Mexico City

Hola!

So here I am in Mexico City. I love it. a lot. Perhaps so much I want to practice my Spanish and come back here for an extended period of time. I´m here until Tuesday when we head out to Oaxaca and then Chiapas, then back to Oaxaca.

We arrived last friday and spent the first two days in the center of the historical section of the city near the Zocolo, which is the big main square with the Palacio Nacional and a big famous cathedral that I can´t remember the name of (all built on top of Aztec ruins of course). I really enjoyed walking around the city and eating tamales on the street. We took a trip on Sunday to the National Museum of Anthropology and saw lots of really interesting artifacts from the Maya, Aztec and pre-Aztec civilizations. THe Museum is in a park with an amusement park a zoo and on the weekends has tons of vendors, so I spent a lot of time walking around and people watching. I also got to experience the subway system here, which is now, by far, my favorite subway. All of the lines have colors and all of the stops have a symbol that represents usually some kind of monument that is at that stop so that people who can{t read can ridethe subway. and it only costs 2 pesos to get anywhere in the city, and you can transfer as many times as you want. and they play music on the trains and in the stations and many of the stations are filled with cool art exhibits and murals. The doors of the trains close really fast though, so getting a group of thirty people on and off without leavinganyone behind is quite an accomplishment.

Now I am in a homestay in Santo Domingo, a colonia (neighborhood, community, also called a barrio) towards the south of the city. It´s the most highly populated colonia in Mexico City and was formed in 1971 through a "land invasion." This means that thousands of families came within a 24 hour period and claimed uninhabited government land. pretty cool right? Then they got all organized and built roads and sewer systems etc. They actually saved the city so much money by creating all their own infrastructure that the city decided to give them money for schools and stuff. The neighborhood is really vibrant. Most people have shops to make a living and there are lots of people in the street all day andlate into the night. All of our homestays are really close together and our classes are held in the livingroom of a house right across the street from where Im staying. My host mom is really nice. She enjoys making popcorn and showing movies, so we do a lot of that. She also showed us pictures of what the neighborhood looked like before there were any houses. Her son and his wife live in the house as well with their two kids Bernardo, who´s 5, and Carolina, who´s 2. they´re adorable and really good to practice spanish with because they talk slowly and use simple words.

Well right now I have to go to a little get-together with all of the homestay mothers so I´ll talk more about my classes later.

love

Emma