Welcome to Pachuca

Well, I made it to MEXICO! And in one piece to, which is definitely a good thing. The town I will be living in for the next four months is called Pachuca, and from what I have seen of it, I think I am going to like it here. The buildings are all so colorful and they continue up on the hill, so the mountains are dotted with brightly colored houses, which is beautiful!

Our apartment is a pretty cute little place. It is basically a bathroom, a bedroom for the head teacher, a big open room in the middle that has our dining room table and two bunk beds for the rest of the teachers to sleep on and then a little miniature kitchen. So not a lot of room, but it is a cute place nevertheless. The only really bad thing about this place is that there is no heat. So the nights are freezing, which will be hard to get used to. The only heater that they have is this tiny space heater that only heats things that are within like four inches of where the heater is so it is kind of useless. But it will be okay.

We took a tour of the school we will be teaching in today, and got to meet some of the kids. Mexican children are adorable and just so open and willing to talk to you and ask you questions even if they don't know what you are saying to them. There was this one little boy named Emiliano (I might have butchered the spelling, but it is my first day in Mexico, I can't expect too much of myself) who kept coming up to the four of us new teachers and just gave us the biggest hugs ever and asked our names. I probably got five or six hugs from him in the 20 minutes we were around the kids. I am really looking forward to getting to know the kids more and seeing more of their personalities, it will definitely be the most rewarding part of my trips.

It is hard to not be able to communicate with the majority of people here. I feel really guilty that I don't speak their language, so I am going to do my best to pick up as much Spanish as possible so that I can have a fuller experience here. Other than they language, I don't feel like I am going to get too much of a culture shock, which I was really worried about. I am sure that I will be cultured shocked a little bit, I don't see how I can avoid that, but I don't think it will be too bad. Although I did find out that Netflix doesn't have the same selection of titles here in Mexico so I can just forget about watching the first 5 seasons of Friends because they only have seasons 6-10 here. Oh, and Hulu plus doesn't work in Mexico either, so no watching the Bachelor. On second thought, maybe culture shock will be a real thing...