Future Plans

Sometimes things don't work out exactly the way you plan them.

I was looking to stay in Tijuana and work in San Diego, but unfortunately, that's not going to happen right now. Why not? Well, it all boils down to down to me and the economy: both are poor right now. I had a job lined up down here, but it fell through right before I was about to start, and that threw a huge monkey wrench into the works. 

Time to come up with a new plan.

I'm going to come back to Philadelphia and work there for a while. Live at home, keep the costs low, visit here a lot, and then come back out here for good once I'm ready. Hopefully it won't be too long a time. Although it's going to be difficult being away from Catalina, we're up to the challenge, and I think it'll be better for us in the long run.

So to those of you looking for a place to crash in Mexico -- you're out of luck for now. But maybe by the time I update this blog next, you won't be.

Stay tuned.

What's new

So, I said I was going to try to update this blog a little more frequently, and I did. I tried. It didn't work.

But that doesn't mean I've given up. We've just been excessively busy down here. Since the end of February, we had a grand total of 5 days free. To top it off, for 2 of those, I was sick – long story short, be careful eating Chinese food in Mexico.

Now we have a little more free time, since we're through the thick of the spring break trips. Life is good down here; I'm actually looking at staying once my year is up. More to come on that.

Anyway, not much else to tell at the moment. We'll try again tomorrow.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Climbers

Climbers
Originally uploaded by dcipjr

The border fence at Playas is always an interesting place to visit. I've talked to Americans on the American side through the fence, heard some pretty cool stories from Mexicans on the Mexico side, and even been buzzed by a border patrol helicopter.

I can now add seeing a movie get filmed to the list.

We go to Playas with every group as part of our border tour. When we were there with the awesome group from Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, we noticed these odd diagonal-runged ladders against the fence, and with all sorts of lights and cameras pointed at them.

Turns out it was a documentary being filmed, "La Historia de Migración". The film crew was rushing around and didn't have time to give us many details -- like, why exactly these guys were climbing ladders against the fence, while a guy played the bugle and another guy played a drum -- so I can't explain this picture much more.

But even though I don't understand this scene, and I doubt the film will ever be a box-office hit in the USA, watching it was still pretty cool.

Giant juice boxes

When we were kids, we all got juice boxes in our lunch boxes. But Mexico has taken the juice box to a whole new level:


That's right. It's a 1-liter juice box. Apple juice, to be exact. Maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal to you, but come on -- it's 1 liter of juice, in a box. To someone who always was still thirsty after drinking the juice box in his lunch, this is pretty cool.

A new post!

Well, it's come to my attention that some people (well, one person in particular) reads this occasionally-updated blog, so I'm going to try my best to keep it updated.

So, what's new in Tijuana? Everything is great. In fact, life is even better than it was when I posted my last entry -- and at that time, I couldn't envision life getting any better. I love it down here. The people, the work I'm doing, everything. So I'm doing my best to make the most of the time I've got left.

Of course, there's the possibility that when my year is over, I might be taking up a more permanent residence down here. But that's still in the works, so I can't comment on that yet.

I've been keeping flickr updated with plenty of new photos, so make sure you're checking that out.

Right now we're in a bit of downtime; now that Christmas vacations and winter breaks are over, we have a couple weeks before the spring breaks start, so that means there's no group. But I've been keeping busy working on stuff for Los Niños and spending time with this one girl I met down here...

So I'll try to keep this updated a little more. Check back. You may find something.

Oops.

Yeah, so I just deleted my entire blog by mistake.

How exactly did that happen? Well...everything in Blogger was in Spanish, because it sees my IP address as being from Mexico, so it defaults to Spanish. I decided to keep it that way, instead of changing the language, because hey, I speak Spanish. So it shouldn't be a problem.

Well, I don't think the problem turned out to be Spanish, but rather, sheer stupidity. I clicked the button to delete the blog, thinking it was the "Publish" button, and just was too lazy to read the warning.

Now I'm going to have to reconstruct all my posts from the Facebook feed I was using. The moral of the story? Keep your web pages in your native language. And if you don't, don't be lazy.

Pacific Standard Time

So you know the whole thing with daylight savings time beginning earlier and starting later this year? That may be true in the States – but it isn't here in Mexico. So tonight, the clocks roll back, same as always.

This means that for about a week or so, we're going to be an hour behind San Diego, and four hours behind the East Coast. We're picking up a group at San Diego International at 4 PM on Tuesday, and after pick-up, we'll probably arrive back in Tijuana at 3:30 PM.

Gilberto says that it's actually good, because it staggers the traffic rush hours at the border, making crossing a lot easier. I guess we'll see -- but it's definitely going to keep looking at the clock a little more interesting during the next week.