So I haven't really done a whole lot since I last blogged but I figured it was important to keep this updated at least semi-frequently so here I am writing another entry. For breakfast today we had Chopped up hot dogs that were soaked in tomato sauce with bread that is a lot like frenchbread rolls but with mashed refried beans spread across the top with a white oaxaca cheese (pronounced Osaca). Definitely the oddest breakfast that I have ever had. Never thought i would have tomato sauce covered hot dogs that's for sure. Well I'm going to go exercise now. I gotta do it every single night or I won't get into the shape that I'm trying to get in again! I can already feel the difference that it is making! Included below is some of the stuff the students are selling and a photo of them testing.

 Delicious Caramel like stuff that one of the teams is selling. This stuff is really really delicious, and the students bought it all on credit! they got over 10000 pesos worth of the food (which name I can't remember) and are doing exactly what we taught them to do (one of the rules of thumb: Buy on Credit, Sell for Cash)

 Some ties that another team is selling. I personally like the second from the left the most.

The students taking their first exam here at the Academy. I couldn't tell you how it went cause I couldn't really understand enough to fully get what it was even about! :P

 The sunset from the Benemerito High School (It is an LDS only high school in NorthWest Mexico City with over 2,500 students! We went there thursday night after selling cheesecake :)

 A cool picture in the main offices of Benemerito, with the values written in the atom (Poder=power, luz=light, verdad=truth, and intelligencia=intelligence)

A 3D map of the high school. It is huge!! that in the top left corner is a track around a full size soccer field


Those pictures were from thursday on the first day that I went off campus, we went out selling cheesecake that we bought for 5 pesos and sold for 15 pesos! We also went to Wal-Mart and I found Dr. Pepper!! Oh it feels like home now that I have my DP! We went to the Benemerito High School on the way back (pictured above) and then went back to the campus. Thursday was a pretty great day :D

The following pictures are from today! We went to downtown Mexico City and it was way cool! took the bus to the subway and took the subway the rest of the way into town! There are tons and tons and tons of people here! Downtown is gorgeous though! It's really pretty and has a whole lot of really cool stuff!

 A statue outside the Palace with what looks like a fairy on and underneath of a flying horse :)

 Said Palace :D It's called Pallacio de Arte Bella (Palace of Beautiful Art)

 The Tallest building in the city (use to be the tallest in latin america) home of some TV company

 Inside the Palace of Beautiful Art

 Hey Look it's Hagrid! Although this street performer got it a little wrong cause hagrid has a bike...not a broom ;) (brooms can't lift him, it says so in the books :D)

 A shot down one of the streets of the outdoor mall we went to, tons and tons of people!

 One of the cool looking buildings in downtown

 An incredibly massive Catholic Cathedral! Inside is basically plated in gold :)

Taking down an incredibly huge mexican flag at sundown

 Jeremi teaching the first class to the students. That is Gandhi to his left.

 The students holding their seeds that we gave them to trade.

 Their first day of earnings! I cant find the photos of the other days right now :P

 Students with their seeds again. Outside this time

Jeremi encouraging all the students as they debate rich vs poor.

I'll try to get lots more pictures like this on here soon :D

Well it's Friday now and the students have Saturday off so it's kind of like the last day of the week and what a week it has been! The students are changing so much it's incredible! It has only been a week too! Tuesday was their first day of selling/trading. We started out the day by giving them a lesson on why mexico is great and that money doesnt mean you're evil. Then we gave each team of about five a little seed from a tree that we found on the ground and told them to go out and trade it for something, and keep trading for more and more value then sell what they got and bring back the pesos. One team came back with almost 400 pesos! almost 40 dollars! The next day we continued to break cultural ideas of poverty being inescapable and the rich being evil. We sent them out again that night and had a team come back with over 500 pesos! and Yesterday had three teams come back with over 1000 pesos! their improvement has been incredible and it has been way fun to watch them get way excited about earning money and having success :) I've been teaching english classes too, and it's way harder than i expected it to be. Because every student I have is at a totally different level, Gandhi is really really good but has bad pronunciation, and marisol can barely understand me at all. So its really hard to teach everyone at the same time. Right now ive been mostly focusing on verbs and vocab and answering questions as they come up. Basically I've decided that practice is the best teacher so i only talk to them in english now and am having them give 10 minute presentations in class next friday! Tonight I'm going with some of the staff to an institute dance! I am way excited and it should be way fun!! They're going to teach me salsa and bachata (the two most popular dances here) and I'm way excited! Well I tried not to make this post quite as long so as not to bore you guys too much :) Hope everything is great back in the States!!

