Saw a pair yesterday:
Daisies a 1966 Czech film. It is very random and very weird. It uses strange colors all over the place, jumps from one scene to the next, uses strange avant-garde stuff which reminded me of Stan Brakhage. The movie still works even with all its weirdness and randomness. It does give the idea of be happy and enjoy life.

I went to see Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation. It had 19 short animated films. Most of them were very funny and some of them were excellent. It was well worth my time. The highlight was one that was very creative in its presentation, by having a pop op book tell you the story, unfortunately it was not very long. There was also a very funny "commercial" of a mexican restaurant based on a cartoon character called "Dr. Tran", it was very funny.
Something weird about the movie was that most people watching were old people. There was a cute old couple that was very lovey dovey.

At night I went to the Canoe Club (bar) with my roommate Damien. At first I was bored but then the conversation got interesting. France has important elections in 10 days and Damien was explaining the candidates stances.

Earlier in the day I had classes. Alison presented her thesis defense, which I missed because I was out buying tea, but I was in on the celebration. She and her advisor looked very happy. I am glad for them. She did some cool thing with coke bottles representing the Gaussian integers the size of her advisor's door to block him entrance to his door on the day of the defense, it looked nice.

The plan detailed in the previous post was almost performed. Greg and I played 6 matches of racquetball which were very fun. I got back, showered and ate a bit. Greg went to put gas on his car (gas stations close late at night). I was about to sleep when Greg arrives and asks if I am going to sleep. He is not sleepy and we decide to play some songs on his guitar. We play some Beatles songs and then instead of getting sleepy the opposite happens and we just chat for hours (Chrisil joins). While chatting we realize no sleeping will occur. Chrisil, Greg and I drove to Burlington to eat at a Dennis and keep the conversation going. We left at 12:30am, arrived at Dennis at 2am and were there until 4am. I left Greg at the airport and then drove back to Hanover. I got lost for 10 minutes and arrived home at 6:05am (instead of the predicted 5:55). I slept for 2 hours before waking up to take the bus to Boston.

I took the bus to Boston at 9am, it was full. At the arrival at Boston I had lunch with my friend Karima. It was nice catching up with her life. She is amazing, apparently she will likely get her PhD next year. That would mean she would get her PhD at the age of 24, exactly 6 years after graduating high school. It would be amazing.

I take the flight to Columbus. Nothing spectacular happened, then I take a flight to Dallas. The guy next to me was telling me about when he lived in El Paso (1961), how he worked in a boat for 4-5 years travelling all around Africa and how he gave math lessons to kids in Africa. He says it is way more fun to teach kids in Africa than kids in America because the kids in Africa have a hunger to learn. It was a very interesting conversation.
Then I took the flight to El Paso. I had a DVD portable player and watched "Stranger then Fiction". The movie was excellent, probably worthy of my top 10 (could replace Talladega Nights for example). It was very fun, very creative and it had a nice message (albeit cliche).

I arrived home at 10pm central (12am Eastern, hence a full 24 hours after leaving the apartment for Burlington). Because of the idiotic daylight savings change in America, El Paso and Juarez have a different time zone. Therefore my mom picked me up late.

I went to eat tacos and talked with Cesar, Emmanuel, Lencho and my mom for a long time. It was great seeing my friends and mom again, but eating the delicious tacos and drinking the superb horchata was just perfect.

I woke up early today to go watch "The Queen" at the matinee showing. Obviously I arrived late, twenty minutes late, but I predict we (mom, Cesar, me) missed only 5 minutes of movie. The movie was very good, but it wouldn't crack my top 10 (or honorable mentions). It was an entertaining, good, fun film, but I just didn't get that feeling of greatness that needs to surround a movie I would love.

After that, I went to Montana to eat with my father and mother. It was great seeing my father (who I hadn't seen in a long time). I ate a delicious Rib Eye (10oz). I also had salad, a potato and some vegetables. The Rib Eye at Montana is truly excellent.

After my meal, I went to Nicia's house to say hi and chat for a while. We talked for about 3 hours and planned things to do on the night. I had to go home for an hour before our plans could kick in because Mary had cooked me "chile relleno", a meal I love more than anything in the world. I also had to appease my internet addiction by checking email.

