Cervantino & My Secondary Project

Sorry for the long silence.  October was the month that the Cervantino Festival happens here in Guanajuato and we have had visitors in and out all month.  I must say that it was such a pleasure-both a change of pace and a chance to get to know some of the other Peace Corps volunteers who live in other cities.  To give you an idea of the festive atmosphere, I am posting some photos my friend Daisie took:

This last one is of the "callejon de besos"  or roughly translated as the little street of kisses. It is one of the big tourist attractions of our city-a street so narrow, that you can kiss across the windows of the buildings.  Supposedly however, since our city is a very conservative, Catholic town, they have actually banned the practice!

We basically spent the 3 weeks of the Festival hosting friends, hanging out in the streets watching many of the free events, and just enjoying the time.  We did attend two events, one a a contemporary dance event by a group called Delfos Dance, from Sinaloa which was the "showcased" Mexican state this year:

 

The other event was an outdoor event by a wonderful singer from Mali named Oumou Sangare:

So while an exhausting three weeks-a really fun one!

On other news, as some of you may know, in the Peace Corps we are encouraged to have what is called a "secondary project" outside of our primary work time.  Mine has turned out to be the adorable new baby boy Attila!  He is officially five months old yesterday and the son of the young woman who is the new CEO of CIMATIKA, the spin off our center is creating to commercialize technology from our center.  He is absolutely adorable and we take him with us everywhere-trips to business meetings, Costco, or just hanging out in the city having coffee together:

So that is about it for now!  Our birthdays were this past month as well, so October was non-stop festivities!  And since we aren't ready to slow down, we are going to San Miguel de Allende this weekend to join my sister Susie, who is already there. We are going to celebrate the day of the dead-one of the more important holidays here in Mexico.  After that, we have a week at home and then take our first "official" vacation when we go to Guadalajara to meet friends for a few days, then back to San Miguel and Guanajuato.  It will be hard to buckle down to work after all this playing. Luckily, at that point, Xmas break will be on the horizon!

New House Paint & Our Trip to DF

Our landlords (and owners of the house) left on the 4th of July for Spain where they typically spend 6months or so a year since like Antoine and I they are bi-cultural, but in their case, Spanish and Mexican.  But before they left, Miguel decided it was time to paint the wall of our house.  We are lucky to have our version of Diego Rivera!  I must say that I liked the wall before, which was painted white with kind of a dark red sponged on leaf pattern:

Now it is much more colorful.  It is sort of an abstract "EKG" pattern in violet, green and orange!  Sounds kind of crazy but it is growing on me.  The colors coordinate with the flowers painted on the house itself:

And I must say it makes it easy to describe to taxis when they pick us up or drop us off!  So, which one do you like better?

Meanwhile, we just got back from Quertaro from our three month In-Service Training.  It was nice to see group member from PCM-12 (our group name) and catch up on what they are up to with their assignments, and it was pleasure to spend some more time in Queretaro.  That said, I was glad when training was over!  Now we don't have any more training until what is called mid-service training next April, and I think most of that is focused on dental and medical check ups.

After Queretaro, we we lucky because we had an additional week off as our center in Guanajuato was closed.  We had booked a suite hotel in the Zona Rosa for 5 nights.  We had a great time despite the fact that I caught a nasty cold during training from one of the other volunteers and it seemed to morph into a stomach flu.  So a lot of our plans for checking out ethnic restaurants seemed a lot less appealing than anticipated. By the end of the trip, unfortunately, Antoine caught the bug as well and is just now starting to feel a bit better!  So our first Mexico vacation wasn't necessarily a roaring success, but it was still nice to have the break.  We were feeling well enough to have dinner twice with some volunteers who were in town from Guadalajara.  They were great to get to meet since they are another couple around our age, and since they will be extending a year and moving to Queretaro, we may have  a chance to see other again hopefully!

