Vacation II

It turns out that I didn't have anything to worry about. It turns out that the high-priest was intrigued by my description of London, Ontario, and all of the indie bands there, so he has agreed for me to assemble a trade-warring party to head North for five years!

Vacation

Man this sucks. My contract said that I can take a 2 week vacation in August. But the biggest problem is that this is Mexico in the 1500s. There are no airports or even bus stations. I really want to get back to my hometown. I asked the high priest if I could have about three years in order to walk back home, but he seemed surprised that such a distance could exist!!!! I feel like I'm going crazy here!

It states clearly in the contract that I get some home leave, so I want some home leave. I want to walk from Central-America to where my best approximation to where London Ontario would be. I figure that it might get a little difficult up nearby the Great Lakes and stuff, but I figure I can just rent a canoe or something.

Fuck I am really pissed.

Indie Bands

I'm really getting tired of how few indie bands there are. I grew up about forty Kilometers East of Windsor in a small town. When I moved to London (Ontario) for college I really enjoyed seeing indie bands of all types. Down here in just-barely post-Colombian-Mexico I'm really dissapointed by how few indie bands there are.

In fact most of the music is this kind of chanting that happens before a sacrifice. Sometimes this place really sucks.

My Iron Smelting Club, and A Bad Day

It's been a while. I have been busy with the daily grind. Here is a quick update:

The locals seem to think that I have magical powers so they gave me a rather large hut and about five slaves to help me out with the daily grind. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to treat my slaves. Canada abolished slavery in the 1830's and we were or will be a kind of safe haven for American slaves escaping from America's south.

Sometimes Aztec slaves are sacrificed so that the sun rises in the morning. I keep on trying to teach my co-high priest that there is no scientific evidence that supports that, and that about in about a hundred years Johanes Kepler will publish laws about planetary motion and science will soon discover that the sun rises due to the fact that the earth revolves around an axis. He reminded me that probably back in my own culture, in its past there were probably people who talked like me, who challenged the zeitgeist of people in an area, they were probably beheaded or confined quarters and forced to confess their treasons.

I backed off at that point, but still, some people just don't know how to take criticism. I wasn't trying to say that my way was better than his, I just wanted him to listen to what I was saying, but he just blew me off.

I for one, won't be sacrificing my slaves to make the sun rise. Besides, I have this one slave that makes the best atole (An Aztec porrige), and they are pretty cool to hang out with at night, but I don't like having to beat them just to keep up appearances.

It isn't all bad though. They let me start an iron smelting club. It is nice to finally get to use my traditional metelurgy degree for something. One day I was just making some bronze alloy to make some jewelry and this one guy seemed really interested in it. I made an arrow head for him. He really seemed to like the arrow head because it helped him vanquish an enemy, so he asked for more.

I had to take a class in geology when I was in college. I found that the surrounding mountains had a lot of iron ore in them so I decided, why not? The Aztecs are pretty okay at pottery so I had a few of my slaves build a bloom furnace, and then blam, that was the start of my iron smelting club.

I have over ten members now. Most of them are from the military. I tried to blacksmith up some things for farming, but my students just seem to want arrowheads and daggers. Sometimes I feel so used :( Sometimes Aztecs can't think out of the box. I can teach them how to make things like iron shovels, nails, hammers, orelocks for rowboats, and all of that stuff, but all they every want to learn how to make are things that help them kill others. They can be so narrow minded. One time I made some nails and used them to hammer together a wooden box.

I showed the box to my students and said, "You have to think outside of this," but I don't think that anybody got the message.

Bad Day

I had a bad day today. I had this student who was the son of a noble. He was a kind of prince. this kid was really great. He was very nice and kind too. He actually helped me out one time. A lot of the peasants still thought that I was some kind of devil, here to destroy everybody. They kind of formed a lynch mob and were comming for me. When they got to my house, this kid took a position on the temple across the street from my house. He raised his arms, the people just kind of looked at him and then they dispersed.

I was actually able to teach a few people some phrases like "hello and thank you." This kid was able to learn those fast. I mimed with him in front of the others. He would give me a chocolate bean and I would say thank you. I would give him a peacock feather and he would say, "tankoo." Finally he kind of mimed that he wanted to learn how to write "thank you." He came up to me after class and patted me on the shoulder. He took a stick and started scribbling things in the ground and saying "Tankoo, Tankoo." So I took the stick from him and wrote the word, "Thank you." After that he practiced for a few minutes and then left.

