Monday, May 28, 2007

Orientation Week wraps up

So I have survived the orientation week here at Tec and it was definitely a long, drawn-out one! On the bright side, however, we got to know a lot of the city (mostly at night...) and I am fairly confident in my taco ordering skills.


By the way, here are what REAL Mexican tacos look like:



Usually the table has a bowl of baby limes that are about the size of ping pong balls, diced onion mixed with cilantro, and a few different salsas (but always including the all-important salsa verde).



The server will always ask if you want to start with frijoles, which are homemade brown beans usually with big chunks of bacon or ham. mmm.

One thing they have down here that's really addictive is Agua Jamaica. It's like iced hibiscus tea but it's not sweetened as much as regular iced tea back home. delicious.




Ok, so the next thing that I have to write about is that we have a ridiculous amount of wildlife on our campus. We have ducks (ok, still quite normal), deer and PEACOCKS!! It's really hilarious to see them waltzing around. By the way, the Spanish name for them, pavoreales, means royal turkeys. heheheeee...

There are a number of duck ponds with fountains in them and you always see the duckies commuting between pools alongside the students on the walkways between the buildings.


Today we had our formal registration process. I'll be taking two international student courses: Mexican Culture and Doing Business in Mexico. That's 4 hours per day, Monday to Friday. They also have extensive extra-curricular courses and I'm thinking of taking the Mexican Cuisine one - only problem is that 1/2 hour of it conflicts with my other courses. We went to the program office today to put our names down on a list as they said they would open up a new section or move the course time around if enough people had a conflict. The international student department has a bunch of sightseeing day trips organized for us such as museums, waterfalls, bungee jumping, brewery tour, etc...

I'm going to see if I can catch the game down here tonight, otherwise I think we're going to go see Pirates of the Caribbean III.