Wow it's already been a couple days since I last posted on here. I was going to saturday, then i put it off, then i was going to yesterday, then i put it off and it didnt happen, and now here i am writing when im about to go to bed :) So today was our first day with the students and wow it was great! First off, all the students are awesome, and one is from Orem, and another served his mission in provo! What a small world we live in! So we started at 7 o'clokc and immediately went to work, we raked an area of our lawn for all the leaves with just our fingers for over an hour, then had breakfast, and then we went to gardening and did about thirty rows that are about twenty feet long each, and cleaned them of all their weeds and re made the hills on each row. After that we went and did another section of the garden and then had lunch. After Lunch we went and cleaned all the dormitories, and the classroom and the offices. We basically cleaned everything up today! Sorry its time for bed, thats why this is such a hurried post, but basically today was awesome! we had a lesson where they wrote down the first things that came to mind about a whole bunch of countries that were written on the board, including the United States and Mexico. And about basically every country except mexico they said all these fantastic things, and for mexico they put like dirty, and corrupt, and poor. And Jeremi brought to their attention how sad that misconception is, that they downgrade themselves without even thinking about it. We're breaking their conceptions that in Mexico they have to be poor, and dirty and can never rise above it, and teaching them to come to their full potential. K well hopefully I will have more time tomorrow to post a blog, and i'll go into much greater detail on today, and tell you all about tomorrow! Hasta Luego!

Well I've been down here a couple of days now, and i guess it's probably time to start my blog or something. So the flight down here wasn't too bad, a 2 and a half hour flight from LAX to Dallas, with an hour and a half there to eat lunch, and then jump on the plane again to Mexico City. It's a whole new experience down here, and it's nothing like anything that I've ever done before. I knew it would be hard the second i got off the the plane here and absolutely everything was in Spanish, and i realized that my Spanish was not as good as I wish it was, it would have made the transition a whole lot easier. Luckily I can understand the majority of what is said to me, but i definitely have to improve my vocabulary dramatically. The people here are really nice and I like them lots, we get along well as far as I can tell, and I think once I can speak good Spanish again it will be a blast! The taxi ride to the Academy was insane! The drivers here don't really care about any traffic laws, they are more or less just suggestions that you can choose to follow or not to follow. At one point in the taxi there were three lanes and four cars and a bus all side by side, i couldn't believe that they managed to fit everyone into that space, it was crazy. This city is huge here, but I think that I will come to love it. Although I doubt that I will ever come to love the smelliness of most of it. The majority of the city smells not very good, however the part that we are in isn't too bad, but it definitely isn't the fresh mountain valley air that I am use to. Yesterday, my first full day was really hard for me, we sat in the classroom planning for the rest of the year for the better part of six hours, and I didn't understand a lot of what was said, and what i did understand I knew nothing about, because I've never been here before. I was really having a hard time and starting to wonder why the heck I came down here in the first place. It has been really hard not having connections to my friends and family all the time. I'm use to always being able to whip out my phone and text anyone that I wanted to and be able to hear back from them really quickly. I could also call people and go hang out with them in minutes and do all the things that I am familiar with, and now I don't have any of that. It's weird every time I leave the offices because that is the only area with reliable wi-fi (a.k.a. connection to the rest of the world) because I know that when I leave i am no longer able to communicate with the people that I know and love. I know that it won't be this hard the whole time that I am down here once I've made some friends down here and we can go do stuff together. Right now though, it isn't very much fun. I'm coming back to Spanish pretty quickly and it's getting a lot easier to talk and to understand and it is slowly feeling more natural, by the time I go back home there will have been blog posts that I probably wrote half of in Spanish before I realized that it was in the wrong language and that it needs to be in English, but that's part of the fun. The campus isn't small by Mexico City standards but to me it's a little bit small. It has four greenhouses, an office building, a building with one classroom in it, Jeremi's House (The director of the Academy here), a field with trees around the outside, and a bunch of dorms that can hold about 60 people in bunk beds. I still don't know how good the water here is, because I still haven't drunk any of it, cause i'm not particularly looking forward to Montezuma's Revenge, although it is probably inevitable, but I am doing pretty good so far. We do have hot water for showers, which is a huge plus and plenty of electricity so it's not like I don't have those normal things, but it definitely is different.
    The food is going to take some getting use to for sure. I've never been a big horchata fan, but they have it for like every other meal here and absolutely love it. So I guess i guess i'm going to have to come to love it as well. They also love limes with EVERYTHING! any food that they have, they have to put limes in it, whether it's spaghetti, tacos, burritos, or even cereal. Yeah they love their limes. They also told me that I'm going to love it pretty soon too and understand why they love it so much, they told me that everyone that comes down here always ends up loving it tons.
   It hasn't been very busy these last couple days so i have had a lot of free time, which hasn't been very good, because it kinda leaves me really lonely and wanting back home, but once the students get here on Monday it is supposed to be a whole lot busier and I think it will get a whole lot better for me.
    I dunno if i'm quite as excited now as I was before coming down here, because all of a sudden it is very very hard. I know that I'll be able to do it though. I know that with with God's help, and with everyone down here's help that it'll work out really well, and that overall this will be a really great experience for me. Coming in I think I was a little big cocky, thinking oh yeah, hard schmard I can do this, I'll just pound it out and go back home, now I'm kinda realizing that this isn't a six minute wrestling match where you go as hard as you possibly can for six minutes, it is three months of constant work and improvement and learning. This will definitely be a life changing experience