Hey everyone! It’s a bit of a gap between blog posts, and I am sorry about that. But there was something important that I did and that I’m still recovering from, so it kept me away from WordPress for a while. I’m happy that I’m back, so that I can keep sharing this awesome trip with you guys. Let’s continue on …
Saturday started the same way Friday did, by hearing the church bells at 6 AM and then recognizing my need to use the restroom and stepping out of my Airbnb room to use the shared restroom in 55 F (12 C) air. Today I felt that I could stay in bed a bit longer, so I did and got up around 7:30. I got dressed and left the place around 8:15 and went back to the lovely little bakery I found the day before. This time, I noticed that the kind of bread the baker made was the “bread of the dead” (they may also be called “hojaldras”) that is typical for this time of the year. The night before, I wrote a message in the Polyglot Conference Telegram group inviting anyone who was curios of going to this bakery with me. I imagined that there weren’t going to be many people coming because we all stayed out late, but 2 people came with me. We took 2 pieces of bread and left for the hotel venue to eat breakfast. Like Friday, the hotel served us breakfast in the room that would be used as the Workshops Room, and I went around saying Hi and Good Morning to as many people as I could. There were some participants that were only starting to take part in the conference on Saturday, so besides meeting one of them in person earlier when we went to the bakery, I met some of the others, whether I went up to them or they went up to me. We were originally then supposed to go to the Grand Hall to have a quick chat with Richard, but even he wanted to have breakfast, and he instead directed all of us to go to the presentation rooms at 9:30 when we were all supposed to do so.
I was a bit clueless about where I initially wanted to go, until I learned that one of the presenters of the 9:30 AM slot, Anamaria Balaş, did not come to Mexico, and had a late replacement, so I went to the Mexico Hall to see and interview with 4 women who live in the mountains of Veracruz on the border with Puebla. I do remember the names of 3 of the women: Karen, Teresa, and Aidé. Nayeli, who was in charge of monitoring talks in the Mexico Room, including her own talk later on, asked the women various kinds of questions about their lives, life in the village, their varieties of the Náhuatl language, and how they live their lives conservatively. It was a great learning experience, and it hit home for me since my family is also from a village, and I can understand their ways. I later got the chance to speak with them and ask them questions about the differences in their varieties of Náhuatl. The next presentation I watched was the only talk done in Portuguese, done by Jhony Andrade who is from Ecuador, and spoke about his journey of language learning and how it changed his life. It was touch missing out on Sara Maria Hasbun’s talk on the North Korean language because I also wanted to learn about that mysterious version of Korean. In the next hour, there were 3 talks, including the first talk in the Workshop Room, and I went there to see Emily Martyn of UTalk speak about how she traveled the world to support indigenous languages, doing this presentation in both English and Spanish. It did feel like a talk rather than a workshop. Haha. Then in the next hour, also with 3 talks, I went back to the Mexico Room to watch Nayeli give her presentation at long last, and this was about decolonizing Mexican Spanish, pointing out several interesting things, including stuff that I also disagreed about regarding the spoken language. The talk ended 10 minutes early so that we could all take a group photo (the second group photo, we had another group photo on Friday evening after the Opening Ceremony.) The photos took place in front of the Grand Hall, because it seemed like a place where all of us could go and have the photo taken there. After the photo, it was lunchtime!
This time, we all went to a small space to the right of the Mexico Hall that was covered with a roof of leaves and blocks, and tables and food were set up for us. I had no idea where to sit, so I found a table next to a table of food and waited my turn. I felt that the introvert in me kicked in and got tired, I couldn’t find the ability to have conversations with the people I shared the table with and having the feeling that I was not included in the conversation didn’t help matters for me either. But I forgot that when I went to get food and sat down to eat. I couldn’t believe the dish they had prepared for us, because it was a dish that my mother often made for my father and that I rejected because the green sauce that went with the meat didn’t taste good for me. Now I found myself having this meal alone with many other people. Having no other choice, I had it, and surprisingly liked it and felt happier, until someone got a surprise because it was her birthday. It was the birthday of a participant from Colombia, and she didn’t just get birthday wishes in Spanish either, being the polyglots that we are. Haha. Her Danish friend planned out the surprise with help from Anja and the hotel staff. After lunch, because of the birthday, we broke a piñata, and many participants had a turn to hit it with a stick. After we speeded up the process by tearing up the piñata ourselves, Anja let us know that the second part of the day’s talks were going to begin, and off we went.
