I miss hot water and comfortable beds. I can't wait to go traveling this weekend (wuhoo for two week spring breaks when you already live in Mexico!) and sleep in comfy beds in rooms that have hot water! It's only been a week of cold showers and I am complainy. How did people shower before hot water? And how do people still do it on a regular basis. BRRR!
This week at school we are preparing for Easter. They celebrate it different than I grew up celebrating it in that they paint hallowed egg shells. Also, when they find the hidden eggs they crush them. My kids don't do anything with plastic eggs or with hiding candy. Some of our Easter projects have been: finger painting easter eggs (Thanks mom for my package!), coloring endless easter pages, dying easter eggs (America style....my kids thought it was pretty awesome and the eggs looked pretty because they got dye inside and outside), creating Easter baskets, and learning a Spring song! We're singing a song about a farmer planting seeds, can you guess what state i'm from? :-)
This weekend we had about 100 different ideas about what we were going to do and ended up doing none of them. However, we accomplished a lot and got to do tons of fun things in Torreon.
On Friday after school we went to the mall to eat lunch. I got Chinese. yum :-) and then of course we had to get ice cream from a really yummy place and then wandered around the mall going shopping and just enjoying the start of the weekend! After that we came home for a little while (i cleaned my room) and then one of the girls parents were here so we went out to dinner with them at Farolitos (a super cute Mexican restaurant). After that we came home and watched 16 candles.
On Saturday we were going to go to the Dunas which are giant sand dunes, we were also going to go camping in Cuarto Cinegas (these swamp things with posinous turtles, snakes, and scorpians...sounds like a blast right??), or to the Prasa about an hour away....HOWEVER, we were going to with our friend Luz and her car is not operating (they were supposed to fix it this weekend) so we did not go anywhere!
We spent time downtown going to the market and clothing and shoe stores. It was really fun, but hard to go shopping with 5 people at the same time! We didn't really find anything we wanted, but it was still fun. While we were downtown my roommate Katie opened the door to get out of the taxi without looking and a bus drove by and got scraped real bad by the taxi door and she almost died. The taxi guy was yelling at us and freaking out. It was scary.
We also stopped at the bus station to get our bus tickets for Spring Break. It's going to be so cheap. For holidays it's 50% off for students and we're Spanish students (didn't you know that ;-) ) hooray!
After that we stopped at an American import store. They had secret deodrant for $8, lucky charms for $9 a box, fruit roll-ups for $7 a box. The only thing we ended up buying was gum (it was cheap) and pop so that we could make root beer floats. As well as enjoy different flavors we can't get here. It was a fun treat and a great experince to laugh about, but not something that I will need to do again that's for sure!!
Then we came home and played games at our house. Dad these people do not know how to play rummycube they've changed all the rules. Another game we played was banannagrams. It's like scrabble speed style and everyone playing on their own boards.
On Sunday we were maybe going to go to all those places again, however the car still wasn't fixed (gotta love Mexico) so we decided to just hang out here. We ended up working for a couple hours and then getting ready to go. We saw the movie Valentine's Day (yes it just came out exactly a month later...) in the V.I.P. theater and got popcorn chicken delivered to our chairs. After the movie we decided to go to the Alameda (it's like an open market place that's full of tents that sell things and have rides-ferris wheel, spinny things for adults and the rest kids rides-and have tons of great food). It's in a little sketchy-ish part of town, but because we went with our friend Luz we weren't worried! We ended up going to this giant Pineapple that has cream cheese slushy like ice cream (don't knock it until you try it!) We also went to a silly photobooth place and got keychains made that was fun!
After the Alameda we walked to this coffee shop/bar that has a live band and candle light tables. We ordered this giant plate of nachos that had beans and guacamole underneath all the chips in the middle and on the outside their was tons of chicken and beef.
After that I came home and watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith while working on grades until 2 am and now I am enjoying a wonderful day off of school! Wuhoo for random Mexican holidays!!
Patricio's awesome drawing. He also has excellent fine motor skills and can make incredible things with his hands already! Last week we celebrated his VERY first all green week which means it was also a no fit week. Wuhoo! the whole class was happy for him :-)
They will be working in their seates (talking in Spanish of course) and then someone starts to sing "I'm a little leprechaun" and they all jump in!
: one is "just add salt", "in a bottle" , and "simple color experiments". My kids LOVE this. The hands on part of watching how they themselves can change things! We have a science lab teacher, but she doesn't really do experiments with them, she mostly lectures and yells at them to talk in English. 
that turned out super cute. I wish I had taken a picture! We haven't heard much more about the unrest that is here, however while I was walking to the grocery store with my roommate Em last weekend we saw 14 big military trucks full of over 100 soldiers with their machine guns, protective gear, hard helmets, and tough faces. They were parked on the same street we live on about 8 blocks from our house and 3 from school all the way to the grocery store. I'm guessing they were waiting for someone, but they were just standing around the trucks smoking or sitting in plastic lawn chairs in the back of the armored semi-like trucks. All this to say we haven't done much lately! We have been hanging out with our teacher friends and our "exciting events" have been going out to lunch or an early dinner on the weekends!
You're the best and I miss you!
We have become addicted to television. We have downloaded all the episodes of NCIS up until this current season and watched them all! We also downloaded Glee season 1, and now we are in the process of downloading Season 1 of the Mentalist. We watch them all on my computer (yes sometimes that means 8 people smooshed around a tiny screen) so by the time we've watched a couple episodes I am done with computer time and therefore don't want to update my blog, so I'm sorry!!
sites. We went to a couple really nice restaurants while we were there and loved just being out of Torreon! One of them had karaoke music and dancing while the other one just had music in the background with lots of music videos. One day while we were there we took a car trip (it reminded me a lot of driving through the East coast and all of us getting sick in the car....) to the waterfalls that were beautiful even though they were pretty little. It was nice to be in a place that was super green and full of beauty away from smelly industrial Torreon! At the waterfalls you could go ziplining, ride in a mule kart, or take a horse, however we opted for walking.
That same night we went to Lucha Libre. This is a complete joke, but something that all Mexicans do and is even celebrated on tv, in movies (aka- Nacho Libre), and my kids' toys. Monterrey is said to have the second best fights only to Mexico City. We met up with some people who were teaching in Monterrey (Eda's friend's brother and his teaching buddies ) and got the inside scope as well as some funny laughs and stale cotton candy!