oaxaca 4?5? can`t remember...

Hi! I am experimenting with the picture placement and i don`t know where things are going to end up. Sorry if it is unreadable later.

Today our language school set up a tour of the ex-convent Santa Catalina. It was a convent at one point, then when Benito Juarez became the president of Mèxico, he made all the Catholic buildings public and the convent served as Oaxaca`s City Hall and the jail. Then, years later they city decided to restore the building and today it is a hotel. The cool thing is that there are a lot of ghost sightings here, and although our tour guide was extremely nervous about talking about ghosts (for public relations reasons), we got him to tell us a story about a family who saw nuns with blood all over themselves walking around the hotel. The family thought it was a show of some sort, and wrote a letter to the mgt. that `the nun show was inappropriate for children`.

After the tour, some of us went to get a drink and we saw one of the many marching band parades snaking it`s way down the street. (There`s a picture above along with the angry line of traffic behind the parade.) This particular parade was to educate people about some sort of ritual cleansing. They were burning sage and splashing the sideliners with plants dipped in special herb water.

The top picture is me with some of my classmates (left to right:Jenny, Lucy (eng.), Shirley (hk), Chris (eng.), Kaori (jpn) and Juri (jpn).

Also featured is a fountain in El Llano, a cool park up the road from my apt., Lucy in a funky little coffee shop around the corner from there, and more street art.

There are sooooo many cool things to see in Oaxaca. I am discovering more every day. I`m really glad i decided to spend a whole month here. I`m also really appreciating having a routine with school in the mornings and hanging out with classmates in the evenings. It is also nice not to pack up every 3 days and move.

I found a neat little lending library that has a lot of books in English. It was a huge blessing becuase books in Mexico are really expensive (like 30 usd) because of taxes, but my book only cost 10 pesos (less than a dollar!).

Well that is all for today. There is a big festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe coming up on Friday- I will be sure to take some pictures and post them soon.

Hope everyone is doing well!