Conference

First of all, I just found this cool website that takes newly uploaded images and displays them as a never-ending slideshow: http://play.blogger.com. I like it a lot because it is really random and I like to try to guess what people are talking about all over the world through their images. If I find one particulary interesting, I can click on it and see what they wrote about as well.

I clicked on this one and really liked the story: http://keyholeministry.blogspot.com/2007/09/cookies.html. Unfortunately, the rest of the entries aren't like this one.

And I liked this one http://chica-cinica.blogspot.com/ because it is so artsy and awesome.

This week, Pablo, Gaby, Maria Luisa, Mary Carmen, Juanita and I went to a conference on e-learning at the Universidad de Guadalajara Cucea. At first I was excited because I thought we would be getting out at the same time we do for school...but that was not the case. We got out at 8 pm every night. The good thing was I didn't have to wake up as early and so I got an extra hour of sleep sort of.

I was also excited because I thought I'd be learning different methods for teaching computers to kids. Instead, it was how to perform research for a thesis dealing with e-learning. There was also a workshop on story telling and I was going to switch to it, except they stayed until 9 everyday and with my workshop I would get out at 3 on Friday instead of 9. Plus, Gaby and Pablo were in that workshop, so they just let me know what they learned each day.

The best thing about the conference was that I got to know some of the teachers better. During the breaks, Pablo and I played basketball and volleyball with some of the college students (feels weird that I'm not one now). And we went to a mall and played pool. Pablo has a "home-made" entertainment system for his car which I found fascinating. He took his PSP and downloaded software onto it so he could play movies on it. Aparently, it uses the same codec that Ipods do. Then he put velco on the back and velco on the front of the dashboard of his car and hooked up his PSP to the CD player of the car. So now if he is stuck in traffic, he can just watch movies while he waits.

Every morning, I would wake up and take the bus to the school and then get a ride to Cucea with Maria Luisa. Since we always talk English at school, we talked English in the car and at the conference. But all the other teachers that went were Mexican and so they naturally started speaking Spanish to each other and by the end of the week, I was speaking Spanish with them.

Cucea's campus is really nice. There are lime trees...hmmm now that I think about that, I wonder if there is such a thing as a lime tree or if it has another name...there were orange trees and lots of green grass. While I was there, they gave me a pamphlet on the degrees and majors they have there and I'm considering going to get my Master's but I have to look into it more. There is so much I want to learn and I want to choose wisely.

Friday, I went with Felicitas (works for the school and helps me with my Visa) and Mary (high school teacher from the US) to the immigration office to sign for our work Visas. Mine was there and so I was done in 5 minutes, but there was an error in the system or something and they had to go find Mary's paper work. So while we waited, I brought out my Homer Simpson rubik's cube and let Mary play with it while I read Harry Potter in Spanish. But then a little 2 year old kid came over and wanted to play with it. He was fascinated with making it move and then he started playing with it like it was a truck. In the end, he ended up throwing it in the air and letting it hit the ground. Well, I didn't want it to break and so after the first time, I took it back and held it up high so he could not reach it and I sat back in my chair to put it in my backpack. He got angry and grabbed my knee and bit it! It didn't really hurt, but I was quite surprised and to make him release, I tapped him on the head. He was a cute little shit. Hahah.

This Friday, I went with Victoria and her sister to a rock concert. I didn't know any of the bands, but it was fun nonetheless. Most of the time I couldn't hear what they were singing either but it seemed like good music. One of the bands was Panda and they had a few good songs. I don't know if I heard this one there, but it's pretty good and the video reminds me of Eyes Wide Shut:



And Saturday I played soccer with my team. We got creamed 15-1. I'm the youngest on our team and the rest are 30 or older and we don't practice. The other team were college students and obviously practice a lot. Not enough to shut us out though hahah. My goal was pretty. I don't think it compares to when I was in high school and we were loosing 12-0 to our rival Pope and the ball was crossed in. Kephren whiffed it (he said he meant to hahah yeah right) which put the ball almost to the sideline behind the 18 yard line and I banana kicked it with a force unknown to mankind. Still this goal made us feel like we weren't total losers.

Unfortunately we play on turf and I slide to save the ball from going out of bounds and now I have a turf burns on the side of my calf, my knee and the side of my butt...it burns especially when I shower.