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.