Day 1

Hey everybody! Well, yesterday I arrived in Mexico! Yay! And classes aren't starting until next week (woo hoo). Our group takes up pretty much the entire 2nd floor of rooms at the Hotel Las Iglesias (which only has 2 floors of rooms) and the third floor is our studio space and they're building us a little kitchen. Off the studio, there's a terrace that gives us a 360 view of Cholula - which is awesome. From my room, I can see the volcano (which is named Popocatepetl, or Popo for short I think) which is still active and smoking out the top...

Today we just hung around Cholula - explored a little and then made our way to the Pyramid - Mexico's largest man-made mountain which has a big yellow church on top. The pyramid is about a half-hour walk from our Hotel but once we got to the base, we walked around it for another 20 minutes to get to the steps (little did I know that there was a less steep path on the other side or I would have... regretted climbing all those stairs!). Once up there, the view was awesome and the following pictures are from this excursion.

Photos from our day:

These flowers were growing near the road on the way to the mountain/pyramid/hundreds of steps we had to climb to get to the top... they were pretty...

This was after the first half of the mountain... to my dismay there was another set of steps waiting for me, which my legs really did not like. I am an artist, not an athlete... but anyway, there's the church. :)

And here's me and Shelley after alllllll those steps... but we made it!

And then a bag of fried crickets was bought and I think I might have been the only one to resist trying one.
Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live my life with that regret... (oh the sarcasm)

There are more photos, but I am growing impatient with the internet (it kicks me off kind of often and it isn't high-speed, so uploading was taking forever/not happening). I will post them later on. For now, I think I'm going to get ready for bed and probably fall asleep before 10:30pm (my time - which is central time, only one hour behind EST).

Hope you're all staying warm in the States. It's beautiful here...