Day 16 (6/17/11)

Highlight of today: our first basketball clinic of the summer at Las Aguilas and my first visit to a pandería! Before I talk about that though I would like to go through what we did leading up to those things. First we woke up and went to our last Spanish class of the summer with Elli (so sad!). At this last class we reviewed some difficult material on using the past tense and the some differences between “por” and “para”. We finished the class by watching the remaining part of “La Misma Luna”. Once we were done we said goodbye to Elli and headed out to visit Joy with the girls. (The two girls on our mission trip are staying with a local woman named Joy).
Once we arrived at Joy’s place it was about 1:45pm so we decided to go out to eat for a light lunch before we had to come back for our basketball clinic. Joy suggested a place called California and we agreed that would be a good place to go. We went out to eat and found that California has a wide selection of food from American dinner, Mexican dinner all the way to American breakfast. It was kind of like an IHOP, but in Mexico. When we finished this meal we drove back to Las Aguilas with just enough time to be a few minutes early to our first basketball session.
The basketball session was supposed to start at 4pm, so we were ready at 4 to see at least a few niños trickle in. To our dismay there were no kids coming in to the clinic even as late as 4:30. Now we had been told that things start a little later here than is usual in the US, so we were still patient and figured the kids were on their way. After 4:45 though, I began to lose hope. Sooner or later my Mexican friend and I saw a few kids walking down the road in front of the church and my friend took the initiative to invite them in. At around 5:20 or so we had around 7 other kids there to play with us and we decided to play a game of “basket” as they call basketball here.
Following our game we hung out with the kids and I even saw a few of them wrestling nearby. I took this opportunity to show them that I wrestled for 4 years in high school (which was fun) and then we started climbing a tree nearby. Once all of this was said and done, the Carpenters asked us to leave with them for dinner. Joy and the girls also came with us and before we knew it we were at a small restaurant in the bottom of a woman’s house. There in the restaurant they served us a soup full of chicken broth, lettuce, and some other corn derivative. I didn’t like it very much but everyone else at the table gobbled it up. Perhaps they have different taste than I do since they live in the northern US, or maybe I just don’t like soup.
After we were done eating Steve and Kay took us guys out to a pandería called “La Era” (it’s like a bakery in the US). At this pandería they sell a ton of great looking sweets, and I couldn’t help but buy some of them. Usually I’m pretty healthy in what I eat so I don’t buy a lot of sweets. Since I’m here in Mexico I made an exception to my healthiness. When the bill was written up for all that I had bought, it came up to be around $15 in sweets. I wanted to buy more, but it would have cost too much and I probably couldn’t have eaten it all.




After this trip, Andrew and I went back with the Carpenters for our last night with them before we leave for our Mexican hosts for two weeks. The Carpenters don’t have any hot water by the way, so I’m not taking a shower even though I’m quite dirty. I don’t like having no hot water, but that’s kind of what I expected here. Anyway, tomorrow will be fun. ¡Buenas noches!