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!