After completing my tasks, I went back to Nicia's house to pick her up (8:30pm) and went to a karaoke bar. We sang 6 songs (3 each). I started with "Like a Prayer" by Madonna. I thought it would be funny for the audience to hear me try to sing this song, but I didn't hear anybody laugh, so it was a failure, at least it was fun. Later, I sang "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. For the last five times I had gone to a karaoke I had a huge desire of singing it, but the fact that it is hard and maybe not that fun for other people to hear prevented me from trying. This time, I didn't back away and sang away. It was very fun. I love the song, know it by heart and I think I did justice to it with my passion. The last song I sang was a popular one by Raphael called "¿Y cómo es él?". I got to see Enrique Vazquez, a friend since childhood whom I hadn't seen in more than a year.

After karaoke, Nicia and I went to Tumbao, the salsa dance club. We danced non-stop and I mean non-stop for two hours. I am extremely exhausted right now, but it was the most fun I have had in a long time. I love salsa dancing and dancing with Nicia is wonderful because she is a very good follower and I don't have much trouble controlling her because she is much shorter than me. She also laughs a lot, which is always a huge plus when dancing. I had a great time.

I am now home exhausted, ready to go to bed, but since my hair is wet (from a shower), I am typing to wait for my hair to dry up (almost there).

In summary, I had two magnificent action packed days where I got to eat magnificent food, dance a lot, sing a lot and see my best friends and family (not to mention my wonderful dogs).
I am in a very happy mood. Ready to go to Spain tomorrow.

My day was watching NFL on TV and a movie. The games were really fun, it is rare that I get to see my favorite team on TV, the Detroit Lions. They won their third game of the season and finished as the second worst team of the league, at least they played well yesterday. The NE-TEN was also fun to watch and the SF-DEN game. Incredible how KC passed to the playoffs, they depended on so much:
Winning and losses by DEN, CIN and TEN. DEN-SF went to overtime and was going to decide whether KC or DEN would pass to the playoffs.

I went to the movie theater with my mom and uncle to see "The Good Shepherd". The movie was pretty good. It makes you think that life sucks for spies. Constant danger, no time for their families, there job doesn't seem to bring too many joys.
A quote that was interesting was:
"The Italians have their family, the Jews have their traditions, the Irish have their homeland, hell even the negroes have their music. What do you have?"
"We have the United States of America, you're just visiting."
Also, there is a quote where Matt Damon says that the CIA doesn't make the big wars, they make sure the wars are small ones. Made me think for a while.

At night, Lencho came and at midnight we went to Tumbao to try to get some dancing going on. Eventhough it was already midnight they were charging us a lot, so we didn't go in and came back home to continue our conversation.

Now, I will play my traditional New Year's touch football, which we play every year since I was thirteen (the tradition is longer, I joined in when I was 13).

After going to all my classes on Friday, I packed and headed to Boston on the bus.
I met with Iuli and three of her friends; Erin, Megan and Carolina. The three of them speak Spanish (Carolina is from Spain). We went to Rendang near Harvard Square to eat malaysian food. I ordered fried taro with chicken, vegetables, cashew nuts and some interesting sauce. It was delicious albeit expensive. Chris arrived just when the food arrived.
After dinner, the six of us went to a bar called Red Line. I drank Pineapple juice and the rest had beers or other drinks. It was fun, although it ended kind of quickly since we wanted to go to another place and in the end left the bar and didn't go anywhere else.
In Chris' apartment, Parthi, Chris and I talked nonsense for hours until we went to sleep at 5am.

On Saturday, I woke up, finished reading Watchmen (review soon to follow) and went with Chris and Parthi to CostCo where they were going to buy stuff for their apartment.
At CostCo I ate a surprisingly good "Chicken Bake" and drank a berry smoothie that was delicious, while Chris had a disgusting looking pizza.

In the night, we went to a housewarming party of Marina, friend of Iuli. It turns out that the roommate of Chris (Sean, a guy who constantly says "awesome") was also going to that party, since another guy on the same house was a friend of his.

The party turned out to be very fun. The time when I had the best time was when some girl put some salsa and merengue music. I danced with a girl named Anya, who was russian, but for a strange reason spoke Spanish. She danced very well and it was very fun. After that, she went with a friend somewhere else and I was left alone when the music changed from salsa to merengue. As I have stated several times, I love merengue, I was looking around seeing who I could invite to dance, I noticed a girl wanting to dance, but it took me about a minute before I actually went and invited her to dance. I danced with Katrina, a swedish girl, for about 4 songs. It was quite fun, since Katrina is one of those girls that looks at you when you dance (I think that is more fun than looking at the floor or at other sides).
Besides the dancing, the atmosphere was quite comfortable and fun.

