Michael & Liz are Bloggable

So for the next week I'll be writing out what I did the week before. For anyone who doesn't know, we went to Mexico for a week to visit Liz's brother Scott's family. Every day I wrote a letter to my Mom for two reasons, to keep the family up to date on all our different experiences and to also document what we did. That letter will be used as a basis for my posts. Once we have pictures to go with the stories, I will include those as well. Here is what I wrote last Thursday:

We've had a great day. i was woken up by a rooster that was crowing at 4AM and it kept me awake until 5:30, then i fell back asleep until 7. Since it's a two hour time difference, technically it was 9 eastern time, so I think that's pretty good. We took a walk in the morning to the beach and walked up and down there with the dogs running around. They have their dog named Libby and then a stray they took in named Bubbles. They are trying to adopt Bubbles right now so they are taking care of her until then. She is super super sweet and makes me want to take her home and take good care of her, but the same is true for most of the dogs on the street here. They are treated so poorly by the locals. Hillary told us about a dog that looked IDENTICAL to Gryffin and said "had that dog still been here when you came, I might have told you take her." But unfortunately the family that "owned" her, poisoned her because they got tired of her (or so we all suspect). The fact that she was poisoned is not in question, it's just a matter of the circumstances. It happened two weeks ago, just breaks my heart. They're just animals to them.

After our walk, we headed out to a town called Sayulita where the Vet is located where we donated all the dog supplies. The woman who works there was super appreciative, so that was pretty awesome.

We then went to another town called Penita and we went to a market where they have tons of shops and stands of people selling things. that was fun to get the local food and see the local people. We definitely had some down home mexican food. I had a torta which was delicious. We then went back home and walked to the girls school to pick them up.

We came home tonight and I did a little reading on the second floor porch type area in the front of their house that they call the "palapa". It's called that for the straw type roof that covers the room. I can already tell I'm going to miss being up there. It's so open and breezy and relaxing. Ugh, LOVED it.

Hillary's Dad and his wife Gilly came by and we then went down to the beach again where a conservation group releases turtles every third night. We got lucky and got to see it tonight. It was so adorable seeing the little turtles trying to crawl their way into the water and then getting swept away. It was a little bit of a shame though, because it is somewhat of an attraction, so all these children and Gringos (white people) were getting in the way and picking up the babies and moving them closer to the water. It's important that the turtles make it themselves so the woman in charge was trying really hard to keep order of the situation.

Anyway, Hillary is making some authentic "Tomales" for us for dinner and I gotta go, I'm anxious to try these! She took a Mexican class to find out how to do it.

We're having an awesome time. It's going to be sad to leave here despite the fact that it is such a different culture and environment. I'm loving being engulfed in it and trying to speak the language. Who knew my high school Spanish classes would be so handy? I knew enough to talk to people in the Mexico City airport and get us where we needed to go.