Good Food and New Friends

After our nice day at the beach on Saturday, Leticia invited me to her home on Sunday for dinner. She has recently moved into a new house---quite large for a single person---3 floors with, I think, 4 or 5 bedrooms. She is so thrilled with the house and I am happy for her.

Right now, our friend, Lucy, who is a pediatrician from Guadalajara, is living with Lety on the weekends. Lucy is working at a clinic here in Vallarta on Saturday and Sunday, and then returns to Guadalajara, by bus, to care for her private practice in Guadalajara during the week.

Anyway...Lety is slowly buying furniture for her house and loves her new kitchen, thus, the dinner invitation! She said 2:00 PM for la comida, with Guillermina and Isthalia, and also that I would meet her friend, Carmen. Since she lives very close to me, I took the bus to her house. On the way, I saw this pick-up truck filled with wonderful fruit and vegetables. I couldn't resist a photo of it. Doesn't it look good?







I actually got to her house at exactly 2:00---a real faux pas in Mexico!! One should never arrive on time for an invitation. 30 to 60 minutes late is acceptable, but it had started to rain and I wasn't about to lurk about in the rain, waiting to be late!!! I knew Lety would forgive me! Here she is in front of her house. Doesn't she look happy?

In case you are wondering, the pink "sidewalk" is actually where she parks her car. Cars are parked right next to the houses here and usually there is an iron gate surrounding the car and entrance to the house. I don't know why there is no gate at Lety's house. Maybe because it is a new development, the gates have not been installed yet.

The first course was shrimp cerviche. Oh, my gosh, it was good! I will ask for her recipe and you will taste it some day at our house! For dinner, we had fish and a salad: lettuce, tomatoes, with pickled onions. Dessert was canned peaches. I will spare you the picture of the dinner but here are the cerviche and tostadas.

Lucy joined us when she got home from the hospital and I enjoyed the afternoon, the dinner, and the new friendship with Carmen.

Leticia is a superintendent of the public pre-schools here in PV and she has instigated a new program of teaching English in some of the kindergartens and elementary schools. In the public schools in Mexico, they start teaching English in the Middle Schools, so teaching English classes in elementary and kindergarten is a new concept for PV. She has been working on implementing this program for 2 years or more. This is the first year and she is excited about it.

On Tuesday evening she had a meeting of some of the English teachers and she asked me to come and talk with them about teaching English.

Ana teaches English in kindergarten, Ricardo and Miguel both teach 2nd grade English, next is Lety, then me, and in the purple is Magdalena who teaches kindergarten English in the morning and in the afternoon she teaches middle school English. Ramona joined us after the picture was taken. (Thanks to the nice waitress who took the picture and made sure our heads were in the middle of the picture!!! Why do people do that, I wonder?!!)

Lety had very nice metal, magnetic, nametag pins made for each teacher with their name and "English Teacher" on it. She asked me to do the honors and present the pins. This is Miguel receiving his pin while Lety looks on. We took a picture of each teacher and I emailed the photos to them. They were very happy.

This has been a very long blog but I simply must tell you about Magdalena and her classes. The public schools in Mexico have 2 sessions because there are so many students. A child attends class in the morning (usually 7:30-12:30) OR in the afternoon (2:00-8:00). She teaches the kindergarten in the morning and then from 2:00-8:30 she teaches in the middle school. There she has 3 groups of 7th graders, 3 groups of 8th graders and 3 groups of 9th graders. In each class there are between 30 and 50 students. So she teaches 9 classes there and says that discipline is a huge problem for her. You can just imagine---that age group, that many students in a class---I truly don't know how she does it. I have so much respect for the public school teachers in Mexico.

Thanks for sticking with me and now, finally, I can say to you:

Hasta luego!