Sitting in the departure lounge in Mexico City International Airport, enjoying an unexpected free wireless connection courtesy of the American Express "Platinum Centurion Club" lounge. I don't know what qualifies one to actually enter the lounge, but sitting near it is working just fine for me at the moment. I have some American Express traveller's cheques in my pocket, maybe the lounge has sensed this.

The day is yet young but free wireless is not the first reason I've had today to be pleased. Despite being slightly down on my Spanish ability over the last few days, I had an amazingly competent conversation with my taxi driver on the way to the airport. We discussed what brought me to Mexico, how London compared to Mexico City, and how life was tougher for Mexicans than Europeans. At the airport he overcharged me for the trip, shook my hand and we said a cheery goodbye.

There was no queue at the United desk (which made the last night's efforts to check-in online and find an internet cafe with a working printer slightly redundant).

And I managed to spent all of my remaining pesos (to the peso!) in the airport. One bottle of tequila ($205MX) + one rubbish sandwich ($44MX) + one packet of Doritos ($20MX) = $269MX = exactly what I had left from the cab ride.

So the day has started well. I'll sign off now because we're boarding (on time!) so I just hope my luck continues all the way to London,

I'm typing this on the fly in a largely deserted internet cafe in the Zona Rosa area of Mexico City. I normally craft these entries a little before uploading them, but the clock's ticking, I'm tired, and I've got an early start and a long day of travelling tomorrow so please take that into account.

It's about 10.30pm local time and I've just popped out from my hotel to upload the "after" video of my Spanish experiment. It's a little dark but the sound's okay. I think I'm probably making as many mistakes as my first video but I'm being a bit more adventurous in what I'm trying to say.

When all is said and done I think I had slightly too high expectations of my (semi-) immersive Spanish experiment. The closest I ever came to speaking a second language was French, and I studied that for five years at school, without getting even close to the point of being able to hold a non-stilted conversation. That said, my Spanish has its moments, and hopefully I can build on them with further study in London.

It feels like with an extra week my Spanish level would have gone up a level, at least the last week was quite frustrating and I hoped it was the precursor to a mini-breakthrough.

I also had rather unrealistic expectations about how often I would be able to upload videos and update this blog while I was away. I must get out of the habit of over-promising and under-delivering but hopefully what I have uploaded has been interesting.

I've really enjoyed my time in Mexico. I'd like to come back at some point but having said that there are so many other countries to see (and many of them speak Spanish).

Random memories I'll take home with me include:

• watching any one of the half-dozen very popular novellas (soap operas) that seem to dominate the television in the evening, any of which impressively redefines the concept "over-acting"
• being joined in the carriage on almost every journey on the Mexico City metro by someone with a battery-powered speaker embedded in a modified rucksack blasting out tracks from one of several pirate CDs he was attempting to sell
• pretending that everything I was served at mealtimes was delicious (which was mostly true) including fried cactus which always had a slimy, gooey texture as if each slice has been recently pulled from a baby's mouth
• feeling slightly uneasy at the Saturday morning programme "Disney's World of English" where Mexican children were given cash rewards based on their grasp of my mother tongue
• drinking cheap tequila out of a plastic bottle with yellow handles that looked like a bulk-buy bottle of cooking oil

Okay, I'm getting kicked out of the internet cafe, so I'd better cut it short. Buenas noches!

It's the end of my first full 'academic' week here in Mexico and life has settled into a pleasantly familiar routine here. My alarm goes off at 7am and I spend the next 15 minutes or so wrestling with the concept of getting up. It is usually pretty cold. Not see-your-breath cold, but definitely stay-in-bed cold.

Once out of bed, if I'm feeling sufficiently guilty or worthy I will do a few 'prison exercises'. These are exercises that require little or no equipment and whose name ends in "-ups" - i.e. press-ups, sit-ups or chin-ups. Since my bedroom is not fitted with a load-bearing monkey bar (in contrast to most television and film prison cells) I have to settle for -ups of the pressing and sitting variety...

It turns out that press-ups are way harder than anything I normally do in the gym back in London. Press-ups are proper, old-fashioned, no-nonsense, men-are-men-and-women-better-like-it exercises from a world where upper lips are always stiff and words are strong but softly-spoken. They do not belong in the metrosexual, reconstructed, skinny latte world I'm accustomed to where 30 minutes on an anatomically sympathetic, low impact, elliptical path cross-trainer listening to a the weekly film podcast of a left-of-center daily constitutes a workout.

I usually manage about 50 press-ups but not without feeling like my ribcage has been prised open with a vice to perform some complicated heart surgery. The sit-ups - lying on a pillow on the floor - generally degrade quite quickly into a bit of a lie down.

It is with flushed face and aching upper skeleton that I head into the bathroom wondering whether today will be a good day i.e. one of the few days where the shower is hot. Most days it's at a magic temperature that my hand thinks is luke warm but the rest of my body cannot distinguish from glacial meltwater. On only two days so far it's been warm verging on hot and when this happens it's like winning the lottery. Not the jackpot obviously, but definitely more than a tenner.

