Day 9, Week 2

Today was pretty awesome. In class we did more reviewing of didn't tense of the verbs and talked with my teacher about the quinceñeras (15th birthday party) which was pretty interesting. :)

We came home and had a good lunch and just hung out for the afternoon. I did my homework and talked to some friends and also looked up more about a trip to Cancun. I'm thinking I'm going to go the weekend of my 21st birthday in October. Mom told me her and Dad would pay for the trip as my birthday present, so I'm really excited about that! ;)

My roommate and I went to the gym tonight for the kickboxing class and it definitely kicked MY BUTT! It was so fun though, and I think it's so great we can be involved with the locals at the gym. What great immersion, right? I think we are going to try to go more classes throughout the week. It will be a little difficult with the volunteer program at the orphanage because they are at the same time. We will see!

Dinner was pretty simple and when we were almost done, someone came to the door and was like "Well I see other Americans in here." It turns out, it was a guy who lived in my house here 3 years ago and is from MSU-Mankato! My mama told me about him, but it was cool to meet him too! He sat down and told us so many stories and different advice about where to go and whatnot.

Meanwhile, another man showed up at the door with our freshly washed, dryed, and folded clothes! We get all our dirty laundry together, they come pick it up and clean it for us, and bring it back so perfectly folded for 68 pesos, which is around $5. :)

We seriously don't have to do anything around here and it's so crazy to think that. We get our laundry serviced, 3 meals a day, hardly any homework, our room picked up (somewhat), and awesome host parents to live with! What a rough life, huh? :P

Buenas noches!
-Whitney

Day 8, Week 2

What a lazy day!! I finally woke up around 10 because the sun was beating into our room so much I was starting to get so hot. I definitely did not do anything too extrenuating today. I did my homework and watched a movie and some episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." I did get some sun time today, though.

At dinner tonight, an older lady had stopped over to the house to visit with my host parents. She lives in Washington and also in Ajijic, which is about 30 minutes from Guadalajara. She told us that she would love to take us around Chapala, which is the largest lake in the area and only minutes from her us, if we just took the bus there and she would pick us up! That would be awesome! Our school does a day tour to Chapala for around $36, but if we can go cheaper with a local, why pass it up!?

This coming weekend I think I'm going to go on the school excursion to Guanajuato, which is about 5 hours from Guadalajara and is known for its colonial history. That will be fun to experience!

I also was talking to my friend Abraham from Cancun about visiting him too sometime. He told me, "you need to come here if you can, I will take care of you." So, needless to say, I think I will be visiting him too. I found some flights for around $239 so I'm thinking maybe around my birthday in October I would go to visit for a weekend. Oh I'm so excited!

I just finished writing a recipe for cornbread for my mamá, because she wanted to make it but didn't have a recipe. That was interesting to translate! ;)

I can't believe I start week 2 of school tomorrow!
P.S. The picture of the flowers was taken in front of my school. :)

-Whitney

Day 7, Week 1

I got to sleep in a little bit! I had breakfast when we woke up, because our mama told us we should have a lot of fun, drink a lot, but don't get drunk! She also told us not to worry about what time breakfast is because the weekends are for sleeping in and whenever we get up she will make us something. haha. Oh the culture is so fun here.

This afternoon I went to the Centro de Guadalajara, which is basically the town square with my roomie, Michelle, and Brandon a guy from Michigan. It was huge! We went into the cathedral and that was so beautiful. There were so many little shops and food vendors everywhere. We found a nice little "diner" to stop at for lunch and enjoyed that experience. After walking around for a long time, we realized we were walking out of the centro area because everything started getting a little shady. Michelle saw an ad for a prostitute in a restaurant, and we knew we better head out! We got a taxi back and I took a nice siesta.

