Isla Mujeres

I can't believe my trip to Cancun is half over! Today we took a ferry to Isla Mujeres, a beautiful little island. It has gorgeous beaches and is a very small Mexican town. We met our friend Bruno, from the hostel, there, and swam on the beach all morning, built a sand castle, and I turned Sav into a mermaid.

Once the sun was too hot, we headed for some good food and shade. I am so determined not to get burnt on this trip! Bruno snuck us into his hostel where we spent the afternoon. I took a nap with the hostel cat on the floor. Then we met some awesome guys who are travelling. They teach people how

to walk on the slackline and make jewelry and stuff to make money. Staying in hostels and meeting tons of awesome people who speak 5 languages and have been to 40 countries all make me realize just how uncool I am. Anyway, I properly learned how to walk on a slackline, which was super cool. And I bought one of their necklaces because they are awesome, and made it while we were chatting. It also smells really good.

We are talented at underwater selfies

Then Sav and I had a little photo shoot on the beach, because there was nobody there and it was gorgeous! We had some fun.

Couldn't skip out on some yoga on the beach! Super spiky rocks are definitely not the preferable place though...

I have a talent for finding dogs everywhere and taking majestic photos of them.

Playa Norte: Isla Mujeres is absolutely beautiful.

So much sand got in my hair from this picture! Gotta love waves...

Sav is gorgeous. And we had lots of fun being professional models and photographers.

Isla Mujeres is definitely a must see if you go to Cancun. The ferry ride is fun, it's a gorgeous Mexican island, and is filled with many eclectic people.

Cenote Siete Bocas

So cenotes are these super awesome underground pools of water. They are all over the Riviera Maya because of the limestone and how it has eroded. They are absolutely gorgeous. We went to like the cheapest one. It had a zipline, and some places to jump from. It was super awesome! I also took my snorkel, and saw lots of fish.

Sea Turtles

So I got to see a bunch of turtles tonight! They were a lot bigger than I was expecting, but on this beach the turtles come out at night to lay their eggs. It's kind of fun to watch. If you watch the beach a wave rolls in, and as it goes back there is all of a sudden this huge sea turtle just chillin there ready to make her trek up the beach to dig a hole and lay her eggs. 

They use their fins to just slap the sand up and spend like an hour digging a pretty deep hole, then they lay their eggs, turn around, and disappear into the waves. They generally lay around 100 eggs. There are dudes that ride four wheelers scoping out the beach all night long and go dig up the turtle eggs and put them in a fenced off area. The turtle's eggs we watched them dig up laid 136 eggs. That is a crazy amount of eggs to lay at once! And the eggs are like swollen ping pong balls. They are kind of soft, but still hard. It's interesting. We were out for like an hour or two and saw a bunch of turtles. Isn't nature so crazy awesome?

And no, I didn't see any princes on any of the turtles, sorry Jess.

Swimming with Dolphins

I finally got to check something off of my bucket list that I've been wanting to do forever! Today I swam with dolphins! It was so amazing. Dolphins are such talented and smart, beautiful creatures. I didn't buy the pictures of me because the cheapest option was $90 USD. Which is more than what I paid to swim with dolphins, so nope. The pictures are things I did, just not of me.

So it was me and this cute little family from India in my group: mom, dad, and 13ish year old son. They had awesome accents and the mom like repeated everything the trainer said and was bossing around the dad and son. It was hilarious. The son was also really grumpy and mad at his dad for some strange reason, and he was attempting to not smile and be grumpy while swimming with the dolphins, but a smile kept popping out of his face because, dolphins, duh! Preteens...



So lots of awesome things swimming around with them, dancing, and actually doing some commands myself to have the dolphins jump and splash and stuff.

Then came the best part, the foot push! So you lay like superman in the water, and two dolphins push your feet and you fly across the pool! It was so cool. I felt like I was going to take off and start flying.


Then once you make it across the pool, the trainers blow their whistle and the dolphins immediately stop and swim back to them, which left me to face plant ever so gracefully into the water. Totally not expecting that. One of the guys that went after me heard the whistle and dove into the water. Wish I would've known that earlier, that's ok. I probably would have looked even stupider because my dive would have ended up being a bellyflop anyway.

Cancun

The vacation that has been keeping me sane this entire crazy teaching adventure has finally arrived! Cancun is crazy hot and humid, and after only a day here, I'm seriously wondering how I can possibly survive a year and a half in Cambodia, which is hotter and way more humid than it is here. That will definitely be a major challenge.

Playa Delfines: the first beach we went to

The beaches are so blue here and the water feels fantastic. I'm super excited for a chill week without worrying about teaching crazy children and dealing with stupid school administration.

Tula

An extinct volcano in the distance.

So ILP has another group of teachers in Tula, and Chris and I headed out there for a weekend of fun and visiting with the other teachers. They have told me that it is a super small town with absolutely nothing to do. So I was expecting a super dinky little town, but it was a lot bigger than I expected. It is definitely smaller than Pachuca. Maybe it's just big to me because I've always lived in super small, rural towns...

View of Tula from atop the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.

Tula was great though, Friday night we hung out and talked. Then we walked to el centro and got some delicious donut holes and ice cream. After that we were off to Plaza del Taco for some amazing tacos! It was a little fenced off area with like fifteen separate stands of dudes cooking tacos for people.

Saturday we headed to the ruins in Tula. They are very small, but still pretty cool. I like the Toltec warriors.

 So the main attraction of the Tula ruins are the 4 Toltec warriors on top of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.

They were pretty huge and cool. And they had some nicely toned little butts which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

The ball court of the Tula ruins is one of the larger ones of the Mesoamerican ruins. This is where the warriors would play ball and the captain of the winning team was sacrificed. Aren't you so sad we don't play games and do sacrifices like the Aztecs?

Going to Tula was a fantastic little weekend excursion. It was fun to tell stories with the other teachers about our crazy kids and talk about life in general in Mexico.

Graduation

So the school we teach at had graduation today. Our ILP students will continue to come to school during the summer break, but the rest of the students are done. So it's going to be interesting seeing who comes and who doesn't. I have a feeling we might have significantly less students. It will also be strange not having all the extra kids running around and being loud and distracting while we are teaching. It might be eerily quiet!

Flag Ceremony

The students were all dressed to the hilt! It was adorable. And I absolutely love Alex's face in this photo. 

No Mexican celebration can be complete without a mariachi band.

Andreh is obsessed with Clash of Clans (a video game) and loves giving
us strangling tackle hugs.

 So we decided to take a ton of pictures with the kids today because who knows which students are coming for the summer and which ones we will never see again.

Here are a few of the pics

Bryan is a cutie who lives to participate in class, but is a major whiner whenever I don't give him a ticket.

Mayte is Danna's sister, and both are very headstrong, but super cute and girly once you get through their wall of stubbornness. 

Lorelei was the screamer to begin with. She still screams every now and then, but is a very happy child.

This is our coordinator (the one who speaks English: aka translator) Alberto.

Did I mention he is super ticklish?

And here is our favorite secretary and hard-core partier Aissa.