Hotel Fenix Guadalajara

... crawled across my chest. I instinctively brushed it off me, but I was still half asleep and it was too dark to see what it was. All I knew was that whatever it was had been big enough to wake me from my slumber.

Yet last night I had forgotten all about this incident and drifted off to sleep as normal - only to be woken once again in the small hours of the morning by something crawling along my back. This time I was quick off the mark and reached for ...

My twenty-first birthday conveniently fell on a Friday this year, and I made the most of it with an eventful four day weekend. It was certainly a birthday to remember, despite tentative plans of going to Las Vegas being scuppered by a collective lack of funds.

The celebrations started on Thursday night in "Mutualista", where I saw a number of familiar faces from both CEPE and last week's trip to Michoacan. After a couple of poor ...

... week I visited the historic city centre, browsed several local markets, and took a trip to La Barranca, a huge green canyon on the edge of town which offers a stark contrast to the urban metropolis. The second biggest city in Mexico, Guadalajara is completely unlike any of the places we had visited previously. It is further north than anywhere else we had been, and has much more of a modern, American feel to it. There is less indigenous influence, but being the ...

... to clear my place and bring the dirty dishes into the kitchen. Though she is still perplexed by the practice, she´s resigned herself to my taking off my shoes at the front door (she leaves hers on throughout the day). After I discovered she was cleaning my room every day, I started pre-emptively making my bed and opening the windows, but she still comes in to re-arrange the pillows and tuck the sheets even tighter around the corners (or so I ...

... be my home for the next several months. Guadalajara is huge, a maze of stubby white buildings spreading across a verdant plain. The city is surrounded by rippling hills and the enormous Lago Chapala to the south.
I'm staying at a hostel in a neighborhood called Colonia Americana, which is sort of the hip, newer part of town. Restaurants and bars abound (everything from delis to sushi joints, american-style burger palaces, ice cream parlors, the ...

... son spoke English. The mum cooked tasty, kind of Mexican food which, like all the food in Mexico, was extremely oily and greesy. If you don’t like greesy food Mexico would be hard. If you were a vegetarian it wouldn’t be the best. If you liked pickled carrot, pickled green unfamiliar vegetables, beans and cheese it would be ok. My other advice is never order a salad in Mexico. I watched someone do this, I warned them not to but they ordered it anyway. The ...

Hola everyone, Still here in Guadalajara, though for sleeping I've relocated to Tlaquepaque (right outside the city, even if it sounds like it should exist in a Dr. Seuss book), where I'm renting an apartment. For the most part, life has been very calm and quiet. This time next week, I'll be in Ecuador! Got over the cold from hell... though I think I qualified for a world record in snot production. Went through three packages of tissues in 36 ...

... We will meet the rest of the students on January 2, 2008 Touch down in Guadalajara was gorgeous, pasing over a huge canyon and the mountains while the sun set. We arrived around 5:15 PM and got our first taste of what the country was going to be like with a language barrier. The announcements were completely in Spanish and very fast. Lili and Kevin speak a little Spanish, and I speak whatever I learned from Taco Bell commercials. Good grief. This was going to be hard. After ...

... cream shops! BIG doughnuts for 25 cents each, nachos and sandwiches for $1. The pizza was sooo good, with apple fizzy drinks and the ice cream in Mexico is the best!!! Freshly homemade with whole strawberries inside! They beat the undies off red bean flavoured ones in Asia... My school days were long and tiring, although I enjoyed it and learnt a lot, and had a lot of fun with my classmates. Two American girls become my best friends ...