February in Colima

At the petatera
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February Report

Professional activities

J's British Council Report for Feb

The new semester started this month which meant that things have been a bit slow to start again! I still have the students from the School of Tourism coming for their compulsory classes, but I have re-arranged the classes so they are now an hour long (instead of half an hour). This gives the students time to be late (which they invariably are!) but also means they get a lot more time to talk and participate in the lessons. Normally I plan an activity and then get the students to chat. I made the first lesson quite easy as it had been a while since the students had spoken English, so we played a true or false game practising different sentence structures. The following week’s topic was Valentine’s Day where the students had quizzes to fill out and games to play, all with a Valentine’s theme. I have also done a class on numbers and the alphabet as my students still have trouble with both. Hopefully it is now thoroughly drummed into them! The final class of the month was about doubts and problems students had with English. I wanted to do this class before the students started their exams in March. We covered ‘many, much, a lot,’ ‘any and some,’ comparatives and superlatives and the omission of ‘the’ in certain sentences. Needless to say, I had to look up these rules myself as I also wasn’t sure on how and where to use them!

Cabalgata
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I have changed the length of my other conversation classes too- they are also now an hour. This means that the number of classes I give has been reduced (and a lot of students can’t make the times) but I think the ones that can make it get a lot more benefit from the longer classes.

With regards to resources I haven’t had a lot of time this month due to the longer conversation classes and the increased amount of lesson planning I have to do. I have carried on sorting through the CDs and the lyrics, but it is taking a really long time due to the fact there are a lot of lyrics missing. I have started making up a few exercises for some of the songs, but I haven’t got very far yet.

"Playing" with bulls
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Socio-cultural Activities

My first weekend in February I went with Liz (my Mexican sister), Karla and Lucina (two friends from work) and Lucina’s boyfriend, César to the beach. We went to Manzanillo which is about an hour from Colima. We stayed in a hotel apartment pretty much in the centre of Manzanillo. We spent the first day by the pool and went out in the evening, then on Sunday we went to the beach which was lovely although the current in the sea was really strong!

The feria came to Villa de Alvarez in the middle of February so I went with friends to the cabalgata (a horse parade which involved lots of drinking, horses dancing and people jumping up and down in the back of trucks to banda music!) We went one Saturday afternoon to the petatera to watch young men seeing how long they could stay on the back of crazy bucking bulls (whilst listening to the obligatory banda music!) We also went to the palenque where we saw cock fighting (I didn’t enjoy that very much!) and Joan Sebastian in concert. I didn’t know who he was before the concert but I really enjoyed it, and the atmosphere was incredible. Apparently the palenquein Colima is the largest in Latin America- it seats 15000 people and it was almost full! In complete contrast to the first cabalgata I also saw the cabalgata de gasolina which instead of horses involves cars, trucks and even buses and lots of men dressed up as women- very funny if not slightly surreal!

Sandra and John, Me and Juan Carlos dancing to banda
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Liz, Karla and I went one Sunday to Laguna Carrizalillos which is a lake up near the volcano. We had a picnic there and spent the afternoon relaxing, chatting and walking round the lake. It was very peaceful.

My last weekend in February I went to Mazatlán for the carnival. It took 11 hours to get there, but it was worth it! I met up with Rowena early Friday morning at the bus station in Mazatlán and we were lucky enough to find a hotel that was close to the beach and a short walk from the centre. Stef arrived that evening and we went into the centre to listen and watch everyone dancing to banda. We spent Saturday on the beach at Isla de la Piedra, which is a beautiful stretch of white sand along a peninsular. We found a vegetarian restaurant that evening (Row and Stef were very pleased!) which had really nice food- so nice we went back the next day too! Saturday evening, instead of observing the banda we joined in! Row and I needed quite a bit of teaching but Stef was good! We wore carnival masks and I randomly got given (well it was left on my head!) a baseball hat by a complete stranger. We had a great night and finally staggered home at 6am! The following evening (after a relaxing afternoon on the beach- much needed) we went to watch the carnival parade. The theme was to do with the sea so we saw lots of amazing floats with sea creatures and people dressed up in all sorts of costumes. I finally made it home on Monday after a very long 15 hour journey, but it was definitely worth it!