A lot to catch up on

Its been a long time since i posted a blog entry so this one is going to be pretty long.  I didn't get a chance to post one last week because i was on a trip but my weekend just started so i have time to get this thing all caught up.

Exams
Last i had written i had just taken my exams so i am going to start off with how they went.  I got both grades back from my physics exams one right after the other.  The first was from the test i thought i had failed and it turns out i got a 74 which i was very pleased with.  Turns out the two questions i did really bad on were really two parts to one question so it didn't hurt me as much.  There were a lot of unhappy people in that class though i know a lot of people who failed.  One guy had studied a ton, he apparently did every practice problem in the chapter (there are a lot) and he got just under 50.  I found out the reason was that half the points of the test were tied into two sections of conceptual questions.  Those sections required little to no math skills but made you apply some of the concepts we had learned to figure out how things act that we hadn't seen before.  Those sections saved me and dominated my friends.  Overall i was really happy.  That test had been a worst case scenario for me and i still passed :)

Getting that test back put me in a great mood but when i got the test back that i thought i had done really well on i got a 70.  Its hard to tell why i missed points and i'm still not totally sure.  There were check marks next to the problems and then a 70 with a circle around it.  I had heard that he had an arbitrary grading style but i was still surprised that he didn't actually show where i lost points.  He invited us to come by his office and ask questions after we reviewed our tests.  So far i have only reviewed the first problem and i got it wrong for an ironic reason.  In Spanish the word for thousand is "mil" which always always always makes me think of million.  Every time i read the word i think million and then correct myself (most other words i just understand by now).  On the first problem one of the numbers given was 1 millón (million in Spanish) and i wrote it down as 1,000.  I'm very curious how i missed all the other points because i thought i had done well and none of it seemed hard but i passed so i'm not upset about it.

Trip
We all got thursday and friday off because of the mexican independence celebration the week after exams.  The international office here organized a trip that left tuesday night and returned sunday.  Both of my physics classes are on tuesday so i could go on the trip without missing them which was perfect.  The trip was a ton of fun but in many ways it was a comedy of errors.

The trip had just under 80 international students on it in all, we rode in two buses.  The first leg of our journey was made overnight, we left at 10 pm and got in at 2 pm the next day to Guadalajara.  There we toured a town called tequila where their primary industry is making tequila (as you might have guessed).  We got to see the whole process from what the plant looks like to the vats where it all ferments.  It was a really interesting tour.  We celebrated mexican independence in Guatemala.  There was a huge celebration in downtown.  We were told that the main event started at 11 but it actually started at 10.  By the time we got to where it was the entrances were all blocked off by military.  There were smaller festivities and street vendors for about two blocks running around the whole main event though so we got to tour those and it was a lot of fun.  We had to ask for directions a few times to find our way back to the hotel afterwords but we made it in the end.  We visited a few artisan towns and lots of flea markets where people could buy souvenirs.  I really enjoyed walking around in those and seeing the kinds of things that people make.  Probably my favorite part of the trip though was a tour we took through an old silver mine in a town called Zacatecas.  Apparently Zacatecas used to be one of the biggest exporters of silver in the world and the mine was huge.  I had been expecting it to be a lot of cramped tunnels but it was actually huge and open.  The ore was richest in a vein that ran almost vertical (maybe 10 degrees) down the mountain so that is the part they mined.  Most of the tour we were walking along paths constructed after the mine closed and we could see a long long way up along the crack and down to water.  The mine was closed when water found a path into it and flooded the lower levels.  I learned a lot about how mining was done back then and was really impressed with how much had been excavated.  At one point we ate in a diner where there was a live band, which would have been really neat but the band was close to us and really really really loud.  It was kind of funny how bad the whole experience was, you couldn't hear yourself think.  Also at two points on the trip our bus lost a tire but both times we just waited for a little while till it was fixed and then continued.  The trip was also my first real experience with mexican lateness.  In my school they are very very clear that people are expected to be at class on time.  On this trip though we were almost always a half hour late in everything we did.  It took some getting used to but once we understood the system it was fine.  If we were supposed to meet somewhere at 9:00 we would just find a leader at 9:00 and make sure we arrived whenever they did.  We figured if we didn't show up after the leaders we couldn't be late :)

One of the most interesting parts of the trip was seeing how students from different nationalities acted.  The french chain smoked, and all of the Europeans drank a ton.  They all drank constantly.  The spanish tended to make a big deal out of problems on the trip and there was one pretty intense rant by a spanish girl about all the things that were wrong with the trip (she was talking to an organizer).  Apparently the stereotype that people know here is that Europeans smoke cigarettes and Americans smoke weed. Some people take stereotypes of Americans to be really true.  There were 4 of us (americans) on the trip and people always assumed that we were huge drinkers and partiers. 

