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With 9 more days to remain in the country, I am finding Mexico to be a really cool place.

Last week I changed families because my first family was never around to talk (which I now realize played a major role in my initial culture-shock woes.) You know how they say you don’t know a good thing until it’s gone? Well, you don’t know a good thing until you get it. My new family is awesome.
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The days here have gotten a little easier. I talked with my professor and now I am down to 6 hours of class a day. It’s still a long day, but it’s much better than before. I now know to be more careful to get enough sleep.

My days are pretty busy. I get up at about 6:45 and eat a little breakfast at 7:00, then I take the taxi to school at about 7:30. Classes start at 8:00AM and run until 2:00PM Monday through Friday. After class, I eat a HUGE lunch which my family prepares (but which is sometimes prepared by a cook hired by the family.) After lunch, I usually get out of the house for a little bit. Today, for instance, I went to the Centro (the center of town) in Cuernavaca and walked around with my friend Emiliano (I’m not sure if I am spelling his name right.) After getting a little site-seeing in, I usually take a shower and work on my homework until dinner (which is at about 8:30 PM.) I’ve been trying to get to bed immediately after dinner to catch the most sleep.

So that is pretty much my day (so interesting, I know!) I haven’t been taking too many pictures, because I don’t have a way to get them onto a computer right now. I will probably take some in the next few weeks so I can post them when I get back.

Tomorrow, I am going on a class trip to Mexico City. I am pretty excited to spend more time with the group I came with, because so far, I’ve only gotten to know one person from my group (The house I am living in houses a lot of students, but most are independant students, and not part of my group.)

There are weekly tests in my classes, and Friday is the test day. I took my first test today, and I feel O.K. about it, but I definitely see where I could improve. The test was covering the differences of use between the preterite and imperfect tenses in Spanish. While I understand the material pretty well, I didn’t study enough this week to do as well as I could have. In the coming weeks, I hope to be a little more on the ball and get my homework done early so I have more time to study.

P.S. Happy 4th of July! Today at school we had a little party with hot dogs and soda and we sang the national anthem. Nothing beats being home, though ;-) Celebrate extra for me.

I arrived safely in Mexico, and I am taking classes 8 hours a day. The classes are good, but I am very tired. I’m hoping I’ll have more energy and time to write next week or the week after.

This week I was placed into one more class than I was planning on taking, and so I have class from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. Luckily, I figured out that one of my classes is optional, and therefore had a few minutes to write here and hopefully eat. (Otherwise, there is no lunch break, just quick snack breaks throughout the day.)

I expected the first few days to be difficult, but they have been more difficult than I imagined due to not getting enough sleep and not eating enough. I am hoping I can get into a schedule soon. It’s possible that next week I’ll have only the 3 classes I was expecting, so I will have more time to take of myself.