The last day before returning to Guanajuato, I was feeling well enough to visit the Anthropology Museum which is always a treat-I especially love the Mayan section.  Here are some photos to enjoy from this splendid museum:

 

All Critters Great & Small

As much as we are pet lovers we are resisting the the temptation to adopt any cats or dogs while we are here in Mexico!  But I do want to share some photos of some of the more tame and wild critters we have run across so far.

As cat people, by far our favorite animal so far was our host mom Rosi's lovely little cat Matias:

And just down the road from Rosi's house, there is a corral with 10-15 cows and calves.  We never figured out how come, but sometimes you see a cow wandering down the road unattended, or patiently waiting outside the corral to be let in:

And up at our bus stop coming from CIMAT center there is this really sweet friendly girl dog.  She seems to belong to one of the people who lives up there.  I had a conversation with a woman one day who said that she was her dog, so hopefully that is true.  I think the dog has a sweet spot for me though because one day I saw her with a piece of twine tied tightly around her neck.  It was broken off as if someone had tried to tie her up and she had gotten loose.  I managed to cut the twine off of her neck which had really been bugging her, and now whenever she is around at the bus stop, she comes over to say hi:

Many times she is joined by goats and sheep who also wander by from close to the old mines:

Last but not least we have to show you a couple of the unwelcome and dangerous critters we have seen:

In our house we have now seen (and killed) 3 alacranes.  An alacrán is related to a scorpion. Supposedly the small black ones like you see trapped here are not too dangerous-like a bee sting.  If stung, you need to take an antihistamine and put ice on the sting and you should be fine unless you have  a very strong reaction.  But there are lighter colored ones with strong venom.  Supposedly all our friends say they only live in Leon, but I bet all the folks in Leon tell the volunteers there that those ones only live in Guanajuato!  In any case, we try to be very careful-we shake out our shoes and we check our stucco walls often in the house-so far that is where we have found all 3-clinging to walls.  But I guess that is better than stepping on them!

Finally, on our way to work from the bus stop after a rain we ran across a tarantula! Hard to tell from the photos, but this sucker was BIG!  So while we don't have lions to watch out for like the volunteers in Zambia, life in Peace Corps Mexico definitely has a thrills of the animal variety!

We Have a Place of Our Own

So it is official-we can finally have visitors!  We moved into our new house last weekend.  We ended up staying with our wonderful host mom Rosi for two weeks longer than expected because the house we ended up renting was quite ready for occupation, so she generously let us keep renting from her.  She was the person who helped us find the house.  It actually belongs to friends of hers here in Guanajuato.  It was not on the market.  It has a small apartment attached to the house and the people who own both units live in the apartment and the house has been sitting empty.  They spend half the year in Spain and after thinking about it, I think they decided that since we were a personal referral from Rosi, they would be willing to rent to us.  Like our PC trainers told us, relationships are really important in Mexico, and I am sure without help from our host mom, we wouldn't have found such a great place.

Our place is up in the hills very near to the center where we work.  After looking at a number of noisy, pretty awful overpriced places in town, we decided that living up here would be calmer and of course would make our commute to work in the morning a whole lot easier.

Here are some photos of the house and our view from the kitchen which is really beautiful.

Our place is right on the main highway going up from Guanajuato and it is white stucco painted with flowers. The blue area is the small apartment where our landlords live.  The husband is Mexican and an architect.  He designed the house and apartment.  Luckily he is a specialist in energy saving , so the house stays nice and cool.  An added bonus is that the bus stops right in front going down to town, and we just cross the street to go up the hill.

Since people seem to name their houses here, ours is now officially called Casa Flores because someone (I suspect our talented landlord) decorated the house with painted flowers.  And the red paint on the wall is all handpainted as well with beautiful a beautiful leaf shape:



















Here is a shot with better details of the flowers:

And here is a picture of our patio, which is lovely but generally a little hot, so we have yet to eat outside!

