{"id":226,"date":"2024-05-16T02:01:41","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T02:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/?p=226"},"modified":"2024-05-16T02:01:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T02:01:41","slug":"high-school-mexico-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/16\/high-school-mexico-city\/","title":{"rendered":"HIGH SCHOOL \u2013 MEXICO CITY"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019ve met many a person whose life peaked during high school. They fondly remember their time as a star athlete, as a cheerleader, as class president or prom queen. They\u2019ll regale you with story upon story of how much fun they had, how every moment was great, and how they wished that it had never ended. Life was perfect.<\/p>\n

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Well, that was not my experience. High school was not a fond memory, but rather a compilation of screwups, fights and unwanted \u201clearning\u201d experiences.<\/p>\n

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I went to high school at the American School in Mexico City. By the name alone, you would have expected that it was a school full of Americans in Mexico City, but it wasn\u2019t. 51% of the school were Mexican nationals, made up of the children of the rich, the famous or the politicians. The remaining 49% consisted of children of employees from the U.S. and other embassies, as well as children whose parents worked for companies willing to pay the large fee. The \u201cAmerican\u201d contribution to the name referred to the fact that it followed the U.S. curriculum and calendar year, and was accredited in the U.S.<\/p>\n

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The school was a true hodgepodge of nationalities, with people from all over the world that just happened to be living in Mexico. Save for some exceptions, the school was fairly divided down the middle, with the Mexicans sticking together on one side, and everybody else on the other.<\/p>\n

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During the first hour of my first class on day one, I heard this kid sitting next to me speaking in Spanish with an Argentine accent and we struck up a conversation. His name was Eduardo and he was actually Peruvian, but who had just moved to Mexico following 3 years in Argentina. Eduardo\u2019s father was the General Manager in Mexico for the now defunct airlines AeroPeru.<\/p>\n

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As it turns out, Eduardo started at the Lincoln Elementary School (American School) in Argentina just after I left the country. Three years later, we both ended up in the same classroom on the first day of class in Mexico. We quickly became friends after learning that we both knew many of the same people that I knew back from my Argentina days.<\/p>\n

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For some reason that we could never figure out, Eduardo and I got on the shit list of these two Mexican kids in our class. I don\u2019t remember what, if anything, we did to piss them off, but I think that it was more a case of hate at first sight.<\/p>\n

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At first it was just an exchange of words and insults, but grew a bit beyond that. Finally, we agreed to meet out by the buses after school to handle the situation like men. Eduardo and I were all full of testosterone and bile, and set to teach these kids a lesson, until one of the students who had witnessed the exchange told us that the two kids were blackbelts in Tai Kwon Do and had recently represented Mexico in a tournament in Korea \u2013 and both had won their respective weight divisions!<\/p>\n

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Leaning on the wisdom of the Mexican saying \u201cMas vale decir \u2018aqui corri\u00f3\u2019 que \u2018aqui muri\u00f3\u201d, which roughly translates into \u201cBetter they say \u2018he ran from here\u2019 than \u2018he died here\u201d, we both headed straight to our buses after class and avoided the confrontation. As we were waiting for the bus to depart, we could see them both on the corner, stretching and practicing their kicks, providing reassurance that we had made the correct decision.<\/p>\n

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Of course, it didn\u2019t end there. The next day in science lab, we were conducting an experiment when the teacher was called out of the class for a second to go to the office. Eduardo and I were working at one of the lab tables, when all of a sudden one of the two kids came by and sprayed alcohol all over our table. His friend followed behind with a match, setting our table ablaze. We quickly moved to another station just as the teacher returned to the class to find two-foot-high flames coming off of the table.<\/p>\n

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A few days later, during the same science lab, the teacher was once again called to the office. This time, the two kids came by and sprayed our hands with the 2% sulfuric acid reduction that we were working with. Eduardo grabbed our bottle of acid and sprayed one of them in the face. The other kid threw a kick that just missed Eduardo\u2019s head and landed on the station\u2019s water faucet, snapping it clean off. Water began to gush out of the broken faucet and flood the room. The teacher returned a few seconds later to find us all standing in a growing puddle of water, working on our experiments and paying no attention to the fountain of water coming out of the empty station.<\/p>\n

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The bell rang and we quickly ran to the bathroom to wash the acid off, as it was starting to burn. The other kids were there washing their burns, and we all started laughing. From that point on, we never had any problem with those guys. We never became friends, but we would all just chuckle at what happened.<\/p>\n

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The person who wasn\u2019t laughing, though, was the teacher. Poor Mr. Jeppesen called the principal from the airport that same evening to announce his resignation and that he was boarding a flight back to Indiana. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve met many a person whose life peaked during high school. They fondly remember their time as a star athlete, as a cheerleader, as class president or prom queen. They\u2019ll regale you with story upon story of how much fun they had, how every moment was great, and how they wished that it had never… Continue reading HIGH SCHOOL \u2013 MEXICO CITY<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christophermacolini.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}