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A plane crash just a few blocks from my apartment has dampened considerably the election elation in Mexico City. The sounds of sirens provided an eerie backdrop to the Embassy party last night. We stood on a balcony and spotted plumes of smoke rising from the park, while we were served wine, hot dogs and hamburgers by a white-tuxedoed catering staff.

The big screens in the banquet hall switched back and forth between cheering crowds in Chicago, and Mexican pedestrians running for their lives from a plane crash that many suspect was an act of drug cartel terrorism. My friends and I stood and stared, in awe of the complex world that awaits Barack Obama's administration. From the conversations I had with Mexicans my age last night, many of whom are embarking on their own careers in Mexican politics and government, the relief we shared over Obama's victory was only deepened by their overwhelming uneasiness about Mexico's security.

But we couldn't keep from celebrating. I wound up at an expat bar just in time to catch Obama's speech, after calling my parents in a speeding taxi and leaving an extremely jealous voicemail on my brother's phone as he celebrated in Grant Park. When I made it through the door, I stood on a chair, grabbed a random caballito of tequila and started scanning the crowd for my friends, with whom I immediately engaged in a mixture of hugging and borderline crowd-surfing.

And now the moment I've been waiting for, for four whole years. I present you with a fresh batch of online away messages and facebook statuses, compiled today at noon, which can finally replace this total bummer of a list from November 2004.

• This facebooker is estatic. And can't find any copies of the Times.
  
• This facebooker is riding high after witnessing history.
• This facebooker is toasting to Obama: woo hoo!!
• This facebooker is looking forward to the next four years...for once!
• This facebooker can't stop smiling.
• This facebooker is all smiles.
• This facebooker is feeling so solid.
• This facebooker is elated and speechless.
• This facebooker is blown away by the city he loves. Sweet home of Obama. That rally was amazing guys... Mind blowing. I was also on Fox News!
• This facebooker is so excited for the possibilities ahead.
• This facebooker is screaming, "YES WE DID!"
• This facebooker is celebrating...with wine.....and joy....and HELL YEAH!!
• This facebooker doesn't know how she'll get anything done today.
• This facebooker is Amavericka!
• This facebooker feels American again.
• This facebooker is choked-up.
• This facebooker is whew.
• This facebooker needs me some confetti!
• This facebooker is at home in Ohio, politically speaking.
• This facebooker is O(migodImProudOfMyCountry)bama.

Cherish this moment

Today I had to make a rare trip to a payphone in order to call Puebla. I went to the one around the corner from my apartment, next to the fruit stand. When I got there, to my surprise, someone was using it. I had to wait in line. For a payphone. I don't know if I'll ever get to do that again.

El Peso

FINE, I said, as I stomped off the scale at the pharmacy this morning. My premonitions were correct. This time I didn't even need to try to convert kilos to pounds in order to understand the gravity of this situation. But I have since done so with the help of google, and yes, very bad: If I continue to consume tequila, beer, and melted cheese at this rate, I will weigh an amount which is considered a lot even among bench-pressers by the time I come home.

Plan of attack:

1. No tequila (on weekdays)
2. No beer (on weekdays)
3. No melted cheese (more than once a day)
4. Three jogs/week in Bosque de Chapultepec, even when smog is unbearable and all wildlife is hiding.
5. No more street snacks, unless accompanied by a Mexican friend or international visitor (street snacks = street cred)
6. No more Cheetos, even though and especially because they come fully coated in chili powder
7. No more chicharron, for this is fried pig skin. Yet so delicious.
8. Will drink only Leche Light, Mexico's answer to skim milk (only 3 g of fat/serving!)
9. No more blogging about how delicious Mexican food is, as this practice often justifies my indulgent choices. I'm sorry.

So now I will talk about other things, with the hopes that one of them will very soon include the fact that my new purple coat fits me again. 

Kindly ignore the fact that my necklace is a spoon.

