Motorcycles and Snails

Way fun weekend! Our family is super into motorcycles and this was the first weekend that we didn't have anything planned so they took us out! Yesterday we went to a place that has natural mineral water and then rode up to a place where we could see the whole city.

Us drinking the water. I was a little skeptical when they said it was clean but hey, I'm not sick yet!

Jesus, Tono (family friend), Yuyu (another friend), Bonnie, and I. Beautiful city view!

At the end of our trip we went to get some food. Of course I'm expecting some delicious traditional Mexican because, well, you come to expect that when you're in Mexico. Instead, this is what we got.

The fear is beginning to build.

That's right, my friends, SNAILS!

Snails! And limes, which go on everything.

And yes, I did eat that. I think an applause is in order. Standing ovation actually.

Yummm....

And that's how I felt about it after. Not a fan. But Bonnie ate them right up! I just couldn't deal with the eyes and the sliminess. Hahaha. Who would've guessed I would try snails in Mexico?

The next day, Sunday, we went on another adventure! After church our family took us to the city of Acatlan to see some pretty cool stuff. First stop was this salt harvesting place. The water comes out of the ground naturally and then runs down and they collect the salt at the bottom. Our family bought some... pretty cool!

Diana and Bonnie

After this we went to a government-run biodiversity... I don't know... giant garden. Haha. We went on a long guided tour of the place, but I didn't listen much. We did take some fun photos though!

Just a couple of cacti.

Fun fun fun.

Another couple of cacti :)

 Fun fact: Cacti grow about a centimeter a year. Which means that one you see behind us is OLD.

 Fun fact numero dos: I've eaten that right there. It's called nopal. And quite tasty in tacos.

Haha. This picture makes me laugh for so many reasons.

Me and Belen. Love this girly!

It was a great weekend! Our family is wonderful and totally spoils us. I know I'm going to be so sad to leave them when the time comes!

PS. I love Mexico!!!

A Typical Day

So everyone keeps asking me what my day to day life is like. Rather than explain it a hundred times, I thought I'd make a post about it!

Every day, Bonnie and I wake up around 7:30 and start getting ready. We shower, get dressed, make our beds, and everything, and come down to breakfast around 8:15 or 8:30. We're changing it up though, because all this Mexican food has made us decide to make exercising a priority. So now we're going to do Zumba in the morning and everything else after. By the way, Zumba in Mexico is soooooo fun. I love it! Haha.

For breakfast we always have fruit, usually watermelon and cantaloupe, orange juice, and either bread or eggs or something. It's way good.

After breakfast, we either go to the school or lesson plan/do whatever until we have to go to the school. Walking to school, though, is a huge part of our day. We walk around 40 minutes to get there every day, the whole time getting cat-calls. It's pretty entertaining. Here are some pictures of what we see along the way!

This giant tree is our signal to turn right :)

Some nicely manicured trees. There are tons of these in the city. So pretty!

We have an Office Depot. That seems so funny to me.

Don't be fooled by the name. This is Wal-Mart! Everything inside says so.

Yep, just some common sites! And this is the school!

It's really big, but we only have the bottom floor. The two upper floors are for an English school as well, just not ILP.

And our yard. It's sooooo nice we love to just sit out there and have our meetings or whatever.

So  yeah, that's where I teach! And these are my kids!

My 4-6 class.

 From left to right, Andrea, Julian (who is actually in my 6-8 class but came early that day), Alan, Roberto (who is hiding), Jocelyn, Isis, Maria, Leah, Samy, and Leslie. This class usually isn't this big, but for some reason that day I had ten! It was crazy.

My 6-8 class!

I'm not gonna lie, I like this class a lot better than the 4-6 kids. They're crazy, but way more interactive, which makes it a lot easier to get them interested in what I'm doing. The 4-6 kids just stare at me all the time. From left to right, Ary, Fany, Jesus (Chucho), and Adrian.

So if you didn't already guess, I teach from 4-8 every night. From 4-5 I have that first class and I teach them just regular language arts stuff, then from 5-5:30 I switch over and teach Jen's kids either math or an activity, then from 5:30-6 I go back to my kids for the same, either math or an activity. Then those kids leave and the next bunch comes in and we do the whole thing again! Language arts from 6-7, math or an activity from 7-7:30, and then again from 7:30-8.

