Mis amigas

Mis amigas
Originally uploaded by kmallory59

Myself and bunch of the gals from my program out for a evening of bowling and fun. Laura (2nd from the right) was celebrating her birthday as was Kelly, standing next to me!!

Semana 6 (week 6) Ride the first bus I see!!

Friday night I went out bowling, dinner and a birthday party with a bunch of the girls (and 1 lone guy) from my program. We were celebrating Laura's birthday and Kelly's too! Bowling was very fun. The alley was the nicest one I have ever been in, new, clean, no stinky bars etc. Of course, all the scoring was completely electronic, so problems there. I bowl so horrible keeping score really isn't necessary! Afterwards, we had dinner at VIPS at Mexican chain that is owned by Walmart. I have learned Walmart owns a lot of businesses here from the upscale to the bargain. VIPS is a level or two above Denney's. I had a "Italian" food and can't tell you how delightful olive oil and balsamic vinegar can be when you haven't had it in a while.
After dinner we all walked to Laura's friends house for a fiesta. We played games, ate yummy cake and learned to salsa and cumbia dance. I got home around midnight, a first for me here!!

On Saturday, Feb. 23, 2008 I decided to adventure out to see the downtown area alone. My host told me about a museum that I decided I must see! In the spirit of my pledge to ride the first bus I see, I got on one, and before I knew it I was going in the wrong direction. OK..no problem, just hop off and find a new bus! Fortunately, I carry my map with me so I could figure out what direction I need to go in, so then I set out on foot till I find a busy enough road to find a new bus. The cool thing is, in my explorations of buses, I am starting to recognize numbers and where they go!
After a hour I made it to the zocolo and was able to find the museum. Museum Ampro, it was incredible, a mixture of pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern art. It is of very high quality, well organized and just about all the information about what you see is in both English and Spanish. From there I went on the hunt for a cool coffee bar I have heard about and it was pretty neat. Wondered some artisans markets and finally went to the movies.
On my trip home, I was standing on the side of one of the busy streets trying to figure out what bus to get on, since it was getting dark, I didn't want to be taken off somewhere to far off my path. As I am standing there, a older gentleman says to me in English "what bus are you looking for" and I truthfully said "no sé (I don't know). He spoke English, I mostly spoke Spanish. He asked me how I got to where I was, I didn't know that either. So after a few more minutes, he went off to his bus. So then, I just hopped a bus figuring if it turned before the next major cross street I would hope off. So about 2 blocks up it turned and I hopped off! But like a miracle, the very next bus that came around the corner was one that was labeled "ZAVELETA" my street! How wonderful, so I hopped on it and 20 mins later I was right by my house! I was quite proud of my success!

Sunday, myself and 3 other gals from my program went to tutor the indigenous students. We successfully broke up into small groups and went to work communicating. In my group, I was trying hard to get them to talk, asking all the basic questions. After that, I went after family stories, actually got a good one. One of the girls, said her great grandmother and father were in the Mexican revolution time period, which is about 1910-1920. From my classes here, I have learned just about everyone was affected one way or another during the Revolution, it was a very very bloody and violent. This gal shared that her grandparents had to live in caves under the group to escape the soldiers. Also, her grandparents hid all their money in the walls of their little house and unfortunately, the military blew up the house and the money too. I actually got her to say all that in English. She would say it in Spanish, I repeat in English and then she repeats in English. Also, I chatted with the students about Dia de Muertos, The day of the Dead holiday. As I suspected since they are from the rural areas it is a big deal in their families and communities.

One last thing of note, my host Esmeralda invited me to go out to late lunch with her and her friends. What was really unique was after dinner we stopped by a place in this little town called "Container City", yep, it is a little shopping area within this town and it is all shipping containers. They are stacked every which way, double decked too. All are painted a delightful pastels and random quotes are painted on the sides of the containers from the Beatles. The ambience is very upscale, trendy, hippy'ish, mother earthy etc. There are clothing shops, tea, coffee, beauty salon, tattoo parlor, bookstore, even a yoga/massage shop. I gotta go back and take photos!

I posted some bowling photos on flickr.

I have started my level III grammar class. No stress. So far I like it, it certainly has a whole different atmosphere. My new teacher is much more laid back which is good for me. Not feeling so stressed it is easier to learn.

luna5

luna5
Originally uploaded by kmallory59

here is my fuzzy total eclispe, taken about 8:51pm, click flickr for total

Total eclipse of the moon

 

About 7:45 pm (February 20, 2008) one of the son-in-laws came in to tell us about the lunar eclipse happening. Paul had told me earlier in the day but I didn't really pay attention as most of them are in the middle of the night so I never seen them. Well, here since it was so early within 20 minutes or so the entire family was on the front lawn watching the eclipse. All of us adults in lawn chair watching the moon, while the oldest grandson (16) runs around with all the little ones (2- 3 yr olds and 1- 4 yr old). It felt like the 4^th of July. Everyone out on the lawn watching the sky!! I called Paul as we didn't know if it was a full or partial, it's a full!  So for about a hour we all sat outside and enjoyed nature at it's best.

