The old jail

This place was eerie. There was one room tucked in a corner that I entered into that was especially creepy and I got the feeling that something terrible had happened there. It didn't look that different from the others, it was just the feeling I got when I went into it that scared me. It was fun though(and a little dangerous) to explore this old jail. We had to keep a close eye on the kids so they wouldn't fall off the numerous ledges. There have been so many times while here in Mexico that i have thought to myself "something like this would never exist in Canada". I guess there is just not that fear of a lawsuit here as there is in some other countries. Another thing that triggered my emotions were the faded walls above the rusted metal bunkbed frames, decorated by the prisoners with drawings and magazine cutouts.

Hotel de Cortez

This is a enormous hotel that was built about 100 years ago and it is almost completely empty all the time, but is very well taken care of. It feels sort of wierd being in it. It was way too void of activity. This intiricately decorated place is in Miramar, just down the beach from where we spent most of our time. We explored inside and outside this beautiful hotel as part of our last visit to the beach before leaving for Barranca del Cobre.

artsy-fartsy

Christmas and pre-Christmas activities

Before we left I was able to attend the temple in Colonia Juarez, which was nice. For the third time since I came here I was asked if I was a Mennonite. The second picture is of Mei decorating our Christmas tree. We held Christmas last Monday night. A few days before we left Liam's elementary school had a Christmas program. Liam is the one in the middle smiling at the camera. The other picture is of an older grade's dance. The whole program was traditional music, dress and dance from various states in Mexico. Liam's class did the state of Veracruz. I didn't get a still picture of Liam's class performing because I was video-recording it instead.

Our Christmas dinner was spent on the main street in Guaymas with a couple that we met at our hotel (outside our room pictured below). It consisted of styrofoam cups of corn with mayo, cheese and butter and hotdogs with mayo and avacado sauce and paletas leche (milk-based popsicles) for dessert. Yum!

Oh the creatures we have seen

We finally saw the black dolphins (we didn't go see the white ones in the tank). It was really cool to watch them arcing through the water, sometimes in pairs as though they were trying to look fancy for us. I didn't get any good pictures although for a while I thought that the second picture above was of a pair of dolphins until I looked closer and realized it was of a sea-doo that Liam went on with some friends. Man, was I disappointed. It would have made a good picture.
And then there are the pelicans... We were strolling along the edge of the water in Guaymas and came upon some men cleaning fish and throwing the remains to a group of pelicans. Fisherman came with coolers full of fish for them to take care of. One man motioned for us to come closer and so we did, of course. Liam threw a slimy fish skin out to the eager crowd of birds. One pelican even nipped a man on the hand. These are huge birds! It was cool to see them up close and watch them fight over the fish and hold them in their pouches. I also spent a long time at the beach at Miramar just watching them dive into the water for fish. They skim along the water and then dive hard and fast straight down. Other creatures we have seen are starfish, countless crabs (some of them hermit crabs living inside abandoned shells), huge sea slugs (at least that what we think they are - there are round flat ones and cucumber-shaped ones), stingray, a variety of birds, and lots of cockroaches.

the beach

Here is a direct quote from Liam the first day we spent at Miramar: "This is the best day of my life!" This place is so perfect for the kids. We are endlessly entertained by swimming, gathering shells, playing in the sand and on the rocks, looking for crabs, running from the waves and watching groups of pelicans diving simutaneously for fish. I haven't ventured in beyond my waist to go swimming as the water is pretty cold for me. I must be a wimp because other people are swimming in it. One thing we do have to watch out for are stingray. We made friends with a couple who are staying at the same hotel as us and told them about Miramar so they came the second day we were out and she was bitten (or stung...?) by a stingray on the bottom of her foot and had intense pain throughout her foot for quite a while. The pain can sometimes travel all the way up the leg and last for 24 hours. It is supposedly not a common occurance at this time of year but Rus saw one in the water when he was wading around too. Maybe it was the same one. He wasn't stung, fortunately. We have also seen a few sea slugs along the shoreline and on the rocks.
We arrived at the beach especially early this morning because we were told that dolphins and sometimes whales come quite close to the shore here. They are a little unpredictable though. This morning was one of the mornings that they didn't come. We are going to keep coming back early every morning until we see them. We have also made friends with a family who co-owns a house on the beach, which they also rent out. They have two boys about Liam's age and have offered to take us to see some white dolphins that are kept in a tank in the resort town a few kilometers north of here called San Carlos. Rus and I are having some moral dilemmas over keeping dolphins in a tank but it is something that Liam is very excited about so we might just go anyway. We can also swim with them if we want.