I went in the Mexico Room and saw more talks in Spanish. This next one was by Juana Maria Nicolasa and her friend, who run a hotel for women in a small town in the state of Puebla, and they spoke about eradicating “machismo” by empowering indigenous women. As indigenous people, they also shared their experiences speaking their version of Náhuatl, and being discriminated against by the way they dressed and their origins. After that talk, LangFest and UTalk decided to have their quiz in the Workshops Area. They originally planned to have the quiz during lunchtime, but we had lunch in the big space that didn’t have neither the projector nor the white screen, so it was done now. The quiz was about various things related to the Polyglot Conference: the presentations, Cholula, and the languages spoken in the area. I didn’t do so well, but because we were doing the quiz in person this time, Richard Howeson of UTalk added some twists and fun prizes during the quizzes. After the quiz was the last talks of the day, and I changed rooms again to go to the Grand Hall to see Carlos Yebra Lopez, as he spoke about 10 polyglot myths, which he gave in French. After the last talks, the attendees all gathered in the parking lot of the hotel and decided to make their way to the next event. There was a dinner hosted by LangFest, UTalk, and the Lingua-Cultura experience, at a jazz bar and restaurant called Jazzatlan. Everyone that was interested in attending needed to sign up, because everyone needed to choose the food that they wanted to eat. I decided to go back to my Airbnb to change shirts and freshen up, and I made the walk alone.
Sunset was coming, but it was still very nice out as I made the walk and saw the really nice streets of Cholula. The restaurant was not as far away from the hotel like Casa De Frida was the night before. I was able to find it and was greeted by the hosts. I saw everyone else who already arrived and chose their seats and proceeded to chat with everyone at their tables. I found one with some of the others who I haven’t got to chat so much with yet, and it was such a fun time, even chatting about subjects that others probably wouldn’t be so eager to chat about at a conference like this. Hehe. Knowing that it was my last night with everyone, once I finished eating, I went around many tables and chatted with other attendees, took pictures together, and swapped language books as well. We had the restaurant to ourselves until 9 PM, when the restaurant was going to start a Halloween party, so we simply ate, paid for our drinks, and went out to look for a place to hang out. Many groups split up, but I followed a group led by Anja. They tried a few bars, but we all left when they said that the bars were asking for expensive cover charges to go in. Anja did find a place for the group to go to, a bar that at first I thought had 2 floors, but then I kept going up and discovered a rooftop on the 3rd floor. I would have been happy to stay at that nice rooftop if the service would have been better, but I also wanted to find some of the others, so me and 2 other friends ditched that group and went walking to another bar to find the other group. By the time we arrived, that group switched bars and went to a pulque place (Pulque is an alcoholic beverage made of fermented agave nectar, which is extracted from the maguey plant.) It was my first time trying out pulque, and the place had several flavors. I tried out a variant with coconut and salt, and I liked it. Several other participants were there, and we were all just chatting on the street, while the police made several visits just to observe us in the cop cars. I chose to stay out until midnight, as the clocks were going back one hour on that night, and anyone who loved sleeping would appreciate the extra hour. I said goodnight to everyone and left with a few friends, who let me know about the condition of one of them who got sick during the day. I arrived at my Airbnb and quickly went to bed to get this extra hour of sleep.
This was one amazing day, but it was my last full day of activities. I still had some time to enjoy the conference, but it wasn’t so much of it anymore, and I’ll explain in the next post.
The Multilingual Bronxite 