More Random photos....I'm posting these while I can....my history with pictures is so scary, I figured I should get these on her while the getting was good.

These 4 sweet little kittens and their mother are residents of the Peace Corps office grounds.  The bosses have agreed to feed, vaccinate and spay them so we are all very happy.  There was one bold attempt to corral them but they all got away so the PC folks relented.

 

 

I tried to post this earlier but I don't think I was successful .  It's pronounced Auto Zone but it translates loosely here to "we are autos." 

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I went with some companeros to a Pulque festival.  It turned out to be an agricultural event, celebrating the Maguey cactus which is useful for a variety of purposes including Pulque ( a fermented Kombucha type drink,Mescal and many more.

Our little group....it was fun.....the taxi ride was a bit scary.

This is a giant Maguey Cactus aka Agave.

If you zoom in on this, you'll learn the many uses of  the  Maguey plant.
 

You can see the huge turnout and maybe the jackets....it was a cool , just right day.
 

Pulque testers

More pulque

This is some of the pulque that was available for taste testing.  I went with the guyaba flavor with some agua miel mixed in....truly delicious

Folkloric dancing.  There was also some good ole down home Mexican ranchero type music.

This is hole in the wall. HaHa...but , it really is.  During one of the Mexican Revolutions, an Austrian royal, Maxmillian, had been sent by Spain to be the Ruler of Mexico and the Mexicans decided enough was enough.  He was being held  as a prisoner in the convent that is behind this wall so the  anti colonists attacked the convent to get him out.  They did and the eventually killed him and 3 or 4 of his compatriots.  His remains have been returned to Austria....happily.   H  His wife was Spanish royalty or something like that...you know those royals marry each other.

If you expand this photo you'll see that it's a pinata shop....lots of pinatas.

This is a description of the fountain below.   This is one of the fountains in the city fed by water that was sent up to the convent by the acqueduct I've marveled over in earlier posts.  On the photo of the fountain, you can see on the ledge on the front where people dragged their buckets out with fresh water.  Its fenced in now but just to protect it. 

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I walk by this fellow's shop  where I have seen him doing a lot of leather repair on saddles etc. but he was doing this in the street, saddle soaping.   I asked him where I could get a chamois and we had a nice chat.  He said my Spanish was good....I think he was sort of shocked.

This is a picture of the place where we have most of our lectures...classes.  The man standing at back is one of our doctors, Mariano, who was also my doctor when I was in Nicaragua. 

This is Paty....short for Patricia...she dressed for our festival day a few weeks ago...and is a lovely person and such a hard worker.

This is Lili, one of our language and culture facilitators.  She is a riot..married to a Brit and full of energy.

These are some of the staff..Paty in the middle, Ana is Mexican and has served all over the world with various relief NGOs.  She says it was so hard to do emotionally and is taking a break with PC. The guy is Kevin and is the training manager..former PC Volunteer in Guatamala, lives here now with his wife and child. He brings his daughter to a preschool near the PC office on an electric bike each morning.

Just a shot of 4 of us waiting at the Immigration office waiting for our Temporary Resident Card.....not Tourist Visa....a bit different.  It was a long bureaucratic process as is opening a bank account.  Very very careful that our signatures match our signatures on our Passports.

This is a display at the Aeronautical Univ. where we've been doing some teaching the past few days...they do it all there...training mechanics, pilots, flight attendants, etc.  and have teams from a lot of countries coming and going.  I'm not sure what all of them do but I know France has a big presence.

 

The airplane photos are all taken at the Universidad National Aeronautical of Queretaro  ( UNAC)  Its an amazing place and its located right next to the airport so the students get real experiences.We are doing some practice teaching of English with some of their classes.  Everyone in the school has to take and pass English classes to graduate.

These two photos are of the aqueduct I described earlier before I knew how to work the picture connection.  Please go back and read about it.....its amazing and there are a lot of You tube videos about it.

There was a car show happening when I walked by so I took a couple pictures of Karman Ghias.

I just love this photo.  Its sort of hard to decipher but the cement was cut away to expose the root of the tree.  That just seems so thoughtful.

This is just a random photo of some of the kids in my cohort.  The kid in the front on the left was born in the US to parents who came from Mexico so he is fluent in Spanish and has a lot of family not far from where we are.  The kid next to him went to Kenyon College where Adam Gilson has worked for many many years.  The kid with the blond hair is a surfer from Massachusets and is missing the water a lot and the young lady is just a nice gal but I don't know anything about her yet.

 

More photos, I hope

 

Well, I may have figured something out.  This will be a stream of consciousness ( photos) that I downloaded.  This first is just a healthy looking meal I had recently...The lady I'm living with does not cook much so I've found some places I can buy some relatively healthy and inexpensive food.  I'm looking forward to having a place  where can cook for myself again and have my dear cat.

THis is located on the campus of the school where I'll be teaching soon.. UTEQ..Universidad Technologico  de Queretaro.

This is a street name I saw recently....Of the sad Indian.....( sad)

This is an interior shot of La Casa de la Marqueza...a hotel/restaurant I mentioned in an earlier post.  This was originally built as a home for the Marqueza whose husband financed the building of the acqueduct ( with her money ) to get clean water to his girlfriend...the nun at the top of the hill.  Apparently, the Marqueza never lived in this place and it has only been used as a restaurant and hotel...not sure who owns it....its in the historic district of Queretaro.

 Neighborhood watch in Mexico...underneath the sign is a place where they hang their garbage bag for pick up...safe from animals in the night.

