Look closly at the picture above. This is how most of the roads are paved in Colima. There are a lot of pot holes, so it is not unusual to wind back and forth on the street to avoid the various holes.
This is the house that I stayed in for 4 months. The family that I lived with had 9 children (most of whom were already grown and moved out). All three of their boys and one of their girls was still living with them. Although they were married, the father slept downstairs, and the mother slept upstairs. Divorce was not an option for them. The father and 2 of the brothers ran the family business of "Autolujos" (an auto parts store). They had two stores. One of the stores was in downtown Colima, and the other store was in Tecoman.
This is a picture of the windows. Look closely. I have never seen any of these kinds of windows here in the US> Since they didn't have air conditioning, and it get very hot, all of the windows had to stay open like this to get a breeze in the house.
This is the roof of the house. You can see the clothes line that served as our dryer. Who needs a dryer when it is 100 degrees outside?!!
By they way, I took many cold showers before someone asked me if I had turned on the water heater??? Huh??? Apparently, the water heater is turned off, and whoever is the first one up in the morning would be the one to turn it on to get hot water ready for the ret of the house. I just thought everyone was taking a cold shower!
This is the inside of the house. Yes, that is dirt. Many Mexican houses are built this way. Since there is no air onditioning or heater, the outside and inside are kind of one in the same. If you were to stand in that area where the dirt is and look up, you would see no roof. Of course, that's bad when it rains because that means rain in your house, too!
This is the room where I slept. Two of the girls were away on foreign exchange programs (the twins), so I got their room. I could choose which bead I wanted to sleep in. However, there were weekends that some of the girls (not the twins) came home to visit, and I would have to share the room.
This is a picture of the room from a different angle with the open windows and my trusting fan :0)
This store is Walmart~ Literally... I don't know why they don't use the same name.
This is the internet cafe inside the mall. This was the easiest place to check our e-mail. The mall wasn't too far from where I lived, and I just had to pay by the hour to use it. The computers at school were harder to use because they were in high demand. We would have to wait up to an hour to get on one, and then, our time was limited to 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the people in line behind us. This is Sherean who was part of our group of 13 students.
There is a McDonald's everywhere, and Colima is no different. Their hamburgers and fries do not taste the same as the ones here, though.
This is one of the malls in Colima. Thre were actually 2 malls in the city, but they weren't very big.
5 people in our group (including me in the middle). We are waiting for the bus to take us to school.
For those of you who don't know, I spent a semester in Mexico in 1999. I have photo albums full of pictures, and Kevin scanned them for me last week. I will be posting some of the pictures as I get a chance. For now, I am posting the pictures of Colima, Colima (city and state). Colima is not a place that people usually know anything about, so for the geography and cultural buffs, here is a link to info: http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/colima/colimaindex.html
You may remember my earlier post about the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico... Well, Colima had pyramids, too. The pyramids are probably 1/10th of the size of the ones outside of Mexico city. These pyramids are located in Villa de Alvarez, which is, also, the town where the college that I attended was located. Here is some more information:
