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.