Tepoztlan

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\161Hola!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful week. We certainly did. We stayed very busy, did well in our classes, and even had time for a school-sponsored excursion. We have both been fighting a cold, along with what appears to be the whole school. Everyone here seems to be sniffling and coughing.

After school on Wednesday we went to a place called Tepoztlan. It is only a 30 minute drive from here but we seemed very remote as went into the mountains to a little village that is very different from Cuernavaca. The village is nestled in a large mountain that seems to be sticking right out of nowhere. You can see it from far off. It is thought to be a magical, magnetic place, perhaps because there is copper in the mountain. There are several witch craft and eastern religious stores. They call them "Metaphysical" stores selling quartz crystals, incense, druid runes, and you name it. Not much of the stuff is made in Mexico, but the quartz crystals come from the area. My professor says that many people get headaches there because of the magnetic power of the area. She says she has a friend that had a house built there but had to sell it and move back to Cuernavaca because she got constant headaches. Sarah, who never gets headaches, got one yesterday. And that was without me ever telling her the story my professor told me. Come to think of it, I still haven't told her.

While we were there we toured the church, built right after Cortés conquered the area in the early 1500's. We also walked through the monastery that was built before the church. It was a beautiful, peaceful place with breathtaking views out all the windows and picturesque gardens full of tropical fruit trees and fountains. A museum of local history, folk art, geography, and medicinal plants is now housed in the museum. We learned that people still live in huts in the mountains and still sleep on thin, hand-woven grass mats with only a thin blanket covering them. We also saw the small wood burning stoves hand made out of adobe that we saw in use in the Day of the Dead movie, "Food for the Ancestors." It is amazing to me that people still use something like this to cook their food. I know that many people, or perhaps I should say many women, in India cook every day over stoves like that and it is equivalent to them smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. Boy are we ever lucky to have our modern kitchens!

One of the most interesting things for me was seeing different types of exotic vegetation while driving through the mountains. Whenever I would ask our guide, who is from Cuernavaca, what a certain thing was he would give me the Nahuatl word. He gave us Nahuatl words for many plants and animals.

After doing some shopping in the central market we headed to the former hacienda built by the son of Hern\225n Cortés. Some of it has been restored and is now an inn and restaurant but most of it is in ruins. Even in ruins it is a magical place. It was the first of many haciendas built around here to grow and process sugar cane.

Today Sarah was given a little "despedida" or going away party here at school. Here teachers gave her presents and decorated her classroom area by the pool with balloons. Monday she starts at the Mexican school in a class of sixth graders that has half their day in Spanish and half in English. Actually, she doesn't start until Tuesday, because Monday is a holiday celebrating the battle of Cuatla. We will keep you posted as to how it goes for her!

Well, I will try to post some pictures. Hopefully I will be successful! I will write more on Monday to share with you Teotihuacan. We are going there on Sunday. We will see the great pyramids of the sun and moon, which rival the Egyptian pyramids. Hopefully we will catch a glimpse of Popocatepetl, the great smoking volcano of the area. If it had been a clear day we could have seen it from the monastery.

Speaking of the weather, the poor Yucatan Peninsula, where we were supposed to head as soon as we were finished with school has been devastated by the latest hurricane, which they call Isodoro here. We are very worried about the people living there. Have you heard anything on the news about the destruction? I tried to do a search on the NY Times website and nothing came up about Merida, our first stop. I know the place has been hit hard yet there was no coverage. I don't understand it.

\161Hasta lunes!