Is it really October?

I can't believe it's already the 14th of October and I have yet to post about Dia de Independencia and my Future Site Visit.  So here it goes I am condensing those two blogs into one.

Future Site visit (Sept 26-29)

This has got to be the most exciting part of training (or at least thus far), not only did I get to meet the people I'll be working closely with, but I actually traveled to Puebla to visit El Flor de Bosque and actually met just about every single person within the state park system I'll be working with (except my bosses boss).  Yep that's right I met the staff of 3 different state parks and was given a tour of each by their environmental education staff.  It was amazing to me how different these three parks were even though they are very close to each other.  There are a few things I took away from my visit the city of Puebla is BEAUTIFUL, living in such a big city is going to be a challenge for the girl who loved living in remote Minnesota, and that Mexico is ahead of the US in how they present climate change to their citizens and how their state parks are serving as huge resources (more on this once I start my service).
Also I am very lucky to be working out of El Flor de Bosque, where I will get to work in this amazing park just outside the city of Puebla, get to also work with the communities around the park, and possibly spend some time after I've learned the ropes well working out of another state park.

This park has everything, including a huge reserve they have been reforesting for almost 20 years

Unfortunately all the pics I took in the reserve didn't really turn out, except for this one!

This is a view of Puebla from one of the highest points in the reserve, it's amazing how close this 13,000 state park is to the very large city of Puebla.

There are a few major things I learned while spending those two days with my counterpart, my Spanish is nowhere as good as I thought it might be and thus I need to start studying the words that will be useful for my job - like the names of plants and animals, how to describe climate change (or cambio climatico - and I need to start having more conversations.   All of my counterparts (and by that I mean that I have at least 10) are very knowledgeable and nice and I can't wait to get back and ask them lots of questions.  By the time my two years is up, I am going to know a whole lot about green technology, I'll actually know how to build a rain cistern, dry toilet, and food dehydrator (Austin and Tanya as soon as I figure it all out I'll definitely share), I'm going to learn about and then work with the communities on worm composting, backyard gardens, natural medicine gardens (super excited about this), and lots of other cool things.  Finally, I also figured out why my counterpart kept talking about me needing boots instead of tennis shoes, that would be because of the rattlesnakes (cascabels) that are in the park.  I of course only figured this out when I saw my first (of what I'm thinking will be many) rattlesnake here in Mexico and he once again repeated I needed to wear leather boots, thus I'm very glad I brought my hiking boots with me since I'll be wearing them quite a bit.

Dia de Independencia (Sept. 15th)

Viva Mexico!

  Independence Day was very fun and exciting.  I started with a play about Mexican Independence on Thursday, continued with a fiesta during lunch on Friday, and watching a whole separate celebration.  On the actual day, I spent the morning exploring on my own and then spent that evening/night celebrating with my host family.  The entire family - grandparents, kids, grandkids, greatgrandkids - came over to my house to celebrate with some traditional food, lots of music and tequila, and later that night singing and dancing.  Here are some shots of that night.

My host mom cooking.

My host dad and his dad