seisojos

Guanajuato

Guanajuato is the capital of the state of Guanajuato and for four days during spring break, I went there. The bus ride was two and a half hours. When we got there we hopped into one of the cabs that was waiting in front of the bus station and zoooomed away. I was surprised how long we were in the car. I thought that it would only be 15 minutes until we got to our hotel. But I didn't mind since we were in the mountains and there were so many tunnels. It was almost like all the streets were underground.

When we got to our hotel we went into our room and rested and played cards. After about an hour we got into our bathing suits and went down to the pool. I jumped in the big pool while my mom got in the hot tub. I practiced the crawl and backstroke, then my dad came down and we had a splash fight. After a while we got out and went up to the room and got all dry.

Then we decided to go on a walk. So we asked for a map at the front desk and started walking. Fo the first time we realized that we were on an extremely steep hill. Me and my mom were looking at a dog while my dad took pictures. When we got to the end of the street we came to a bigger street. This street had a lot of cars on it, so we were very careful. When we finally got to the other side of the street we started walking. We passed a bunch of stores, then we got to a little plaza with a big church.

We decided to go into the church first and then we would go have lunch. When we went inside I gasped. Almost everything was GOLD! I sat down in one of the seats and just stared at everything. Soon I started complaining about how hungry I was so we left and went to have lunch. When we found a restaurant, we went in and had a big meal, and it was so big, I didn't even leave room for dinner.

Then we went to the mines, but they were closed. So we went back to our hotel. Since it was already 6:30, I went into the hallway and looked at the movie selection. I looked at all the movies for a while and then I chose "What About Bob?" I didn't have anything for dinner except for some pretzels with mustard. Mustard is called mostaza here and it is my new favorite thing. After the movie was over, I went to bed. I fell asleep almost immediately. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

YAWN - In the morning, I read some of my book and then when my parents woke up we went to go have breakfast. We realized that breakfast was right here in the hotel. But the food had meat in it, so I asked if I could have some plain scrambled eggs and waffles. When my food got here, I gobbled it up and went back to the room and read more in my book. When my parents came in and said that our taxi was here, so we got all our tourist gear and went outside and hopped into the cab. Our first stop would be the mummy museum. Our driver was very nice, his English was almost perfect.

When we got to the mummy museum, we paid for our tickets and went down a long narrow hallway until we came to a dark room that had a movie playing inside. We watched some of it, then moved on. When we got to the next room, I froze solid. There weren't Egyptian mummys like I had pictured, they were like dried up old people with clothes on. Their skin was peeling off, it was the most creepy thing I ever saw, so creepy I can't even write about it. After the mummys, our driver drove me and my mom and my dad to a tram that went down the hill to the center of town and the main jardin. My mom and I rode in it but not my dad, because that sort of thing freaks him out.

The main jardin in Guanajuato was like the one in San Miguel, but a little bit fancier. Since there was a medieval festival going on, some people were dressed like knights and vikings. When the driver picked us up again, we drove through all the tunnels. I felt like it took hours to get back to the hotel. It was not a short cut, he was just trying to show us around town. Then we went swimming in the hotel pool again. We went back to our room. Since we didn't have a big lunch, today we wanted a real dinner. SO I decided to watch a movie now, I chose "Pirates of the Caribbean". When it was over, we called a different taxi and he took us down to the jardin again.

We took a little walk before eating. We saw some guys playing chess on a big table under a tree. One guy was playing about 11 other people at the same time. He would go back and forth and back and forth to make his moves. Then we decided to go and eat. There was a little lady outside the restaurant waiting for us. She took us to a table and gave us menus. I was sitting next to a balcony and I could see mariachis playing music below. There was a tiny, stout lady wearing an apron and dancing in the center of the crowd. She was doing the funniest dance ever. I kept watching her, she was very funny. More and more people came up to watch her dance. Whenever she tried to get someone to dance with her they would turn on their tail and run away. She would smile and laugh, she only had a few teeth. When our food came, I had ordered pizza, it was the best pizza I had had in Mexico. After dinner, we decided to walk around a little more. We came to an arcade and my mom and I played air hockey. After a few rounds, we decided to return to our hotel and go to bed.

In the morning, we woke up and had another big breakfast, I ate the exact thing as the morning before. Then we went back to our room and got our tourist gear ready - again. Our plan was to go to the mines then to a store the owner of the hotel suggested. When we got to the mines, we looked at some small models of places in Guanajuato, especially the mines. When we were finished, we put on helmets and a guide took us to the boca (mouth) of the mine. We kept going down deeper and deeper down the stairs. When we got pretty far down, the guide turned off the lights. Our guide spoke spanish so fast we couldn't understand much of what he said, but we understood when he turned off the lights that it must have been scary working there because the miners only had candles back in the old days.

