Alicia Ray Fonseca
West Virginia University College of Law, 3L
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Bad Luck Strikes Amongst So Much Good

If bad luck comes in threes, then I met my quota over the past three days.

First, I was running through the narrow, busy streets of Guanajuato around 6:45 a.m. two days ago at a pretty good pace when I tripped on a piece of metal protruding from the sidewalk and plunged knee and elbow first on to the cobblestone. It was a nasty fall! What impressed me as funny, though, was that although I was covered in dirt and patches of blood, a couple of Mexican guys still yelled piropos, or “cat calls,” at me while finished the remaining three miles of my run!

My second round of bad luck came yesterday morning, when I realized that I had contracted the stomach virus that had felled other members of our group. Although I had to miss the trip to the legislature that day; Tammy, a.k.a. “the mom of Guanajuato,” gave me some good, strong medicine that helped me recover quickly.

My third dose of bad luck came as I was attempting to take my first picture at the entrance of Las Plazuelas, a site of small pyramids excavated within the state of Guanajuato that we visited today; the battery of my camera was completely dead! Of all the days to be without a camera! Because I have a fetish with taking pictures—I used 29 roles of film over my five-week stay in Segovia, Spain—I felt like a fish out of water, a journalist without a recorder or notepad to be a tourist without a camera! However, as I was serving as co-translator for the pyramid tour, I soon became less aware of the fact that I couldn’t capture every angle of the stone pyramids and the surrounding artifacts. And honestly, having originally imagined that the pyramids we would be visiting would be the “big pyramids” found closer to Mexico City; this local excavation site, although interesting and amazing nonetheless when considering how and when they were constructed, was slightly disappointing.

When we arrived back to town, I was hoping that the 30 minutes I had before the Folkloric Ballet started might be enough to recharge my battery. It was not. But as I watched the cultural dances from different parts of Mexico, I found myself realizing that there was almost a freedom in being able to just enjoy the cultural moments, taking the experiences in with my senses and recording them purely in my memory rather than through a lens.