This is a photo of the intersection in front of the house where I'm living ....just wanted you to see the overhead power and telephone wires.  Also, notice the ficus trees...they stay green year round...very nice and many are pruned back and make nice shade over sidewalks and the street.

Another shot of the inside of La Casa de la Marqueza.  This is the stairs up to the hotel part ( only 8 rooms) from the restaurant on the first floor.

This is also inside the La Casa de la Marqueza.  This is the Virgin Guadalupe...we were told in one of the presentations about the history of Mexico.   Apparently, this is a LatinX version of the Virgin Mary who was very light skinned in the Spanish renditions, so they darkened her skin and gave her a Spanish name to placate their recent converts in the conquered lands of the Aztecs, Mayans, and other darker skinned peoples.

This is a photo I tried to include earlier...it's the languages building where I'll spend most of my day...when I'm not playing pickleball. :)

An attempt with photos

 

 

This is an aqueduct that was built in c. 1780s to get fresh water from an underground aquifer up to a convent built on a hill overlooking Queretaro.  It's an absolute wonder to me and the government has preserved it well.  It runs down the middle of a fairly large avenue and is a reference point for anyone looking for or giving directions.  What's really amazing about it is that there is no more than a 2% change in grade in the whole expanse and it runs c.1200 meters.  There is a lot on the internet about it if you're interested but the point is that they got the water up there and then they disbursed it to fountains throughout the city by a series of pipes or canals that ran downhill with the fresh water.  There's a whole story about how the guy who organized the project was married to an ultra rich Spanish marqueza but was having an affair with a nun who lived up at the convent and the nun was always sick due to the bad water so he used the Marqueza's money to build the aqueduct and once it was finished the nun went back to her love of Jesus instead of the boyfriend.  There is a fabulous hotel and restaurant in the historic part of Queretaro that he originially built for the Marqueza but the story goes she never lived there. Quien sabe.  I'll try to post some pics of it.  It's officially called La Casa de la Marqueza.  The historic district is very interesting, of course most of the buildings were build during the Spanish occupation so there's that.  I haven't gotten outside the city to any of the Aztec, Mayan or other indigenous sites but I plan to do that as soon as Peace Corps allows it.  We're not allowed to go anywhere outside of the city until we get sworn in and then spend another 3 months at our sites.  I think they fear people will jump ship once they see other parts of the country....quien sabe.  ( I love that saying....of course it means, Who knows.

This is an example of how words get changed with languages.   This is Auto Zone in English....It might translate to "Autos we are"  in Spanish but the pronunciation would be very similar.  It's a used car lot.

 When this adventure started, there were three of us on the “seasoned” side.   We have lost one due to a bad fall that resulted im a broken nose .  Apparently he had had a couple earlier mishaps so it seems Peace Corps decided to medically separate him.  A week or so late, another one of us got Covid so je had to be quarantined for a week but he has recovered and is back at the trainings.  We have a young woman out now with covid but we think she’ll be back tomorrow.  I’m stills struggling getting photos from my phone to the laptop so I can add them to the blog but Im trying something different this time.  I’m writing the  blog post on my phone so hopefully I can access the photos more reliably.   We’ll see.   

Clearly, Im still struggling with photos.  The one at the top is a mural on one wall of the gym at my future university.   Their mascots is falcons…slight spelling difference.  This would be a perfect place for pickleball but the floor might be a problem….it seems to be some sort of padded surface….as if for gymnastics.

This is the mural at the other end of the gym.

This is the languages building where Ill be doing the bulk of my work beginning in early Nov.  We each spent three days at our eventual sites and mine is not too far from where I am now so I remained in my host home and traveled back in forth each day to the campus.   I had a great time and the teachers, all of whom speak English and are anxious to hear more, were very welcoming and accommodating.  It was great to experience the reception I got from the students which is what keeps me coming back to Peace Corps.  They broke into huge smiles when they saw me on campus during those three days and in class they paid rapt attention to my every word and their regular teachers, who stayed in the room, reported that the students seemed very interested in speaking English while I was there.,far more than usual.   That is the whole, or at least a major goal of this program...to get conversations going and give students and teachers alike opportunities to speak in English with a native speaker. I'll be serving in classrooms but I'll also try to get some conversation clubs etc going after school hours.

I have just gotten really frustrated trying to get photos from the cloud onto my laptop so I'm going to just write some news and work on the photos later.  It seems to work for a while and then when I try the same process again, it fails.  I know, I know...its me not this laptop.

Re: pickleball. I learned that the National Pickleball Assn or some sort of organization has reached out to Peace Corps headquarters in some fashion....I don't know any details.  But, when I was in a meeting with the country director the other day, he mentioned that he had called the home office to report that he had a  trainee who wanted to get pickleball going.  Amazing.   Apparently they have been talking about it at the DC office.

Anyhow, my plan now is to order a net and some paddles and balls from Amazon and once I get on campus, get permission from someone to set up the net and just start playing to see what kind of interest we can generate and it will, or will not, go from there.I did learn that the other PC vol. at my university has played pickleball and likes it a lot and also has a relationship with the PE dept. chair at the University...that all bodes well

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341494728_Identification_guide_of_MEXICAN_PARROTS

There are not a lot of real exciting things to report  yet but a couple weeks ago I heard a lot of birds outside my window and when I looked, I marveled at a huge flock of parrots perched and squawking in a tree nearby.  It was amazing and I haven't seen one since but the website above confirms my sighting....it was great.

 I'll stop for now and use any free time to conquer the photo issue.

 Pat