Meanwhile, Paul really wanted to see it, can't due to the fact it is raining in Houston, but Caitlin went up to Houston to a free rally to see former President Clinton. If I had been in Houston that is where I would have been too. I really encourage the girls to go, how often do you get to see either a future, current or past president of the US. All in all, a really memorable evening.

 

My really fuzzy eclipse photos will be on flickr.

Week 5'ish    20^th of February 2008

 

February 17, 2008, Happy Birthday Miss Melanie, she is entering her final "teen" year, the 19^th birthday! She sounded happy on the telephone and her dad made tuna casserole as requested!! I was able to really enjoy a very nice conversation with her, so that made my day!

 

On Saturday Feb. 16^th I went up to Mexico City with the kids in my program to visit the home of Frida Kahalo and what I thought was the home of Diego Rivera, the incredible muralist. I have been to Fridas house before but we didn't see Diego's home we saw some sort of huge giant lava rock building, sort of castle like that was apparently created by him to hold all of his pre-Hispanic artifacts. This was a building full of rooms with about 20-30 foot ceilings and he made mosaics in each of the ceiling of figures from the Aztec culture. All the floors were made of marble. Up on the balcony he created more mosaics out of the marble, more of the Aztec symbols along with his fave communist symbol. I was a bit baffled as to why a supposed communist would create such a grandiose building to hold stuff that belong in a real museum not personal one. I guess that is the dichotomy of artists…?? Supposedly he died before the completion of this building and so it was finished by his pals, and open to the public free of charge.

 

Sunday, Feb 17^th, I went with Mercedes, (my host Esmeralda cousin who asked me to tutor indigenous college students English). She picked me up at 9am and as we drove the 20 min. to their dorms, I really doubted that a bunch of 20yr olds would be getting out of bed to practice English. Boy, was I wrong. Slowly but surely, there ended up being about 15+. All with eager faces and seemingly genuinely interested. Between Mercedes trying to explain to them in her broken English what I was saying, my Spanish, we all ended up having some really good laughs. About half of the students kinda understand really basic English and the rest don't really understand anything. I tried to engage them in speaking but just like me, they would get all embarrassed and shy about it (although I am way better about that now). They seemed most puzzled about past tense so I practiced a bunch of irregular verbs in present and past tense!

 

Overall, I was there with the students for about 90 min. and I told them that next Sunday, I hope to bring 3-4 friends from my program so that we can break up into small groups for conversations. I was so impressed by their interest, enthusiasm and the fact they got out of bed at 9am on a Sunday morning. For this next Sunday they have requested 10am! I am okay with that too! 10am works better for my friends in my program, I think I have recruited 3-4 gals to go with me next week.

 

School part is going fine. I finally got approval to drop down from Level 4 grammar class to the Level 3. I am very happy about that, less stress. I also just found out that Level 3 is the writing class and had I known that I would have taken it in the first place as I really wanted to focus on my writing skills. Better late than never. So starting next week, I will be writing small essays every week which I  believe will really improve my writing and I hope also my speaking skills.

 

My speaking skills are coming along. Although at times I think that I am caught between basic speaking and intermediate. At times my sentences get all tangled up but somehow I get my point across anyway. This trip I am so much braver about speaking than ever before. I do still get nervous and intimidated but I just push through it and go for it! My supervisor at my internship, Maricarmen tells me that I am improving, so I will take her word for it! She took me out Sunday evening to see a art exhibit, but it was closed, so then we wanted to go to the movie but all the good ones were way to late, so we just strolled the mall and ate some dinner. I just enjoyed visiting with her and practicing my Spanish.

 

I am posting photos on my flickr acct as my internet speed permits….

 

 

 

 

Happy Valentines Day

To all my friends, family, my darling girls and especially my dear patient husband. He wrote me the sweetest card and I got emails from the girls!!
Candy and chocolate was really flowing at school today. Once again I had really forgotten the date again, but my host Esmeralda wished me a Happy St. Valentines day and I thought it was tomorrow!! I am really calendar challenged here.

Hope you all have a Valentines full of love and chocolate!

xxoo
k

Week 4

Week 4- Surprises Sunday, February 10, 2008

Happy 30 years to my darling husband..we met 30 years ago today at
Teen World USA in Redding CA and have been together ever since! I was
greeted to a surprise phone call from Paul wishing me "happy 30
years", I was thrilled and ashamed to admit it, I not only didn't know
todays date was but hadn't even remembered!! I am so glad he
remembered and called me, really made my ordinary Sunday special.

