Home Sweet Home

For some reason I can't copy and paste, so read the paragraphs below first! And then the pictures. I think that it would make more sense!


After the chocolate farm we went to an amazing restaurant overlooking this beautiful river. It was awesome.

Here's what a cocoa bean looks like. You can see how inside there are little white sections, inside that membrane you get the cocoa bean that you use for chocolate, you have to dry it and all that first. It's really cool.

Palenque. This place is mind blowing.

This is my group and the family we stayed with. Paola, the wife, on the right, Alan, my "uncle" in the middle in the yellow and the two little girls of course are their kids.My family in Puebla.

The beach house we stayed at. RIDICULOUSLY beautiful and amazing, and the best part FREE. Our host uncle owned it. Well, actually her family did.

Swimming in a waterfall, las cascadas el chiflon, in Chiapas. So crystal clear and beautiful!

Thoguht this was just a darling picture, host uncle and his daughter, had to put it.

Church in San Cristobol de Las Casas, a really really cool hippie town in Chiapas.

Palenque panoramic view.

SO.

To catch you all up.

I got home late Monday night after a wonderful 6 hour layover in Washington D.C. :) It's been a crazy week, but good. I'm basically working out my classes for fall semester and a couple for this summer, job searching, getting my life back together in general. It's always crazy and insanely overwhelming to come back from another country. There's been some tears, but mostly smiles. The nicet hing was that all my stuff was at my apartment, just where I left it, making it so I didn't have to move anything.

The last week that I was in Mexico we went on vacation to the states of Tabasco and Chiapas, which are hot, humid, and beautiful. We were lucky to be able to stay with my host uncle down there who lives in a beautiful beautiful house with his wife and his 2 daughters, who all are so incredibly cute. I guess I'll give a little rundown through pictures.

So in a nutshell things we did on this vacation :

*Stayed with Villahermosa with my host uncle

*Drank the most famous Horchata in Tabasco

*Went to Palenque in Chiapas

*Lots of swimming

*Chocolate farm ("hacienda")

*Went to Tuxtla Gutierrez

*Took a boatride down el Canon de Sumidero in Tuxtla

*Went to San cristobol De Las Casas where we were attacked by people who wanted to sell us things.

*Went to las cascadas del Chiflon

*Stayed at a beach house for free

*Rode four wheelers down the beach like royalty

*Caught a jellyfish

*Caught some fish

*Made a beach fire with tinfoil dinners

*Had a crapload of fun.

And I've Reached the End

I've reached the end, and it doesn't feel real. In about 40 minutes we will be starting our last hours of teaching, and it partly doesn't feel real. They are moving the school to a different building so we had to pack up all the ILP stuff into boxes today. What a strange, strange, feeling! We're leaving for our vacation tonight to Tabasco and Chiapas and I am unbelievably excited! And then after that, hopping onto a plane to Maine!!! Then, I get to drive to Turner with Mom and Dad and Ethan and visit home! I am so excited!! Here's some end of the semester pictures.

This is a representation of how I moved from living with Cryshel to being "siblings" with Jordan, because we ended up having the same family, just at different times.
I love this picture, I think it really represents all of our personalities.
This is me teaching the little chillins'. I just look so professional, huh?! I mostly just help the teachers and don't teach solo, but I wanted some pictures of me teaching!
This was the picnic that we had for McKenna's surprise birthday party! We made a bomb fruit salad and calzones and had the picnic at the top of the hill where the cathedral is at night, the view was beautiful!

So I'm pretty much done with my responsibilities, everythings squared away, and and I'll be on a plane before I know it...probably a good reflection post coming once it all hits me!

It's good to have family everywhere!

So this last weekend (the second to last weekend I have in Mexico...just thought I'd point that out) I went to Xalapa to visit Jackie, who is Ernesto's sister, and they are just a darling family! The first day we got to go visit surrounding cities with their daughter, Priscilla and her friends, whose 21 years old so just about my age. It was really fun, we got to see Coatepec, one of the "Magical cities", it has a really rich history, one of the first cities the Spaniards landed in, therefore theres lots of Spanish traditions, they do one of the most famous, or maybe the most famous, running of the bulls, just as in Pamplona. They also do amazing sand art on the streets.

The cool thing is is that I had just watched a show on T.V. with my host mom about Coatepec and had thought, "Hey, that looks amazing, I want to go there!", not realizing it was so close to Xalapa! And when Priscilla and her friends were telling the history of the place I thought, hey, this sounds oddly familiar, and realized I had just watched that on T.V. The cool thing, though, is that I understood it both times almost perfectly (in Spanish) and obviously enough to realize that we were talking about the same place! Spanish milestone!

Here is Jackie and her family, they were super amazing and nice.
Heres a really cool cafe that had this patio inside.
Kristin and I at the waterfall..I like this picture a lot for some reason.

A cool broken bridge in Coatepec.
A view of Xalapa.

Here's the Zocalo in Xalapa...all the trees are blooming, the purple ones are SO beautiful! There's tons of these in Puebla too.
This is a really cute town I forget the name of that is in the mountains near Xalapa, it's famous for leather shoes!
This is an outlook from the city in the mountains, it was absolutely breakthtaking, it had just started to rain and it was all foggy, like a movie. I really felt like I was in a movie, it was so picturesque.
The waterfalls near Coatepec.
Priscilla is the one in the white next to Kristin, the other two are her friends..this is near the waterfall.