At dinner our mama asked us if we were going out tonight and at that time we didn't know. She said, "oh you are so young, go out and have some fun!" or something to that degree. :) She likes it when we find something fun to do. So later on, we rounded up the gang and we told her we were going out and she replied with a very excited "MUY BIEN!" (very good, for those non-spanish speaking folk)

Another great adventure encountered tonight when we went out: We were trying to find a nice bar or restaurant to go to and ran into this one bar. It had a fancier house-party-like look to it but I kept noticing some possibly gay men walking in. My friend Michelle says, "well I just saw two ladies that didn't look straight, so what do you think the chances of us being in a gay bar are?" As we were walking out, we noticed some definite signs that we were in a gay bar. haha Oh it was funny to talk about later. BTW Mom, they had those weird wagon wheel styrofoam snacks at that bar!

The pictures I took from the Centro are as follows:
The main altar in the cathedral, the outside of the cathedral, the governor's palace, one of the main streets of shops and vendors,and a cool monument of something I'm not sure of. :)

-Whitney

Day 6, Week 1

Hello from Guadalajara! TGIF! I woke up and had breakfast and went to school for the first Friday in Mexico. :) School was interesting like always. We learned two songs and talked a lot about the differences between all of our countries and Mexico. That was really interesting. They teach us a lot about safety precautions and stuff too, so that's kinda nice.

After school, my roommate and I had lunch and then I laid out in the sun for a little while. We made our way to the gym for the first time today! I was really pumped to be able to get back to the gym. It isn't the prettiest of places, but hey it's somewhere to workout. All the mexicans just seemed to look at us funny. My legs are definitely gonna hurt tomorrow though-haha.

We made a plan with some of our friends from school to go out tonight for dinner and drinks tonight, so after the gym we got ready to go out. We went to this restaurant that is close to the gym and the mall and then we walked for ever to try to find this hoppin' bar that our friends knew about, but we didn't find it. So, we stopped at this billiards place for older people and it kinda killed the night-haha. We took a taxi home with 7 people in the car and made our way back! Tomorrow I think we're gonna go to the Center (of the town) to hang out for the day.

-Whitney

Day 5, Week 1

Hola! Today was an excellent day! Like usual, I had breakfast before school and then we stopped by our friend's house to get her. Her host mom is super nice and yesterday invited us into the house to wait for Michelle.

My classes were good, too. I like to think of them more as conversation tables more than classes. We are reviewing some things and then we tend to veer off onto different topics that end up being pretty funny. We tend to talk a lot about things that are sexy like the telenovelas (soap operas) and advertisements, etc. It's pretty funny listening to our teachers talk about that. My first teacher is Carmen and she doesn't speak any English, so it's complete immersion there, and my second teacher is Mercedes who is a tiny little lady that also doesn't speak much English. I feel like because it is total immersion that it doesn't seem like we are doing a lot in the classes, but it's just that I don't realize that I'm learning while I'm listening. I was talking to a girl in my class from France about wanting to travel to Cancun sometime to visit my friend Abraham, but I don't know if that will happen or not.

After school, Megan, Michelle, and I walked home to have lunch and then we took a little siesta. :) We just hung out for a while and were getting really bored, so we decided to take another stab at trying to find the gym. We actually found it!! We asked the man to take a look around and then we decided to join it. It's not the prettiest gym ever, but it's definitely nice and they have classes they you can take too. I'm pretty excited about it, because it's not too far from our house and I think Megan and I are going to start tomorrow after lunch. :)

When we came back, we had a really good dinner that was a bean soup, something like roast beef with a sweet BBQ-like sauce and homemade potato chips with chocolate ice cream! :) ahh it was good!

Tomorrow I think we are going to get a group of people together from our school to go out for dinner and drinks. That should be pretty fun so I'm excited about that! No orphanage AGAIN today because apparently they just started school so HOPEFULLY next week. :)

I can't believe week 1 is already almost done!!