At 8am (a las ocho) it's time for breakfast with the other student living in the house (Timo) as prepared by Maria, the maternal figure who runs the house where I'm staying. At school I affectionately refer to Maria as "la mama de casa" but I think this may have connotations I don't understand. There's a good chance I'm telling people that I live in a brothel.

Breakfast is generally a plate of fruit (papaya and banana - we only eat fruit with three a's) with yoghurt, followed by eggs (fried or scrambled) with warm tortillas and salsa. Salsa seems to follow a reverse traffic light system - red is mildly spicy whereas green is oral supernova. I have yet to try a flashing amber salsa but will let you know as soon as I do.

During breakfast I attempt to make polite conversation with Maria. Although my Spanish appears to be progessing well in classes, I now remember that I was always better at comprehension than actually speaking, and for some reason all but the most basic of verbs and nouns seem to desert me. Favourite topics of breakfast conversation currently include: whether or not it is cold (and I'm still not entirely sure if I'm expressing a general opinion about the prevailing temperature, or asserting that some unspecified object is currently hot or cold); whether I have had enough to eat; and how much the food I've just eaten has pleased me¹. Maria must think she is providing shelter for either a dullard or a retard² and quite possibly both.

After breakfast I walk the five minutes to the language school. If there's time before class (there usually is) I play hacky sack (yes, hacky sack) with Timo and possibly one or two other classmates. There is a pure and simple pleasure to be had in kicking this little knitted ball of beans around the patio of the school. I have vowed to buy one to take one home with me and play with it on the local common and thus keep this innocent pleasure alive. I obviously won't do this. Because I'll look like a dick.

Then the bell rings and it's time for class. The first two hours I have a basic language class with one other student - a young Singaporean girl called Christina. In our first class together we were invited to practice some basic adjectives by naming in turn the different colours of the skins of the peoples of the world. The official list, at least according to my Spanish teacher, is white, black, yellow, brown and cafe con leche.

After a short break - more hackey sack, some dodgy wafer biscuits and coffee with sugar but no milk - we then have a conversation class. So far the teacher-led topics have included: what sort of food the people in our respective countries enjoy, what our favourite passtimes are, and why naive Gringas³ who accept motorbike rides from strange Mexicans after dark shouldn't really expect any sympathy from the police when it all goes horribly wrong.

After conversation we switch teachers and have a vocabulary lesson centred around the adventures of Platero the donkey, who seems to be permanently hungry but tender and pure of heart. I have become rather fond of Platero but one of the outgoing students has already told me that Platero dies in the last story so the tales are, for me, tinged with sadness.

After Platero, it's the end of classes and back to the casa for la comida - the main meal of the day. This generally involves more tortillas, some beans (frijoles) some kind of meaty dish and guacamole. It's surprisingly like Mexican food at home but without the nagging feeling immediately afterwards that you've just spent 30 quid a head on peasant food.

In the afternoon, depending on the day of the week, there may be another activity arranged by the school. Monday is a walking tour of different parts of San Miguel. This week we visited a very old church on the outskirts of the town which looked like it was taken straight out of Children of the Corn and quite frankly gave me the willies. Nearby there were some peculiar little shrine-like structures where 'bad magic' is apparently still practiced. And there was an all-pervading smell of pure evil (or sewage) and we were followed by a pack of snarling dogs all of whom had either an obvious injury or an unpleasant skin disease. But unlike a 1970s horror film, rather than decide to stay in the old church and play with a Ouija board, we walked to a bus stop and went home.

Wednesday is 'singing' class which involves listening to, translating, and then ultimately singing along to three songs, usually a kid's song, then some old Mexican standard, and then something by Shakira. ("Only three good things ever came from Colombia: cocaine, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Shakira...")

Friday is cooking class, which is really "chopping stuff up for someone else to cook" class but the food's very tasty and in massive quantities. Thank god I'm doing all those press-ups.

In the spare time I'm either studying (up on the roof if it's hot) or sitting in El Jardin (the main square) catching up on email or uploading these blog entries. Yes, the small plaza at the centre of this historic Mexican pueblo has better WiFi than my flat in London. And it's free.

Other random things that have amused me so far:

• Getting on a bus to visit Guanajuato - an hour and a half away - where they chose a two hour movie to show on the overhead television screens. Anyone know how The Illusionist ends?
• A chain of KFC-style 'restaurants' called Pollo Feliz, i.e. Happy Chicken. I'm sorry but I'm not entirely convinced that the pollo is all that feliz.
• A fairly macho-looking local wearing a T-shirt I presume he didn't understand that read "Proud To Be A Trucker's Wife"

¹ There is a very gentle joke relating to Spanish grammar in this sentence...

² I realise that this term is at best unsympathetic and at worst downright offensive but political correctness is late to arrive here in Mexico (see later) and I might as well enjoy it while I can...

³ American, white, female, cf. Gringo.