Teaching is really fun but definitely exhausting. I feel like I'm always planning lessons because my 4-6 and 6-8 kids are in different stages, so I have to plan ten elementary lessons, two math lessons, and three activities each week. Which may not seem like a lot... but it takes forever. I haven't yet been on time with my lesson plans. I love it though. I often feel like I'm not doing them any good because they're just crazy and don't really want to learn English, but at the end of the day I know it's for a good cause. It's really cool to see how well the method really works. My kids have been in the program for around four years and you can have a pretty decent conversation with them in English! It's cool.

So yeah! As soon as teaching is over, our host family takes us home, we eat dinner, spend some time together, and then go to bed! And start the whole process again the next day.

It has its challenges, but I love, love, love my life here. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Primera Vacacion!

This weekend was our first vacation! As a starter we just did a little weekend trip to Puebla (the capital city of the state of Puebla, which is the one I live in) and it was soooo fun! We left on Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m., spent Saturday and Sunday in Puebla, and then came back around 8 p.m. last night. It's only two hours away from Tehuacan by bus so we had plenty of time in the city.

Upon getting there, the first thing we did was look around at some little stands and stuff. Actually, that's a lie. The first thing we did was find a bathroom in a movie theater because we didn't realize there was one on the bus until we were getting off... haha. Anyway so we went to this movie theater and they charged us five pesos to use the bathroom! Well they called it a donation because supposedly it went to curing cancer but it felt like a charge. At least until I had relieved my bladder, and then I felt all right about it :)

Anyway, so first we looked around!

This was just one of the streets in Puebla covered in vendors. Here in Mexico, you see about a billion of these everywhere you go. They have your pretty typical knick knacks and cheap things that seem cool at the time and later pretty useless, so I never buy anything. I'm still waiting for that special something to catch my eye :) Hahaha.

After this we took a tour of the city! It was BEAUTIFUL. Plus we got to sit on the back of this tour bus thing and listen to this guy tell us all about the history of the sites in Spanish (because it cost half as much as the English tour). It was pretty fun.

One of the many, many cathedrals in Puebla.

Inside the cathedral. It was huge and GORGEOUS.

Just a giant mural on the wall. These were everywhere.

Tour bus!

Mexican flag at the site of a big battle against the French... Which is now celebrated on Cinco de Mayo!

 And yes, that is graffiti you see on that flag. There is graffiti everywhere in Mexico.

Here died hundreds of patriots on May 5, 1862 defending the (something) of no intervention. Yup.

So yeah, that was our tour of Puebla! It was beautiful and I'm totally in love with the city. If my dream of living in Mexico when I grow up ever comes true, it's definitely going to be in Puebla.

After the tour and looking around downtown some more, we went to their mall! It was pretty cool and there was a really nice park outside that we took some pictures at. Random side note though... People in Mexico take PDA to an extreme. I swear there were like ten couples making out the whole time we were at the park. The never even came up for air! Yuckkkkkkk.

Ashley, me, and Mandy in the park.

 After this we went back downtown and just kind of explored the half indoor/outdoor mall. Some people got some ice cream, which by the way, Mexican ice cream is super delish, and we all just relaxed! When it was getting late-ish we decided to go find the hostel we had booked online, which should have been pretty easy.... But this is Mexico.

We took a bus to the area it was supposedly in, asked some locals, walked around for around 40 minutes, and finally found the hostel down some dark dirt road. I've never stayed in a hostel before, but I can tell you this one was definitely sketchy. It looked exactly like a house. There was no sign or other indication to say that it was a hostel other than a poster on a nearby phone pole, so we called that number. Actually, Edwin, one of our local friends who spent the weekend with us, called the number, and the lady tells us she doesn't have any empty rooms! Surprise, surprise.

So Edwin called around and found us a nearby-ish hotel to stay at. It was twice as much as the hostel, but still only around $10 a night in dollars. Anyway so we find the hotel, pay, Edwin leaves to go stay at his friend's apartment, and we go to bed. NOT! The mattress was about as soft as a rock. Haha. But it was an adventure, right?

