent development is that i am learning to roll my r's!  I have been practicing while i walk to and from school and just today i started to feel the flutter.  I am still a ways from mastering it and i can't keep the sound going but i can definitely do it.  My host mom says that once people get to this point it takes about a week to get the hang of it :)
Juice
One of my biggest discoveries since my last post was a juice drink sold in gas stations.  I don't know why i had never tried it before, it is sold in every gas station here, i guess it just never looked appealing.  It turns out that it is a pure juice drink, one of the ones where the drink tastes exactly like the fruit ("odwala" and "naked" type) but here a bottle costs 80 cents US!  I try not to buy drinks here but now when i do i have something i really like that is healthier that coke.  Some places do not sell water, which is really strange, so i'm glad to have another alternative.  The juice is almost as cheap as water too, it costs 17 cents more.

Buying drinks has been a little strange for me here.  In the us i always just get water with any food i eat but here water is never free, it is just as expensive as every other drink.  I carry a bottle with me that i can fill up at home for free but it often runs out and on the trip i ended up having to buy anything i wanted to drink.  The drinks are usually pretty cheap but it still all adds up.  I like having interesting things to drink (i try to experiment) but it still feels weird to not be able to get water for free.

Anyway thats it.  This seems pretty disorganized but it covers the most interesting things i can think of that have happened in the last two weeks.  Thanks for reading!

1 down, 3 to go & traffic

Exams
The way my school here organizes the year, every class gives 4 exams which end up being worth most of the grade.  Last week was the first week of exams.  Overall they went ok, i wont really know till i get them back.  My worst exam by far was in E&M.  I think the whole thing was a tragedy of errors in a way.  I was pretty tired going into it and pretty stressed about it but i was confident in the studying i had done.  The reason it went badly was that on one question i for some reason started to do the problem the wrong way (it still works, but the math is WAY harder) instead of the simple way.  I spent quite a while trying to make the math work without any success and i was getting more and more frustrated.  The question after that one also used the answer i couldn't get.  In the end i just explained exactly how i would get the answer.  My explanations weren't that great though because the test ended a half hour earlier than i expected.  The test had 4 questions, the first one i definitely got right, the 2nd i felt good about but my answer at the end seemed strange so i might have made a math mistake somewhere.  The third i never finished and the 4th i explained.  I'm hoping the teacher gives partial credit so i pass.  Overall i think i just need to get more sleep and relax before the next exam.  The simple answer was something i had done 30 times or so and as soon as the test ended and the stress left i realized what was wrong (given 20 min i could have done it all after that).  Doing badly on that test made me more nervous for my thermodynamics test but it went incredibly well.  I had better timing on that test than any other test in my life.  The professor told us to put our pencils down as i was boxing my last answer :)  So all in all i had two tests that went ok but not incredibly (chem and society) one bad one, and one great one.  I'm glad its over and i think i'm going to do a lot better in the next exam week. 

Today
Today i got up for tennis, then had a group meeting for a presentation, did some homework, ate some food, went to the supermarket and bought a pineapple, some cereal, and some ice cream (as a reward) and now i am at home and about to go to bed and sleep as long as i can.  It has been a really nice relaxing day which is great.

Traffic
It also occurred to me that i should talk about the culture and general observations instead of just saying what i'm doing.  This time i want to mention how traffic works.  The biggest and most obvious difference is that pedestrian right of way does not exist.  It reminds me a lot of New York, pedestrians are expected to be smart enough to stay out of the way of cars.  I often feel like i'm playing frogger when i cross big roads.  It is rarely possible to find a clean gap across 4 lanes of traffic so often you end up standing in the middle of the road in an empty lane waiting for the next one to clear.  I wouldn't say its dangerous but it does keep you very aware of where all the cars are.  Turn signals and stop signs are also totally optional.  It took me a little while to realize but most people don't use turn signals at all, which makes deciding when to cross some streets much more tricky.  I have seen one car pulled over by a cop before but i think that largely traffic regulation is non existent.  Someone told me that there are 4 independent police forces in Monterrey.  They said it was because whenever one gets corrupt they just make a new one but i'm not sure how much of that was a joke.  Seatbelts are also pretty much non-existent.  Taxi's rarely have them for passengers and i have yet to see any local wear one as a driver or passenger.  Not having them doesn't bother me that much because when i ride in taxis we are usually driving pretty slow, there are speed bumps all over the place to regulate speed.  I'm suprised taxis don't get in more accidents with all the weaving through traffic that they do, but even if they did nobody is going fast enough to do any real damage.

