Recipe for Disaster, I mean, Chiles Rellenos

Step 1: Stand in Mexico City's central plaza next to Mexico's biggest cathedral on Mexican Independence Day until a chef walks up to you and asks you to take his picture.
Step 2: Wander the streets together talking in broken Spanish and broken English for several hours while drinking cans of blue colored vodka poured into empty 7-11 cups. Confirm that chef is actually a chef and works at the Hilton by looking at his resume he happened to be carrying with him.
Step 3: Try to understand when chef communicates that he wants you to meet his mother, his 3 dogs, and his brother only a few train stops away.  He might also make you dinner but you will not be certain.
Step 4: Follow him. Get onto subway, then get onto bus (colectivo) and then walk for 10 more minutes to his house and meet his mother, 3 dogs, and his brother.
Step 5: Sit on couch and talk about Mexican school systems with chef's mother and how you don't like eating meat using a combination of  the following 5 Spanish words you know: "No" "Carne" "Chemicos" "Me" "Gusta". Gesture how you like to see where your meat comes from. Listen as chef explains that they have eaten one of the pet fish from the tank and that they can do that tonight. Decline offer.
Step 6: Upon chef's insistence, put on proper chef attire. Black shirt for the lady. White shirt for the gentleman.

Step 7: Keep drinking the kool-aid in every sense of the phrase, preferably of the blue variety.
Step 8: Pour cream and cheese of the Philadelphia variety into blender. Add pecans and sugar.

Step 9: Cut open peppers and scoop the "meat-no really, it's okay-meat" from mysterious pot at back of stove inside of peppers.
Step 10: Walk to corner store and 'borrow' toothpicks and walk back. Don't forget to carry blue kool-aid with you for the evening stroll.
Step 11: Sew the peppers together with the toothpicks. Then flip over and pour cream and sprinkle dried cranberries on top.
Step 12: Eat the chef's stuffed pepper.
Step 13: Let chef drive you home and spend 10 minutes trying to communicate the concept of 'trust' without actually knowing the word in each other's language.
Step 14: Take a 14 hour bus ride to Chiapas the next day.

Optional step: Consider how you could have been eaten alive as shown at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia.

A few notes on language for the chef.

One-way ticket to Mexico

The idea to go to Mexico to teach -or at least learn- appeared as quietly and as logically to me as the idea to cross a street when the light turns green. I should go now.
In case I fell asleep at the wheel, I found a subletter, a car sitter, and a 1978 issue of National Geographic to remind me that I really was going. So this National Geographic (pictured below) featured this woman who trekked across the Australian outback by herself with 4 camels. I randomly found the issue and IT SPOKE TO ME. I found out this woman also wrote a whole book about her solo expedition. I immediately located it and devoured it. I have no intention of walking hundreds of miles in Australia or getting to know camels better but I think it was research for Mexico. Did I read books on living in Mexico? Do I speak Spanish? Absolutely not. Did I read a book on a woman in the desert for several months by herself? Obviously!

When I got to the end of the book, I sketched out a sculpture and finally "realized" that sculpture with what little supplies I haven't packed away and only hours before boarding the plane.

Someone already asked if the sculpture is a book. Yes, it is. You can read it and interact with it.

I have been joking that I have put more work into planning a good theme party than I have this move to Mexico.  So, dear friends, if this blog is how you are hearing about my departure, don't be offended. I barely got a chance to inform myself. Weeks after adopting the aging issue of a National Geographic as my bible, I just happened to notice the article on the next page: MEXICO.