Anyway, enough of that little frustation rant. The next morning, we got up and went to Cholula! Which is some ruins just outside of Puebla.

These are them!

Cholula!

Apparently this particular city was abandoned at some point and the pyramids got all covered up. Later a cathedral was built on top of what seemed a nice hill but was really a pyramid! So they're excavating a lot of it, but they can't really dig under the cathedral. So just imagine a big pyramid under that giant mound of dirt. It was way cool though. I love to imagine all the people walking around just like us in their city!

Some of us on top of a pyramid thing they actually let you climb!

The cathedral on top.

Inside. It was Sunday so they were having mass!

The view. Absolutely breathtaking. And me. Looking sunburned.

So I tried about fifteen times to get a picture that did the view justice, but I just couldn't get it! It was beautiful, though, and you could see so many cathedrals! I swear there are more cathedrals in Puebla than Mormon churches in Utah Valley :)

After seeing the ruins and the cathedral we went back down and did some shopping at all of the vendors.  They were constantly yelling, "Gueritas, gueritas, que quieren comprar?!" (White girls, white girls, what do you want to buy!) Ummmm, nada, gracias! Haha. But I did buy a popsicle and this:

 Looks like a popsicle too, right? Wrong! It's a jicaleta, or jicama on a stick. What is jicama, you ask? Well I'm not sure, but we eat it all the time. It sort of has the texture of a potato, but it tastes like a snap pea. And I really like it! So here's a bit piece of it covered in some chamoy and chile. Yummmmmm.

And finally, we got to see them act out an old native ritual! There was drums and singing and dancing, which was fun, and then people stood in a line to have their sins washed away with smoke. I was tempted to participate for the experience, but decided I didn't want to smell like smoke all the way home :) It was fun though!

After this we ate and then headed back to the bus station and back home! It was a very successful first vacation I would say. Very fun. If you ever get a chance to go to Puebla, take it!

Me encanta Mexico!

Tomorrow marks a week in Mexico! And so far I am love love LOVING it. I don't even know where to start! How about where I am?

I am in Tehuacan (tay-wah-CON), which is somewhere in the bottomish right of that green spot you see right there. It really didn't take too long to get here, just a plane ride and two buses. A day of travel and we were here!

Diana (13)

What next? My host family? I don't have a picture of all of them but here is Diana and Belen.


This is Diana. She is so great. She's only 13 but she acts a lot older than that and I have a lot of fun talking to her about anything and everything. In this picture she's singing some nice mariachi karaoke, which was the highlight of our evening today, along with learning how to Latin line dance.

Belen (8)

And this is adorable little Belen! I absolutely adore her already. She's constantly saying and doing hilarious things and she's really good at figuring out what I'm trying to say in Spanish and explaining it to her family. Both these girls are just so great!

Other than these two the family also has a 16 year old son, Jesus. He's pretty quiet, I think Bonnie and I are a little bit intimidating to him, but he's super nice and very chivalrous. We never have to open any of our own doors or anything and on our first day of school he rode his bike alongside us to make sure we were safe :)

Oh speaking of Bonnie! So I actually live with another volunteer. At first we were both kind of annoyed about this because we both want to learn Spanish and we didn't think we would speak as much if we were together. But she doesn't know very much and I can get by all right so it works out pretty well because I talk to the family and then translate and teach her, so we're both getting what we want! Plus we get along really well so it's great. We have our own bedroom and bathroom in the house, which looks like this...

Those are Bonnie's feet you can see in the corner :)

 Umm what else to tell you there's just so much! The city is beautiful and quite nice. They have a decently sized, very American mall, which Bonnie and I live really close to so we can go there whenever we want to remember what home is like. Today we toured downtown, which I totally loved! They have a couple nice parks with fountains and benches and the whole thing that are really nice for just sitting and reading. I'm definitely planning on spending some nice afternoons there after church. Tehuacan also has a lot of rich history. On our tour of downtown today we saw just a little bit of it. Here are some pictures from a cathedral downtown. It's 1800 years old!

Where the congregation sits

The altar

Looking up. So detailed and beautiful!

