Bernal

This weekend I spent Saturday and Sunday in Bernal, a small town about 40 minutes outside of Queretaro. I went with a group of Mexican friends and had a lot of fun with them. I'm practicing Spanish a lot!

We fit six people into a tiny 2-door car. 

La Redonda Winery

La pena de Bernal

The incredible view from our roof!

Wonderful people and friends!

Mi casa!

Here are some pictures of my house

The kitchen!

My bathroom.

My room is the door on the left, and my bathroom the door on the right.

This is a picture of my host mom, her husband, all her children and her grandchildren. This was taken about 10 years ago.

Final week of class!

This week was my last week of my classes! The past three weeks I have had class everyday for either 7 or 8 hours, so I have been really busy. On Tuesday I will start my practicum working in a university classroom at a school called Liceo. I have class Monday-Thursday from 4pm-8pm. This means no school on Fridays!! I am really looking forward to start working with my students!

My class with our teacher, Sharany, the best Spanish teacher I have had!

Our conversation class with our teacher, Rafael. Such a fun group of people!

For my TESL class we worked on preparing a 4 hour lesson plan that we would teach real students. This is my classroom of beginner English learners. They were so eager to learn. Many of them work in the tourist industry. The older man in the front is learning English so that he can talk to his grandchildren! Working with actual students reminds me of why I want to be an English teacher!

My friends Nacho and Rachael! 

On Friday we had a party at our school to celebrate our completion of our classes and to welcome the new students who came for the practicum.  We ate delicious food, had a pinata, learned some salsa moves, and enjoyed ourselves. The people who work at my school are all incredible people. After the fiesta a lot of my friends and I went to Karaoke with our Mexican friends.

San Miguel de Allende

I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to write recently. Well, last weekend I went with 5 of my friends to San Miguel for one night. Traveling here is actually really cheap. Our bus ride (1hr) to San Miguel was under five dollars! We stayed at a really nice Villa, we had our own house and a pool. It was so nice to get away from the city and spend time with my friends!

The view of San Miguel from our Villa!

A huge, famous church in San Miguel

We were lucky enough to have seen this parade pass by! I'm not sure exactly what it was about but I think it was some kind of indigenous people. 

Guanajuato!

Yesterday we went to Guanajuato with all of our group. This is such a beautiful city! It reminded me a lot of something you would see in Europe. The city has no stop lights, but traffic wasn't too bad! There are underground tunnels and it's just really interesting. Lots of hills as well. There are a ton of mines in this area; we visited one and hiked underground. This was really interesting because we are learning about the Mexican Revolution in class, and the mine workers were forced to work long hours and under really harsh conditions. Eventually they revolted which was part of the revolution. 

A beautiful church.

Mummies! We went to a museum with a ton of mummies; they even had baby mummies, it was kind of disturbing. I don't remember exactly but these mummies were embalmed naturally because of something in the water they drank in this town.

If you see the stick to the right of the Hidalgo sign, this is where Hidalgos head was displayed after being beheaded. "Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Ignacio Allende, José Mariano Jiménez and Juan Aldama were tried for treason, executed by firing squad and beheaded during the Mexican independence in 1811. Their heads were on display on the four corners of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, in Guanajuato." (thank you wikipedia)

We visited the house of artist David Rivera, which is now a museum with some rooms on display, as well as his artwork.