so life in the pv ain't all fun and sunshine (and psycho-thunderstorm rainy). living here requires a herculean amount of patience. why, you ask? well, no matter what one may think, this is still a developing country.
a top-five list of things that have required my patience (since i suspect a lack of patience wouldn't get things accomplished any quicker anyway), if you will:

1. the first day i arrived here, i stood at the luggage carousel until there were no bags left to pick up and all the other passengers had left. my luggage was lost. i camped out in my apartment that first night in the clothes i'd travelled in. bienvenidos a mexico, me!

2. during my first week of living here, i had no hot water. the gas-run hot-water heater thing was broken. repair ppl came to fix it, but after they fixed it, flames would catch onto the wiring and the whole thing would set on fire. it must've been a sight to see me pointing to the water heater, enthusiastically shouting fuego! while the repairman looked on. luckily, it was hot as hell here anyway, so i didn't really need hot water that badly.

3. we still don't have internet at home yet. i'm currently writing this from my brand new second home, the 24-hr internet cafe down the road that has wireless laptop capabilities. in order to get dsl installed at home, we have to install a new phone line (we currently have some fucked-up phone card calling system at our place), and to do that, we have to get permission from the complex owners. after we get that, it'll take a while to get the line installed. i'll be happy if i can surf the web from my bed by springtime. but i'm definitely not holding my breath.

4. laundry. ah, laundry. it's normal to have it done for you here, and they charge you per kg of clothing. the manager of our complex gave us the number of a place that will have it picked up and delivered, so we've been using this place. i have no idea why we haven't given up on them yet, since every week something goes wrong. either they don't pick up the laundry when they say they will or they don't deliver it the day we expect them to. i've run into a lot of i-have-no-underwear-left situations in the past few weeks. this past week, their delivery/drop-off timing was perfect, only i was missing a very cherished bra that i stupidly gave them to wash. i really, really hope the laundry man is a non-existent-bra-size victoria's secret fetishist, since he swears the bra was never there, and i would bet my very-tanned left arm that it was.
one of the lovely library ladies at my school offered to have a TGIL-day (the "L" being laundry) w/ me where i can use the machines at her house, and i'm seriously hoping she was serious.

5. i still don't have a bank card yet. my salary is supposed to be direct-deposited into my bank account. i still don't have a bank card yet.
nor do i have my teacher's ID, which would allow me to buy my school uniform at a discounted price at the dept. store where it's available. i don't need to have a uniform, but i hate having to decide what to wear everyday. i'm considering just bringing in the issue of the newspaper where the faces of all us new teachers are plastered on the cover. that's as good as a teacher's ID, no?

and now here's a terrible joke i heard on t.v. this morning:
what did the mexican fire chief name his two sons?
hose a and hose b
GROAN.

post-post disclaimer: my intention is not really to be snarky or racist or snide or ungrateful in this entry. truly. despite all this mildly frustrating stuff (which even i'll admit is nothing, compared to my friend, who's been waiting something like three weeks to spend a fortune for his car to be fixed after having hit a truck that had a pregnant woman fall out of it), i'm still very much enjoying my time here, as my previous posts have hopefully conveyed.
i went to see a relatively new movie in a swanky cineplex for 30 pesos ($3 US) last night! beat that!