1st Day of Orientation: Part 2

I take back everything I said about making friends! I think since orientation was early in the morning people were not social. After the break we had a few dry, but necessary presentations for immigration, email set up, and course registration. The group AMI, which does intercultural programs and sponsors the big brothers club, divided everyone into groups to do activities around campus. I met nice people from Australia, Korea, France, Canada, and Brazil in my group. Having the small groups helped and then the rest of the day was really nice. People were inviting and in a better mood than this morning and rightly so.

 My face Mexican flag face paint for the first group activity of taking individual pictures and group picture with the Mexican flag and sombreros.

My terrible ID picture. These things never turn out nicely.

The most exciting things about today are that my class schedule is awesome and that all the classes in the recreation center are free/included. So I can take any kind of rhythm class from salsa to tango, pilates and other group fitness, singing to piano/guitar lessons! Because I can only take a limited amount of credits at ITESM due to the conversion between semester and quarter credits, I will have plenty of time during the week to participate in classes at the recreation facility. Overall I am really excited to start classes so I can meet new people and better my Spanish. Later this afternoon Blanca and I spoke for a long time just in Spanish regarding my class schedule, so this language learning process may be easy after all. I feel sorry for the Australian girl Natasha I met who doesn't know ANYTHING in Spanish and her host family does not know ANYTHING in English. Her host mom just keeps talking at her and teaching her a few words here and there. I think Natasha will pick up the language after a while especially once we have been in the basic Spanish class for a while.

Anywho, Alma is picking me up shortly to go hang out with her friends so that will be nice.

Oh there are a few house rules from Blanca:
1. Visitors can only stay until 10pm
2. Visitors can not go on the second floor of the house even just in my room
3. I can stay out as long as I want, but just be quiet when I come in
4. Don't help wash the dishes if she is home, only when she is out can I help

I also found out today from the housing coordinator, Claudia, that my host family wanted a girl this year because for 20 years they've been doing this they had mostly boys stay with them and have not had great luck with that. I thought they asked for a girl because they have 2 sons and 2 grandsons and wanted the presence of a girl. I hope I don't get on their nerves and that they enjoy my stay with them as much I enjoy being here.

Hasta luego!
~AST