Anyways, I really thought this past week would shape up to be nothing
but school, boring! A lot of it was, but things improved on Friday.
First, after not really having much homework for a week or so, that
completely changed, I now have about 5 assignments to work on over
the weekend all due next Monday, Tues or Wednesday. 3 essays and bunch
of reading!! Not that homework is really a improvement but the other stuff that follows was the exciting part.
Friday was my internship, I took my bus to Unarte as usual, and as I
walked up to the school, I see my supervisor, Maricarmen leaving in
her car! I yell out her name, she sees me and says for me to get into
the taxi that some students are getting into. Off we go and I have no
idea to where!! Soon we approach at large private high school named,
American School. Which coincidentally is where all the grand kids of
my host family go to school, but only one is in high school, the rest the kids
are in the lower grades at different campuses. Soon I am helping set
up a display table. Unarte is part of a college fair being hosted at
the high school. Mostly I visited with Maricarmen and help with
setting up and tear down of the display. Afterwards, she drove me out
to one of the larger universities here, I can't remember the name
though. The campus is quite large, looks like about 5-6000 attend. Has
all the sporting facilities, including a US style football field. Then
back to Unarte to unload all the stuff. Then I was free to go! So I
walked to zocolo just to see what there is to see, took me 45 mins or
so. Then I decided to figure out my way home on the bus. I only got
lost once but the driver pointed to where I needed to go and so I
found the correct bus and made it back home.

Yesterday (Sat.), Mercedes, my host Esmeralda's cousin, who works for
a non-profit agency, asked me if I would be interested in teaching
English to some students on Sunday's. All the students are from very
rural areas, indigenous and very poor. Her agency gathers up the
financial resources and gives these kids 100% scholarship to come here
to go to university. There is about 30 of them, they all live together
in 2 houses (3 kids to a room) and I will be going out to their houses
and I guess, sit in a room and teach or converse in English to whoever
is interested! I am thrilled and I start next weekend. Apparently,
they are all in English classes at their university but they are in
their first year, so none of them speak English. All the kids speak
Spanish and some speak their native indigenous language as well.
I told Mercedes I was very excited about doing this, then asked her
how to say 'excited' in Spanish, she told me that if I said "excitado"
in Spanish it would mean "excited in the romantic way". Oops.. so the
way to say excited in Spanish is "emotionado" emotional! Another new
word and culture tidbit learned.

Today, I was surprised by Esmeralda, she invited me to go out
sightseeing a little. She took me to the central part of the city, but
we went to the part of city that is the very oldest. So we visited a
mall where they have taken the old walls from the 1800's factory and
incorporated them into modern buildings. It was amazing, basically the
frame of the entire mall is the original brick walls from a 1800's
tannery factory. What was the coolest, was this huge glass area in
the floor of the mall and beneath it revealed rooms of the tannery
and stuff that was dug out during the archaeology excavations years
ago. So you can see where the tannery workers worked, the tools and even a water
system. It was like a museum under the floor of the mall! It was
really fascinating and interesting. After visiting the mall we walked
around a bit, wandered across the street to a little restaurant with a
live jazz band where we enjoyed the music and lunch. The area around
the restaurant seemed to be the art district. Paintings, drawings, and
other art were displayed and for sale up and down the street. I am
planning to go back another day!

Time to get back to my tarea (homework)…it is always looming….

Italian Coffee Company

DSCF2122
Originally uploaded by kmallory59

The largest coffee chain in Mexico. This particular one is on my way to and from school. I pop in almost daily to get a Moka Frappe and use the wireless internet. It is the strongest connection I can find.

Red Blue and Green

If there was a theme to this weekend it was the colors "red, blue and
green". I went to Jalapa, not Oaxaca. As it turns out, violence in
Oaxaca turned up again a day or so before our trip and our director
suggested we not go there at least for now. So we went to Jalapa.
Guess what the citizens of Jalapa are called??? Jalapeños!! Yep, you
got it, guess where the pepper gets its name from… the region of
Jalapa. Small world!!

What about red, blue and green??? As it turns out, I was with 4 other
students, Amanda (Washington State), Kathy (Univ. of Nevada, Reno),
Lloyd (Cal State, Humboldt) and Richie (Univ. Nevada, Reno), ages are
19-22. Kathy and Richie are taking photo classes here in our program
and their assignment for the week is to take photos with the
subjects/objects containing the colors red, blue and green. Soon after
we arrived as we wandered the streets, we were all spotting this color
combination everywhere. So there was lots of stopping and
photographing going on. It was quite fun actually and really gets one
to think about what is around them. So I was even trying to get artsy
shots too, finding colors, textures, lines etc to photograph. I have
put my few attempts at art on my flickr page.

