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.