Buenas noches!
-Whitney

Day 4, Week 1

Today was a good, adventurous day! I woke up and had a nice breakfast, which is usually your choice of cereal, banana, melon, OJ, and toast (which is already toasted in the bag). I talked to mom on skype right when I woke up so that was really nice to see she finally figured it out! ;)

School was good again. We are reviewing the subjunctive and imperative clauses, which may not mean anything to you, but it is like commands and things that you are desiring. We got two more students in our classes. Another girl from Germany and one from Austria. I think it is so cool that all of these people from around the world are meeting in Guadalajara to speak Spanish! :) I took some pictures of my school to give you a better picture of where I am.

After school we walked home and lunch which was a pasta with a tomato sauce on it and a filet of fish with a really flavorful cilantro sauce on that. It was pretty good. And for dessert we had a cake that our mamá invented that had a vanilla cake on the bottom and a chocolate-like ice cream/gelato on the top. mmm was that delicious! I soaked up some more sun today after lunch. It gets really hot though so I can only lay out for like an hour max.

My roommate and I wanted to find a gym to join, so after I did my homework (good student yes I know ;) ) we went on an adventure. As we were walking past the car wash that is also on the way to school, this older man that worked there had to stop me and ask me what my name was and tell me that I was beautiful and my eyes were like mmm! haha...oh I love how flirty everyone is. It's just funny to me. Guys are constantly honking horns, yelling from cars, windows, streets, you name it, staring and wanting to make friends with you. Well long story short, we didn't find the gym but we found the mall. We stopped at the mall and walked around for a while. When we got back to our house, our host mom told us that we were about 2 blocks from the gym-haha. So I think tomorrow we might try it again!

We had an enchilada dinner tonight that was a lot different than the enchiladas at home, but still pretty good. It is very interesting to learn the different customs too. Because when we are eating, our host mom never eats with us. We are always alone and she serves us before anyone else.

Tomorrow evening we get to go to the orphanage to volunteer, so I'm really excited for that. I think it will be sad yet fulfilling at the same time. There's just so much to see and do here, but a little difficult to get and out do it when you don't know your way around yet! I hope they assign us to our Mexican friends pretty soon so we won't be so bored after school.

Buenas noches!
-Whitney

Day 3, Week 1

Hola! Today was a good first day of classes. I woke up and had breakfast and headed to school to figure out which rooms my classes were in. I am in a level 5 (out of 10) class at 9-10:40 and then a level 6 class from 11-12:40. They were both pretty easy today, just introductions and stuff. I have 7-8 people in both classes who are from all over the world. There are 2 guys and a girl from Japan, one guy from Korea, a guy and a girl from London, a girl from Germany, a girl from France, and two of us from the US. I think it's so cool to have people from all over the world speaking a language that is different from their native language. :)

I signed up to be in a latin dance workshop and a latin song/guitar workshop so hopefully they will have enough people for those to take place. The orphanage volunteer program doesn't start until Thursday, so I was kinda bummed about that but it will come soon.

After school, we came home to have lunch which was great! Alfredo spaghetti, zucchini, homemade BBQ chicken, and amazing pineapple. :)

Of course after lunch it's time for a siesta, so I went outside on top of the building behind our house and laid out for a little while. It gets pretty warm quickly though. Our friend down the street came over and we all walked to the Waldo's Mart dollar store to get a few things. We stopped at a little general store to get a pop and sat on the steps outside to drink it. I bet I had 5 guys drop by or walk by the store that either whistled, said good afternoon, or just smiled at me. It's pretty funny being down here.

Oh, and there are Volkswagen Beetles EVERYWHERE! It's so funny, I did not think they were going to be very popular!

After being pretty bored just sitting around tonight, we finally got some dinner around 8. We had a chicken soup, salad, bread, mixed fruit, and I had a beef taco. Ooh! Was it ever good. It's just going to take me a while to adjust to the eating schedules. We have lunch after school around 1 and then don't have dinner until 8. But oh well!

P.S. I gave my mama the MSU rug I bought for her and she loved it! :)



If there is anything you should need my address for, please use this one using FedEx or DHL:

Whitney Madison
Centro de Estudios para Extranjeros-CEPE
Universidad de Guadalajara
Tomás V. Gómez 125
Col. Ladrón de Guevara C.P. 44600
Guadalajara, Jalisco
México

It was like 82 degrees today, so perfect again today!