Thats it, thanks for reading :)  Feel free to ask me if you have questions

Ben Hamming

Wish Me Luck

My cold passed fairly quickly.  I spent most of friday napping and relaxing and by saturday it had turned into a stuffy nose and most of my energy was back.  Today the nose was not as bad and i had more energy.  I'm going to bed early tonight and hoping i'm totally done with this when i wake up tomorrow.  As for the reason i need luck, this coming week is exam week.  Monday i have an exam in society/culture, Tuesday in E&M, Wed i have a 20 minute presentation in society/culture about violence against women, and Thursday i have an exam in Thermo.  This is going to be the first big checkpoint to see how i'm doing in all the classes!

Today after church the Australian Missionary i met invited me to eat lunch with his family.  I ended up staying at their house till 5:30 visiting with them.  It was really nice to meet the family and see the house.  I'm really glad i've gotten to know them.  It cut into my studying time a little but it was totally worth it :)

Also, random story.  My thermodynamics teacher is the most traditional/old fashioned teacher i have ever had.  He is a big orator and is very excited about everything he teaches.  He writes everything on the chalkboard, what he teaches does not follow the same pattern as the book, and he only permits questions in specified points in the lectures.  His class is kind of quirky but i think the quirks make it interesting.  Last thursday 15 minutes before the class was going to end one student grabbed his stuff and stood up to go.  I didn't think that was a big deal at all, in a lot of classrooms students are encouraged to (if necessary) leave with as little fuss as possible.  The teacher stopped him and spent the entire remaining 15 minutes of class explaining why such behavior is totally unacceptable.  His main arguments were that:
1.If one person leaves today, tomorrow 3 will leave, and soon everyone will leave.
2.Common laws of courtesy are all that separate us (in this academic utopia) from those killing each other in the streets (his words, and they are an exaggeration don't worry :)
3.His classes are the only wealth he has left to him and if we do not respect them there will be nothing left to him in life. 
Some of his arguments seem kind of silly but he was deadly serious.  Incidentally he never explained the protocol for leaving the class early on the first day.  We now know that if we let him know beforehand and sit near the door it is ok.  I could not believe how much he exaggerated in all of his explanation or how big of a deal he made it.  I am soooooo glad that i was not the one who tried to leave :)  I still like this guy as a teacher i just have to be very very careful not to cross any of his lines.

Thats it, i will post how the exams went at the end of the week, thanks for reading!

Ben Hamming

This week and random things

Schedule
First off, i realized there are a few things i never mentioned on here that i really should.  First there is my schedule.  Mon Wed Fri are my slow days when i try to get things done, tuesday thursday are the busy days.
Mon-Wed
tennis 7am-10am
chemistry 1:30 pm-3pm
society and culture 6pm-7:30pm
Tue-Thurs
tennis 7am-9:30am
E&M 1pm-2:30pm
Thermo 3pm-4:30pm
Salsa 5:30pm-7pm
tuesday-Bible class 7pm-9pm
thursday-Frisbee 7pm-9pm
Fri
tennis 7am-10am

You can see that Tuesday and Thursday i have only one break, between tennis and E&M, the one between thermo and salsa i eat dinner during.  Just thought this was something that belongs on my blog and i hadn't posted it yet.