Guaymas

We have had a few delays in our vacation plans so far. We tried to leave Wednesday night but there had just been a snowstorm in the mountain pass that our bus was supposed to go through so we had to wait until Thursday evening to leave. We left at 11:30 pm and were supposed to be in Hermosillo in 10 hours but because of the snow it took an extra five or six hours. We took another bus to Guaymas and settled into our hotel room a couple of hours later. We tried to catch a ferry but there were none running because of the weather. We were told that these strong winter winds could last for days. We have found a beach that is unbelievably free of tourists. For hours each day, we have had the beach to ourselves. We get to it on the local city bus, which only costs 8 pesos for all of us. It is busy in the summer with the locals but right now the locals are wearing their winter clothes. We might just stay here and not go to tourist-ridden Mazatlan after all. The weather is beautiful. The coldest it gets here, even at night, is about 18 degrees above zero. The days since we have arrived in Guaymas have sort of blended together and I didn't even realize that it was Christmas Eve until I started hearing all the fireworks. We actually thought it was Saturday the 23rd when really it was Sunday the 24th. Learning that it was Christmas Eve (although we still didn't realize it was Sunday until we tried to go to church the next morning and were told that it was then Monday), we got kind of excited and ventured out to the main street to buy fireworks from vendors that had set up tables and booths for this occasion. Back at our hotel, a group of local kids noticed the fireworks we were carrying and gathered around to help us set them off.

Rus here:
Julieta Venegas has impressed us, we saw a video of hers on tv, and liz bought a cd.

a vacation from our vacation

This will be probably be my last post before Christmas, so Merry Christmas everyone! We hope to be able to phone some of you during the holidays. Liam is done school Wednesday afternoon and we have about 17 days before we have to be back for him to start again in January. So this is our planned itinerary: take the bus to Guaymas, then the ferry from Guaymas over to Santa Rosalia in southern Baja California. We will probably spend Christmas day there. Then we will take the bus south, stopping and spending a few days at various towns along the way, ending up in La Paz. We will then take the ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan, where we will spend a few days or weeks or months...well, maybe not months. From Mazatlan we will go up to Los Mochis where we will catch a train that will take us past the Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon) to Creel. At Creel we will catch a local bus (a 5 hour trip) that will take us into the bottom of the canyons to a tropical town called Batopilas. There we will spend the rest of our days until our return home to Dublan.

So that is our tentative plan.

And here are some random pictures for your viewing pleasure:

1. Ila, Liam, and Rus were walking past the church by the school yesterday and noticed this little yellow bird flying around inside the hallways. They found an open door, Rus easily caught it because it was so exhausted, and they let it go outside. You can see the little bird in Rus' hand.

2. A beautiful house that is now the headquarters of the Diario (a newspaper).

3. A nativity scene in front of someone's house that is missing the baby Jesus. For a long time we thought it was so sad that someone would steal it and then that they never replaced it with a new one. Then we were told that it is a tradition for a lot of people to not put the baby Jesus out until Christmas.

4. A crazy scary huge old rickety slide in the backyard of a friend's house. This father of the family who has it now used to slide down it on wax paper when he was a kid and would fly off the middle hump. Yikes. It's scary enough without the wax paper. Liam loved it though. We took some vidoes of him.

5. Rus and Mei. Weeeeee!

bicicletas

There are some cool ones here that we want to import. Click here for the link. The mercurio has a lot of unique bikes, but Rus is especially coveting this model that is popular with vendors here and reminds us of Christiania bikes.

preschool party

1. Ila and Mei showing off their bags that their teachers made for everyone.
2. Mei excited about her present from the gift exchange (a pencil case)
3. Our little blondies at the beginning of the line.
4. Ila trying to smash the piñata
5. A classmate who was so proud of her sombrero (four lucky kids got one from the broken piñata)
6. Candy scramble!

tis the season...

...for crazy decorated trees!