Wednesday, September 29, 2010 Mushrooms Day 2, Queretaro

Second day at the client. I was zipping through my work, given that this is my third mushroom inventory and eleventh inventory observation total. They gave me a full tour of the entire premises, basically because for fun because I told them I wasn´t auditing the farm part. But this is always the best part; chicken manure, moldy hay, steaming mushroom growing rooms, etc. The controller offered to take me after work to the nearby colonial town of Queretaro. We drove in his car past lots of countryside houses made of concrete, as with all buildings in the non first world. The town was really nice; the outskirts were all upscale shopping malls, Walmart, Sams Club, Burger King, Volkswagen, while the center was full of nice plazas, souvenir shops, and churches. I feel like they just didn´t have anything for the natives to do, so the Spaniards made them build way too many opulent cathedrals. Oh, and all the public parks in Queretaro are equipped with free Wi-Fi, while the US still doesn´t have free Wi-Fi on most public university campuses; wtf. We walked around the safe, family-friendly squares and got some ice cream. On the ride back, he gave me a 101 on Mexico. Here´s what I learned: Mexicans are family people. It´s an extremely diverse country geographically and culturally and ethnically, but all Mexicans are proud to be Mexican and identify as such. The biggest problem facing the country is not drugs, but education by far. The poorest state is Chiapas in the South. Outside the border cities, Mexicans aren´t looking to move to the United States. President Calderon´s solution to the drug problem is to "clean up the house" aka kill everyone involved (which is why we drove through several police barricades with everyone holding machine guns, but went right through because we both had glasses on). Mexicans all have cell phones and credit cards. Most people live in cities nowadays but the Walmarts are slow to penetrate because it is a small-scale mom and pop economy. The reason their flag is what it is, is because the Aztec leader Tenoch was looking for the promised land and he said that God told him that when he saw an eagle with a snake in its beak that´s where he should settle. Well, him and 20 million other people agree, because that´s the site of modern-day Mexico City and the Jewel on the Spanish crown of their colonial empire in the Americas.