On Friday I went to a party at la casa de Mike, who is an engineer fresh out of MIT. I don't mean to stereotype but I thought it very engineer-like of him to lower a string with a key attached from the balcony, so I could efficiently let myself in. He proceeded to throw one of the best parties I've been to here, because it had equal numbers of Mexicans and internationals, not the usual 9:1 or vice-versa ratio which can often lead to linguistic hegemony.

So the party was bilingual, and all the more fun because it was attended by engineers, archaeologists, a pianist, and opera singer, and even a man chronicling the history of the Tabascans (who did SO much more than invent sauce). The result was a refreshing blast of new vocabulary, so neatly and cartoonly contexted in each person's spiel about their job, that at times I wondered if we were trapped the pages of a language textbook. 

I'm Maria, I play the piano and I hate to transpose!

I'm Paula, I study biology, and wow are the ethical issues surrounding stem cells ever crazy!

I'm Beto, I'm an archaeologist and I help people to register Pre-Columbian artifacts that they find on their property, because Mexico is really into cultural patrimony laws!

I found myself trying out my own new terms from the mariachi world, like chamba (party where Mariachis are a required ingredient), callo (finger calluses), and huapango (a particular song style, strumming pattern, and type of party, the defining details of which I'm still figuring out). These new words we shouted to each other over David Bowie songs and cups of sangria (this is ALL I'm gonna say about the sangria: it had the usual ingredients, plus figs and cinnamon... I will leave it to you to conclude how delicious it was) and chocolate candy skulls, which have flooded the shopfronts and roadside stands in recent weeks, as Mexico gears up for Day of the You-Know-What.

Macho cheese

Things I enjoy about machismo and its ramifications:

• Sweet talk
• The fact that PDAs are allowed anywhere, at any point in a relationship
• Drive-by poetry
• The fact that two men fighting over you in a bar can actually happen outside of your fantasies
• The chair-pull-out in restaurants, though I was never properly trained on my half of the procedure and this often results in awkwardness
• The fact that if I close my eyes while on the back of a motorcycle, I can easily pretend I'm on horseback (either as a Spanish countess or girlfriend of Pancho Villa, depending on my mood).
• Every Mexican love song ever written
• Dancing skills and willingness
• The selection and affordability of hair gel
• This picture

Things I do not enjoy about machismo and its ramifications:

• Sweet talk
• The fact that PDAs are expected anywhere, at any point in a relationship
• The fact that my eye color is considered a more stimulating conversation topic than my career interests.
• The fact that "girlfriend" and "bride" are the same word in Spanish, and "my compliments to the chef" translates to "Now you can get married!" 
• The fact that I can blow an entire dinner party with one sarcastic comment that could be misinterpreted as an affront to my date's sense of honor, or something like that. Same goes for this bullet point.
• The fact that the government needs to pour millions of pesos into an ad campaign that teaches, "Equality between men and women starts at home." The visual aid is a man's calendar, where he's circled the note to himself: "Respect the decisions of my wife and daughters every day."

Adios, amigo

Today my friend texted me that he quit his job in Mexico City, and is going home next week. Reading his message at the roadside stand where I was eating lunch, I let out a loud, American "Oh man" with my mouth full of huitlacoches, which I'm sure my fellow lunchers found adorable.

He's been teaching at an international high school (swank meter: all students AND teachers are required to own a macbook) where he is paid twice as much as his Mexican coworkers for simply being a citizen of the greatest country on earth. One of his duties includes helping kids locate their chauffeurs after class, so they don't accidentally hop into the wrong BMW. Understandably, he is not wild about this arrangement.

I met up with him at an Irish pub to say goodbye, as well as to call dibs on his coffee maker. We split a burger and watched the Rays cream the Red Sox with the volume off, as the bartender's Moby mix provided an unexpectedly awesome soundtrack to the slow-mo instant replays. All of a sudden, I missed the U. S. like crazy.

