First Host Families

Hello again to all,
I didn´t anticipate writing again so soon, but I have a bit of time now as several members of my family are out and about. I just arrived today at the house of my host family here in Cuernavaca! I will be living with this family for about the next month. They are very nice people and I think I´ll have a great stay here. I have a brother who is 14 and two sisters who are 19 and 22. The father runs a funeral business selling coffins (dont worry he seems like a great guy) and I believe my mother stays around the house. They have an amazing view from the roof of their house so I attached two photos so people could see. One thing I loved about the DR, and now Mexico is that on many house you are able to go relax on the roof and this house is a great place to do that! The other picture I attached is of a pretty typical street scene in Cuernavaca. My host family is fairly well off, I have my own room and the house is pretty nice. From what they tell us, our host families in Xalapa usually have less money than the ones in Cuernavaca. Today, we also had a chance to go to the huge open air market here in Cuernavaca, another thing I really enjoy about many latin american countries. The environment is very exciting as you will find anything from shoes, to all sorts of vegetables, school supplies, and of course things like pigs heads and intestines. I guess thats what keeps it exciting. It´s a lot of fun to strike up conversations with many of the vendors, they are very friendly and love to show you their products. A few even yelled Viva Obama as our group passed. As Rob tells us many Mexicans are very excited about Obama being elected in spite of the fact that Mexico struggles with lots of issues of racism, among other social issues. All in all, I´m very happy to be here, I´m loving speaking lots of spanish and feeling myself soaking up as many new vocab words, phrases and grammar as possible. There are quite a few differents in mexican spanish as compared to other countries, mostly in the vocabulary used, as they draw a lot of influence from Nahuatl and various other indigenous languages. The food is also wonderful. Although I´ve only been here a few days, I´m starting to become very accostumed to spice in the food and really enjoying that (mom and dad, you might want to have that bottle of texas pete on hand when i get back). Anyhow too many things to say...I should probably leave it there for now. Hope everyone is doing very well back home! Thanks for reading, hasta la proxima!