I should have done this long before now, but I finally jumped on the blogging bandwagon. By now I have traveled somewhat extensively, and as I don't enjoy journaling it is often difficult to remember the details of my trips after the fact. I will be residing in Guanajuato, Mexico for the next five weeks and I thought it better now than never to begin blogging about the experience, both to keep track of where I've been, what I've done and when, as well as to share my adventures with friends and family.
I arrived here on Sunday 6/28 with my friends Jaime and Amber; we all went to Spain together in 2007. We flew from Detroit to Houston to León-Guanajuato. Overall the travel went well, except we flew on an itty-bitty plane from Houston to Mexico and it really kinda sucked. When we de-planed there was someone from the health ministry monitoring the passengers with a heat-sensing camera, presumably to look for potential swine flu carriers. We thought that was pretty interesting. So far, there haven't been any reported cases of swine flu in the state of Guanajuato. Fortunately for us we didn't have any problems with customs and in fact the customs officials were pretty nice to us. We took a taxi from the airport to our homestay in
Guanajuato, which took about 30 minutes plus some extra time for the taxi driver to find our street, which is in a neighborhood called Pastita.
Our homestay "parents" are named Rosario and Sergio, and they are in their seventies. They have been super nice to us. Rosario likes to sit with us while we are eating and talk our ears off. She is really funny and doesn't at all act like she is 70! She is a really good cook, too.. but she feeds us waayyy too much food, especially Amber! We are hoping to lose some weight while we are here (we walk at least an hour every day, if not more) but this might be an impossible task with Rosario shoving food in our faces every time she sees us.
Our school is called Academia Falcón and it is about 15 minutes away from our house. We start classes every morning at 8:30 and end at 3:30. This week we have two conversation classes, an advanced grammar class, a salsa/merengue dance class, a class on the Mexican muralists, and a cooking class. Our schedule will change each week, at least in part. So far we are really enjoying our classes. The school is similar to the one we went to in Spain two years ago (Castila), but so far it seems a lot better.
We have only explored the city a little bit so far because we have been so tired after our classes. Plus, Mexico has national elections this Sunday, so there has been a lot of commotion in the streets with political campaigning. Hopefully we get the chance to really get around Guanajuato this weekend. The city has a really confusing layout because none of the streets are straight, but amazingly (Jaime and I got lost all the time in Granada) we haven't gotten lost yet!
I will post pictures of Guanajuato soon, but here is a picture of Amber, Jaime and I from Spain. [Amber is wearing orange and Jaime is in white; the other girl in the picture is Erin, another NMU student.]
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