My friend Anne Bryson, visiting from Philadelphia, and I were eating breakfast at my dining room table this morning when I spied a Fed-Ex truck parking in front of my house and a moment later the guy bringing a small rectangular package to my door.

When I opened it, I found a familiar-looking manila envelope with a familiar-looking address in the left-hand corner: Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program. Hallelujah! Another proposed exchange, again in Mexico! I thought I would have to wait much longer--and perhaps wait fruitlessly--for another possible exchange.

This time I knew what to do to find out the location of the proposed exchange: I called the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs at CNM and asked Louise Scherffius, executive secretary, to see if a Fulbright packet had been received in the President's office. She called me back a couple hours later to give me the news: the proposed exchange location is at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz!

I quickly googled "Xalapa Mexico" and found its location on a map: 64 miles west of Veracruz, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, and 187 miles east of Mexico City. It's a university town (three of 'em) with a population of 387,000 as of the 2000 census. (Read more about Xalapa on Wikipedia.) My exchange partner teaches at the Centro de Idiomas, Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa.

Xalapa sounds wonderful to me! Now I must wait and see if my exchange parnter's school and mine agree that the exchange would be beneficial to both institutions.

I'm trying to restrain myself from running down the halls and shouting the news. But it's Good Friday afternoon, so there's hardly anyone here on the fifth floor of Max Salazar Hall to share my good news with anyway.