While I can't imagine leaving Mexico City right now (I JUST figured out where to buy skim milk), I got even more homesick when we went through the list of nice American things he is about to go home to. This included, but was not limited to, The Daily Show, deciduous trees, flannel, and air quality. Sigh [cough]. 

American is to Apple Pie, as ______ is to Mole.

I can't wait to eat myself stupid.

Text message from British friend Jake, regarding our weekend trip to Puebla.

Don't worry. We have non-spicy ones, just for you.

Man selling fried grasshoppers.

Puebla is famous for Mole, that saucy Mexican combination of nuts, fruit, chocolate, and chili powder, which is naturally spread all over chicken. I still haven't developed a taste for it, nor do I get terribly appetized when I bump into mole fixings at the market near my house. But this weekend, after spontaneously hopping a bus to escape the capital, I decided to try everything Puebla has to offer. And if that meant fried grasshoppers, well gosh darn it, that meant fried grasshoppers.

As soon as my roommate Becca, Jake, and I arrived in colonial Puebla, we hit the cobblestoned streets in search of a greasy snack. We were instantly satisfied with these super-quesadilla-empanada-like things. I'm kicking myself for not remembering what they were called, because everyone agreed they ought to be prominently featured on the menu of My Dream Restaurant. Imagine with me for a moment . . . a place where you will be able to order, from the same kitchen, all the dough-wrapped treats of the world. 

We met up with two more of Jake's friends in front of the Cathedral. They said they were hungry, and were instantly adopted into our travel group. We did our obligatory mole tour, and chased it with some churros rellenos in the central plaza. Churros are essentially lincoln logs of fried dough, rolled in sugar and injected with flavored custard (we tried apple, peach, choco-walnut, cheese, and la lechera, a.k.a. sweetened condensed milk [Mexicans have no shame in consuming vast quantities of this and the world could stand to follow their example]). 

As we digested, night fell. We watched the families running around and laughing in the plaza. Probably hopped up on their own churros, smiling parents were shooting giant crayon-shaped balloons at their kids, who scurried around until way past their bedtimes. Meanwhile, some old men played a marimba under a portico.

Audio Postcard: I scream, you scream

I was lucky to land in Mexico two weeks before Independence Day. People were already getting pumped up, hanging flags and rallying around the giant digital clock that counts down the days until the bicentennial on September 16, 2010 (mark your calendars).

I was way lucky, though, to spend Independence eve on a bus to the colonial town of Dolores Hidalgo, where Mexican Independence was first declared. It was there in 1810 that Father Miguel Hidalgo, upon hearing that Spanish authorities had sniffed out signs of the upcoming rebellion, issued what is now popularly known as El Grito (the scream) of Independence. The crowd of campesinos who had trekked into town to hear Father Hidalgo say mass, instead heard him screaming a call to arms.

My friend Colleen and I decided to hop the tour bus at the last minute, joining a group of mostly middle-aged and elderly patriots on their way to this otherwise sleepy mountain town. Spirits were high. People couldn't wait to join the crowds in Dolores Hidalgo's central plaza, where they would hear the governor's rendition of El Grito at midnight. Back in the capital, millions of Mexicans were turning on their radios and TVs, and the brave ones flooding into the Zocalo in front of the National Palace, and hear President Calderon scream the same scream.

Here's a postcard from our bus ride, where we got a sneak preview of what El Grito would sound like.

Me: OK. Who wants to be the president?

Bus Tour Guide: Right there, that guy!

Colleen: Ready, everyone?

Me: You sir? Ok, you. Please.

Man: Mexicans! Long live the heroes who gave us both country and liberty!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Miguel Hidalogo y Costilla!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Doña Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: Long live Vicente Guerrero!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: ¡Viva Mexico!

Bus riders: ¡Viva!

Man: ¡¡Viva Mexico!!

Bus riders: ¡¡Viva!!

Man: ¡¡¡Viva Mexico!!!

Bus riders: ¡¡¡Viva!!!

(applause)

Bus riders: (chanting) Again! Again!