I´m sitting in the faculty computer pod at the Centro de Idiomas, the school where I´ll be teaching for the coming year. I´m here for a faculty meeting. The coordinator of the Centro, Maestro Miguel Angel Murrieta Rosendo, whom I met last week for the first time, told me he will introduce me at this meeting.

Pery (Esperanza) Zamora is my mentor here at the school. She took me to her house for lunch (la comida) last week, and I met her husband Serafin and their two daughters. Gabi, their older daughter, had just returned from a month in Toronto, Canada, where she was studying English.

The meal was wonderful--chicken in a cream sauce with corn and chile, red rice cooked perfectly, just the way I like it, nopalitos cooked with tomato, fried platanos, and corn tortilas. (Can you tell I´m an aficionada of the food here
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The faculty meeting turned out to be very similar to the meetings in my department at CNM: a presentation of the many tasks to complete and problems to resolve during the term, and the expression of many opinions and ideas on how best to accomplish them. I enjoyed being an onlooker of this event that looked and sounded so much like the meetings I'm used to, aware that if it had been back at my college, I would have been in the thick of the discussion.