Because Guanajuato is hilly, our house is kind of a multi-level split level design-so lots of stairs and lots of hard surfaces.  This is looking down from the dining room, kitchen level to the living room.  We don't have much furniture-but we do have a fireplace!  Although in the very arid land I would be terrified to ever light a fire!

Here is the kitchen-which is really large and mostly empty although we now have a fairly large round table over near the windows.

And this is our view from our kitchen windows!

So as you can tell we have plenty of room for friends and family and we hope you will make plans to come see us!

Otherwise, we had a chance to go to Querétaro again last week since Peace Corps needed some more people to come be Spanish speaking guinea pigs for their language trainers in their certification training.  So since they were paying our bus fare for the day trip, we brought empty suitcases with us and filled them at Costco with last minute move-in stuff like some more pillows, etc.  Otherwise, we would have to pay to go to Leon and the bus and taxi fare wouldn't make it worth it.  So it was a treat to go back to a larger, flatter town for a day!  But it was hot, so we were actually kind of get back to our cooler part of Mexico!  We will be going back to Querétaro in mid-July for our early in-service training and then since our center will be closed we have booked a few nights in Mexico City.  We really enjoyed the overnight trip we took there during training so we thought we would go back when we will be able to really enjoy the restaurants and movies in the big city.

A Little Bit About Work

CIMAT has been a very welcoming center.  When we arrived, the first challenge was finding a place to put us!  Our counterpart Laura didn’t want Antoine and I to share an office since she knew that we would basically talk English all day together-which is definitely right!  Since space is at a premium, it was a challenge to find two spaces.  Luckily we both ended up with offices rather than a card table in the software development room!  Antoine is sharing an office with a post-grad student and I have my own space which is an office of one of the researchers who is currently on sabbatical in Spain. The center is currently finishing construction on a new building that will house a robotics lab as well as the software department and it is my understanding that eventually towards the end of summer we may move there.  But for now, I am not complaining.  The only challenge is that our center is built on a billion hills and there are something like 10 buildings built up the hill and so it is really difficult to get to know anyone and to gather round any facsimile of a water cooler!  So that is the bad news. Here is photo so you see what I mean-very challenging on the knees by the way, especially at almost 8000 feet up!

 

But I am hoping that once we start to teach some English classes we will get to know more people. Our first project here is to help with the transition to a new website for the center.  They are scheduled to go live with the new site at the end of June and while there is currently content on the old site, it really needs to be rethought and rewritten both in Spanish and in English.  Since the communications director has a very busy schedule, we decided that the best approach is for Antoine and I to rewrite the site in an English “Lite” version and then once we all agree on content, they will translate the new copy into Spanish.  So far, the process is working and it is a great way to get know every aspect of the center since we spend hours studying the content that is on the old site, studying work documents, and trying to understand how to communicate all the aspects of the work done here at the center.

The highlight of the first week was an invitation by the Director of the center to join him for lunch along with our counterpart at one of the nicest restaurants in town.  They both insisted that we try one of Mexico’s specialties called Escamoles, which for the culinarily challenged among you, translate as ant larvae!  In this case they were served as a starter in the form of a sope-a  little masa pancake and they were very good-kind of nutty and buttery as they are described-but better not to think about what you are eating!  Here is a photo:

Aside from the amazing lunch, we welcomed an opportunity to spend some time with our Director who is a brilliant and busy man.  He has won the national prize for mathematics here in Mexico and it was interesting to listen to the kinds of projects he is interested in working on for the center.  We will see how they all develop and how we might be able to contribute.

Meanwhile, we have the website to keep us occupied.  We also will be starting some English classes in the next few weeks.  Antoine will be leading a conversation group for interested staff members and I will be focusing on a business English class for the people in sales and the people who work with industry.  So it is will be interesting to see who signs up and how those courses proceed.  For now however, May 1^st is a holiday here in Mexico, so we have been enjoyed both Monday and Tuesday as a holiday!  Not a bad way to start off our new jobs!

