Happy Santa Cruz Day

So here I spend most of time in La Plaza 24 de Septiembre and I was always wondering, "why is it called 24 de Septiembre?" Well as it turns out that's like "Santa Cruz Day" and it's the foundation of the city? It's the anniversary of the city or something. It's kind of like the 4th of July. I was in the plaza eating ice cream with my buddy Palmer at a really cool rooftop restaurant that we always go to at night. It was the 23rd and right at midnight there were tons of fireworks dotting the city-scape and it was quite the beautiful moment.

Because of the holiday, I had a four day weekend and it was rad as hell. I pretty much just kinda lived the life up and it was so great. At night I meet up with friends at the plaza and we walk around and go to different places; I love the lifestyle I have here. During the day I do different things. It's mostly lazily move around and get ready for the day until like 1 or 2 before I do anything. This week though was a lot of starting my VISA work so I can continue to stay here legally.

There was a feria here that I went to yesterday and it was really interesting. I realized that sometime really weird things can be different. I didn't know that there were other kinds of cows. They had a whole bunch of cows that were just straight white and had these weird, tumor-looking things on the backs of their necks. It's straight meat and apparently it's really good tasting. I can't wait to try it.

After the feria I went and met up with some friends in the plaza. This was yesterday and it made me realize how much I like being foreign here. I was kind of bored at the table cause I came so late so jumping into the conversation and what-not was hard and all they told me about was the stuff I missed so I didn't really care. I saw a group of girls come in and sit at a table near ours. I turned to exchange student Aaron and asked him if he wanted to go talk to them. He was like "sure." So all I did was get up and sat by them and said, "hi, my name is Josh and this is my friend Aaron" and that was it. They talked to us all night and we ended up not having to pay for anything because of it. The girls were from La Paz so I just kind of talked about my friends Teresa and Micaela that were exchange students in Door County. But since they weren't from here I got to actually suggest things to do around the plaza. It was at that moment I felt like I could start to say that I actually live here, not just that I'm staying here. It was pretty cool.

This weekend was homecoming at Sturgeon Bay. I was a little bummed for about 5 minutes that I missed it but then I remembered why I enjoyed the dances. I like the dressing up, all the festivities, the dancing all night with good friends, acquaintances, and people you just met. Then I realized I've been doing that all weekend for the last 4 or 5 weekends (I am bad at keeping track of the time here) and if I was in Door County I'd pretty much get 3 chances to do that (homecoming, sady's, and prom) but here the schools do festivities like that pretty regularly to make money for their big senior trips (my class' is to Cancun next year). And if there aren't any of those I can go to the center and go to any of the almost 100 different places to go dancing. Everyone here is really friendly so that if (pretty much when because people will just grab us and dance/talk to us) we get separated we can always instantly make some new friends.

I am honestly not fully looking forward to school just because of how much of my day it takes up. Although, last week I was just really tired and was feeling pretty lazy so I just went to school at around like 10:30-11 and when I checked into the office they were just like "it's no problem." A major perk of having a super nice host family and just being an exchange student. I really like the 4 day weekend and I'm looking forward to my summer vacation that's coming up shortly. I liked not really needing to do to much and just living the life here; it's so great.

Love you all

P.S. I was requested to post picture on the blog here instead of just being exclusively on my Facebook but the thing is is that as of now, I do the blog via my computer and I take pictures with my phone so I just upload my photos from my phone because I am far to lazy to transfer them to the computer. Maybe one day if I have enough free time I'll figure out a different method but as of now, this is far easier. Sorry.