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!