Christmas celebration

The Friday before Christmas break our kids participated in a Christmas Pasada. Basically, this means that my kids loved having a Christmas party for the afternoon. For this party we walked around our kinder area where we stay and sang for the pasada (in Spanish) asking if we could come inside and join the party basically. The party consisted of 3 pinatas, tons of cake, bags of candy, watching movies (thanks for sending them to me Tammy), and playing outside! I also gave my kids their Christmas presents which were just little bags with candy, stickers, coloring page, and a baby ornament for a tree :-) My kids were so generous and sweet to me. I got some awesome Christmas presents from them as well! One of my favorite was chick flicks from one of my sweet boys. They are in both Spanish and English which is exciting because it will help me out later when I'm back in the states!

This video is the song my kids sing for each child as they have a turn to thit the pinata and about how you "do it do it do it (and then it ends with) oh time's up"

Teacher Christmas Pasada

Thursday the 16th or 17th we had our teacher pasada at school. They catered in some amazing food from our favorite restaurant, however they didn't have vampiros our favorite food! We were told this would last for about 2 hours, but in the end it lasted for 4 hours! THe school hired a clown (i have no idea why....) to entertain us and he did some funny things, but generally speaking he was just obnoxious!
This party made me really sad! I noticed a couple of the cleaning ladies standing around and then didn't see them later on...Perla, one of the aids, and my friend came up to me and asked me to help get Stella some food (my cleaning lady...) Because there wasn't a chair for them they went back to work. No one noticed they were missing or did anything about it! And when we did tell a principal and the woman in charge of us, they just tried to make the ladies feel stupid. If there had been 3 teachers waiting around for chairs we would have gotten one immediately, but it just shows me really how much they are disrespected and belittled. It was really sad. I told my roommates at home that night and they felt really bad too.
Also that night we ended our secret santa and got to give them our "big gifts" which mine just got a coffee mug filled with choclate and these really cute 3-d snowflakes that my mom had sent me in a package :-) She was really excited about it which was wonderful!

Christmas Party

The Sunday before flying home we had a dressy Christmas party at Casa E- our neighbors. It was fun to be able to relax with each other and dress up. The girls all wore dresses and the guys had on suits or dress pants and nice shirts. It was our goodbye to a lot of our friends until we came back! People made appetizers and just hung out. We had the party both inside and outside which was fun. I love Christmas parties outside, that never happens in Mexico! :-) Here are some pics of my friends. Sadly I can't tag them all and let you visualize who is who but know that these are most of our friends!

Socccer

My roommate Katie had a championship game and they won! Interesting fact- the team they played against had some Colegio Ingles kids on it (15 yr olds) and Katie's team had up to 30 year olds. After that game we went to our friend David's game. His game is at this giant fake ship caled "la marina" where they play basicaly rec soccer. He ended up playing two games instead of one and then after that was our friends Paco and Juan Carlos' game. The best part was being able to get suntanned in almost December! It's fun to watch soccer in a country where soccer is loved and respected!

Thanksgiving

So it's not exactly the same in Mexico as it is at home. First of all, we had to work on Thursday which was not quite the same at home! And then we came home from school and made our food. We ate at 6:30 p.m. and everyone just made a dish or something. There were things missing from normal dinner such as home (thanks mom :-) ), lefse, pumpkin pie, cheesy potatoes. My dish i made was cheesy corn and noodles, which wasn't the same because there's no Velvetta in this stinking country! Another difference: there was about 30 people there, 18 Americans and 12 Mexicans...I've never eaten thanksgiving in Spanish or had flan as a dessert.

Santos game

We went to the game! This is 4 of Katie's teammates and her coach along with my some of my roommates! Sadly they are out of the finals now, but it was fun to be there!

This is the hall of fame that is outside of the stadium. It's full of players and looks wonderful. This is Sarah and I :-) Thanks for coming to visit me!!

While Sarah was here I wanted to take her to a Santos game (the professional soccer team here), but because it was a qualifying game all the tickets were sold out but, Friday night Katie's soccer coach called us and asked if we wanted to go! He had wonderful box seats wtih free drinks and free food. The tickets were supposed to be $1,500 pesos (like 130 dollars), but instead we only paid $500( $38) for them! It was a wonderful game and Santos won which means they got into the semi finals. It was great to see our kids at the game as well!