Last week
I thought last week was going to be bad because i was up really late sunday night doing homework.  We were supposed to get back early evening from the trip but we lost a tire on the trip and didn't get into midnight.  Usually if i don't sleep well sunday night i'm just tired all week, which i was, but it was also a great week largely because of the weather.  It has definitely cooled off now, the highs are hovering around 87 but when its overcast its often in the 70's.  The weather this week has been my dream weather for tennis.  Its that temperature where if you slept outside with just a t-shirt you might get cold but its perfect for exercising.  I really like playing in the mornings because of how cool it is, and the sun never gets in your eyes (its not up).  Everything seems easier when i'm not hot.  Its easier to sleep, i can get some homework done at home instead of finding air conditioning to do it all ect.  This week has probably been the best one i have had here just because of that (i haven't had time to do anything fun).  The only minor downside is that it has started to rain.  I really don't mind the rain that much at all but it takes a while to dry once i am wet because of the humidity which can be annoying.  Just as i am writing this rain has started outside in earnest and i just heard thunder.  One day this week we had a torrential downpour for about 2 hours.  I had not seen rain like that since being in florida, nothing like it exists in the northwest.  I was exposed to it for about 20 seconds heading to class and i got completely drenched.  Some of my notebooks in my backpack got a little wet but they shielded my textbooks which was great.  When i got to my building i had to get a bunch of paper towels and dry off some and i was still dripping on absolutely everything when i got into the class (but so was everyone else). 
Fitness testing
One day it was raining in the morning so instead of playing tennis we did fitness testing during tennis practice.  I have never considered myself a good sprinter, i'm pretty good at running distances but i've always known that the average athlete can sprint faster than me, but i discovered that everyone on our tennis team is pretty slow.  We did 10m and 40m timed runs and i won both by a pretty large margin.  We also tested high jump which i was the highest in by a big margin again.  I'm not trying to brag, we did these same tests in tennis at whitworth and i am an average jumper and an average sprinter at best.  I was just really surprised that everyone here can be so good at tennis and not be very fast.  After those tests though we tested for situps in a minute and i got dominated by every single person on the girls and guys team.  To count you had to go from shoulder blades on the ground do elbows touching the knees and you were never allowed to move the arms.  I got somewhere in the mid 30's and i was the only one there not to break 40.  There is a workout routine that we all do three times a week and it has a lot of ab work in it.  They have also talked a lot about the individual strength training they do on their days off.  We never do any cario workouts at all which i always thought was strange but i guess they just focus completely on strength and it seems to be working for them.  It was a funny practice because i discovered that i am easily the fastest and weakest person on the team.

RR
 A very recent development is that i am learning to roll my r's!  I have been practicing while i walk to and from school and just today i started to feel the flutter.  I am still a ways from mastering it and i can't keep the sound going but i can definitely do it.  My host mom says that once people get to this point it takes about a week to get the hang of it :)
Juice
One of my biggest discoveries since my last post was a juice drink sold in gas stations.  I don't know why i had never tried it before, it is sold in every gas station here, i guess it just never looked appealing.  It turns out that it is a pure juice drink, one of the ones where the drink tastes exactly like the fruit ("odwala" and "naked" type) but here a bottle costs 80 cents US!  I try not to buy drinks here but now when i do i have something i really like that is healthier that coke.  Some places do not sell water, which is really strange, so i'm glad to have another alternative.  The juice is almost as cheap as water too, it costs 17 cents more.

Buying drinks has been a little strange for me here.  In the us i always just get water with any food i eat but here water is never free, it is just as expensive as every other drink.  I carry a bottle with me that i can fill up at home for free but it often runs out and on the trip i ended up having to buy anything i wanted to drink.  The drinks are usually pretty cheap but it still all adds up.  I like having interesting things to drink (i try to experiment) but it still feels weird to not be able to get water for free.

Anyway thats it.  This seems pretty disorganized but it covers the most interesting things i can think of that have happened in the last two weeks.  Thanks for reading!