Hola from Mexico?

I wish I actually wrote this post in Mexico just so I could say Hola from Mexico.. anyways I'm back at the Tute and I just figured out how to write here!

Me and my English class kids!

A run down of my summer: I went to Mexico through MISTI and the highlight of it was working in a 500 people rural community about 30 minutes by car from the nearest town. The beginning was rough, the program basically threw me and 10 other students, some from the US, others from Mexico, into the community and told us to diagnose the status quo and figure out what kind of sustainable projects we could implement. We eventually decided on a two part project. First part was giving a bunch of free workshops open to the entire community based on what we knew, so for example, I prepared a workshop on first aid since I'm an EMT here in the states. And the second part was more of a public health project. The community had a clinic, but pretty much no doctor. So being ambitious students from MIT, Harvard and Yale we had all these crazy ideas like implementing a teleclinic so people from the community could be seen by doctors via skype. In the end what we did accomplish was collecting baseline statistics through medical surveys of the entire community and organizing all the data into graphs, and of course, we all love graphs :)

Teaching first aid: measuring blood pressure

Besides the work we had our fair share of sightseeing and did a whole list of exploratory things: farming corn, waterfall jumping (with helmets and life jackets of course), getting a shot at Mexican nightlife where salsa music is as common as top 40 pop, visiting a surrealist garden, witnessing a protest against the newly elected president in Mexico City and of course, climbing the pyramids. One of my fav parts was definitely all the food, especially the cheap cheap fruits. I'm also going to have to declare my new found love for chilli covered mango gummies (so yummmy, seriously).

Workout wise, well there was definitely no rowing in Mexico, though a couple of gyms here and there. Funny thing is at the beginning I didn't realize that the city was actually 8000 - 9000 ft above sea level so I was getting super frustrated with my inability to run until I got pretty sick. But afterwards all was well, and running has always been my all time favorites so long runs through the countryside, though limited, were pretty nice. I was hyped to find out we were going to this famous lake with boats outside of Mexico City thinking I'd see some crew. What I did see was this (picture on right), not quite a crew boat but still super cool!

Best thing about the countryside: finding food everywhere!
Here we were taught how to de-spine this cactus-like plants called nopales and cook them into salsa!

Offroading on horses through the countryside!