I can't wait to explore more of it. Bonnie and I live about a 40 minute walk away from the school so we get to see a lot of the city while we walk there in the morning, but it's on bigger roads so there's nothing too interesting to see. 

Speaking of walking to school, though, men here are something else! We get whistled/honked/cat-called at sooooo much when we're walking! The most common is "gueras, gueras!" which means white girls. We also get stuff in Spanish like "bonitas novias" (beautiful girlfriends) or "mi vida" (there's not really a good translation for this, but it's sort of like saying my love). The funniest, though, is the ones that say the little English they know to you, like that's going to give them some kind of leg up on the competition or something. I can't tell you how many times we've heard, "Hello, ladies!" in their Mexican accents as we walk by. I have to try so hard not to crack up. I'm getting used to it already though. I'm sure when I come back to the states I'll feel weird not drawing so much attention when I walk down the street! I have yet to see another blonde haired person here though haha so it's understandable.

Well that's about it for today. I'm alive and well and loving it! A little exhausted from lesson planning and teaching but definitely having the best time of my life :)

Adios!

I'M IN MEXICO!!!

Hola! I'm here in Mexico! This is mostly for my family because I sent them an email, but I just want to make sure they know I'm here and safe. Our flight went well, we landed in Mexico City about an hour and a half ago. An ILP representative met us at the airport and helped us get bus tickets. We are currently sitting on a bus to Puebla (free wireless on the bus how fancy is that?!) and once we arrive in Puebla we'll catch another bus to Tehuacan. I'm very excited and loving it already!

Random side note: It's crazy to be sitting here on my expensive laptop and then to look out the window and see how so many people live... thousands upon thousands of plain concrete houses. I'm already realizing how lucky I am to be an American :)

Other random side note: My internet is in Spanish! Haha I guess I should have assumed... anyway, I like it!

(Promise this is the last one): I just tried to upload a picture but it took about a year and a half and never got there, so sorry! Yet another lame post.

Adios, America!

Well, this is it! My last ten hours in the United States. AAAAHHHHH! I'm all packed up and ready to go...

Luggage!!! All approximately 150 pounds of it :)

I'm terribly sorry but this is the only picture for today. I promise my blog won't be this boring forever! :)

Anyway, I'm very excited. I was getting a little nervous about everything the past couple days, but today I had to go to the eye doctor to get some new glasses (my family's lovely puppy decided to eat mine the day I left home haha) and it made me feel all better! I picked out some lovely frames and I can't wait to get them.

No! What really happened was I overheard two of the receptionist ladies at the eye doctor speaking Spanish while I was waiting, so when I was going to pay I asked one of them about it! This is me: "Do you speak Spanish?" And both of us know I heard her speaking Spanish like five minutes ago. But how else was I supposed to start the conversation? Hahaha. Anyway, she got all cheery and said yes (obviously) and we got to talking! Turns out she was from Mexico City, which is about three hours away from where I'm going. I told her all about my trip and she was so excited for me! She even gave me the office's business card and told me to call anytime if I needed anything :) So cute! It reminded me how much I love Latin people. They are so friendly and truly caring. It took away (almost) all of my fears! I know it'll be hard down there with trying to understand/speak Spanish, learning to teach, meeting a new family, adjusting to new food, and everything else, but the people are what's truly important. And I know they're going to be great.

So I guess I owe my family's crazy annoying puppy for making me have to go to the eye doctor and meet an awesome new friend :)

Anyway, I'm incredibly excited and not so sure I'm going to be able to fall asleep tonight. This time tomorrow I will be in Mexico! It honestly feels like a dream, I kind of can't believe it's really going to happen...

I love you all! Can't wait to share my adventures with you.

Adios!

Goodbye Boise!

I am leaving Boise (for Utah, not flying out until Thursday) in approximately five and a half hours... So excited! And so sad. I loved being home for the break and seeing all my friends and family. I love them all and I'm going to miss them!!! Two words: SKYPE ME.

Unfortunately I didn't take a single picture of us together. Lame I know. But just imagine a group of awesome, hilarious people and you get my friends! Haha. For reals though.

Anyway, I love you all and I can't wait to see you again and share my amazing Mexican adventures with you! :)