January 5, 2009

This morning as waking up before the alarm, which I suppose was a good thing even though sleeping through the night was a little bit rough. I got up at 9, though, because my host mom was planning to take me down to the center of town at 11 to show me around before she dropped me off at the campus.

I had a breakfast that consisted of raisin bran and some milk, and then an apple which I put in my purse but never ate. The apple i had the night before wasn't that great though, and I'm also a little more fond of pears anyway, so I asked if I could have one of the many pears that were sitting below the apples on the stand on the table. Well, that brought a laugh. Those pears aren't real. In either case I ended up with the apple and I got to laugh a little at myself first thing in the morning.
So my host-mom, my host-dad, and I walked up the way a little bit past the German food restaurant to catch the bus. Public transportation is pretty neat. It’s going to cost me 3 pesos (which is about a quarter give or take a little bit) for each bus ride. The bus did, however, sound like it was going to fall apart but no one else seemed to be worried about it. I also was rather quick to blame it on the roads which I named twice as bad as Pennsylvania roads. I actually, though, upon reflection, think it was more the bus, or maybe just one of the roads we were on because when they picked me up in the car I didn’t have any thoughts about Pennsylvania roads at all.

We walked around the center; they showed me this old cathedral, the governor’s office, the Colon bookstore and a famous ice cream/sherbet shop and then we walked over to the campus which is not a centralized location. That basically means that unlike SU or Etown or wherever, everything is not in the same place. There’s a different campus for the Education school, for the Anthropology school, for the Engineering school, etc. They all run entirely independently too and could be working on a different school calendar. It’d be like if the Sigmund Weis school of Business, School of Natural and Social Sciences, and School of Arts, Humanities, and Communications were on separate campuses doing their own thing (and yes, I did have to look up what the actual names for the different sects within SU are).

So orientation is…well…very much orientation. Lots of talking. We got two orientating handbooks, a little notebook, a map of the city, and a little cook book. I’m informed that we’re going to be taught how to actually cook some of the Yucatecan food which could be pretty neat. Maybe my cooking skillz will drastically improve between now and when I get back and suddenly we’ll have gourmet meals every Friday night come the Fall (don’t get your hopes up).

We have a lot of holidays, which I can’t say US colleges have. Our Vacation looks like this:

February:

2^nd (Monday)

23^rd (Monday)~ Carnival

24^th (Tuesday)~ Carnival

25^th (Wednesday)~ UADY’s Foundation

March

3^rd *(Tuesday) ~ Cepeda Peraza

16^th *(Monday) ~ Benito Juarez

April

6^th-16^th Easter à the 13^th-16^th we’re doing excursions as a group though

May

1^st (Friday)

5^th (Tuesday)

15^th (Friday) ~ Teacher’s Day

And of course then I come back the 23^rd of May.

But that’s that. We went to lunch and ate panuchos, salbutes, loganiza asada, and codzitos. I’m going to spare myself a little bit of time by saying the loganiza asada looked like something out of John Dies at the End (bad thing) (and that’s exactly what I thought when I saw it on someone else’s plate) and it wasn’t particularly tasty. It looked like a huge worm of some sort had crawled up onto the plate and died. Or maybe Louie ate some red kool-aid powder and now it was coming out the other end. In any case, I found a picture on the internet, but I don’t think it quite does everything justice.

I have sort of made a friend. Her name is Chelsea and she lives just a few streets over. She’s staying with my host-mom’s older brother and his wife. I think the two of us are going to get along pretty well. She’s studying creative writing/English at a school in Tennessee right near Memphis (she’s actually from Maine though).

Skipping ahead, tonight for dinner I had a tamale and fantastic iced tea (which was probably something like Lipton’s lemon tea like I used to have at Ms. Angies at small group). It was a lovely dinner because it was familiar. Tamales I’ve had in Tecate each time I went, so I knew exactly what to expect when I ate it and it didn’t disappoint. And it was pretty good, too.

Instead of living in a mansion, I think I actually live more in something akin to a Hotel. Something like the Tipton I’m going to say, only there’s no Mr. Mosby or crazy twins running around wreaking havoc. I have access to a pool which someone comes to clean on Thursdays at 2 or 3 am. I have wireless internet. I have someone who comes in on Saturdays and cleans the bathroom in my room and changes the sheets and towels. There’s someone who comes in during the week and does the dishes. It’s also extremely nicely decorated so I’m going to go with very nice hotel.

And since I’m quite tired, I’ve had more water today than even yesterday, I’m going to go to bed. I actually, for the first time probably since ever, I wanted water. I’m beginning to fear about this whole water business. I don’t think I could handle being someone like Lee whose drinking practices include water, water, water, energy drink, and water. Well, at least I had tea at dinner. And this Jamaica drink at lunch. Hopefully all is not lost. =D