Swearing In & Host Family Life in Guanajuato

As of last April 19^th, we are no longer PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) but are now PCVs! (Peace Corp Volunteers).  Our service will end officially on April 18^th, 2014.  The swearing in ceremony took place in the garden area of the Peace Corps Offices in Querétaro and we were officially sworn in by Laura Dogu, who is the number two person in charge at the US Embassy in Mexico.  The ambassador was supposed to do the honors but had a last minute change of schedule in conjunction with the G20 conference.  

We chose Salvador, our fellow volunteer who is originally from Spain, to do our five minutes volunteer speech in Spanish.  He did a great job and even though we took the easy way out as a group choosing our Spanish speaker to give the speech, in terms of presentation skills and personality, he was a very good choice to do the honors. The ceremony was more emotional than I had expected.  I am not sure if this was due to the ceremony itself or only our vast relief at finally finishing our 10 weeks of grueling training!  Even though we consider ourselves lucky in terms of being assigned to Mexico, the training experience seems to be difficult no matter where in the world you do your service.  Between classes running six days a week and the anxiety about your future service, it seems to universally be the part of the Peace Corps experience that everyone is glad to see come to an end!  Speaking of classes, as far as we know, we all made it successfully to the “intermediate low” level of Spanish that is required for our program.  So that at least means that we aren’t on language “probation”.  That said, once we get just a bit more settled, Antoine and I want to start to see what we can do with online resources to continue trying to improve our language.  We also plan to get a television, which we don’t currently have, in order to get more practice listening to Spanish. 

After the ceremony itself, we visited with our center directors, host families and PC staff for a while.  At that point, our center director and counterpart colleague were invited along with the other important guests to one of the CONACyT research centers for lunch with the Embassy representative.  Meanwhile, we went back to our host family’s house, packed our things and went back to the center to await our ride to Guanajuato-our new home base for the next two years!  Before I change the subject and talk more about our first days here in Guanajuato, here is a photo taken after the ceremony.  The Embassy person is the tall woman in front of Antoine in the light blue jacket.  Behind me is Sam, our youngest volunteer from our group, headed out to work in the rural area of Puebla near where they are constructing a giant telescope. He is hoping to work with some of the surrounding villages on eco-technical projects.  The other people in the right side of the photo are the other 3 new PCVs from our group.  Two of them are staying in Querétaro working at Universities and Salvador, standing next to our Assistant Director Kitty Kaping, will be living in Leon.  Finally, the last two people in the photo are Beatriz Charles, our program manager, and in the back row middle, our country director, Dan Evans.


 

 

So, after the ceremony we were able to ride up to Guanajuato with our counterpart Laura and her driver.  We are currently living with our new host family in an area up above the city center called “Los Filtros”.  It is a little residential enclave about a two minutes’ walk from the main highway that runs between the city center and our CONACyT center called CIMAT where we are working.  We love our new host mom, Rosi.  She is a single mom with three sons.  Since two of them study in Querétaro, it is quiet most of the week and we live downstairs in a little separate studio apartment, which is a huge improvement over the single small room we had at our first host family's house.  The bathroom is built into a passageway and have a very low ceiling so poor Antoine has hit his head at least once that I know of and has to duck to shower, but neither of us are complaining since we are so happy to have a much more comfortable space.

The walk is surprisingly bucolic-we walk by a corral with cows, horses and mother hens being followed around by the cutest little baby chicks!  Every so often, for some unknown reason we will walk by and see one of the cows alone standing outside the corral or wandering up our little dirt road.  That is the moment that we realize we are actually having a Peace Corps moment despite working at a mathematics research center with all the comforts of home.

Our Visit to Mexico City & Countdown to Becoming a Full Fledged PCV!

