January in Colima

Liz and Karla on a night out
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January Report

Professional activities

J's January Report for the BC

This month has been very quiet as all my students have been on holiday; therefore I have worked fewer hours at the CAAL. I have created more resources; continuing the exercises on “lingo,” and setting up more advanced “fill in the gap” exercises. To create these exercises I have taken articles from the BBC magazine which are quite specific e.g. about football, how sound travels etc and taken out words from each paragraph. These words are then muddled up and placed in a box at the bottom of the page and the students have to put the correct words in the gaps.

The volcano people
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I have also started sorting through all the lyrics that are stored in the CAAL, checking all the CDs work and that the songs match the lyrics. This is quite a long task as the lyrics were not really in any sort of order and there are lyrics missing for some of the songs. I have started re-cataloguing the CDs and finding the missing lyrics on the internet. When I have done this I plan to create some exercises based on listening to song lyrics because at the moment the students just come in to listen to music and don’t really get any benefit from it. I would also like to put some more recent music onto CDs because a lot of the music we have at the moment is from several years ago.

The hall where Perla had her 15th birthday
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It’s also been suggested that I could create exercises for the films that are on video and DVD too so that the students are actively watching and listening the films.

Social Activities

I went back to the UK for Christmas which was really nice. It was great to catch up with my family and friends again- although the temperature difference between there and Colima was about 20ºC lower! I arrived back in Mexico City at the beginning of January where I spent the weekend with a German girl, Pia, who I’d met in Colima. I stayed with Pia and her friend for the weekend and we went round Templo Mayor which was really interesting and also around Coyoacan, (one of the oldest parts of Mexico City) which is close to where Pia lives.

My Mexican family (Liz, Perla, Seora Lety and Fer)
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I had a lovely welcome from my family when I arrived back in Colima, and it was nice to meet Liz the older sister who’d returned from Europe. I also met some more guys who work on the volcano here in Colima and had a hilarious night out with them- it was nice to speak English for a night!

A few days later it was Perla’s fifteenth birthday and so we had a party. Perla didn’t really want the big party that is normally associated with girls’ fifteenth birthdays, but what started off as having a few friends round for pizza (few meant twenty in Perla’s terms!) turned into hiring a hall for 100 people and ordering 7kg of Pozole and 3kg of cake!

Aunts, Uncles and Cousins
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One weekend after that I went with two of the guys who work on the volcano to El Santuario de Mariposas in Angangueo near Morelia. We met a group of American students there who are studying in Puebla who one of the guys knew so we went with them into the reserve. It was an absolutely incredible experience; we saw millions of Monarch butterflies that migrate every year to this place from Canada and the United States. I’ve never seen anything like it- so many butterflies on trees that the trees looked orange! And hearing the sound of all their wings too… It was worth 2 uncomfortable 12 hour trips to get there and back!

More of the family
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Finally I also went to visit Stef in Tepic. I arrived on a Friday evening and after meeting Stef’s lovely flatmates and eating with them we went to a graduation party where I met lots of her friends. On Saturday we went to a lake about 40 minutes away from Tepic which was beautiful and we had some delicious ceviche and other fish dishes (overlooking the lake). We were planning on going out Saturday night but we were all so tired we fell asleep at 6.30pm and didn’t wake up until the middle of the night! Sunday we went to a ranch in the country with the relatives of one her housemates where we had amazing barbequed fish. I had a chance to look round the town centre before I left on Monday morning and managed to buy quite a few things from the Huicholi people there!