Summary of the first 10 days

Ok, so it´s kind of late to start a blog of my trip, but Michelle is harassing me to make one so I will try it out....I have been here for a while though so this first blog will just be a brief (hopefully) summary of what I have done so far.

First of all, we are here for 4 weeks and the topic of the trip is migration from and through Mexico to the United States. So basically we are traveling around Mexico and we are staying with homestay families and taking classes at different institutes in the states we are visiting. The first state we went to was Oaxaca.

Overall Oaxaca was pretty cool. The woman I stayed with was really nice. She was always hugging me and kissing my cheek and she called me mi vida (my life). The town was also pretty safe. I could walk around during the day by myself without having to worry about anything...which will not be the case when we go to Michuacan.

The food here has been pretty good so far, but people in my group are starting to get sick. We can´t drink the water or even brush our teeth with it. Everything is done with bottled water. We also can´t buy fruit or salad (basically anything that would have been washed with water) from anywhere...we can only eat it with our homestay families. The milk is also a little sketchy....they dont refrigerate it even though it says to on the boxes. I had cereal today (corn flakes) but my host mom heated the milk on the stove first so the cereal was soggy and pretty gross. They give us so much to eat though! If it weren´t for all the walking we do I would be really worried...

In Oaxaca we went on a few excursions to some of the smaller pueblos to interview the people their. It is so crazy how different their lifestyles are from ours. I will post pics when I get home, but Oaxaca is the poorest state in Mexico so their are so many women and children begging in the streets or trying to sell jewelry and stuff. And there are so many skinny dogs on the streets! They constantly have their nose to the ground looking for food...it is really sad. Another thing that I have had to get used to is the sewer systems here...which apparently suck so you can´t throw toilet paper down them. So their are little (uncovered) garbage cans next to the toilets for the paper....let´s just say some of the bathrooms don´t smell so great.

The class that we had to take in Oaxaca was 3 hours and pretty boring. We had a lot of reading to do and a paper to write and I´m really not in school mode yet so it was kind of torture. But we also got to go do some fun things like see different ruins around Oaxaca. Monte Albán was amazing! I will also post pics of that later, but google it if you are interested :)

Well this is getting long so I will wrap it up. We left Oaxaca and drive for about 6 hours I think to a town called Juchitan (I think) where we stayed in a hotel for the night. Then we drove 6 more hours until we got to the state of Chiapas, which is where we are staying this week. The drive was horrible though because we are crammed into 2 vans (there are 24 of us) and the roads are very windy and the drivers are crazy!! They pass right before hugh hills or curves and their are always people driving on the side of the road....it is very chaotic I would never want to drive here. We did get to stop at a beach on the way though, which was nice. We are in the middle of the country so we never really see water....in fact I don´t really know where this beach was....but anyway, I think that is all for now. I will fill you all in on Chiapas later.

Adios!