the world's largest city

Yesterday we left from Puebla from the tearing eyes of our host mom. A two hour drive led us to the Los Pinos grounds, the Mexican White House. Los Pinos stands for the Pines. It was originally a place bought by a rich Panamanian who name it Rancho Ormiga (Ant Ranch) because it was one of his smallest properties. We didn’t get to enter the buildings but from the outside they were very beautiful. We toured the area and learned about the many previous presidents while making fun of the old, traditionally-posed statues. Mid-way through the tour we got some unfortunate news - the first lady was not going to be able to greet us.

An hour later the tour buses arrived to our meeting location – which also happened to be our sponsor – Xochitla – an ecological park in the middle of Mexico City. Just a note – the small state of Mexico has close to 22 million people – 15 of which live in the city itself. I had no packed lunch – so when I found a snack shop, I found sanctuary for my stomach. There I gorged myself in nachos with cold cheese and a bag of Doritos – which essentially are cold nachos, too. After our routine allocation meeting, we split the group into host-family drop off sites: some stayed at the Xochitla site; the other went to a place called Satelite – close to an hour away. Phil Woods was assigned my roommate and we got on the bus going to Satelite. We quickly learned that with our meeting facility being at Xochitla, we had to get up an hour earlier. Woot!

That night we met our host family. I had no idea what to expect, but was hoping for another great Mexican host family. I trailed into the building to find Phil wearing a big white shirt that said “Po” in black letters. I looked to the left of him to put the rest of the picture together. My host family had made t-shirts with their hostcode: Tostadas de Pollo. I received my shirt with “llo” and completed the code. What a great introduction! We crammed into their small Dodge car with our luggage and went home to their beautiful house in the northern part of Mexico City. My host parents are named Rocio and Pareko and their daughters are named Mariel (Bocho) and Marisel. They had 3 dogs as well.