Since I don't drink, I was the designated driver, so I gave a lot of rides. I drove for 2 and a half hours. It could have been 2 hours, but I got lost in one of the rides, since I hadn't driven in Boston before and the girl did not know how to get where she wanted me to take her and everybody I would ask would send me farther and farther away from the place we had to go.

On Sunday, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine, Karima. Karima and I met in an international summer science camp in Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel four years ago. She's a grad student at MIT, so I called her to see if she wanted to do something. The day was grey with lots of rain, so we went to some nearby place (it turned out that she lives very near Chris' dorm). We talked for a couple of hours and then I took the bus back home (interesting that I am starting to think of Hanover as home).

Had a great time, I am really enjoying my life.

Started the day early to go give lectures to High School students to prepare for the math olympiad. I think I did a pretty good job with the topic I was teaching.
In the evening, David asked me to give a lecture to some High School professors in mathematical olympiad training. I gave a lecture on geometry, I didn't have any time to prepare[1], so the lecture came out being a very random jump to several sections of geometry. I would get lost in some proofs, but in the end, I think I did an ok job considering the circumstances (I wish I could say I did a good job). The bad news about this seminar, its that the university of Juárez (UACJ), didn't give enough publicity, hence only a handful of professors showed up. The good news is that two of them were very motivated on what I was telling them.
I also learned a lot by seeing how David presented a couple of problems to the professors. I think he is a very good lecturer and I hope I can be better than him[2].

After the seminar, Neto, David and me went to Café Veracruzano. There I noticed I wanted tamales and asked for tamales, but they didn't have any. David had the idea of going to "La Choza". We went there after a couple of coffees and we ate tamales. I tasted the four types of tamales they have there. It is very cheap[3] and very tasty. I missed tamales so much.

At night, after watching the bad news on the UTEP match[4], I went out with Lencho, Nalleli, Angélica and Raúl. We went to a party. The party was full of younger people (minors), hence we felt out of place[5]. We decided to ditch that party and go to another one. The other party was a private housing community, and they didn't want to let us in, so we had to make a couple of calls to get the name of the birthday girl. We finally got in. We stayed in that party for about 2 hours.

We had tacos for supper at "Los Cuñados", which is a place I had never been to even though it is one block away from my house. They were good, but next time, I will go to Chiris. I need to taste those Horchatas once more before I leave.

And that was the end of the day.


[1] Another person was going to give the lecture, but he had some setbacks and couldn't make it, hence David called me.
[2] I am tired of the classic sentence: "I wish I could be as good", for one to be really better, you must want to be better, not as good.
[3] Each tamale is $8 pesos, that is about $0.75 dollars.
[4] UTEP lost in OT againts Texas Tech 38-35. They missed an extra point and two 2-point conversions and they missed a Field Goal in the final second. They should've won this game.
[5] Another reasons we felt out of place was that the music selection was awful.

On Paulo's party, Aki told me that she had taken dance lessons for three months and remembered I liked dancing, so she said we had to get together and dance before I leave. I told her to meet today and dance. She has classes at 7am on Friday, so we decided to get to Tumbao at 9pm (the time they open). Since Aki told me she would go with some friends, I decided to wait for my mom on some things she had to do and arrive a little late. I arrived at 9:40pm. Aki, had left already. I feel bad for making her wait (I realized she had left, when I called her at 10:15 and she told me she had waited).

Other than that, I had a great time. I love dancing so much, I don't know why I don't go more often. Since the new band that plays in Tumbao plays cumbias, the DJ plays only salsa and merengue. So between 9 -11 (before the band arrives) they only play salsa and merengue, which are the things I like the most. In the past, they wouldn't play much merengue, because they had to play cumbias for the crowd (mexicans like cumbias more), but now, since there was going to be live cumbia playing, they could play more merengue, and I love merengue. I danced about two hours, most of the pieces with my mom (only two songs with another person), it was great. It is impressive how much more fluid one dances after a couple of songs, the rhythm of dancing just flows naturally, it feels really good. I had a lot of fun with some of the steps, merengue rules.

