Paso de Cortés

We went up to the Paso de Cortés, between the two volcanoes that you can see from my site, Popo and Izta for short. It is how Cortés traveled from Puebla to México City when he was conquering the natives. Unfortunately we didn´t realize how far it was from the city, so we only got to spend a couple hours hiking in the pass. There are supposed to be a couple of waterfalls, so I will have to go back sometime. Here, the flags of CONANP (like our National Park Service), México, and the National Park of the two volanoes is backdropped by the cloud-covered Popo.



Also, I snapped this picture last week. There is a local church famous for its interior decorations (no pictures allowed inside, so no evidence here). Inside it is full of this amazing handwork on all the walls and ceiling. They manually ring their bells, though, so this poor guy was up in the bell tower trying to cover one ear while ringing the bell with his other hand.

New Site

So a couple weeks ago I moved to a new site, and I´ve been settling in. It´s definitely much easier the second time around...I understand the bus system, just not the local routes, and with an upgraded language ability I can communicate fairly well with the people.

This is the view from my small town. This is an active volcano, called Popo for short. You can hike near the volcano, but I´m not sure if you´re allowed to hike up this one. Some of the inactive volcanoes in the area you´re allowed to hike up with a permit and appropriate gear.



Also, I went to a local museum a couple weekends ago that has some really interesting pre-Hispanic artifacts. Skulls and death are important, as shown by Day of the Dead and the Katrina figurine that are popular all over México.

Fails

If any of you surf epicfail.com or failblog.org, you'll know a new fad is random pictures of things that don't make any sense. The pictures and videos are pretty funny, so I wanted to post some of the things that I've seen in México.

They were doing construction on my office...this guy is hooked up to a safety harness, which is good. But look closer at how long the harness cable is...



This is a kindergarten in Puebla...obviously the razor wire is only for the really bad kids...



A restaurant in Monterrey. No smoking, but they'll sell you the cigarettes anyways.