I decided to do a flurry of a couple of postings, since it has been awhile since I have posted anything.  This is mainly due to the fact that our training days are really long and packed with stuff to do.  But we are beginning to the see the light at the end of the tunnel!  It is Saturday and we only have 2 more weeks of training before our swearing in.  Swearing-in is officially Thursday, April 19th, so not even quite 2 full weeks left to go.  It was actually supposed to be Wednesday April 18th but the US Ambassador will be at the G20 Summit.  I guess he figured he need to be there in Puerta Vallarta instead of our swearing-in!  We are all looking forward to our swearing in although we have lots of big things to complete before that happens. 

Speaking of the Ambassador, we were invited to go to his home for a cocktail party when we visited Mexico City last week.  We were in Mexico City for just 2 half days and one night to visit the Benjamin Franklin Library, to meet resource people from the Department of Commerce and State and US AID.  In addition, we met with the officials at CONACYT, which is the Mexican government organization that runs the research center where many of us will be serving.  When we went to visit the US State Department people, it turns out that one of currently serving volunteers worked with her in Washington, D.C. for many years and she was the person that snagged us an invitation.  The Ambassador was not at home, so his second in command was hosting the reception.  It was being held as the closing event for a Smart Grid conference that had been held that week.  Needless to say, it was really fun to see the house-which is really large and lovely, and it was really fun to be driven though the most beautiful parts of the city to get there!  I don't have the photo that we took of the group in his house, but when I get it from the person who took it I will post it  But here is a photo of the courtyard of the hotel we stayed in.  It was in a great area with good distance to nice restaurants etc.  It is called the hotel Casa Gonzalez.  Even though we loved the charm of the place, the rooms were just okay. Next time we will stay in the same neighborhood but find a different place.

 

Meanwhile, now that we are back at our training site, we are working on a practicum with one of the local universities here in Querétaro, and we are giving our final presentations next week.  I am working with one of my fellow PCT's (Peace Corps Trainee) supporting a professor who is developing low cost parallel robots.  So not exactly the classic Peace Corps experience!  We need to give our 20 minute presentation in Spanish, so that could be painful all around for both presenters and audience, but great practice for the Spanish qualification test which is also looming.  I started out at the intermediate level of Spanish, so in order to be sworn in unconditionally, I need to have advanced by 2 sub-levels.  I have no idea if I have done that, but fingers crossed that I have because there isn't too much time left to cram!  If I haven’t advanced enough then I will have to build a plan with the language instructors to get to that level before the next early in-service training, which happens 3 months after your service starts. So I am hoping that isn’t the case.  I do want to work more on my Spanish once training is through, but in my own way and at my own pace.  We are really hoping to stay focused on staying in Spanish with our colleagues at the center rather than using English.  Many people there speak lots of English, but our hope is to limit our English to class time only.  It is bad enough that Antoine and I speak English at home!

Okay I guess I have finally caught up.  On a final note, this week has been a fairly important holiday week in Mexico, “Semana Santa”, the holy week ending with Easter tomorrow.  So yesterday, Antoine and I went to the centro of Querétaro to watch the silent processions.  These are processions of volunteers from different churches around the state who silently march barefoot between seven churches in the city.  It is really beautiful and impressive.  Most of the people are carrying heavy crosses or statues of Christ or Mary or Guadalupe.  The atmosphere is respectful but also carnival like with people lining the route to watch and there are also little stands that sell tortas and gorditas and other yummy types of snacks.

Down to SIx Trainees & Our Future Site Visit: Warning Long Post!

A few weeks back we lost one of our fellow trainees.  We aren't sure what really happened-why she decided to early terminate. She was the only other woman in the group and also the other trainee assigned to Guanajuato, so now Antoine and I will be the only "pioneers" going as the first volunteers to the new center there.  I think she was struggling with the language and I also think she had not pictured her Peace Corps experience being the kind of unique experience the technology transfer program here is in Mexico.  It is a fairly technical, professional program, although many people in our program who are seeking the more "typical" PC experience find that in their secondary projects working with children in the pueblos or building houses with Habitat for Humanity programs that some people work with here.  In any case, we wish her the best.  I am sure it was not an easy decision to early terminate after the long process of applying to Peace Corps.

