Final blog

     So I wrote a final blog entry a while back and I kept forgetting to post it.  Finally I just now got to it (finally).  I hope you enjoy:

           After being home for a week it was hard to make myself write another blog entry, but I figured I had to update my blog one last time after our last trip and coming home.  I’ve had a great Christmas and it’s been great to see family again after being gone for so long, but it’s also fun to look back at the great experience I had in Puebla.

                My last week in Mexico was mostly spent on a “road trip” through the Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico with three of my friends from ND.  A lot of our larger group decided to spend most of the time in Playa del Carmen, a popular beach near Cancun, but we decided that we wanted to see some of the other places in that area as well.  So we payed Nicholas, one of our van drivers from previous ND trips, to drive us from Puebla, throughout the Peninsula, and finally to Playa del Carmen.  The first few days were spent seeing the cities Campeche and Merida as well as multiple Mayan ruins (Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Tulum).  After that, we spent a couple days relaxing on the beach in Playa del Carmen.  Overall, it was really a great trip.  We balanced out the “touristy-ness” of Playa del Carmen with ancient ruins and some cities less-traveled by American tourists.  We ate a lot of great food, took a lot of pictures, and really had a great time.

Pyramid at the Mayan ruins of Uxmal

There were lots of iguanas at Uxmal

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This is a cenote, a sinkhole that filled with rainwater and served as a water source for the Mayans in the Yucatan.

We had dinner on the beach in Progreso

The grand pyramid at Chichen Itza

Ruins at Tulum

Our group with our van driver Nicolas

On the beach at Playa del Carmen

                After that trip, I really only had a day and a half left in Puebla before I had to head home.  I spent the time packing up, buying some last minute gifts, and saying goodbye to some of my favorite people and places.  It was a fun time, as all of my host moms kids were coming into town for Christmas.  Seeing and talking with all of them was great.  Hearing them chat and throw sarcastic remarks at each other was entertaining, and it also made me realize how much better my Spanish had become since I first arrived at the start of the semester, struggling to understand my host mom introduce me to everything. 

                My last night in Puebla was a fun one, although it went a little bit later than it probably should have.  Sam and I had to be ready to load ourselves and our luggage into the vans that were taking us to the airport at 4:00 am.  However, our family was having a combined Christmas and birthday party at our house with lots of extended family and friends.  Sam and I hung out with the family for a while and then decided to head to bed around 9:30 so that we could at last get a little sleep before getting up early.  However, right as I was about to fall asleep, I heard a bunch of trumpets start playing outside my bedroom window.  Sure enough, my family had hired a Mariachi band to play at the party.  After unsuccessfully trying to ignore the music for 15 minutes or so, I threw my clothes back on and went outside to sing and dance with everybody.  It was a great memory for my last night in Mexico. 

The mariachi band that kept me up all night

My host mom singing with the band...

...and dancing with out dog Leo

My last night with Maricela and Luis (my host brother)

                I guess I should finish off my blog with some sort of reflection over the entirety of my study abroad experience.  Probably the best thing I can say is that I learned a lot.  It was such a special experience to live with a family and participate in a different culture for an extended period of time.  I don’t know if I’m entirely fluent in Spanish now, but I can definitely have a good conversation in Spanish.  I’m way beyond where I was 5 months ago.  I also have a much better knowledge of and appreciation for Mexican culture.   I miss the climate, the food, the people, and so much more.  I found a new home in Puebla during my 5 months there and learned a lot during the process.  I’ve had a lot of great experiences in college, but I think this one has been the best yet.

                And that’s the end!  Thanks so much for keeping up with my travels over the course of the semester.  It means a lot that so many people kept following me as I was gone.  I hope you enjoyed the blogs and maybe learned a thing or two from them (I know I enjoyed writing them).  Merry Christmas! 

Finishing Up

So the semester is finally winding down.  After a busy last few weeks, I am finally done with all of my classes.  It's exciting to be done, but also sad to know that I'll be heading home.  At this point, Puebla is like my home away from home, and I'm not excited to have to leave.  That being said, I'm very excited to come home and see all my family and friends again.
I actually only have 2 and a half days left here in Puebla.  We have all day tomorrow, and then on Friday, a few of my friends and I are leaving for a "road trip" of the Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico.  We'll be there for 6 days, seeing different Mayan ruins and spending the last couple days on the beach near Cancun.  We'll get back around noon on Thursday, we'll have all day Friday, and then we'll be leaving early Saturday morning.

