Classes Begin

Saludos a todos! Well, I´ve now been here in Xalapa for over a week and it seems like everyday I enjoy the city more and more as I meet more people and become more familiar with some of the great places Xalapa has to offer. In the last week I´ve gotten to go to a Ballet Folklorico in the State Theater which is just down the road from my house, met my Mexican cultural assistant and hung out with him various times, started my classes at the school for foreign students, hiked around and inside the volcano in the center of the city, watched the US/Mexico soccer game (hooray victory!) with a fun mixture of mexicans and foreigners, and met lots of really great people. So, there has certainly not been a shortage of fun things happening. Getting classes going has been somewhat caotic as the system here requires a lot of patience and flexibility. My class schedule has changed at least 5 times this week for a variety of unforseen reasons. It´s definitely been a good exercise of patience and makes me appreciate how smoothly signing up for classes goes at Goshen. This week at the EEE (school for foreigners) I´ve been going to a variety of classes to get a feel for which ones I like better and then in the coming week and I can decide which ones I want to drop. In general the professores seem very good and the classes sizes are really reasonable. On monday our classes at the university will start up, so things will pick up as far as school work goes. I´ve also made friends with a few of the guys who work at the EEE in the office and it´s been really fun hanging out with them in the evenings. Omar, my cultural assistant has also been a big help and a lot of fun. He is a university student as well and he was matched up with me basically to show me around the city and to be someone to do activities with. He also enjoys playing soccer so I think on Sunday we may play in a pick up game or something. Tomorrow, a few people from our group and a few Mexican students are planning to head to the beach, I´m pretty excited about that. I´m hoping that during the weekends, I´ll have a good bit of free time because there are endless amounts of daytrips around Xalapa that look really interesting. I figured I would at least take advantage of this weekend while I still have few obligations and homework. Alright, well I think that´ll be all for now, the pictures I attached are of the soccer field in the crater of the volcano in Xalapa, I thought that was pretty cool and the Ballet Folklorico. I had a bit of a shortage of photos this time since I havent been carrying my camera everywhere like before. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Journey From Cuernavaca to Xalapa

Hello! I´m now writing from Xalapa which will be my home for the next 5 months. We arrived here on Tuesday evening on a very wet and cold evening which was quite the switch from the always sunny and hot Cuernavacan weather. Before arriving in Xalapa however, we spent the weekend making a few stops along the way. We spent a few days in Puebla which has a very European feel to it, the architecture is very fancy and the city is well known for its building made with a combination of ladrillos y talavera, or bricks and painted ceramics. I really enjoyed the city center of Puebla, there was always something happening whether it be music or a clown performing with lots of spectators. The clown tradition here in Mexico is pretty strong, it´s not too uncommon to see a clown walking down the street in full clown attire.

We also spent one day in Tlaxcala, a city considerably smaller than the cities we had visited up to that point (still 100,000 people). I really enjoyed this city, it was really relaxed and very quiet compared to Puebla or Cuernavaca. In the city center in Tlaxcala, they were having a demonstration trying to encourage people to think locally about the products they consume and remind people that Mexico is a country founded on corn, tortillas, tamales, etc and not the fast food restaurants and large corporations that are slowly infiltrating Mexican society. So, they had a tent up selling delicious tamales and 6 of us from our group ate there to support their cause. We all ate until we were stuffed and paid an unbelievable 86 pesos for everything, about 6 dollars.

Sooo, on to Xalapa! I now have about 3 days here and I´m beginning to get to know the city by exploring and walking lots of places. There are lots of really cool things to do here in town and many more attractions close by. I am living with my new host family, its been a bit of an adjustment from my last host family, but I´m slowly getting to know them. The family dynamics are very different here than in Cuernavaca, my family is much more timid and less talkative here. They run a restaurant business out of their home and deliver the food to people. My host dad also works as a chofer on hollywood movies that are filmed here in Mexico. The way he described it to me, it sounds really spuratic, he basically gets a telephone call one day and needs to be on the set the next day and might be gone for months at a time working as a chofer getting the actors from one place to another. As I mentioned earlier, the weather is also quite a shift, today its finally sunny and dry, but still a bit chilly. The day we arrived the weather really reminded me of Scotland which I wasnt expecting at all. My classes will start up in a few days which I am excited about. I live about a 20 minute walk from the School for Foreign Students and about 5 minutes from the Humanities campus of the Universidad Veracruzana. I plan to take 3 classes at the UV and 2 at the School for Foreigners. I really looking forward to getting plugged in with the university atmosphere here and begin to meet some peers and take classes. Well, I think I will leave it at that for now, we have our cultural history class with Rob here in a few minutes. Ok, until next time!

Pictures: the center of town in Xalapa, a view of the cloud covered mountains from the

city square in Xalapa, and climbing through tunnels in a pyramid in Cholula which I realize I didnt mention in blog post (Cholula is a city outside of Puebla which actually has the biggest pyramid by volume in the world and archaelogists made tunnels to study to the construction of the pyramid). Looking back over my pictures, I left out so many details of our trip. I would love to show my photos to people when I get back and explain all the fun things that I´m leaving out in the blog posts :)