We also understood that the miners didn't make much money, they were like slaves. After a long conversation with our guide which we didn't quite understand, we went back to the top. There were chairs there. I plopped down, I was tired of all that climbing. I can't imagine how tired I would be if I were also dragging out rocks on my back.

Next we went to the store. It was very interesting. It had all kinds of Mexican art and pottery. The man who owned the store told us all about the art and the artists and where they lived. He sure was a chatterbox. The woman who worked there just sat ina chair and stared at us. We bought a few things and then she sprang into action wrapping everything up. We bought a traditional Mexican ceramic of a skeleton holding a rooster. The owner gave me a small toy for free.

On our way back to tour hotel we bought some postcards to write to people like you. We had one last swim at the hotel before packing to leave. We said goodbye to the people at the hotel since they were our friends now.

On the bus home, I kept thinking about how nice our trip was. I hope we get to go back to Guanajuato. They have a film festival there in the summer and they show movies in the tunnels. That would be super fun.

Eschucha! - A Sound Game

Every day we see lots of things in San Miguel that we don't ever see in New York City. We also hear a lot of sounds that can seem really strange, until you know what they are. Click on the sound bars below to hear a few, and then click on the hint below to see the answer.

SPECIAL DELIVERY

GOT GARBAGE?

HE'S MAKING A POINT

NEED A SHIRT?

RISE AND SHINE

Some things we never hear are: car alarms, sirens, the ice cream trucks here sound different and there are hardly any, cars on slick roads (because all the roads here are so bumpy and also because it NEVER rains). I miss the sound of all my friends playing in New York.

Check back in for more sounds.

Mercado Martes

The Tuesday market is one of the most popular markets in San Miguel. I go there almost every Tuesday that I am not in school. It is not inside a building, but outside covered with big colorful tarps, which makes everything underneath shady.

In the Tuesday market there are things that you would never believe were in a market, from food stands selling prickly cactus fruit and strange meat to fortune telling birds and old coins from the 1830s. From old televisions and tools to clothes and candies, from homemade honey to mexican movies.

My favorite thing is the fortune telling bird. The fortune telling bird looks exactly like a little yellow chick. It costs about 5 pesos for the trainer to get the bird to come out by putting seeds on his finger. When the bird came out he did a bunch of tricks for us, like pulling a string on a tiny car, drinking from a little cup and touching a small doll on the hand. The trainer tells him what to do in Spanish. Finally the bird picks out some tiny scraps of folded paper and that is your fortune. Our friend started filming the bird and soon after about five tricks the bird got stubborn and just knocked the cup over.

Many businesses in San Miguel are closed on Tuesday morning because the it is a sort of tradition to come to the Tuesday market. It is a place to buy stuff but also to see your friends and hang out.

more photos

Sorpresas!

Here in Mexico there is a plan to make kids buy more bags of chips. They put sorpresas, or little surprises, in the bags of chips. One of the most popular surprises are tazos. A tazo is a little metal flat circle that has a picture of a pokemon or character from sponge bob on it. They also have plastic ones with rubber on the outside that look like this. There is also a game that you play with tazos when you collect enough. It is hard to explain, you lay them all out and throw other tazos at them to flip them over. If you get two of the same tazo, you can trade them with someone else. All around Mexico kids of all ages love to play tazos. You can get sick after a while if you eat bags and bags of chips to get lots and lots of tazos. At some fleamarkets you can buy tazos by themselves for about 5 pesos each. Some of the bigger tazos are 10 pesos. 10 pesos is a tiny bit less than a dollar. You can also get sticky bugs and weird creatures in chip bags that look like this. In Mexico there are all kinds of different chip flavors and shapes, like Takis. They make your mouth on fire and your fingers the color of Mars, the shape of Takis is exactly like a cinnamon stick. Tazos make one little bag of chips pretty exciting!

Caballeros!

One Sunday morning we got up early and got ready for an adventure, horeseback riding in the canyons! We got in a car with our friends and set off. We drove on and on and on and farther and farther away from town until San Miguel was just a speck in the distance. Soon we got off the highway and went onto a smaller road. This one was much more bumpy. A while passed and I yelled out, "I see the pyramids!" And it was true. In the distance, there were a few big pyramids. Soon the driver announced that we had reached the gate of the ranch so the kids, including me, hopped out of the back of the pickup truck and opened the gate and we all drove through. Next there was another gate and another and yet another. They have the gates because the horses can run wild when they are not being ridden and they don't want them to escape.

