Sunday, August 31, 2008

Guadalajara - Week 2

From Guadalajara
So I've been in Mexico now for two weeks...all the time drafting a blog post in my head. Thank you Becky for reminding me to actually write it!

Erik and I are living with a local family in the suburbs of Guadalajara. The husband, Rafael works for FedEx and his wife, Olivia, takes care of the house and family. It is a full house, with one other exchange student, a college age daughter, Olifer, who is in law school, and a kid named Jaime who lives upstairs--I think he rents a room. And as is typical of a Mexican family, there are a lot of other friends and family in and out.

Every day we take the bus into the city for school. The ride is about 45 minutes and sometimes it is standing room only the whole way. This is the worst part of the day and we do dread the bus. In an effort to make the bus time more productive and entertaining, I've loaded up my iPod with music from Itunes Latino. We dread the bus so much that one day last week we actually walked the whole way home--which took 5 hours.

We attend the IMAC school, which primarily exists to teach the locals English. Our observation is that all of the middle class in Guadalajara know at least some English, and most of the schools are bilingual. For 4 hours a day, we learn Spanish. I personally find this particularly challenging, because the lessons are 100% en espanol. Makes it very hard to comprehend every detail when the explanations are all in the language you don't yet know.

We've done a couple of weekend outings, which I will write about some other time. Overall, the experience has been great so far--so much so that we extended the trip by a week so that we can be here for the 16th of September, which is Independence Day. Unfortunately, I forgot the USB cord for my camera, but I will get Erik to load some pictures from his iPhone and supplement them later.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Guadalajara, here I come...

It's been an eventful week in my house. To make a long story short, working with the husband didn't work out, and this week we both found ourselves without jobs.

This created a unique situation. No bosses, no jobs, no kids, hardly any bills...when will we be in this position again? Retirement? 25 (optimistic) years from now???

So we are going on an adventure. I've always wanted to do a language immersion program but it's just never been right. I've been married, had a job, had bills to pay...how was I supposed to take more than a week's vacation?

A week from tomorrow, we leave for Guadalajara. We fly into Puerto Vallarta (tickets bought with miles--thank you FWI), transfer inland by bus, and stay for 4 weeks with a host family. The host family feeds us 3 meals a day while we participate in daily Spanish lessons at the local school, see the sites, and practice our Spanish in the authentic Mexican city.

How will I live without Facebook and 24/7 email?! Well, I'm sure I can find a cyber-cafe for my daily fix (and blog updates). What about TV? I-tunes? If I'm going to eat Mexican food 3 times a day for 28 days...I might have to get over my hatred of corn tortillas and refried pintos. Or maybe I'll get lucky and my host family will be just like Chipotle.

It is my dream adventure, I can't wait!