Mexico City, August 2013 - #6: Hasta Luego Mexico!

Well, this is my last post from Mexico. And as usual, life has been jam packed since I last wrote! I'll give you the highlights. (If you're lucky, Lou will write a guest post about our week-long vacation in Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende!) 

Real hairless dogs who love their strangely still yard buddy...

So right after my last post, Lou and I proceeded to have an awesome week being super touristy, spending lots on delicious food and an alebrije of or own (a pavoreal, which literally means a royal turkey but translates as peacock...we liked royal turkey better), and then relaxing like retired American expats in San Miguel de Allende about 4 hours north of the city. It was glorious! And we documented it all with our brand new fancy D-SLR camera. But we don't have a cord yet so none of the pictures are uploaded, and my iPhone snapshots will have to suffice for now. But boy did we have fun playing photographer! In Mexico City, we dove deep into Mexican history with lots of pre-Colombian ruins and temples, the ancient breed of hairless dog native to Mexico. We dabbled in the more modern/ contemporary Mexico with some markets and museums too, not missing the incredible murals in Bellas Artes or the alebrijes in the Museo de Arte Popular.
We saw almost everything we wanted, but were foiled at every turn when we tried to see Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera works! Every museum we went to that bragged about it's extensive Frida or Diego collection had temporarily closed those exhibits! But luckily they still had some pretty cool things and we had a good time anyway. We also had fun drinking tequila with my roomie before going out to dinner and after a long day of visiting the south of the city, which led to the picture below when we were both a little inebriated and starving. Yes we're clinking water glasses, and yes Lou is wearing a bib for an unexplained reason...his dish was easier to eat than mine was! And yes we went to sleep directly after this at like 10:30pm. And it was wonderful! 

Bright colors and houses on the hill seen from the restaurant we ate at the first night.

After being super-tourists we opted for a couple relaxing days in San Miguel de Allende. My Lonely Planet book called it the Disney World of Mexico for American retirees. I said, Sign me up! We stayed at a beautiful bed and breakfast, slept in late, had an Arrested Development marathon, and worked our glutes wandering around the cobblestone streets of the town and climbing back up the hill to our hotel. The town is so beautiful and full of colors and old colonial style buildings. There is a church that looks like a pink frosted wedding cake that always has kids playing in front of it tossing blinking or shiny 10 peso toys up into the air and chasing them down as the other tourists in the square dodge and weave to avoid getting hit by plastic balls and giant blow up pencils. We stayed two nights and can't wait to go back!

View from our bed and breakfast just before we left...there's a hot air balloon in the distance if you look carefully!

 Our trip was quick and in a week, Lou had to fly back to Boston and to being a PGY3 and I had to go back to work and prepare to give a presentation of what I did this summer. At first when my boss told me I would present my work, I was nervous. I didn't know if I would have to do it in Spanish, I didn't know how to choose the best cases, and I felt like I hadn't really done very much. But as I started putting together my presentation, I started to realize that I had put together a pretty cool tool, and that I had read hundreds of laws and dozens of cases, all in Spanish, and done a pretty good job identifying and categorizing the most important things. I somehow learned about Mexican labor law, international union protections, complicated hiring and promotion schemes, and so much more. And as I put the presentation together, I started to piece together what felt like a million individual pieces, like pieces of a dinosaur fossil where each article in a statute, holding in a case, sentence in the evidence cited by the court was a tiny piece and a small victory in what felt like an endless and bottomless expanse of land to dig up. But in the end, as I pieced everything together, the skeleton of a very complicated and expansive field of law became visible, and it was so satisfying to see the whole giant animal, so to speak, after spending so much time digging up such tiny parts.

Chile En Nogada - A big green pepper stuffed with meat and veggies, and decorated like the Mexican flag

I gave the presentation to the President and Director General of the organization and maybe 10 other people in the office who would likely use the law library for their work. At first, I stumbled, because although I was giving the presentation in English, I had written the whole thing in Spanish so that it would be easier to use and had only explained it to my supervisor in Spanish. Who would have thought that at the end of my stay, it would be difficult for me to give a presentation in English! But as I got going, I became smoother, and the meeting was really fun and exciting. Everyone was fascinated by what I had found and asked lots of questions. They got excited and you could see ideas forming through the questions they asked about how the courts work, what is binding and what isn't, and so many other things that I hadn't thought to explain. It was also really fun teaching people about the different oddities of the law, from an international court that seems more similar to the common law system that we know in the U.S. to the very convoluted way precedent is set by cases in Mexico, a civil law country with complex and confusing legal rules.

Me and Fer, a researcher from the office and one of the sweetest people here

The meeting that I thought would take half an hour lasted for an hour and a half. It ended only because we had gone past the end of the work day, and even so, on the way out, people in the meeting asked me questions and told me stories and congratulated me on an excellent job. I admit that it felt so good! And I think it really will be useful for them. At the end of the meeting, I had a PowerPoint slide that had potential cases by theme, that I thought would be interesting but unimportant. But when we got to that slide, the President of the organization asked me to slow down, and to give my opinion about the strongest possible cases and the differences between them. And as I talked through my thinking based on what I had done this summer, I had a moment (a tiny moment) where I felt like a lawyer who was starting to build some actual expertise in something I really care about. And it felt really really good.

Mescal cocktails with the office in Coyoacan - Salud!

 After my presentation, I still had about a week left at work, and the week was full of goodbye parties! I went to lunch, dinner, brunch, and drinks with different combinations of people from work. It was so sweet and really fun to spend time with everyone! So here are some pictures from this past week's goodbye parties.

Girls goodbye lunch with much needed (and very potent) apple martinis!

Me, Pau and Ayi

After a delicious, epic, and adorable 3 hour brunch with Jenn (who coordinated my internship) and her kids

Because four goodbye gatherings aren't enough, and because my roomie has been gone for a week and just got back, we're having one more goodbye party tomorrow night, when I'm all packed up and ready to go. Tomorrow, unbelievably, is my last day here. It's been quite the adventure, really hard and really wonderful at the same time. Muchas gracias D.F.! Hasta Luego!

Peace out Mexico - It's been real