Finally we got to the horseback riding place, it was a ranch with a bunch of horses and chickens in it. Then a man who looked exactly like a cowboy came out to greet us. His name was Don Felix. Don is a nice way of saying Mr. in Mexico. He took us over to the horses and each of us hopped on one. I got the one I wanted. He was very gentle. Soon a few other mexican cowboys, caballeros, hopped on horses and we started moving. It was really bumpy. We kept on walking along, then one of the horses started going wild. The person that was on it had to switch horses with a more experienced rider.

When we started up again, we came up to a steep cliff. I thought that this was the end, but then I heard someone say that we were actually going to go down! The group started down. I was scared, but my dad said it was perfectly safe. I started to go down, my horse kept on slipping on the rocks and throwing me all over the place. Soon the leader of the group stopped and pointed at a tiny cave in the mountain. He said that it was an eagle's nest.

Then we started moving again and soon we came to the bottom of the canyon. There was a little stream running there. All of the horses drank so much, I could see their bellies getting bigger! Soon all the horses had enough water. Then we started galloping through the water. It made lots of splashes. After a while, we stopped galloping and got back on the trail. We rode through a little village with about three small huts in it. There were also a lot of barking dogs. Some of them came and started to bite our horses legs but we just started galloping and the dogs could not keep up with us.

We rode for a while on a sandy trail until we came to another village. This one was a little bit bigger than the other one, and this was where we stopped. We all got off our horses and stretched our legs. I felt like I was still bouncing around, even though my feet were on the ground. There was a little store and I bought some chips, so did my friends. We ate together in the shade. Soon it was time to ride back. The horses were impatient to get home so we galloped almost the whole way home. It was really fun.

When we got to the ranch we had a big feast of homemade cheese, chips and all different kinds of salsa and baked beans and last, but not least, tacos. After a big lunch, Don Felix, the owner of the ranch, showed us where he got all of the fruit that we had for lunch, and it turned out to be cactus fruit, little plum-sized fruit called tuna that grow on nopales. He showed us how you have to roll the tuna on the ground to get all the little cactus prickles off, then peel it and eat it.

He really is a caballero, because it also means a gentleman and a cowboy and he was both. After that we explored the property and chased chickens. Finally it was time to go home. Almost the whole ride home I blew big, big bubbles with my gum. When we got home, it was just a regular sunday afternoon.

Lucha Libre

Lucha Libre is one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Mexico. It's wrestling and I actually went there. It was in the bullring here in San Miguel. It was so fun. At first the guys that weren't that good at wrestling came, but it was still so cool. Once someone fell out of the ring and then the rest of the wrestlers jumped on top of him, but he didn't get hurt. One of the guys even went into the crowd and grabbed someone crutch and used it as a sword!

After the bad guys left the ring, women wrestlers came on! I was pretty surprised how good they were (almost better than the men.) At the end they kept on slapping each other. They even got into fights with men in the audience. Then we waited a while, I was so excited for the next act. Suddenly, someone jumped into the ring and then I realized that I was wearing the same mask he was! He gave me the thumbs up, he thought I was a fan. Then someone jumped into the ring and knocked my guy over! Then another guy ran up and gave the guy who knocked my guy down a high five. They were teammates. Then another guy ran up to the guy who pushed my guy down and spanked him!

It was really funny. Then the rest of the guys came on and the real wrestling batch began. Everyone has a different mask or funny hairdo, tight pants and even sparkly capes. In total there were 7 people in the ring, even the referee was involved. Once my guy threw someone out of the ring, but he just came right back and slapped my guy. Once someone went out of the ring for a second and then all of the other wrestlers jumped on top of him. OUCH!

Eventually everybody got off of him and got back into the ring and it was back to business. Soon snacks arrived. Since I had not had any dinner, I was so hungry. I bought pistachios and gobbled them up like mad. It was already 11:00 pm and I was getting tired, so we decided to go home. So we left. When we got home, I had a little bit of minestrone soup and then went to bed and before I knew it, I was fast asleep.

Candelaria

Candelaria is one of the most important holidays in Mexico. In Parque Juarez all of the paths are filled with people selling plants. There are cacti, flowers, small trees and even eating plants! People also sell candy and paletas, which are popsicles. My class had a field trip there once. I bought some things to make a small garden at home.

Another very important part of Candelaria is CASCARONES!!! They are empty eggshells that people have hollowed out and on Saturday or Sunday or Monday everyone gathers in Parque Juarez or the jardin and cracks them on each other's heads! It's so fun. Even I was pretty good at it the first night. I was just getting used to it, but the second night I was ready. Everyone was ganging up on me because I was the only gringo there (except my parents). I got a lot of people on the head. Whenever I ran out of eggs, my mom would buy some more at a stand. Then it was back to business.