Last night I went out with Emmanuel, Karla and Alejandra to a club called Volumen. We like it there. A drunk guy was hitting on Alejandra very obnoxiously, hence we left early. We went to Chiri's Tacos and had a fun conversation, great tacos and amazing Horchata (I can't stop praising the horchata at Chiri's).
Reading Trivia or Superman Returns at imdb, I noticed this line:


Lex Luthor says, "To the primitive mind, any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic," which is a paraphrase of
an Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" ("Profiles of the Future," 1961).

Part of the conversation yesterday revolved around that idea. Funny how I mentioned a similar quote without realizing that I probably got it from Superman.

Today, I woke up early to play fútbol. I didn't play well but it was very fun. I played with the olympiad crew. A couple of little kids joined in and it was fun. Two of the kids were very good (but age is definitely a huge edge).
The olympians came to my house to plan the Math Olympiad, but the only thing we did was play poker. I made a couple of mistakes. The most memorable hand was an all in KK-J9s where the J9s won.

I solved a nice problem a couple of minutes ago, but I can't post it because it might be used in a test to select the Mexican team for the IberoAmerican Mathematical Olympiad.

Jay Gupta, my roommate in college my freshman year (I studied at Southwestern University my freshman year, then transferred to UTEP). A really charismatic, cheerful, optimistic guy that I really care about as a friend, finally came to visit me here in Juárez after three years of trying to convince him. He arrived a couple of hours after I arrived from Chiapas on Thursday evening. The first day I took him to meet my uncle and we had a chat over there (mainly political, but also many jokes). Then, we came to Juárez (my uncle lives in El Paso) and I called Lencho and César to invite them to join me and Jay at Chiri's tacos. I wanted Jay to taste the delicious Horchata and the tacos. We each ordered a different thing, so that Jay could try different types of tacos.

On Friday, César, Jay and me went to the movie theater to watch "Talladega Nights", the new Will Ferrell movie. The movie was very good, very funny. Although not as good as last years comedies (Wedding Crashers and 40 Year Old Virgin), it was quite funny and fun to watch. After that, we came back and planned a night of poker. I won the poker game, then we watched "VideoDrome". I had seen this movie before, but I definitely enjoyed it more this time. I understood much more of what is going on (which it still falls short of understanding the movie, since the movie is so weird). I liked the movie very much. In another point to make, we bought potato chips for Jay to try them out. I think he liked them very much, Mexican potato chips are much better than American (in my opinion).

Saturday. Jay, César and I went to downtown Juárez, to show him the market, making Jay taste the delightful mexican candy. We had to leave a bit early because it started raining heavily. Jay had a Melón water, (my favorite flavor of aguas frescas, although not found in many places). I don't recall how much we did, but I recall we saw "Citizen Kane". Great movie, third time I have seen it. Lencho said he loved it, Jay said he liked it.

Sunday: Lala, Román, Elías and Héctor arrived early (8:30am) to play some SMASH Bros. Jay realized my Juárez friends are immensely talented in SMASH Bros. It was very fun, it was also very cool to check some glitches from SMASH Bros, specially the "black hole" thing and the thing where Game and Watch turns into a projectile was alfo funny. My mom, my sister, Jay and I went to see "Miami Vice" to the movie theater here in Juárez. Cinepolis has incredible movie theaters, the screens are huge, great sits. The movie was quite good, action packed and interesting. After that, we took Jay to Ajua, to taste formal mexican food. I had chicken filled with chile and cheese in mango sauce, it was good. Jay had an enchilada, a chile relleno and some other thing (the Mexican plate it was called). Ajua is a beautiful restaurant, very nicely decorated, but not too many people go anymore, I don't know how it survives. After Ajua, Lencho came to my house and then I picked up Nicia, who had just returned from her vacations, and her friend Mayela and we went to a coffee place called Espazio. I hadn't been there before, they should get some air conditioner because it was really hot. We talked for a while, but the thing got really fun when we started playing Jenga. I have never played Jenga before, it was evident I was the worse. I was the third man to lose, but in the following rounds I would get impatient and I would lose pretty quickly. I lost 7 times, Lorenzo and Jay each lost 3 times and Nicia lost 0 times (Mayela had already left, because she has curfew at 10pm). It was a fun night. When we got back home, Jay stayed up reading Spiderman comics, for some reason he got hooked by my Spiderman comics collection (I have about 200 Spiderman comics in my room).

