Since my classes don't start until the 1st week of march, CJ and I have been keeping busy with a salsa class, yoga class, and a mexican cooking class. We have also been playing ultimate frisbee and coed intramural softball. I am on a flag football team and a basketball team and it has been fun and a great way to meet people. Ambassador-ness through sports. (future blog post waiting to happen). We are going on a couple trips before classes start and this blog post is about our trip to Morelia, Michoacan in the southern part of Mexico. It was about a 13 hour bus ride, but it wasn't that bad because the bus was about half full, so we could spread out and sleep. They also played movies. We went with a group of 20 students from all over, Germany, Finland, Mexico, the Basque country in Spain, and of course the US.
We went to a Monarch butterfly reserve where the butterflies hibernate through winter, then wake up and do it like crazy. Apparently on sunny days in February, millions of butterflies fly and it is amazing. They say you can hear their wings flying since there are so many. Unfortunately, it was cloudy and cold when we went so they kept on sleeping. The butterflies slept on branches that usually stick out, but since there were so many, the branches were weighed down, that tells you how many there are.
We got to spend the afternoon in the city of Morelia, which is one of the prettiest colonial cities I have ever been to. The cathedral is gorgeous. All of the buildings in the downtown area were built with this cut stone and then left unpainted. It looked very nice. They lit up the cathedral and on Saturday there was a fireworks show and the area in front of the cathedral was packed.
The next day we went to three small cities, Patzcuaro, Santa Clara del Cobre, y Tzintzuntzan (which we were sure was the home of Tsutsey from Avatar (sweetest movie ever, we saw it 3 times, all in 3D and once in IMAX)). They were all interesting places. We bought a beautiful copper vase in Santa Clara del Cobre. We also bought a 3 painting set of Don Quijote paintings and little "viejito" which is what they call the people dancing with the pink mask of an old person.
It was a long ride but the trip was worth it.
This is the cathedral
We found a alley called "Romance Lane" and it had parts of a poem throughout the alley and flowers. It was pretty
Romance Lane
They had an aqueduct system in the city, but they don't use it anymore
Fountain
We went to a restaurant under the aqueduct. I almost had to duck to get in.
In Santa Clara del Cobre, we went to a copper workshop and we got to help form the copper. It takes about 3 days to go from a block of copper to a formed vase or plate.
CJ found a horse and fed it grass
Jarryd and CJ
They lit up the church, so pretty
Los viejitos
After seeing how they work, we decided we should get something, so we got a nice vase. I think we should have asked for a discount as payment for our hard work.
This was a toy called "atrapanovios" or boyfriend catcher, it is kind of like a chinese finger torture toy, it's hard to get your finger out.
Inspired by Karla Jensen
This was an old Monastery or something, it was a huge building, went on and on.
In Tzintzuntzan, there were people dancing. We guessed that it was a rain dance. That night, when we were in Morelia, it not only rained, but it hailed! It was a really bad storm for about 5 minutes, the 5 minutes that we were out walking around. pretty crazy, it reminded me of storms in NE with lightning and wind and hail, I was waiting for the tornado
Gorgeous right?
Fireworks and the cathedral all lit up
More viejitos. They did this funny little dance.
This is a video of the lighting and fireworks show. I tried to spin a 360 and show everyone who was watching.
