I’m not a kid anymore. And sometimes it is never more obvious than when I see little gaffes that I can just imagine my mother sighing over. And then I need to slap myself and remember that pretty much anything that someone decides to wear should be fine with me if it’s fine with them.

I most recently heard my mother sigh (in my head) when I saw this:

and then this:

Coincidentally, I needed some new underwear. And also coincidentally, I own some racer back shirts. So, I was looking for a racer back bra. Unless you want a thick and heavy sports bra, you are out of luck around here. The only thing they had at Fabricas de Francia, our biggest department store, was a regular bra with a little hook thing that might work for ladies who always have assistance available when getting dressed.

I asked my daughter in law if they had them in Mexico City and she hadn’t seen them there. So, possibly the reason all these women wear visible straps is because they haven’t seen the perfect thing in the stores? Here’s what I mean:

By the way, I know the top photo needs a different undergarment entirely. I haven’t done any research on what to wear with a top with a hole in the back. Ladies?

The historic center of Mazatlán has many beautiful homes. Some have been restored to modern standards with new plumbing and updated electrical and some have been maintained by their original families.

There is a historic commission that oversees the district and there has been a pretty successful effort to make Centro an appealing place with a program for placing utilities underground and installing curb cuts for wheelchairs and lighting in the sidewalks. I love living here.

There are a lot of buildings here in Centro that would be wonderful homes if people with energy and money were to take on the challenge. The vigas (roof beams) on many have fallen in – but these old concrete and brick buildings will stand for a long time even without any protection from the weather.

Many people lament that (I have read this about other cities with historic cores, too) too many gringos move in to take on challenges like this and “force out” the locals. I don’t believe that this is exactly true, since all of the ruins I am talking about are unoccupied or barely occupied.

Real estate prices are being driven up, but taxes are still low so there isn’t the same effect like there is when gentrification happens up North.

Here in Centro in Mazatlán, I feel that gringos have upset the balance a bit…or maybe we do at first. For example, it took Paul and me a while to figure out that our block has kind of a pet crazy guy. He taps a coin on our gate and grins vacantly at us. We figured out to give him a peso or two. But it did take us a while and I imagine people wondered if we would ever “get it.” I know it’s a little frustrating for our neighbors to try to communicate with us. But overall I don’t think there are bad feelings towards gringos here.

I just thought for a minute and in our immediate vicinity there aren’t more than two gringo households on any block, and many blocks none.

Many of these houses will probably never be brought back to life since they are probably owned by families where a whole bunch of siblings owned a piece many years ago and through deaths, etc. the project of even tracking the heirs all down to see if they did want to sell would be a daunting one. So they sit, old and beautiful, but they sit.

I have been collecting pictures of ruins on my Flickr page, here.

I was a mess in Spanish class yesterday. It has really gotten hard.

Something happened as if a blender went on in my brain and all the separate tenses, their conjugations and irregulars all were mixed up into a Spanish smoothie. I can’t even tell you how upset I was.

We are in a difficult place as far as learning goes, and our teacher tells us that he’s pushing us, which is usually good for me. But sheesh, I have to figure out a way to move forward – and without further meltdowns, too.

The sentences we use in class are answers to questions in our homework. We take the sentences and each student in turn changes it based on our teacher’s prompting – for example, he will say “Paul hopes that….and then you have to change the verbs in the remainder of the sentence into the subjunctive. And then if the first part of the sentence is in the present and the second part is in the past then you need a different subjunctive that uses the haya construction. As you can tell my head is just spinning.

The future and future conditional are floating around there too, just lying in wait so they can trip me up, I think.

So, before class on Friday I am going to review our homework from the last month or two and try to make myself better “cheat-sheets” for all the tenses. I haven’t even felt like I’ve got the preterite and the imperfect all that solid yet.

So, anyone have any tricks for how to overcome brain freeze at this point in my Spanish lessons? I am determined to learn and get through this tough patch but I would like to do it without tears in the future.