On Sunday night, Lencho, Nicia agreed to arrive at my home at 10am (Monday) to start the last day of Jay in Juárez. Nicia arrived at 10:20, Lencho arrived at about 11am. While we waited for Lencho, I showed Jay and Nicia three of the 6 movies I have that César filmed. César has made 7 films, and he gave me (a little over a year ago) a DVD with his first 6 films. The third one is hilarious, so I knew Jay would like it very much. When Lencho arrived, we went downtown. Our plan was to enter the museum of history of Juárez that is placed in the ex-aduana (the old customs office), where Porfirio Díaz signed his resignation to the presidency in 25 de mayo de 1911, because of the Mexican revolution. When we arrived to the ex-aduana, it was closed. We decided to walk Juárez street (which is full of clubs on nights) and we saw that Kentucky Club was open and since it is a famous bar (the one that claims the invention of the margaritas, although my uncle says it was another bar called Manhattan). Nicia, Lencho and Jay had a margarita to taste the margaritas from the "inventors". After that we kept walking and Nicia wanted us to taste the "chuchos". Chuchos is a popular bar downtown, that was a drink called chuchos that is tequila with a root from Chihuahua called chuchohuistle (I am not sure it is spelled this way). The four of us had a shot, talked for a while and left when the waiter kicked us out (he didn't kick us out, but he implied that if we wouldn't order anything else, it would be better to leave). After that we went to El Paso because our plan was to see the Museum of Fine Arts of El Paso. The museum was closed (stupid Monday), so we paid the $5 parking for nothing. Although we did see the paintings that they have at the Camino Real, very good paintings by the way. We then ate at Sinbad's. After eating, we went to Sunland Park and walked around for a while, then we entered the arcade place, which is very poorly managed, the Area 51 had a deficient gun, the Marvel vs. Streetfighter game had two unworking buttons, the percussion game had a cuple of the discs harmed and the ice-hockey game had a wall where the disc wouldn't bounce off. What a bad arcade place. After that, I took Jay to the airport and he invited me a beer. I learned that in Texas there is a law that prohibits people from having guns if the place where they are get their income mostly from alcohol. For example, you can have a gun at Applebees eventhough they sell alcohol, because most of their income comes from food sells, yet you can't have a gun at the airport bar because most of the sells come from alcohol. I didn't know people could carry guns anywhere (almost anywhere) in Texas. Jay left.
After that I visited my uncle with Nicia and then I came back home.
Monday was a very fun day. I am very glad Jay visited.

After playing five hours of SMASH (the highlight was me beating Lala's Luigi, which isn't so big a highlight, but it is for me because I am the weakest link of the SMASH club), I went to a party at night. The party was for Fernie's brother. It was fun. Not much to highlight actually, maybe it didn't even deserve a blog entry. I guess I could point out that my sister looked beautiful and that I was so into a math problem I was working at that I took a little notepad with me in case I had any ideas during the party.

I watched three comedy movies and then went to a stand up comedy act in the night.

I started the day watching Clerks II. The movie was very funny. Kevin Smith has some trouble in the romantic sections of the movie, they don't feel authentic or real, and it is awkward many times, but the comedy of Jason Mewes (Jay) comes to save the day in many instances. I laughed a lot and had a great time. Jay was really funny and Randall had many funny lines, the story seemed forced in several instances.

I watched "Modern Times" by Charles Chaplin. I liked the movie, but not that much. The reputation of Chaplin made me expect more. This was the first Chaplin movie I have seen. It definitely was funny, but I felt it carried a bit too long (maybe because I was tired).

After that I saw "The Great Dictator" by Charles Chaplin. Now this movie is now one of my favorites. I loved it. The speech by Chaplin at the end of the movie is incredibly moving. The movie is funny by making fun of the sadness brought by the nazis. The movie was made in 1940 and wasn't well received in America, because the USA was still neutral regarding the WWII. It is impressive how Chaplin denounces in satire fascism. More movies should be made striving to provoke thought and humanity.

Juan Carlos, friend of my mom, had 8 tickets to go to Foro 33 to watch a comedy show. We went. Three stand up comedians and then one other comedian that did an act. The three stand up comedians were funny, specially the first one. I had a good time.