dia de independencia

i know this entry is late, but last saturday night, the 15th, the four of us went to the Mexican independence day festivities downtown with the young single adults from our stake from the Church. it was a lot of fun, and way exciting. it was packed. there were tons of food vendors and people selling noise maker toys that were colored with the colors of the Mexican flag: red, white, and green, and there were also people selling some spray foam in cans. after a while, everyone gathered in the plaza near ´la presidencia´, which is the capital building, where supposedly at midnight the president of Irapuato was supposed to come out and do the ´grito´. the grito consisted of him yelling ¡viva miguel hidalgo! and then everyone else yelling ¡viva!, and then him yelling the same for some other person in Mexican history and the crowd doing the same. then at the end, he yells ¡viva Mexico! and everyone yells ¡viva!. it was hard to hear the president at all, so we just kept yelling ¡viva! with everyone else. it was a lot of fun.

so while we´re all waiting in this crowd for like two hours for the grito, people would start shooting off this canned foam, and once one person started, everyone in the crowd started, and so we all got foamed, then it would dry off pretty quick. it was like snow covering everyone.

the four of us gringos left right after the grito, and as we were making our way through the crowd we came to a big opening right in front of the church on the other side of the plaza. we thought it was strange that no one was standing there. then, before we knew it, fireworks and firecrackers exploded off the front of the church. there were no barriers or anything, someone people just knew not to stand there, everyone except for the four gringos there. there were huge fireworks shooting out of the top of the bell tower of this church and exploding right over us. it was crazy, but way exciting. finally, we gave up watching them and went back to the hotel.

here are some pictures from the festivities:

first, the four gringos: from left to right, emily, angela, matt, brandon. we were trying to show off our faces that are painted with colors of the Mexican flag. second is angela and matt after being foamed, then brandon and emily after being foamed. the last one is just a picture of the crowd and all the flags and things people had. good times.

some pics...finally

hey everyone,

well, i´ve made it through my first full week at the ranchos. everything´s going well still. we started teaching our students this week, though a lot of them weren´t there when we showed up. it´s understandable, since they have other things they have to do, you know?

the internet at the hotel hasn´t been working for the past week, so i´m not going to write a lot right now here at the internet cafe. but i wanted to post a few pictures of rancho life.

this first one is how i had to get in my room all last week: through the window. it´s a long story, but it ends up the key got lost to the door, emily had one made, but it only fit the inside, so we had to climb in the window to get in the room. thankfully one of the window´s doesn´t have glass in it.

the next few pictures are of my room. my bed sinks in the middle like a bowl. the first night brandon and i were both sleeping in the bed, and we ended up pretty much on top of each other. since then he´s at another house in another rancho. i ended up taking off one of the mattresses so that it´s not so curved.

later, there´s a picture of my room from the outside. it´s just that door in the middle and the window to the left of it.

next is a picture of nopales, which are cactus. we eat them fairly often (the green part). they cut off the needles, cut up the nopal, and cook them. also, the red parts on top are called tunas. they´re a fruit that you eat also. you cut of the outside, like you peel them, then eat the inside. there´s lots of seeds, though, which is kind of annoying.

lastly, there´s a picture of El Encino, one of the ranchos, from up on a hill called La Santa Cruz (there´s a cross on the top of the hill). it´s really pretty out here. the stars are amazing. last night it was a clear night of stars, then on the horizon almost all around there was lighting. it was pretty cool.

bienvenido a mexico

Well, I got to Mexico on Saturday. My trip was good, except for waiting for the girl from our program that I was supposed to meet in the airport in Mexico City, who I ended up waiting for for two hours, then finally found out that she had the flu and had changed her flight to Monday. Then two hours later I was able to get to the bus station to take the four hour bus ride to Irapuato. I ended up getting in a little after 1:00 in the morning. Thankfully, Angela, the girl I was supposed to meet, came in yesterday without any problems.
Now all four of us are here. We're having a great time together, laughing a lot and enjoying being here. Today we're finally going out to the villages for the first time to meet our host families and our students. Our job this week is to find out who is still going to be a student and if any of them need to take tests. Then we'll be back here in the city sometime Friday night, probably to leave at 2:00 am on Saturday to take a trip to Guadalajara to attend the temple there with other members of the Church from here in Irapuato.
Good news: the hotel we're staying at here in the city has wireless internet. The other three people I'm with all brought their computers. It appears that I'm the only one that was too scared to bring mine. Oh well. Thankfully they're letting me use their computers.
Being here in Mexico reminds me a whole lot of my mission in Venezuela. A lot of things are similar. And so I keep saying that such and such is just like in Venezuela, or it's a little different than things in Venezuela. No one has complained yet that I'm getting too nostalgic, though it's kind of getting on my nerves that I keep recalling my mission. Not that that's bad at all, but I'm not a missionary here and I want to enjoy Mexico for Mexico, not for being like Venezuela. Does that make sense?