Last week, we celebrated Mexican Independence Day here in Cuernavaca. It was amazing for me to see the amount of national pride that so many Mexicans have. For Independence Day here, one of the biggest events is the grito. The main grito occurs in Mexico City, where the president, gives a grito (yell) at around 11pm the night before Independence Day. There are other gritos in different parts of the country where the governor of the state provides the grito. However, many people watch the grito from Mexico City on television. It reminded me a little of watching the ball drop on New Years Eve. The grito consists of the president yelling ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva X! ¡Viva Y! and after each one, the crowd yells ¡Viva! It's really fun. I also celebrated my friend, Memo’s birthday, here in Cuernavaca last week. I think we celebrated at least 3 times!
After celebrating Independence Day and Memo’s birthday here in Cuernavaca, I did some traveling last weekend. After school on Friday I took a bus with 3 of my friends to Mexico City, the bus only cost about 4 dollars and was really convenient. The problem was, it was the cheapest bus so it didn’t take the highway (which is a toll road), so we were traveling on a really really windy road and I felt nice and car sick by the time we arrived. The road wound up and down through mountains. The mountains that I traveled through had lots of trees, including some pine forests. It was really neat when we were coming down the mountain, because as we were coming down there was Mexico City sprawling out everywhere that you could see. All 24 MILLION people. Word is that officially the population is 18 million, but unofficially 24 million. We then used the public bus system to get to our friend’s house. At one point I got really confused because we were waiting for a bus and the guys I was traveling with pointed out to me that I needed to wait with the women because it was safer. In some places, to get on buses, there are separate lines for women and children than for men. I guess it’s because if the men are pushing or grabbing or whatever. Who knows, but that was different than anything I had seen before.
Overall, I was really impressed with Mexico City and definitely hope to go back while I’m here. I only got to see a small piece of a huge city. It reminded me a lot of New York, but also of a European city because of the age of many of the buildings. Overall, it was a clean city and I felt safe while I was there. I think I also felt safe because I was with people who knew the area and who I knew were watching out for me. I think one of the hardest things about the city is that there are a lot of children selling things on the street and a lot of people asking you to buy something or asking you to give them something. On Saturday, we went into a cafeteria for lunch. A little girl, who couldn’t have been more than 7, came over and tried to sell us gum. Then, after we said no thank you, she just kind of sat down with us and watched us. She was really cute. She was pulling the gum that she was chewing out of her mouth into this long string and twirling it around her finger. Kids! And she was watching us, just hanging out and watching us. It made me think about how vulnerable these kids are, because I didn’t see an adult with her and she had just sat down with four adults, three of which were men. Anyway…it’s really common here in most of the country to see children working in these informal types of situations. Also, there aren’t any rules about people not being allowed to come into stores or restaurants to ask customers for something. While in the city we visited a few museums and saw a few of Diego Rivera’s murals. I felt like I could have looked at them all day because they are so intense and so busy.
After returning from Mexico city on Saturday night, I took a trip with the school to Teotihuacán on Sunday. Again, it was a really good trip. I’m going to include a link to some of my pictures on Picasa that I think should work. For some reason, I’m having trouble uploading photos to this website. Somebody let me know if it doesn’t work and I’ll share them a different way. It’s hard to say much about Teotihuacán other than it is a really amazing place. Well, I think that is about it for now. I’m still chugging away at my Spanish classes and learning lots of new vocabulary everyday. I always enjoy spending time with my Mexican friends and their families to try to practice, but it’s also frustrating to have to resort to English so often to get my point across. Poco a poco. That’s what they say here. Little by little!
I hope everyone is doing well and thanks for checking in!
http://picasaweb.google.com/eharanin/SeptemberInMexico?authkey=-Uy6l0LPCUA#
