Mexico Trip - Day Eight

March  14, 2013

     We began the day with breakfast on the go because we had to drive a bit farther to get to the rural school from La Paz.  Once we got to the school we were shown around the school campus and introduced to Ericka Flores, the English Pilot Program teacher at the school.  She was super nice and by far my favorite teacher during the cultural diversity practicum because she cared about her job and the children when I didn't get that feeling from the rest of the teachers we followed around.
     We followed Ericka around to around 5-6 different classrooms and you could tell that the students respected her because she had good classroom management, the students were excited to see us, and she got us involved with the students.  It was wonderful.
     During the student's break time, Ericka bought us a snack, which was very nice of her, and we sat at a table outside.  Many of the students gathered around us and asked us how to say different words in Spanish and how we would pronounce their names in English.  It was very cute and fun to see the students of all grades so excited to talk to us.
     After snack/lunch, we went to a couple more classrooms with Ericka and then hopped back in the van on our way back to La Paz.  We had some downtime this afternoon, an unusual occurrence lol, and decided walk around taking pictures and looking in shops for souvenirs  We came upon a street artist who had small paintings of different places in and around La Paz on little easels   I bought one of his beautiful paintings of Balandra Beach because that was one of my favorite places and where I tried snorkeling.
     After we finished up shopping and taking photos, we hopped in the van and headed over to UABCS, the local university.  (University of Baja California Sur).  We got a lovely tour of the campus because Angela and possibly Kayleen will be attending there in the fall.  We stopped in the bookstore and I bought four fairytale books in Spanish in order to have a resource for ELL students in my future classroom.  I have ideas to do lessons on fairytales so that students who speak both English and Spanish can follow along and discuss with each other.  On the tour we also passed the music department where I got to see some people jamming on instruments and another classroom of students learning cultural dances.  It was definitely my favorite part of the tour.
     After the tour, the man who gave us the tour took us out to dinner at a fancy restaurant.  It was a really nice restaurant and I had delicious cheese ravioli and everyone else split two meet tray things.  I am not sure what they were called but they brought out these big silver boxes with a bunch of different types of meat on top of them.  There was a lot of meat and eventually the two sides of the table tried to see who could finish the most meat.  It was a very interesting and amusing contest.
     Once we finished dinner, Garrett, Kayleen, Angela, and I went and met up with Zuzuy to go out on the town.  We went to a couple different bars and places.  I really liked the first two we went to.  The first was a  cozy bar built with wood panelling and an underground sort of feel.  The next place was a karaoke bar (I think called Sinatra) and that was really fun to watch people sing.  Surprisingly, there were people who sang in English as well as Spanish and there were a lot of songs on the list to choose from that were in English.
     I didn't like the third place we went.  It was called The Jungle and was basically a big rave party with people really squished and it was loud and smoky and not my scene at all so I left pretty quickly and went back to the hotel to shower and go to bed.  It was a fun evening and I learned a lot about how far my comfort zone will stretch.