Hello friends and family! Welcome to my new blog! Rouwenna (a felow smithie here in Mexico) showed my how easy it is to have a blog last weekend, but I am just now getting started. Part of the problem is that I have already been in Mexico for a month so I hardly know where to begin. But instead of trying to recount everything that has happened in the past four weeks, I think I'll just start with today and go from there!

My first class this morning was at 10am, which is very nice, especially considering I have class at 8am on Mondays and Wednesdays. The university I am attending, Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP), has two campuses- CU (Ciudad Universitaria) and el centro. El centro is in the center of the city and the campus buildings are mixed in with other non university buildings. CU is a more traditional campus, and it is huge. It's a good 25 minute brisk walk from one end to the other, and that's just academic buildings, no dorms or anything. Very different from the 10 or so academic buildings I'm used to at Smith!

So my first class of the day, the History of Mexico, was at 10am in CU. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to the class- a 15 minute walk to the bus stop, a 5 minute bus ride, and 15-20 minute walk from the bus stop to my class, depending on the location of the class.

After class, I went to track practice. That's right, in my effort to stay in shape, I have gone off the deep end and joined the track team! It's actually not the bad, because the team is very flexible. They have two or three traininers there all day, and you just show up when you have a chance. Not exactly the time demands of smith crew, but then it also lacks the team dynamic. But today was only my second day, and I've already met a lot of nice people. Hopefully we'll keep showing up at the same times and I will get to know them better. I'm not 100% sure I'm going to stick with it, it depends on how much time it ends up taking, but for now it is an excellent way to stay in shape!

After practice I went back home to eat. The biggest meal of the day here is around 3pm, and I almost always come back home to eat with my family. Today we had tostadas and they were delicious! Beans, beef, lettuce, cheese, avacados, salsa and cream. I love that we have avocados and cheese with almost everything.

After "la comida" (we don't really call it lunch even though that's basically what it is, just bigger and later), I had my dance class. It's in el centro, which is much easier to get to than CU. It's less than a five minute walk to the bus stop, 15 minutes on the bus, and then a 5 minute walk to class. It may seem like I'm spending an awful lot of time describing my means of transportation, but really, it's a big part of my life here. In another post I will have to go into more detail about the crazy bus drivers here...

My dance class went really well today. It's Mexican folkloric dance, and it's really beautiful when done right, but I am still in the very begining stages. The class is always really intense because we are jumping around for a solid two hours, and the first few classes we just learned all these basic steps and did them over and over again, but today we put all those steps into these really fun coreographed dance.

After class, I went with some of my friends from the program, Charlotte and Jenna, to Patricia's house. Patricia is our wonderful program director, and she lives in the most beautiful house in the middle of the city provided by the program. Tomorrow the university is throwing this huge welcome party/Mexican Independence Day party for our program, and we are all going to be wearing traditional Mexican costumes, so today we went to patricia's to pick out our costumes. There weren't very many options left when we got there, and I am a bit skeptical about mine to be honest, but I'm hoping it will grow on me tomorrow.

After Patricia's, I went out for tacos and a churro with Max and Asha, two other friends from the program. I know, it sounds so cliche, eating tacos and a churro in Mexico, but that's my life.

When I got back to my house, I finished a paper that's due tomorrow and set out to finally start my blog. And here I am!