quince anos

Saturday November 17 I attended another extremely cultural event...I went to a Quince Anos. (Yes, I too thought they were called Quinceaneras...but no, the Quinceanera is the PERSON celebrating her Quince Anos). It was an extremely interesting experience that frankly blew my mind. In classic us form (us = the family i live with) we left the house at 7:30 when misa (church service) was supposed to start at 7. So sadly, I did not get to experience the misa part...we just went straight to the fiesta. It was in a huge banquet hall, like, imagine the most extravagant wedding you've ever been to in the states and it was AT LEAST that out of control fancy. It was much more than anything i personally had ever experienced, and i was kind of appalled by it all in some respects (mostly the money respect). Every time I would mention something about how "wow" it was, their response was "but you guys have sweet 16 parties like this don't you???" i think they've all just seen the tv show My Sweet 16 and assume we all do that! I was like um....no. the most ridiculous part(s) was when the girl made her grand entrance she like came down this lighted stairway doing this interpretive dance type thing all the way down to the dance floor where she then danced several dances by herself and with a partner. Then later on she and two guys came out all in black and danced to a compilation of Michael Jackson songs (sort of cool being MJ but still way over the top). After her big entrance her parents made this big speech about how she is now a woman and they are presenting her to society and all that jazz. It was just frankly all way too much for me. Tons of LOUD music, live band, lots of dancing, yeah all you would imagine and more. Ridiculous. But interesting. Let's just say we left at 1 am and they still had not cut the cake ... now obviously this family (Itzi's cousin) has money, but I'm told even families don't do money they still make a big hooplah out of it all. anyways, it was interesting, very interesting. not so much my scene, but great to experience yet another very cultural event.

here are some pics of the family at the big event:






in other news, life at school is about the same. i spent the majority of my day teaching english in one way or another, which i am still not totally happy about, but it's life. with the little kids i am in charge and we basically just sing songs all the time, which is a delight i suppose, although the little ones still really just don't learn anything ... in second grade i help itzi out and basically just have conversation with the kids and help those who are struggling. in first grade it was SO overwhelming (really tough class) we decided to split up the class so itzi teaches half the kids and i teach the other half ... not a huge fan of this (especially since we're outside where distractions run rampant) and the kids are really quite a handful but i'll work on it! monday evenings i have regularizacion where i help 3 kids who are around ages 13-15 (FINALLY! an age i know how to deal with!) with english. it's actually a lot of fun. tuesday mornings two kids from the community come and i spent 2 hours with them working on spanish and math. other than that, my days are filled with helping with breakfast, brushing teeth, and not tons else at the moment! pretty much all english ... eh. :-)

regularizacion on tuesdays with brenda and oscar

giving the kids ketchup on their eggs

the whole crew at the kinder

english 101 with maestra natalia: these are your EYES!

i hope everyone is well and truly enjoying FALL! take care.

Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)

Just a warning... I am probably going to write a lot more in this space than most of you want to read, but I want a place to keep all my learnings/meanderings about Dia de los Muertos together, and I figured this was the best way to do that. So feel free to just browse and look at the pictures if that's all you want :) I won't be mad ...

So I'll be honest, leading up to this weekend I was pretty freaked out about the whole concept of Dia de los Muertos, but now that it's over I'm just totally intrigued by it, although I still find the basic premise to be quite "out there," if you will. I got to travel a little bit and see what it was like in a couple other towns besides Cuernavaca so that was sweet too.

BASICALLY, the idea behind Dia de los Muertos is that the dead have permission to return to earth to visit friends and relatives on Earth once every year ... Dia de los Muertos (Nov. 2). It is thought that those who died as children come one day and adults another day. Throughout the days of the dead, which is actually celebrated like all weekend long, the living welcome the departed souls with "ofrendas" of flowers, incense, candles, and food. This tradition has been around since forever and was started by the indigenous of Mexico.

ORENDAS (which are usually set up in the person's home) include the following:
- marigolds (flower of the dead)
- pan de muerto (no idea whats so special about this stuff, i mean its good, but yeah. the stores have been FILLED with them. the other day i went to a panaderia to get some bread and where i would normally find like 50 different kinds, ALL they had was pan de muerto)
- food (they prepare and set out the favorite foods of the dead from when they were alive)
- candles and incense
- sugar skulls (crazy decorated)
- photos of the deceased
- paper cutout thingies
- a trail of marigolds leading from the street to the ofrenda itself so that the departed can easily find their way home




Also, a big place to see the happenings is in the panteon (cemetery). I went to the cemetery in Ocotepec which is a town nearby Cuernavaca. The gravesites were crazily adorned with flowers, streamers, ofrendas, etc. We went on the day when the kids come back, which was quite interesting. One grave was surrounded by family and they were singing with guitar and other instruments to the departed child. Another grave was adorned in pink and white streamers with a HUGE sign that said "Bienvenida Princesa" (Welcome Princess). Family members usually spend time cleaning and decorating graves. I haven't quite figured out if they REALLY think the people come back or what, but the Welcome Princess sign sure suggests it does. I didn't go to any of the graves of my family's family members so I didn't have that personal of an experience to know. Itzi did go twice to Jojutla where her mother and grandparents are buried but I do not know what they did there.

Jardin Borda (a big garden place) in Cuernavaca had a huge festival all weekend long including a competition of Catrinas. Catrina (i'm still a little confused about her) is kind of like a symbol for Dia de los Muertos. My family told me she represents the dead wealthy high class women. She's basically a skeleton all dolled up. a lot of kids were her for halloween. Anyways, there was a competition so there were like 40+ bigger-than-life-size Catrinas varying from ones made of mcdonald's cartons, to chiles, to popcorn, etc. etc. Check out my facebook pics to see more of her. It was really a sweet display. Also throughout the weeke.nd and in various cities/towns there were real-life Catrinas that you could take your picture with.


In Cuernavaca's zocalo (main square) on Saturday there were tons of huge ofrendas, and I had intentions of taking pictures on my return through but it was gone! So I have no pics of there which I am bummed about. On Sunday we went to Mexico City to check out what is normally a HUGE competition of ofrendas in the giant zocalo there...to find nothing. It was quite disappointing, we drove over an hour just to see these and there was NOTHING. My family figures it's because of a lack of money, but who knows. I was quite bummed...


It was an interesting combination between Dia de los Muertos and Halloween here this past weekend. Kids were trick-or-treating every day (Friday-Monday) which was interesting. People give out candy but more often MONEY to kids who go to "pedir Halloween." (ask for halloween) In all the costumes I saw I would say about 95% of them were the more morbid type: witches, vampires, draculas, etc. (all the things my parents would never let me be when i was a kid). I think my family's kids were the exception to this (Tigger and a jar of Winnie the Pooh's honey). I asked my family if it was a coincidence that Dia de los Muertos and Halloween fell on the same weekend or if it had some purpose to it and they said yes it was purposeful but didn't explain any more...who knows.

check out the wikipedia page on Dia de los Muertos for a decent description of it all (notice the last pic is in Ocotepec where i went)


Here is the ofrenda that we set up in our house for Itzi's mother and grandparents. Just a smaller simpler version of all the grandotes that were out there that I saw.

Anyways it was a very interesting, educational, and rather entertaining weekend.