FIL recap

The FIL is over and I am listening to the last concert, Acterciopelados, live, on the University’s radio station. We decided that it was too much on a Sunday night, even though it's free, and the place sounds like it is jam-packed.

I think we did just about everything we wanted to do during the last week. We bought books for ourselves and others, we saw most of a concert, we listened to concerts in our house (they are all broadcast live), we listed to talks by authors and architects, we walked the isles until our feet couldn’t take it anymore.

Adolfo posted our photos, so you can see the madness. Here are some of the things I noticed:

We encountered many friends and coworkers at the FIL, which makes me feel like we are meeting the right people.

You can SMOKE in the expo hall! The first person we noticed smoking was a security guard.

The general admission for the FIL is $20 pesos (discounts for teachers, students, and seniors). That’s a price that many people can afford once and some of us can afford it several times. It allows families to come to check out the books. I thought it was very generous and allowed a wide variety and large number of people to come to the FIL.

The FIL is run by the University of Guadalajara and many of the people working in the expo hall looked like students. They were obviously not assigning people to security guard duty based on physical appearance (seeing these teeny little girls with shirts that said “security” across the back made me pause more than once). Which then made me think – really, what kind of security do bookworms need?

I found a book in English by a woman we saw speak 2 weeks ago, Raquel Tibol. I’m very excited, because I came home from the speech and looked to see if she had anything published in English and found very little.

Adolfo found good architecture books (of course) and had to make difficult decisions about which to buy (the agony lasted for days!). He did buy one in particular, which he showed me before buying. I said, “Who’s that guy?” And, in response, he turned the book over. The guy was posing next to his model of the St. Louis Arch! Whoops! How embarrassing.

There was an excellent stand for CDs (Pentagrama) and I bought one Blues and one Zydeco CD and Adolfo got a CD of very old Son. I think they are all pretty good.

There is an architecture part of the FIL called the Arpafil. We saw one of Adolfo’s coworkers give a very interesting talk on sustainability.

We caught the announcement of the winners of the architectural competition for the FIL and one of Adolfo’s friends won first place.

We saw part of a speech by Elena Poniatowska. But, the best lecture we saw was by Tariq Ali.