Camp Cabungalo in Brenham Texas and Mexico

Oh My Gosh. This week has been absolutely INCREDIBLE. After wishing for ever to be hosted with a ton of people all together, I finally found myself rooming with nine other students on a ranch in Texas. The ranch has three cabins/bungalos, we're not sure what they are exactly, so hence the name, Camp Cabungalo. Each cabungalo has two rooms, each room two beds and its' own bathroom. On top of living in hotel style conditions with a ton of other awesome people, I got to share my room with my bff in the cast, Molly. We were so stoked to find out that we were rooming together. We basically knocked each other over from excitement when we found out.



This week was mostly amazingly fun. When we first arrived here at The Retreat (the REAL name of our ranch) we spent a good fifty minutes freaking out about how awesome it is and taking pictures. We had a huge bonfire and Molly, who also is a singer songwriter, and I played guitar and sang for a long time. We didn't sleep at all that night and we got to know this awesome chick Brittany a lot better. We stayed up all night drinking coffee, playing pool, laughing, making ridiculous videos, and generally having a ball. We didn't sleep for thirty-three hours, which was a record for me. The day after our all nighter we worked on our Mexico Medley, which is sweeeeet.



The week basically was night after night of late or all nighter coffee drinking, video making, bonfire dancing, amazingness. Last night we decorated plastic eggs and filled them with tea bags, almonds, uncooked noodles, and other random stuff we found in the kitchen. We then covered them in googly eyes and feathers. It seemed like every single evening when we returned to our haven, It was so soo cool to get to know more members of the cast much, much better.

Ah, it is now April 2nd and I've been in Mexico for nearly two weeks already! My last host family didn't have a computer or internet so I am only now finishing this blog.

The first week in Mexico was awesome. We were in Monterrey, where I lived with an alum of Up with People named Mayte, her two beatutiful, intelligent daughters Marisa and Mariana, their father Geno and their abuela (grandmother) Teresa. Mayte always said I fit right in because my name started with M. I got to be very close with Mariana who is 12. Everyone in the family spoke excellent English but insisted on speaking Spanish most of the time so I could improve. We played Scrabble a lot so I could learn new, important words like balde, which means bucket, and morro, which means purr. I feel like my head is getting back into the Spanish language and I understand a lot better than I did when I arrived.

Now we are in Mexico City and staying with a cool girl, Ana who's twenty years old and lives with her really nice abuela and aunt. Ana works at a gym that's in a really nice indoor/outdoor mall. Every night she picks my roommate Veronica (from Norway) and me up and we stay here until eleven o'clock. We drink coffee at Starbucks and talk endlessly. I continue to get exactly what I want as far as roommates and host families.

Being in Mexico has been harder than I expected. Maybe because it's so different from home and I've been semi cut off from communicating by cell or internet I have been feeling very homesick at times. In the US I didn't feel homesick hardly ever, and when I did think of home, I didn't feel very badly but here, it hits my harder than ever. I'm really grateful I have Veronica as my roommate for two weeks because we get along very well and I've been wanting to know her better for a long time.

Yesterday, we went to the pyramids at Teotuhican and I climbed the largest one, which is actually taller than the one in Egypt. It's so cool I can now say that I've climbed one of the seven wonders of the world.

onother exciting thing, on Friday, we get to meet the president of Mexico!

It's so cool and yet so challenging for me here. I'm learning a lot about myself, other people and the world. I'm really glad I'm here even though it's hard right now.

Hugs to all,
Marina