Trouble in tequilla town

First day of school went well. I met a lot of interesting people. I’m in a class with two other people – one from Swiotzerland and one from Sweden. I won’t be entirely surprised if Jorgen the Swede is in another class tomorrow as he seemed to be struggling a bit, but you never can tell.

We newbies (there were about 12 of us in the intake spread over several classes) met up at 8:30 and after some chitchat and breakfast did a brief, but rather difficult, test. Then it was straight into classes until 1:30. As is often the case I walked out feeling slightly shell-shocked form concentrating for several hours.

I spent the early afternoon on an expedition to a supermarket further away than the one I tried on my first day. This one was a bit more up-market (no car tyres piled high here) and had some nice food. What it lacked, however, was any breakfast cereal that was not loaded with sugar – it’s even worse here than the USA. Someone I met yesterday said that Mexico had a problem with sugar, drinking coke has become an epidemic. Interestingly all the sugar is leading, they said, to more mosquito bites as the mosquitoes target people who’ve eaten lots of sugar.

Then it was off for a little orientation tour put on by the school. The idea was to learn something about tequilla and then go on a walk around town to see some local ruins. There were four of us new students doing the tour – Grant from Canada, Tataiana from Brazil, and Rick from Germany. We had an interesting little lecture on tequilla and thren moved on to a tasting. Only Tatiana and I were trying the tequilla, and we’d just had our first taste when Rick fainted dead away.

So we all charged over to try to help Rick who was on the floor and having mild convulsions. Soon enough he seemed to recover a bit, tried to get up (in spite of being encouraged not to) and promptly collapsed again. Once again we sort of got him up, this time into a chair provided by the staff of the tequilla place. Now you have to understand we had only met Rick a few minutes earlier and he kept insisting he was OK and demanding to be helped back to his accomodation – none of us were in a position to realy say no to him, although we did anyway.

Then he collapsed again, which had things spiralling out of control. At that point we insisted that our guide call the school for help and the staff call an ambulance. It was a quick insight into the terrors of being ill in a foreign country as there was no ambulance to be had for some time. The school director came and eventually medics turned up but Rick did not help things by giving strangely inconsistent aswers to questions (he may turn out to be an undercover spy). After a while we all pursuaded Rick to listen to the medics who wanted him on a saline drip and he was eventually taken back to his resiendce to by the medics.

The only bright side of this event was that I got to use my Spanish in earnest and to, if I say so myself, good effect talking ot the staff and ot the medics.

Tatiana, Grant and I thoroughly bonded over this experience. As the rest of thre tour was obviously not a thing, we went and had a beer instead and disected the unexpected end to our first day of school.