Day 1- Travel Day
Another trip was about to begin. An early flight of course meant laying in bed not being able to sleep interspersed with nightmares of waking up 5 hours late. Nonethelss, I made it to the UCF house to get a ride to the airport (Hunter rules!). We got to the airport, checked in (they gave me a ticket with Robbie’s name, so that had to get cleared up), and then met with some other group members. Ally, a new friend, wanted us to all check-in together and do everything together, but we had already checked-in, so we went through security and waited at the gate like good little international travelers.
As departure time approached, we were apparently missing one of our group members. There was frantic texting and calling. There was a virtual play-by-play of her location as she got to the airport, waited in line, and then tried to get a ticket. Alas, they had closed the flight though. Stephanie wasn’t getting to Mexico City today. Once we got on the plane, we met Santiago and his mother. They were on standby, and luckily (for them), someone had overslept. Santiago was a surpriseingly calm and quiet baby up to the point that his mother was filling out her customs form. Robbie successfully aquired the proivelidge of holding the baby during this paperwork part of the flight. He was a whole lot less fidgety sitting in Uncle Robbie’s lap.
Once we got to Mexico City, we had to eat. Oh, and also we had to wait 4 hours for everyone to get there too. So, our first meal came from some strange place called McDonalds, where the two quarterpounders seemed expensive. Of course we didn’t quite understand the exchange rate just yet, so had no idea how much money we had spent. There was much eating, some napping, some wandering around the airport. We found a nicer looking resteraunt with nicer looking hosteses. We asked them some importsant questions in our terrible Spanish. “How many pesos for margaritas?” They laughed and finally answered. “How many pesos are beer?” Another answer that meant nothing (exchange rate problem again). “How many pesos for your phone number?” Didn’t ask that, but you can imagine.
Finally, around 5, the entire group was in Mexico (minus Santiago’s original seat owner). We somehow just ran into Alfredo and Daniel. So, we loaded up and off we went. The commute was roughly 2 hours. We arrived in the darkness to see that Alfredo’s green truck (that is older than me) appeared to still be sitting on good tires and operational. That thing is amazing!
We ate a small meal and then pretty much just split up and were assigned to stay with local host families. Me and Robbie were sent to live with Oscar and his dad Oscar, or as they say in Mexico, “Oscar y Oscar.” Robbie got the guest room, which meant that I was to be in Oscar’s room. Upon further inspection, this meant that I was going to be sleeping in a bed shaped like a race car!