We arrived into Jalapa around 1:30pm on Fri. 2-1-08 and checked into
our hostel, Hostel de Niebla. All 5 us had a room together, 3 sets of
bunk beds. I had my doubts about this hostel but all were unfounded.
The rooms and bathrooms were extremely clean. The hostel provided a
free breakfast or we could cook ourselves in the kitchen. My top bunk
was comfie and I can't complain. All for around $10 a night per
person. The hostel was right in the center of town so we were in
walking distance of all we wanted to see. Friday was just wandered
around to see what there was to see. We found a nice art museum and a
café outside. The café served the best ever cappuccino I have ever
had. I didn't know it, but the state of Veracruz, of which Jalapa is
in, is known for coffee. OMG, is it good!!! I saw several coffee
roasting shops so I had to buy a pound or so of coffee, $3.80, I
couldn't believe how reasonable priced everything was.

We had the best dinner ever on Friday night at a local Italian place.
I had a very yummy plate of pesto pasta and salad. So so good! Went
back on Sunday for lunch as well. I think, just about everything on
the menu was under $5.00, in Houston these dinners would run easily
over $15-20 a plate. The quality and flavor was just incredible.

Saturday we all visited the Anthropology Museum. The state of
Verazcruz is where the famous "Olmec heads" were found and are on
display in this museum. It is believe that the Olmecs were the first
civilization in the Americas. The information in the museum is
overwhelming at the least but just seeing all that history is amazing.
How did these ancient cultures create such large detailed carvings.
Since Richie is a archeology major and Lloyd is a geography major,
both of them had lots of additional facts and experiences to share
about some of the stuff we were seeing and that helped make some sense
of it all.

My travel companions are really delightful young people. All of them
take their education seriously, all want to go out into the world and
make a difference. I wasn't sure I was going to fit in with them, but
we all had very interesting conversations, most of them have traveled
quite a bit, so we had that in common as well. We nickname Richie
"Meriwether Lewis" from Lewis&Clark as he is such a explorer type. He
spent last summer working in the forests of Alaska doing some sort of
archeology surveying or something, so he had earned the role as the
lead explorer in our pack. He and I both had a copy of our Lonely
Planet book with us, so we would find something of interested and head
out. His edition was newer than mine and had much more interesting
descriptions of places. Our favorite was "the fertile drinking
grounds". Friday night, they all went out looking for a club/bar that
was described as "fertile drinking ground". They showed me it the next
day, was a pretty scrappy looking nightclub.

All in all are really successful trip and lots of fun and laughs.
Hopefully we will eventually make it to Oaxaca. Back to reality and
school tomorrow.

Jan. 31, 2008, Week 3 just ending….

Tomorrow I leave for 3 days to visit Oaxaca. I have heard it is very
colonial and beautiful. Last year there were a number of protests and
such but supposedly that is all done now. I am going with 4-5 of the
other students, all around 20 yrs old. Funny to think they are the
same age as my girls but I don't feel at all motherly towards them!
They are all planning to stay in a youth hostel as it is very cheap,
but I will have to wait and see. If the quality is below my standards,
I will be at a nearby hotel. I can rough it if I have to, but if I
don't well… I don't. Sleeping in a huge room with 15 people just isn't
appealing. Some perks do come with age!! Not sure what I will be doing
there but I hear there are museums and ruinas (pyramids), zocolo and
incredible craft markets to visit. By Sunday, the question will be
answered.

Things at school are going well enough. I have so much I should be
reading to prepare for various classes, but I can't get motivated.
One, the deadlines are still a week or so away and it is just boring
stuff, puts me right to sleep! I have decided that level of Spanish
here, is much higher than anything I taken a Univ. of Houston. Much of
the time I feel like I am treading water…..

My one of my favorite classes is Seminar of Spanish, it is really just
a communication class. How is the language used in advertising,
literature, plays, newspapers etc. Today we went on a field trip to
the local office of the largest regional newspaper. Very interesting.
Computers everywhere. We toured the various departments that cycle
through all the various sections of the papers 24 hours a day. Least
newsworthy stuff like social, entertainment go to press around
midnight and throughout the night the various sections based on
importance go to press, then at 3 am is the final section, the front
page. Then the around 4-5 am it is delivered locally and outlying
areas. Some areas as far as 4 hours from here. One cool thing the
local paper does here is that it publish every Sunday a magazine full
of ads of high dollar condos, cars etc and photos of the social elite
of Puebla. The proceeds from this ritzy glossy magazine goes towards
publishing a small version of the paper that is delivered for free out
in the very rural areas, not sure if it is delivered daily or weekly
but it is nice that they want to make sure all economic levels get the
news.

Congratulations go out to my Melanie, she got her drivers license today!!!

Los Lagos in Jalapa

Los Lagos
Originally uploaded by kmallory59

2 big lakes with large walk ways all the way around them. To see more photos hit the flickr link on the left.