We also had a chance to visit our new center and future home city of Guanajuato, and also to meet our new host "mom"!  Unfortunately, the town is just as hilly as I feared! the picture above is a picture of the monument to El Pípila.  He was a miner and hero during the Mexican Independence.


The bigger issue is that it is really mostly a tourist city and a very youthful university city, so staying in the center can be really noisy. And of course then there are the famous "callejones", the little narrow streets only accessible by foot or steep staircases.  So the topology may make it very hard for us to find a place to live that is relatively accessible and not too far from shopping and the bus we need to go up to the centro.  So fingers crossed that we will find something we like. 

Up at our center we met one the employees that we will be working with whose family is a very old family from Guanajuato and she has promised to help us house hunt, so that would be terrific!  And in addition, she lived 8 years in Ashland Oregon, which is the sister city of Guanajuato, so she we have some northwest memories in common.  She actually took us to her family's home while we were there.  She is the oldest of 7 girls and 1 boy in the family, so her mom's house was a beehive of visiting family. We met Suzy's 1 year old niece, who was adorable and who was wearing this cute little crash helmet they had bought her since she is just beginning to walk.  Her neighborhood is one that we are targeting.  It is about 10 minutes from the center.  We would have to take 2 buses to the center where we will work but it would be worth it to be able to live in a little quieter part of the city.  We will see how things develop.  We have been told that it is harder to find housing in Guanajuato than in Querétaro since it is really much smaller-probably only 70-100,000 people versus a million, and then you have all the limitations caused by the hills-there just isn’t enough room in the valley to build anything else.  So will just have to wait and see. 

We won’t be facing looking for a place right away, anyway, because we will be staying with another host family for the first month.  We met our new host “mom”, Rosie on our future site visit as well. She seems great.  She is a single mom with three sons, although the two oldest ones are living and studying in Querétaro.  So she lives with her youngest son who is finishing high school.  They live up the hill from the center of Guanajuato on the road that goes up to our center, CIMAT.  Their house is situated on a hill with stunning views of the city and it feels surprisingly rural.  To get to and from the center, we walk about 2-3 minutes down this kind of dirt road to the main road where the bus runs up to the center and down to the city.  Along the way we pass donkeys and cows and chickens!  So it definitely gives you that more traditional PC experience!  Her house is very modern, with satellite TV, internet, etc.  Where we will be living seems much more comfortable than our room here in Querétaro because she has a little private kind of one bedroom apartment in the bottom of the house where we will be staying.  It is two rooms connected by a bathroom (very low ceiling in the bathroom, so Antoine may have to stoop to shower!).  One of the rooms is set up as a living/dining room with a refrigerator and the other room is the bedroom.  The little apartment has a couch and a dining table with 4 chairs and desk.  So compared to our 8 x 10 foot room here with only one chair and a stool-it will almost be like having our place, so we are excited about that!

Last but not least, we got to visit the center where we will be working which is called CIMAT.  The first thing you notice about the center is that it is a collection of buildings built on-you guessed it, a steep hill!  And the architect in his wisdom decided he didn’t want to block the amazing views by putting in any handrails, so I spent two days huffing and puffing and teetering up and down cement stairs between floors!  The good news is that I definitely won’t have to join a gym here-I will get all my exercise just living in the city and going to the center!  It is going to be a challenging assignment on many levels.  Since it is mathematics research center, the researchers who work there tend to be relatively shy introverts and “in their heads”.  No joke that when our counterpart introduced us to one of the pure mathematics researchers, he said “hi” and them turned around and almost ran into a door because he was obviously thinking of some esoteric mathematical thing!  In addition, the center was built like a series of little rabbit hutches-so no gathering around the water cooler there.  So, it could be very challenging to meet with people and figure out how to interact with them on projects. 