-Whitney

Day 2, Week 1

This morning I woke up and my roommate arrived when I got out of the shower! We had breakfast together and then our mama walked us to the school. It is about 10 minutes to the school, so it's not bad at all. When we got there, she gave us both hugs and kisses-haha. It was like we were in Kindergarten again! ;)

We got some amazing OJ at the school and sat down in this theater for an orientation. There is going to be so much to do through the school! We have our classes, of course, and then there is volunteering at an orphanage that I'm going to do twice a week and also an opportunity to volunteer at a hospital. You can sign up for dancing and art workshops, take day tours throughout the city, and weekend excursions to places like Guanajuato, Tlaquepaque, and Puerto Vallarta. I'm really excited for all of this and hope I get to go on a bunch of them! We took our proficiency tests that were oral and written to see which levels of Spanish we were at and then we came home.

Megan, my roommate, Michelle, our neighbor a couple blocks down, and I walked home and had lunch. We were pretty bored most of the day, but we walked to the pharmacy which was an adventure in itself. We got a little lost so we stopped twice to ask for directions, but the people spoke so fast I could only understand probably about half of it. haha. We came back to like 5 people eating at our house. It was really weird and we don't know who they were but it almost felt like we were at a cafe haha. We both took naps and hung out before dinner.

After dinner we took another adventure to try to find the mall to look for cell phones, etc, but after like a half hour and pretty much coming to a dead end we decided to turn back around. It was so weird because we heard sirens coming to I waited and waited to see the police or something and there was nothing, it was like a big black van. I think the people here just put random sounds into their cars! The sidewalks here are horrible! (Mom take note haha)

Now I'm getting ready for bed and my first day of classes tomorrow! I'm really excited. I'm going to post some pictures of my house on here too.

P.S.. Weather is great--81 today!

-Whitney

I Made It!

Wow, I made it to Guadalajara! I left Wabasha this morning about 6 a.m. for the airport with my mom, dad, and Brian. I was feeling good and happy about everything until I gave everyone hugs and kisses and then the tears started to flow. They didn't last too long, but then they came again as I was sitting on the plane! I flew out of Minneapolis/St. Paul around 9:30 heading to Houston, TX. It was a pretty good flight, except for I can't find my Ipod so of course I had no music. :(

Anyway, I had a two hour layover in Houston and my flight left for Guadalajara at 2:30. It seemed like a pretty quick flight. I was pretty nervous about my connecting flights and all the little things that go along with flying. I landed in Guadalajara at 4:45 and we were transported via bus to our door to enter Immigrations and Customs. Everything was going really well up to this point. I walked through the doors from Customs into the main entrance of the airport to be surprised by the mass of people waiting on either side of these gates. I felt like a superstar! So I saw the place where I get a taxi and got that all done. It was somewhere around 30 minutes to get to my house from the airport.

I got to my house, which is a little condo-like building with a gate in front and I knocked on the front door. I was getting really nervous at this point! My host mom yelled "Whitney?" from the upstairs window and I answered, "Sí!" She came to the door and gave me a big hug and kiss on the cheek! It was great. I knew at that point it was going to be all right. :)

After she showed me the house, we sat down at talked for a long time. Her Spanish is really fast and it's a little hard for me to understand it all right now, but I'm hoping it'll only make me better. She's already complimented me on my great Spanish already! I showed her pictures of friends and family as we were sitting there.

My host mom, Eugenia is also a host mom for her grandson Alejandro who stays here at the house too. I also met her husband Luciano tonight, who seemed like a nice man. Two of her other grandkids stopped by, a little boy who's 3 and a little girl, 1. They are adorable!

I've just gotten everything settled into my room and am getting tired! Eugenia is walking me to school tomorrow for my evaluations and orientation type stuff. My roommate is coming from Virginia tomorrow and will be here early in the morning too.

What an awesome adventure this is going to be!

-Whitney