¡Hola internet! What a week. I'm here in Mérida, Mimi went to Cancun to pick up her brother at the airport and then to Akumal for the week. I took a week of Spanish classes which started at 9am waaaay across the city. I am not a morning person, I had to get up at 7:30am to get to class on time. I came home and slept a couple of days but I'm very short of sleep right now.

Also, it is Carnival. Mérida has one of the largest celebrations of Carnival in Latin America. It started Wednesday with the Burning of Bad Moods, yesterday was the parade of the children and tonight was the first of the major parades. The theme this year is the Year of Marvels, because this year Chichen Itza was named as one of the 7 Marvels of the World and Chichen Itza is in the same state, Yucatán. I didn't go... but I watched it live on TV, does that work?

My favorite group were the DIF Adultos Mayores which is a group of, shall we say, persons of a certain age. They were spectacular, suspend your biases for a minute and imagine troops of women who are all over 60 and are dressed in the sexy outfits you see on Mardi Gras floats, who dance down the street in unison with perfect rhythm. They put the hip action in the salsa, they had the moves and the outfits and the will. It looked like a few of them were lacking a bit of endurance and the heels were not as high but they worked it all the way down that long boulevard.

After the parade, the local channel went to one of the many stages along the route where bands were performing. I don't know why they picked the one they did but it was definitely not the best of the lot. After the first band, a guy came out in a full Zorro outfit (I may be the only person still living that remembers the TV show Zorro) with the black mask, the cape and everything. Under his name it said impersonator y cantante, impersonator and singer. His first song was 'Wooly Bully' which I might also be the only person alive who remembers all the words. He sang it in Spanish but there is no missing that tune and that refrain. I should have changed the channel then but no, I waited until he started his next song which just might have been a big hit for Donnie and Marie. At that point, I switched to the national channel and got lost in a telenovela. I'll have to blog sometime about the prime time soaps here, telenovelas, they are fantastic!

I dropped by the house a couple times after class and I was happy to see the walls already going up for the 2nd floor that we are adding. It's daunting, the amount of work that remains but I am still excited by the process and the visible results.