The next morning the sun came up but it was a little cloudy. I walked out of my hut, and the word "thank you," was written ten times. It started to rain. The thank yous were washed away. I learned later that that kid's father was the rain priest. five days after the equinox, the first born to the rain priest, is sacrificed to the rain god to mark the beginning of rain festival that that happens once every ten years.

I went back inside so that I wouldn't get wet.

OMG Aztecs Can Be So Annoying

Okay so like it was the first day of summer in the year 1510. The sun rose over the temple of the moon. I appeared in a flash of light juxtaposed against the morning twilight. The locals instantly sensed an omen and armed themselves, ready to disembowel me. Luckily a friend of mine in the program tattooed some Aztec hieroglyphics into my skin, explaining how I was a messenger sent to teach the locals the "tongue of the gods," to prepare them for their reckoning.

So they took me to the house of the local high priest, and rather than giving me any time to rest, they made me teach them...Seriously, I just traveled back in time five hundred years, and I can't even take nap. I think this is going to suck.

So anyway, they don't have any copy machines, so I had to start by teaching them the English alphabet, by writing in in the sand with a stick. My first class had about twenty students, and it seemed like it lasted for two hours. They don't have any clocks here so I didn't know when I would begin or end. Finally I just made some hand gestures and left.

I really wanted to check out Teotiuacan. I wanted to find all of the cool bars and stuff. I went to what I thought was downtown, but was actually a temple plaza, where they were performing some human sacrifices. There was this amazing barbecue smell. I totally got taken in by it, but failed to notice the rack of skulls that was at the base of one of the temples. This dude called me over and offered me a piece of meat off of this bone that looked really long. I tried some of the meat, it was pretty good, but later I realized that it was a human femur. I'll tell you what that is going to be the last time I ate femur, despite how delicious it was.

Man, it was kind of a bummer walking around ancient Mexico. Everybody was staring at me. When I tried to get a snack, I didn't know how. I don't know if people use money here, or how can I even get some money. I'm going to totally ask the high priest later if he can give me a loan or something. I'll pay him back.

Oh and talk about racist. I'm pretty sure I just got shot with a blow gun dart. Back home in Canada people usually don't treat foreigners this poorly.

Toodles for now.

Introduction: The Downtrodden Solidarity Project

Disclaimer* this blog is a work of fiction.

Hello.

My name is Jeff Swiner. I graduated from the University of Western Ontario on London, Ontario. I have a masters degree in traditional metalurgy. These days there isn't much demand for classically trained black smiths in Canada, so in 2003 I packed my bags and moved to South Korea to become an ESL instructor.

Working in Korea afforded me many opportunities that I probably never would have recieved back in Canada. The most recent one was to be a member of the "Downtrodden Solidarity Project." This project is a high tech effort to change history through the use of time travel and English education.

The leftist Doolkyeorah newspaper in association with Dongul national university have been developing time machines for the last twenty years for the soul purpose of going back in time to change history in order to give conquored peoples the tools that they needed to overcome the struggles that they would have faced in the future.

The pilot project for this endevor was to send native English speakers from all over the world back to Mexico circa 1510 to teach the Aztecs how to speak English so that they can better deal with the Spaniards when Cortez invaded in1517. In order to do become qualified for this project, I had to send a university transcript and a blood test proving that I didnt have type "B" blood.

I endured a rigorus four question interview that probed my interst in movies and favorite Korean foods. I was also the only person to survive the two week orientation. Well it was me and three other people plus this Korean newbie named Cyrus. Cyrus pretty much washed out of the orientation because he asked some pretty stupid questions in my opinion. When they were telling us about the goals of the project he asked why they were trying to teach the Aztecs how to speak present day North American English and not Castillian Spanish.

He was promptly told not to ask such silly questions and the conquistadors will know how to speak English because of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. When he reminded them that that particular war happened 78 years after the desired time frame of our time travel Cyrus was promptly dismissed.

Oh well goodbye Cyrus, and hello Teotiuacan for me!!. I will be blogging using my laptop and KT's wormhole Qook internet connection that uses quantum physics to charge a laptop battery and connect people to the internet. Aztecland here I come!!!