I'm typing this on a coach from Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende. It'll take about four hours to cover the 160 miles or so to this "colonial jewel in Mexico's crown". It's supposed to be one of the best places to learn Spanish in Mexico and generally a pretty chilled out place to spend some time, certainly in comparison to the ridiculously populous Mexico City (circa 20 million people!)

My flight from Washington arrived into Mexico's international Benito Juarez airport about 10.30pm local time yesterday which was about 4.30am UK time so I was not surprisingly a little knackered. Immigration was mercifully quick and smooth, certainly compared to Dulles where I once again experienced that annoyingly patriotic policy of marshalling hundreds of non-US citizens into a long queue to wait for a handful of immigration desks while maybe two dozen proud US passport holders get their pick of at least twice as many dedicated immigration desks. But not so in Mexico City and I arrived at customs wth my bags pretty quickly.

Benito Huarez airport, in common with a couple of other airports I've visited, has a genius red light/green light check at customs. Basically you have to press a button which through some random algorithm causes either a red or a green light to illuminate. The idea being that if you've got a couple of kilos of charlie stuffed in your suitcase, it doesn't matter how cool, calm and collected you are, there's still a reasonable chance you're getting searched, questioned and then presumably chucked into one of the world's most notorious correctional facilities. I was irrationally relieved to get a green light - as you press the button it's impossible not to think "Hang on, am I absolutely sure I didn't absent-mindedly put a couple of small bags of heroin in my rucksack while I was packing?"

On emerging from security I had been expecting to run the gauntlet of local taxi touts but the arrivals hall was disappointingly calm and I managed to get an approved cab very easily. After a fifteen minute drive through central Mexico City I was safely at my hotel, and contemplating the twin pleasures of a hot shower and a cool bed in that order.

This morning, after sleeping like 'el morte' and sampling pretty much everything from the hotel's breakfast buffet, my original plan of catching another cab to the bus station seemed a little unadventurous and so I enquired at the front desk (in English sadly) about getting there using the Metro. The tone of the answer in no way suggested it was the sort of journey no gringo should attempt without a personal bodyguard and so full of confidence and refried beans I took the short walk to the Insurgientes metro stop.

The metro was pretty easy to navigate and very cheap (two pesos - about 10p) although the barrier at the entrance immediately ate my ticket and so I couldn't work out it could stop me going further than I'd paid for. Maybe it's just one price to use the whole Metro, or maybe it just operates on some crazy trust system.

On each of the three separate trains it took to get to the bus station there was a (different) man with a rucksack with a speaker in the back playing songs from a portable CD player at full volume. Occasionally a passenger would beckon him over and buy a (presumably bootleg) CD. It was a lot more pleasant than a tonally challenged busker and suddenly the salsa remix of Coldplay song made a lot more sense.

The bus has a number of television screens which are currently showing a Danny Glover film dubbed into Spanish. Danny appears to be playing a reclusive Vietnam vet who by a peculiar twist of fate ends up looking after a young (possibly) Vietnamese girl and by bonding with her works through some of his issues, which are explained in flashback and relate to the accidental killing of a Vietnamese child during the war. So the basic pitch is "man comes to terms with killing Vietnamese kid in his youth by being nice to a different Vietnamese kid later in life". Not entirely sure that restores the balance Danny, but I guess we'll have to see how it ends...

About this time last year I introduced Blovember - a solid month of blogging on Man Writes Blog. This year I'm attempting, albeit with a slightly late start, a variation on the theme I'm calling Hablovember, so titled because I am spending most of November in Mexico attempting to learn Spanish. Actually, let's qualify that - as much Spanish as it's possible for a man two decades out of school to cram into a brain that hasn't had to learn anything genuinely new for quite some time.

If it all sounds a bit random that's because it is all a bit random. I had a stack of air miles teetering on the brink of expiry at the end of last year and ended up booking a return flight to Mexico nearly a year in the future. This was before swine flu had pushed Mexico just below Mogadishu on the list of desirable holiday destinations and it seemed as good a place as any. Also, despite the United Airlines Mileage Plus programme creating the distinct impression that a man with 100,000 air miles could rightfully consider the world his travel oyster, when it came to booking the flights it basically boiled down to North America or Mexico.

Anyway, I've always fancied learning Spanish - and have made a couple of half-hearted attempts in the past - and as the flight dates got closer I decided that rather than jump on the Lonely Planet Mexico tourist conveyor belt I'd instead make a proper effort to get some Spanish under my belt.

So the plan is to try the whole immersive approach - I'll be living with a Mexican family and taking lots of one-to-one lessons at a local language school. Although this would be rather extravagant in London (private lessons I mean, not living with a Mexican family, although importing a Mexican family just to create an immersive environment just round the corner would be quite extravagant) but it's about ten quid an hour in Mexico which makes it somewhat more feasible.

I'm aiming to keep the blog updated fairly regularly while I'm away, and hopefully the "stranger in a strange land" factor will guarantee a few genuinely amusing moments amongst the facile yet sadly inevitable "don't foreigners do the funniest things?" observations.

I'm also aiming to keep a video record of my progress, which you'll be able to check out on the hablovember channel on YouTube.