I wonder if Ayn Rand would approve?

Yesterday a group of us went to the Museo Marco in downtown Monterrey, which is the contemporary art museum. They're currently having an exhibition on this amazing and apparently very famous architect named Ricardo Legorreta. His stuff is very blocky, but colorful and with a lot of interesting flourishes and tons of natural light. He has designed many buildings all over Latin America, but he's done a lot in Texas and California too, including the San Antonio library, which I think I'm gonna drive down to look at when I return to Austin.

The San Antonio Library

Some of his stuff looks vaguely sort of Soviet-style, too, especially some of his European and Korean works (go figure), but even those have a lot of personality. For anyone familiar with the San Jose Hotel in Austin, a lot of his stuff looks like that, even the houses. Which were absoutely phenomenal. My favorite part of the exhibition was all these little dioramas and models they had of a bunch of his buildings that you could look at. And most of them were missing roofs, and maybe only only had half-walls, so you could actually see what the floor plans and layouts were. I guess they were the actual architectural models that they used, because they were so detailed and vivid, and even had little plastic people inside them, so you could get a better idea of the scale. It was amazing.

Yesterday on campus, right outside these crazy buildings, , I discoverd a pond around them, which contains many water-fowl, including a duck with two tiny baby ducks, and a goose sitting on a large nest of eggs. I counted 12 eggs yesterday, when she would raise her little butt to pull some grass or twigs onto the nest and squawk quietly, but I might have missed some. Watching her sit there, guarding her eggs, in the middle of this busy campus, is somehow one of the most touching things I've ever seen. It's so sweet. I'm going to keep going back there every day to see if they've hatched. I can't wait. I don't know how long little geese incubate, but surely not more than another 5 weeks?

Also in that pond are the baby ducks. Holy God, you've never seen anything cute until you've seen these two tiny ducks swimming around in the water with their mommy. They could probably both fit in one of my hands and they're still all fluffy, like how kittens are when they're first born. They both swam away from their mom yesterday when she hopped up on the shore for something, and she totally freaked out! She started squawking and jumped back into the water, chasing them and yelling, until she caught up with them, and then swam between them, and was quiet and still. Amazing. I sat there for about 20 minutes and just watched them swim around. I probably could have sat there all day.

I've been playing racqetball in the evenings the last couple of days with my professor, and yesterday we played with this Polish guy we met down on the courts, who's lived in Mexico for several years. Another girl from St. Eds came with us yesterday too, and then we played doubles tennis. Or, we tried to. Christy and I weren't very good, but my professor and the Polish guy are. My professor, especially, just ran circles around us, and wore me and Christy out! I hope I have that much energy when I'm almost 70!

Anyway, after raquetball and tennis, Christy and I went and got tacos and beer at this place I like near campus (which, incidentally, Kurt, if you're reading this, played Avril Lavigne the entire time we were there). I like her a lot. She's really sweet and smart. After that, we met up with a bunch of the Tec people at our adopted bar we call the Blue Bar, because everything in it's blue, even the lighting. I don't think any of us know what the real name of it is. But while there last night I met this guy I've been sort of mildly crushing on since day 2 of this thing when I saw him in the lobby, but I hadn't spoken to him until last night. Turns out he's from Fayetteville, Arkansas and goes to Hendrix College in Conway! Totally cray. So we chatted for a bit, and that was nice. He's tall and skinny and nerdy looking. go figure. When I said I was leaving and walking back to campus, he was all, "Oh, I'll walk back with you." But I'm pretty sure he was just drunk and tired.