Trip
A few weeks ago i went on a trip to the grutas de garcia (grutas=caves).  It was a lot of fun and we got to see a lot of neat cave formations.  I took a bunch of pictures but the lighting in the caves was really really bad so its hard to make out most of them.  Just google image search grutas de garcia and you can see all the things i saw :)

This last week
A lot has happened since my last entry.  Last sunday i went to see SALT with a friend from the US named Julian.  We also met one of his friends along the way named Melanie and she decided to come with us.  Turns out she lives about 50 ft away from me and we never knew it!  She has a tiny little one person apartment but it is pretty nice inside.   She is from Canada and has a boyfriend that lives here in Mexico, they met when the boyfriend was in Canada.  Anyway the movie was good and then in the mall there i found myself a new pair of tennis shoes which i desperately needed.  Then we went to wallmart and i got notebooks, cereal, tennis grips, a pineapple, and shirts.  I needed more shirts because with tennis i didn't have enough clothes to make it through a week without laundry.  Fortunately i found a rack of simple thin (thin=cool,temperature) shirts for about $2 each so i bought 4.  This morning i just realized that even though the hangers they came off of all say large two of them are actually mediums and don't fit that well.  When i got back i cut up my pineapple and this week i have been snacking on it.  My host mom told me that there are also really little pineapples you can buy that taste a lot sweeter.  I saw them at wallmart but didn't buy any so next time i am going to. 

Monday was a pretty regular day except i had my first test in chemistry.  I felt like it went pretty well which was nice because i hadn't studied for it all that much.  Other than that i just went to class and did homework.  Tuesday morning i didn't hear my alarm go off so i missed tennis practice.  I really need to buy a new one because the one i have is really quiet and with all the fans going it is easy to sleep through.  A few weeks ago i met an Australian missionary at my church.  He is here with his family running a bible education program four youth and ministry leaders.  He told me that he was going to start a class on Marc and asked me if i would be interested.  We talked for a while and he is a really nice guy so i told him i would take the class.  It meets tuesday evenings from 7-9.  In the past i played frisbee on tuesday and thursday evenings so now i'm only getting half the frisbee but i think its worth it.  Tuesday was the first day that i had the class and i liked it.  It is taught in spanish, and often he struggles with words and especially pronunciation but everyone helps him out and all the other students are really nice.  Sometimes i help translate questions for him and afterwords i gave him a few tips on pronunciation (he always emphasized the first parts of words ending with cion, he would say ádoracion instead of adoracion).  I think im going to continue going to the class.  The whole thing costs around $30 (materials ect.) and it is for basically the whole semester.

Wed was an eventful day.  I had to skip tennis practice to go turn in all my visa paperwork and that process took the whole morning.  Then when i got back from the visa office i realized i had lost my wallet!  I remembered having it at the office but right after i got out of the taxi it wasn't there.  I went right away and canceled my debit card and the international office here called people at the visa office and asked them to be looking for it.  Then i went to chemistry where i got my test back and i got a 72%.  It was a lot worse than i thought i did (but still passing).  It turns out what happened was there was one set of questions that all build on one another.  I got the first part wrong and then although i applied all the concepts correctly, each question after that was wrong.  That represented almost all of the points i lost.  There was one quesiton i didn't know the answer to, and another one i couldn't remember how to say the name for a geometric shape in spanish.  I drew it and worked out all its angles and everything but apparently they wanted the name.  The shape is if you take two elongated triangular pyramids and then stick them base to base, its kind of diamond shaped.  I'm not even sure how to say it in english really.  All in all i'm ok with how it turned out, i just have to pay really really close attention to problems that build on one another in the future because there does not appear to be partial credit.  After chemistry when i was at home eating lunch the international office called and said that the taxi driver had found my wallet in his car and was going to return it.  I think that when i pulled coins out to pay the taxi my wallet must have fallen out.  Anyway that was a huge relief.  I kind of wish now that i hadn't canceled my debit card because now until i can get a new one getting money is going to be a pain.  Right after i finish writing this i am going to pick up my wallet :)  Also the physics homework due today was mercifully short, which was really nice and gave me some time to relax.

This morning i woke up to go to tennis and discovered that i am sick.  I have a sore throat and a bit of a headache.  I don't think its serious i'm just going to skip Frisbee tonight and try to go to bed really early.  I sent the coach an email and explained why i have missed three days this week (slept through alarm, visa, sick).  The team is pretty loose with commitment though, people have their own schedules and the coach knows they just come when they can.  I still have not been told officially that i can practice with them but for now i am assuming i can because it has been a few weeks. 

Now i'm off to get my wallet and go to class.  Thanks for reading everyone :)

Also, i have been here one month today! I arrived on Aug. 2.  I can't believe a month is gone already, it really seems like time is speeding up.