The time has really flown by recently, but I've been making the most of my last month here in Mexico.  A couple weeks ago, Mom, Dad, and Adam came to visit for the annual Puebla Thanksgiving party, to which all the students' parents are invited.  We had a really great time; I loved getting to show them this city I've come to love this semester.  Some highlights were running the "Outta Town Dash Around" of the Indy Drumstick Dash on Thanksgiving morning, eating dinner with my host family and the family of my friend Sam (we share the same host mom), climbing the ancient pyramid in Cholula (town outside of Puebla), and exploring all the markets in the historic center of Puebla.

One of the many markets we explored

View of Puebla from the pyramid

  

After the "drumstick dash"

Since they left, I've also had a great time celebrating my 21st birthday with a big party at my host family's house, complete with piñatas and lots of great Mexican food.  The next day, I also celebrated by getting up early to climb the nearby mountain Malinche with a group of exchange students from UPAEP.  The hike was difficult, but it was SOOO much fun.  It was an awesome experience, and I was super greatful to be able to go (after being too sick to go the first time all the ND kids went to climb it). 

Showing off the birthday pinata

Our pinata had fruit, peanuts, jicamas, and even a little bit of candy!

Climbing up above the clouds on Malinche

Most of our group decided to climb a tree during a short break

The view from near the top

towards the end, we were hiking in the middle of the clouds.  It was cold

So even though I haven't been blogging a lot lately, it's not because I haven't been doing anything. Actually quite the opposite.  I'm super excited for our end of the semester trip.  I'm sure that I will take a lot of pictures.  Hopefully I'll make one last blog post for the semester.  I'll include those pictures, and maybe say a little bit about what I learned this semester.  

Thanks for keeping up with my blogs even when there's a lot of space in between them!

A Much-Needed November Update

Hello again! Sorry it's been so long since my last blog.  I've been pretty busy here in Mexico.  At the end of October/start of November, we were busy celebrating  El Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) here in Mexico.  After that, I started out the month with a round of exams (I think I did pretty well on all of them) and then I spent a couple of weeks trying to get over some sort of cold/flu-type sickness.  And after that, I spent a week in the state of Chiapas with our Notre Dame group.  I'm just now getting completely caught up with everything, and now I'm starting to have to put things together for our Thanksgiving party (complete with visits from most of our families) and register for classes next semester.  Needless to say, it's been hard to find time to blog, but I've been having a great time.  I'll try to fill you in on what's been going on the past month.

Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead)

Really a multiple day celebration, Day of the Dead took place Nov. 1st and 2nd.  I learned that this holiday is much bigger and more important in the smaller, more rural towns of Mexico, where people follow Mexican traditions more closely.  Even though I didn't get to see this celebration in its fullest, I still got a taste, and it was a lot of fun.  At UPAEP, students built their own ofrendas (shrines or altars) to honor the dead, often with themes that mirrored their field of interest (e.g. an altar for deceased children for students interested in pediatrics).  Also, my host mom made an ofrenda for her family at our house on top of a counter that was in her family's old store for multiple generations.  On the 1st, we had all of the ND group over to see the altar and share some great food (lots of tamales). 

ofrenda at UPAEP

another UPAEP ofrenda

Our ofrenda at home

Trip to Chiapas

Two weeks ago, we left for a week-long trip to Chiapas, part of our ND program here in Puebla.  I'm very fortunate to be here in this program.  As far as I know, no other study abroad program has university-sponsored trips like we do, and these trips have provided some of the highlights of my time here.  This trip was especially great.  Chiapas is the southernmost state in Mexico, bordering Guatemala.  It's covered in mountains and rainforest, and is largely known in Mexico for its natural beauty.  Unfortunately, the region's terrain (combined with other historical issues) has made development there difficult, and for this reason around 75% of the population lives in poverty.  Our trip to Chiapas served two purposes: 1) to see the beauty of the region, and 2) to meet up with the Chiapas branch of Partners in Health, known here as Compañeros en Salud.  

One of the Puebla program's alums currently has an internship with CES, so we were able to meet up with him and spend a lot of time with the program.  We met up with them in Jaltenango, where their region headquarters is.  There, we spent a day listening to presentations from different people in the organization who talked about what they were doing.  Matt, the ND alum, talked about the acompañante program he is coordinating.  This program trains women in rural communities to be acompañantes, people who communicate with doctors in local clinics and accompany patients through their treatments.  They make frequent home visits, making sure that treatments are being followed and that the patient is doing well.  This allows for more consistent and personal medical care in a region where most doctors are only there for one year periods before they leave to work elsewhere.  One day, we got to visit the town Plan de Libertad and spend the day with acompañantes, getting a feel for life in these communities and seeing the work they do.  It was a really special experience, and I feel like I learned a lot about what Mexican life is like for people living in other parts of the country.

