Daily life in PR

Bonding with the Sixth Graders

Recently I went on my first GPS field trip. We took a three hour bus trip through the curvy mountatins in an outdated school bus to see the largest radio telescope in the world in Arecibo. Despite the the sixth grade dance party with Jonas brother and Daddy Yankee music on the bus we finally made it. The museum had many hands on informative stations for the kids and it was interesting to find out how scientist travel from all over the world to Arecibo to use the telescope to learn more about our universe and beyond. The best part was actually spending time with the kids, the long day was worth it. Aren't they cute?!

Unfortunately, Puerto Rico has many homeless wandering dogs that just break my heart. There happened to be one who comes around my house, that I really want to take in (can you guess why?). I named him Omar because he came around right after the hurricane Omar that was suppose to hit us. I can't believe this little guy survived the rains, he's a tough cookie.

Trick or Treat!

We dressed up as Puerto Rican boxers for halloween and then went out for the night. I was "Juanma Lopez" and Andrea was "Ivan Calderon". I think that the Puerto Ricans were pretty impressed with our research we did for our costumes.

Elections

I'm sure things got pretty crazy at home around the election time, but I have never seen politics the way I have seen them here. Each of the parties caravans around town in a parade of cars with loudspeakers blaring music, hanging out of the car swinging their flags and beers. They come at all hours of the day and night. They will hold up traffic for hours, but the Puerto Ricans don't seem to mind. So the night before the elections we decided to find oursevles a parade. There are two main parties here that our color associated so we wore blue shirts and brought red ones so when we found a parade we could jump in. We ended up finding the Popular Party(red) so we put on our red shirts and started honking the horn and shouting. The parade actually ended up in the plaza at their rally. Look in the picture you can see that even the family dog goes. To the right is a picture of one of my students supporting the popular party.