The good news is that we really liked our Director.  He is this brilliant guy who has won the national prize for mathematics here in Mexico and written a number of math texts.  He seems really interested in our backgrounds and hopeful that we can help the centers focus on how to put more of mathematical research to work in the commercial area.  So if we have his support in that, we may actually be able to get some interesting things going.  Meanwhile, our counterparts have got a few starter project ideas for us to collaborate on. We are going to be helping with a web site project and also looking at some of the project management processes and software testing procedures!  So it feels very similar to the kind of work we have done back in the US.  They all want us to get some English discussion groups going.  That is one of the charters of the TT program here in Mexico because all of the researchers in the CONACYT centers need to speak and write in English to present at conferences and to publish papers.  So we will be working pretty actively with the post grad students to help them improve their English skills.

Our First Week in Querétaro

We haven't had too much time to communicate during our first week here in Mexico.  Our first week's training schedule was jam packed between meeting our new host families, Spanish classes, meeting all the new people here at the Peace Corps office and training center, getting vaccines and trying to learn our way around the city.  I will try to give you at least a brief overview of at some of the highlights.

Querétaro itself is a modern, large city.  We are staying with a family who lives about 10-15 minutes from the center here (walking) which makes it relatively easy for us to get here everyday.  Most of our group of seven trainees live fairly close, although one of our group members has to take a bus everyday since he lives quite a distance from the center.  Our family consists of a couple who is retired and also the mother of our host mom, who lives with them.  They are building her a small little "in-law cottage" right behind the house.  The house, like many others in the city, has a locked front gate and walls around it with an open patio area.

The first weekend after arriving, we went with our host family to visit one of the local Costco stores and Walmart.  So at that level, shopping life here is not that different from the US.  However, since we aren't allowed to drive, we will only be going out to the large "big box" stores when we take a cab.  Luckily there is a pretty modern shopping center not too far from where we are living which is about a 15 minute walk. It has a fairly large supermarket with pretty much everything we need in the way of everyday things.

 The first weekend our host mother drove us around to help us get oriented to the city.  She took us to a really interesting local market called the mercado de la cruz.  Here is a photo of one of the many fruit stands inside the market:

The market itself is basically in a large cement building with a mixture of things going on-people selling fruit, small restaurants, people selling DVDs, clothing and jewelry.

I also took a few photos of the Peace Corps center here where we attend class every day.  We start at 8:30 most days and finish at 6PM, so the days are pretty long and packed with classes of all sorts.  Last week, for example, we had 2 medical sessions (and also got 4 shots!), some safety sessions, some cultural trainings sessions, language classes of course, and we took a field trip out to visit one of the centers where some of the current PC volunteers work.  The PC center here is in a property that used to be a large house.  It has been renovated to accommodate both offices and training class rooms.  

The teachers have put labels on many of the items around the center to give us an opportunity to absorb some more Spanish as we take our breaks in the garden area:

The center is made up a few clusters of buildings around a central garden area

We have a volunteer lounge where we can relax and take a break in the few minutes we have.  And the death stairs (as I call them), lead up to the area where many of our classes are held.

Otherwise, I have not gotten out much to really see the city yet.  Querétaro is famous for its aqueducts, which are nearby to where we live, so we have seen those:

 

They are really impressive and run about 3 miles through the city and end at a convent in the center of town.

So that has been more of less the first week here. I have been having a pretty strong reaction to the flu shot I was given and have not been feeling my best-very tired, sleeping a lot and feeling like I have the flu.  But hopefully I am getting over that.  We are having a transportation rally tomorrow where we are supposed to take buses throughout the city to discover some of the historic sites. That should give me a chance to see more of the city.

Last but least for the news of the week, we discovered last Friday our new permanent sites!  This is the place where we will be living and working for 2 years once we are through training and are sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers in mid-April (April 18th I think in our case).  