View from on top of our hotel in Jaltenango, where CES has its offices

Inside the truck we took to get up to Plan de Libertad, the small pueblo where we shadowed the 

acompañantes

Walking down the street in Plan

Riding on top of the truck as we left Plan

The rest of our time in Chiapas was spent admiring how beautiful the area is.  Hopefully you enjoy the pictures!

Our first activity of the trip, visiting the Mayan ruins in Palenque

More Palenque

Our hotel near Palenque was near this beautiful waterfall.

We got to hike up the top of the waterfall and peer over the top!

The waterfall also housed a small cave that we got to explore and swim in (we were a little to rambunctious for the bats)

Swimming under the waterfall was fun

The next day we went on a boat tour of the Cañyon de Sumidero

Baby crocodile next to the river

The canyon was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been

Somehow our guide spotted this iguana from the boat

The "Christmas tree" water fall

under the falls

market in the city of Tuxtla, one of the larger cities in Chiapas

In Jaltenango, we visited a co-op which collected a sold coffee beans directly from local farmers.  They taught us how to correctly smell and taste coffee samples

From the roof of the co-op

From the top of the truck on the way back from the rural pueblo of Plan de Libertad

 San Cristóbal, the last city we visited, was incredibly pretty

Interview video

Remember when I w tricked into signing up for a radio interview?  Well, it tuns out that the video interview that the made me do beforehand has been published online, and it now has its own designated spot on the Puebla program website (here).  I still look somewhat uncomfortable, even though they took out all of the really long uuuuuummmmmmmm's and the parts where I stared helplessly at them before announcing that I had no idea what they said.  Hopefully you'll enjoy it, or at least hear what my Spanish sounded like three weeks in.

Living Less Like a Tourist

Hello again.  It seems like I'm getting worse and worse about keeping this blog up to date as I keep forgetting to update how things are going here in Puebla.  Maybe it's because I'm starting to sort of get into the routine of living and going to school here.  The first couple months, especially the first couple weeks, everything here was new.  I did a lot of sight seeing, learned a lot about Puebla and Mexico, and I wanted to share all these cool new experiences with everybody.  Now, we've been going on less trips, everything seems more ordinary, and I feel like there is less "stuff" to blog about.

Honestly, I think I like this part of the experience just as much.  Although I loved traveling all over and seeing all kinds of new things, it got exhausting travelling somewhere almost every weekend.   This past weekend was super nice:  I got to stay in and actually get some homework done, I went out with most of our group to celebrate our friend's 21st birthday, we watched ND beat USC, and I got to listen to the Colts game on Sunday.  So I didn't do anything crazy, but I was able to get caught up on some things and also have some good quality time with my friends and host family.  I'll be staying here in Puebla again next weekend.  Now that I'm caught up on things, I'm looking forward to being able to just spend some time hanging out in Puebla, exploring el centro again.  

As things are beginning to settle down a bit, the little interactions I have with people don't stress me out quite as much as they did before.  I went to go get a haircut without really thinking much about it in advance or frantically trying to memorize how to describe the cut I want in Spanish.  I finally got up the courage to talk to the UPAEP tennis coach and find a time when I could come for lessons (embarrassingly, I've been signed up for a time slot I can't attend for at least a month, and I just now talked to the coach to change the day of my clinic).  Overall, I just feel like I'm more confident and willing to go do things on my own without the other ND students there to help out in case I can't understand somebody or forget an important word.  That being said, I'm still far from fluent and I have a lot to learn still, but I think these things are positive signs that I am making improvements little by little.  

There will be a couple more big trips later on in the semester, but for now I'm more than happy to relax and try to experience Mexico less like a tourist and more like someone who could live here for an extended period of time.

What would a blog be without pictures?  Here are some from my ND group trip to Mexico City 2 weekends ago:

One of the new places we went, a museum of the famous painters Frida Kahlo (and Diego Rivera), built in the house in which they lived together

I took my phone to the Palacio Nacional the second time around so I could get a panoramic photo of this enormous Diego Rivera masterpiece

Group pic at the Palacio

Back to the amazing Museum of Anthropology and History

Palacio de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Palace) where we saw some great ballet folklorico

Some of us went to watch the ND vs Navy game with the ND Club of Mexico

Back to the Basilica de Guadalupe, but with even bigger crowds this time

We had more time to explore the ruins at Teotihuacan