Fergal, Rachel and Peggy relax at the entrance of Cetlalic School.
Our Instructor, Augustina, is vivacious and engaging. Estamos Emprediendo Espanol. Ninguda Duda!
Fergal discovers what Mexico and Ireland have in common: Catholic School Style Punishment for sloppy homework. ¡Senora Augustina nos ensueñó como como las monjas en Irlanda!
Our class (back row from left) Rachael, Nancy, Nancy and Fergal. (Front row) Nancy, Tim, and Augustina, our instructor.
Un cuarto con una vision hermosa: Each morning, just before sunrise, I caught a glimpse of the great Volcano, Popocatepetl, and its puffs of ominous smoke. A perfect time and place for yoga and sun salutations. The scenery around Cuernavaca adds to the charm of the city, and centers of worship, Christian and pre-Christian, abound.
My landlady, Senora Yolanda, is charming and warm hearted. We got along very well and I actually wept leaving her home, my new home away from home. She is also an excellent cook. I've never had such delicious chili rellenos or tamales as regular delicacies. After every meal, when we thanked our hostess for the delicious food, she blessed us with the words, 'Bien provecho" (may the food do you good). I think this a very appropriate and amicable benediction. Fortunately, Cuernavaca is very hilly, and the extra calories are quickly burned off on the walk home from school. In the evenings, Senora Yolanda invited her guests to play dominoes at the dining room table, topped off with a shot of tequila, salt and wedge of lime close at hand. Home was never as good as this!
Cuernavaca Diary
June 16, 2007
My journey into Mexico, the country that I have gazed at from my window in San Diego for five years, is at last realized. Some recalcitrance from adventure kept me in a closet of sombre safety that eventually drove me to distraction. I needed adventure. I hungered for some great change to shake me out of my dark mood. And Cuernavaca has done it. The strange and beautiful songs of a myriad species of birds, and the flitting of gigantic and variously colored butterflies have enchanted me. I heard about the Celtalic Language School from a friend in San Diego who is a devout Episcopalian homosexual (each and both are great in number). He said something about a "fairly radical" school for learning in Spanish in Cuernavaca and I immediately felt a thrill of knowingness make my body quiver. I had to go.
Cetlalic School is located in a neighborhood called "El Tunnel" even though no actual tunnel exists in the area. In fact, a narrow bridge carrying heavy traffic (and sometimes heavy pedestrians) stands a little to the north of Cetlalic's small campus, which, like most of the buildings outside the center of the city, is guarded by a tall stone wall and heavy ornate iron gates.
The bridge spans a narrow deep ravine that carries a gushing stream in wet weather. It rained nightly during the first two weeks of my stay. On the fourth day, the very day I fell ill with a terrible intestinal distress, a great storm came over the city in the mid afternoon. It even eclipsed the storm in my duodenum. The sky darkened very suddenly like twilight and thunder shook the walls of the house. Soon, sheets of blinding rain fell, reducing visibility to a few yards. I had not seen anything so dramatic since I was a child in Ireland and a terrible storm turned our street into a river. I remember all of our neighbors gathered in their vestibules, nervously laughing and waving at my mother and father who stood with me in our vestibule while the water crept up dangerously close to our front step. The lighting struck immediately overhead at one point and I heard Mrs. Calhoun, the housekeeper of the Buchanan's next door, scream out in horror. Her dog, Pickles, an Airdale terrier, shivered in fear in between her thickly stockinged legs and slippers. I was thrilled by the whole drama, but dared not show my hunger for the destruction of my own home and family. What force was this within me that wanted terror to destroy everything I knew and loved and hated and resented? I knew it, and I knew to keep it hidden. But back to Cuernavaca. That afternoon while the rain came down in sheets, I sat on the toilet, my innards trying in spasms to rid themselves of some terrible beast. But I recovered in a few days thanks to Cipro, an antibiotic available from any Mexican pharmacy. The sidewalks on the steep streets of the city are a sorry affair. They are at times three feet wide. Never enough room for passersby to walk without one leaving the sidewalk and entering the gutter or street. At several intervals on my steep walks through the city, the sidewalk disintegrates and ceases to exist. Abandoned houses lean forward into the street like drunken men and swallow up the sidewalk, necessitating the pedestrian to walk on the roadway where speeding cars pose great danger to all and sundry. I am amazed that I or some of my fellow pedestrians were not killed on several occasions, especially when the little white taxis sped up and down the city's curving streets.
The "colonia" or neighborhood is called "Tlaltenango." I loved reciting the name of the barrio to the taxi drivers, who mistook my fine pronunciation of a single word for fluent Spanish. This was never without an occasion of acute embarrassment on my part. For the taxi drivers, hungry for chat, rattled on in Spanish while I mumbled, "No hablo mucho Español, Señor!" And then a terrible silence fell over the car until I asked, "Cuando cuesta?" and handed him a huge bill for which he had no change. And like all the taxi drivers in Cuernavaca, he was very patient and waited until I ran into the house and got smaller currency. None of the taxi drivers expected a tip. A trip of 3-5 miles was usually around two or three US dollars. 
The spanish colonial architecture of Cuernavaca is lifted and tilted by centuries of seismic shifts, resulting in surrealist hallways.I recommend the Cetlalic School for people who want to learn Spanish in a progressive environment. The instructors are competent and each has his or her own vivid and compelling passion for teaching. I was fortunate to have Francisco for the first week of class, and Señora Augustina for the second and third week of class. Both are serious and competent, but Señora Augustina has a sense of the group's needs at any given moment. We had fun while we learned in her class because she was very sensitive to our cultural curiosity, and Señor Francisco lacked that confidence, but it will come with experience. I learned more Spanish at Cetlalic in only three weeks than any non-native language that I have studied thus far. It's clear to me now why the "intensive" classes are so popular and successful. I have listened to and spoken along with various tapes and compact disks, but nothing compares to being there in a city and having to find out which street to take home from a friendly stranger. Immersion works for the acquisition of this language for me at this time.
More telling of the quality of the school is how Jorge, Marta and the staff took care of Peggy (a student in my class) who became ill during our stay. She complained of a nagging headache and breathing difficulty on a trip to Mexico City one afternoon. At first, the group thought she suffered from altitude sickness (the road to Mexico City winds through a mountain pass that reaches almost 8,500'), but she worstened upon returning to Cuernavaca and was admitted to the hospital. She was much more ill than we thought, and was sufferering a serious infection and inflammation of the brain that could have been fatal. Fortunately she recovered well enough in a week to be able to travel again, but the staff were wonderful in their care of Peggy and her friend Nancy, who practically lived the next week by Peggy's bedside. The support of the school's staff in the midst of this crisis means that I feel safe sending loved ones to study at Cetlalic.
We were all on edge through the darkest days of Peggy's illness, but I learned an important and enouraging lesson in human nature. A group of people, who only days earlier were complete strangers to one another, came together and supported a sick person and her friend through a life threatening illness with compassion and sensitivity. I haven't felt such sudden and intense connection with a new group of people in years, if ever.
Here is a link to Cetlalic's Website:
Cetlalic Link
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