We found out that we will not be staying in Querétaro.  We will be moving to a city called Guanajuato.  It is a much smaller town than Querétaro, with around 70,000 people.  It is also a UNESCO world heritage site and is a city that is famous for both its Cervantes festival and its mummy museum!  It is also unusual in that it is a city with many tunnels and little tiny alleys and curving streets, so hopefully I will be able to find my way around.  We will be working with a one of the Mexican government research centers there called CIMAT.  We are pretty excited about the work assignment since it is an institute that focuses on mathematical research and actually grants degrees (Masters and PhDs) in various mathematical specialties.  It is a brand new partner for Peace Corps and they seem to be interested in figuring out more ways to liaison with industry.  We will be going there with one other woman from our training group who will be focused on testing I believe.  We are happy that it is more of an educationally oriented site than an engineering one.  Here are some pictures of the city itself:

It is supposed to be a very fun city that lots of people here in Peace Corps like to visit.  So we are hoping to be able to find a place where we have at least 1 guest room.

This is a picture of the CIMAT campus where we will be working.  Apparently it is situated up above the city.  Hopefully we will be able to get a bus to take us there easily!

 

So that is it for now.  I will try to post something over the weekends, although maybe not as packed full of news as this posting :)

So Many Places, So Little Time!

Monday February 6th, 2012 Washington D.C.
Staging day for our departure to Mexico in 2 days on Wednesday February 8th!

As I so often read on the other applicant's blogs, our last few weeks getting ready to arrive here at staging have been unbelievably hectic! So any visions we might have harbored about being the "cool, calm, prepared volunteers were wiped away in either a: mental sweat of trying to get the new electronics set up and working together (new laptop and tablet/reader) or b: a physical sweat of hauling around way too much luggage.  Luckily, we were able to take some of the clothing we took with us to Europe last spring to our storage, now that we know we will be going to a relatively warm climate versus one of the "cold" countries.

We also are a bit jet lagged from all the place rides.  So where have we been?

We stopped in Paris for a few days to say goodbye to friends and family and buy some little presents for our new friends and host family in Mexico.  I hope they like French stuff :)














Starting on the 12th of January, we flew from Paris to Florida where we spent a week, just enjoying some of the pleasures of being back in the US and taking advantage of the beautiful beaches in Miami and Sarasota.  It was a bit chilly to swim, but made for some great short walks and just hanging out for a week.  We had the added bonus of knowing that since we decided to stop in Forida, we didn't end up in Seattle during the only week this winter so far that they were hit hard by snow.  So we didn't have to worry about power outages and slippery roads.  Thank goodness!

Next was Seattle.  We mostly spent the week there visiting friends, and attending meetings at the company I advise for, Ivy Corp.  We even flew in our new French consultant and got to attend the belated holiday party, so that was really special!  Again, it was hard here to say goodbye to family and friends.  Luckily, we are confident we will be able to coax many of them down to visit us in Mexico once our initial settling in period has passed.

After rainy Seattle, we got to spend a few days drying out in Los Angeles.  The highlight there besides seeing friends and going to eat at many of our favorite foodie haunts, was being able to check in and see our house.  It gave us a chance to check in and make sure everything is okay there and reassured us there was nothing more to do on the home front before we flew back to the East coast.

So, last but not least, we landed in Washington D.C. last night!  We came out a day early so that we could feel a bit more rested and catch our breath.  We met a woman on the plane from LAX to Dallas who is part of the PCM-12 Mexico group!  So that was really fun to be able to compare notes.  And at least we now know we aren't the ONLY ones going! It will be fun to meet the other volunteers tomorrow.  We found out that there is also another peace corps group staying here at our same hotel that is going to Zambia. So eventful days for both groups!

I will write another post when I can either before we take off for Mexico once we have met the other folks in our group, or after we get there.  We will just see how the time and internet connection goes.