Vera Cruz and the Preceding Week

It’s been a couple days, like a week I think, but it’s been a crazy week. I had my first cooking class and salsa class! The cooking was really fun! We made taquitos and one other food, I don’t remember what it was called, but it was basically the same taco concept just with different stuff on it. (Which is pretty true for most of the food here). We made homemade salsa, and made everything from scratch, and it was delicious. We also ate habanera peppers, which were insanely spicy, but really good. The next day after our classes we had our salsa dancing lesson, which was wicked fun! The music was awesome, and it was just a good time. I’ll be a pro by the time I get back! Then it was Friday and time to leave for our weekend excursion to Vera Cruz. One other very exciting thing happened this week. We were outside playing Frisbee (which we do every day between our classes) and some guy came up to us, and he’s the captain of the ultimate team at UDLA and he threw with us for a bit and then asked if I wanted to play with the team while I was around. Although I won’t be around for any tournaments because we have stuff every weekend, I’m going to practice with them and which is pretty awesome and a great way to meet people and stay in shape, which is really cool. But anyways, on Friday we woke up early, and then drove to the museum of anthropology in Vera Cruz, which had a ton of cool Mesoamerican artifacts and stuff, including the giant stone heads that the Olmec people were famous for (and were the basis for the character "Olmec" in Legends of the Hidden Temple). Then we went to our hotel, and had dinner and a local music and dance show. Now, our hotel was phenomenal. Vera Cruz is on the east coast, in southern Mexico where it’s less desert and more tropical paradise, just north of the Yucatan Peninsula. Saturday morning, we went to the beach, and then we went on a river boat tour of a local mangrove swamp area which is kind of like the Everglades. That was really cool, because although we didn’t see any, there are crocodiles and lots of other really cool animals. What we did see, though, were these really brightly colored large crabs which cling to the roots of the mangrove trees. Then that night, we just hung out on the beach, did the same this morning (Sunday). Today was beautiful, about 80 and sunny. And then during the day we went to the city of Vera Cruz, which was nice, but quiet as it was a Sunday. There we did some shopping, and just walked around the colonial city, which was very different from Oaxaca because Vera Cruz has a colonial Spanish origin while Oaxaca was much more prehispanic. I got back at about 10, and I wrote a paper on the bus, and I have my first test tomorrow! It’s amazing how fast everything is flying bye, ive already been here for two weeks! Everything here is great!

Adios!
--Nick