Mexico #7

Whats that, its story time! Awesome!

So last weekend I took a trip back to Queretaro to get out of the city for awhile and hang out with an English speaking friend I met on my first trip. My first solo trip in Mexico, but I wasn't nervous, I mean, what could go wrong? Well apparently missing my stop and going to the wrong city was one thing that could go wrong. And while the first part of this did indeed happen, fortunately I was spared the second. My friend (who I will henceforth refer to as Arianne, since thats her name) called me while I was on the bus to ask where I was, so I asked a fellow passenger and he told me, "Queretaro". Great, I thought, I'm almost there. So then we stop at this little dinky market and a bunch of people start getting on. "This can't be my stop," I thought, "since Arianne told me I'd stop at a big bus station in downtown." Well whether we did or didn't stop there before, I don't know, but I honestly don't remember stopping there, so I'm pretty sure the bus driver just forgot that he had a passenger going to Queretaro. Confident that it wasn't my stop (which it wasn't) I stayed on the bus. But as we pull away I notice we are leaving the city... Queretaro... where I wanted to go. I'm confused, so I ask again, where are we going? San Miguel? That small tourist town an hour north of Queretaro? Uh oh. So I run to the front of the bus and tell the driver to stop, I figure wherever we are is better then ending up in San Miguel. Well where we were was about a kilometer outside of town, which made for a pretty relaxing walk back to the bus station. I called Arianne to tell her that I had no idea where I was, but I was on the side of the road somewhere, and for some reason she got really nervous. So I told her to relax, eventually made it back to the market, and had a guy call her to tell her how to get to where I was. 20 minutes later, everything is fine, although apparently that market district is notoriously dangerous (however I found the people to be quite friendly).

The rest of the trip went great, really relaxing and fun. Also, her brother has a 10 month old pit-bull named Brutus and we are best friends now. On Saturday we went to a big lunch her mom had organized with old high-school friends and their kids. I got to practice my Spanish a lot that day, but the whole group was really fun, and I even won some flower pots in a game (and came in second place in a "best legs" contest). The return trip was much more uneventful, but I got to watch Transformers 2 in Spanish on the bus ride back. I think I was only able to enjoy it because I couldn't really understand what they were saying half the time. And that was my weekend!

Then this week I finally got to revaluate my first round of patients. The results were way better then I expected. We evaluated them using the "Fugl-Myer" scale, which is a standard clinical test of arm mobility on a scale of 0-66. The scores of my patients changed from 31 -> 41, 20 -> 36, and 15 -> 26. My control group had 2 people go down (4 points and 1 point) and one person go up 4 points. Typically a change of ~5 is considered good, but I had one patient increase 16 points! Pumped. Lets see how the next round goes!

Now for this weekend, well, last night I went out to a bar with a bunch of couchsurfers, which was awesome, and subsequently got invited to go to a Lucha Libre match tonight! Thats Mexican wrestling if you don't know, with the masks and shouting and craziness. So I'm really excited about that. Then another guy offered to help me with my Spanish so were meeting up to review tomorrow. Then on Sunday I'm going to a soccer game (Pumas, local team in the top league). Other then that, no big plans, although I got to play soccer for a bit today too. Except now I'm sweaty and gross and theres no hot water in my room. Stupid shower.