Since the cascarones were filled with either flour, glitter or gold, my face was covered with gold and glitter and flour. After a big night, we went to our favorite restaurant, La Grotta, for dinner. Finally it was time to go home, I was exhausted.

All of that happened in the first 10 days of February.

More photos of Candelaria

Dolores Hidalgo

Dolores Hidalgo is another town on the outside of San Miguel and me, my mom and my dad and our friend, Timo went there one day. It is a town where colorful pottery called Talavera is made. When we got there we went to the coolest pottery shop. It had everything you could ever imagine, from plates to mosaic frogs. There were even chandeliers. Me and my mom picked out a pitcher for orange juice.

There were so many ceramic things I couldn't believe my eyes. We bought so much stuff. Then we went to the counter and the guy wrapped all of them in newspaper. When we were about to go have dinner we passed another pottery store even bigger than the first one. We went in, it was so much cooler than the other one because in the back we saw people making the pottery. First they did molds to get the shape. then some people sketched what they would draw in black pencil. Then other people would paint in the sketch, like a coloring book. Then the pieces got fired in a kiln and then someone would buy them. They didn't let us take any photographs when they were working.

After that we looked at tiles. We each picked 9 small tiles to make a small design. Finally it was time to have dinner, we went to a thai restaurant. I had shrimp and shipwreck soup. I was so hungry. After a while Timo's neighbors came. It was such a coincidence! After that we got ino the car and went home. It was a long day.

Taboada

Taboada is one of the hot springs in San Miguel and almost my whole class and some 3rd graders go there every Thursday after school. I went there last Thursday for the first time. I rode in the back of a pickup truck to get there. Some people ride horses to get there. When we got there, I got into my bathing suit and got in the water, it was so warm.

At first I didn't know what to do. But then someone had an idea to play a game chasing each other. It was super duper fun. We also went in the hot tub and one of the big kids put on a really funny show for us, I kept on dumping water on her head. We also played in a kiddy pool and the same kid who put on the show made up a game and we played it. I was surprised, it was so fun.

Then we all got into dry clothes and went to the playground there, just outside the entrance. We all went on this cool spinning thing. Some kids got in it, some kids climbed on top of it. I held onto the outside. When it started spinning, my fingers slipped and I fell off and scraped my knee. It really hurt. Soon it was time to go home, I didn't want to go, but I had to. But there's always next Thursday.

Mi Escuela

I was nervous and excited about the first day of school. I laid out all my clothes the night before because I knew we had to get up early. My mom thought school started at 7:30 but it started at 8:30. We took a taxi and were there before any of the teachers or kids. It was so cold and there was frost on the cars and cactus also. We had tea in the office. When the bus arrived, tons of kids poured out of it. Many of the teachers also ride on the bus.

My school is called Los Charcos. It is on the outskirts of San Miguel. It is not like the schools in New York, each classroom is a different building. We have three recesses and school gets out at 2:30 and every Thursday we get out at 1:15 pm. We also have to pack lunch. I like to have yogurt, quesadillas and sometimes hard boiled eggs. We rush through lunch to get to recess, so I never finish it.

At recess we play tag with tires. There are three tires and the kids with tires are IT. If a tire hits you, you're IT. You can throw, spin or roll the tires. Everyone has to bring a hat, because it is so hot out. There are not specials like at the schools in the city. Here there's knitting, arithmancy, movement and making art projects and calendars. Sometimes we go on nature walks to find bees sucking pollen. We walk in big fields of cacti and mesquite trees. Once I saw 5 bees on the same flower. I also got pricked by a cactus but it didn't hurt.

I take the bus to school and back every day. The bus is always so crowded, some kids are even standing in the aisles. It is so noisy on the bus, sometimes the teachers have to ask us to quiet down. I never have homework, but I have to practice Spanish at home since most of the kids in my class already speak English and Spanish. Every year the third grade makes a big project, this year it is a tree house. A few years ago it was a pizza oven and on people's birthdays we make pizza and the person whose birthday it is bakes a cake and brings it in. Next week one of the girls in my class is having her birthday. I'm excited to see how the oven works.

In my class kids get their own desk. Kids also get their own pack of pencils and their own notebook. They even get a pillow for sitting on the rug and one for the chair to their desk. I think my mom is going to make mine. My parents start their school on Monday and they get lots of homework. My dad might cry. Well, at least I hope he will.