4 am

Here I am at 4 am. It's dark here. If I can shift my sleeping scedurle that just a couple more hours I'll be doing fine with the time change.
So we had our tours of the birth center and the student housing. The student housing where I am staying also is a big house with 5 bedrooms an office, living, dining, kitchen area. Big windows everywhere, all tile or wood floors. In fact there is tile everywhere. Everywhere you go the floors are all tile or marble. the birth center is 2 doors down the alley. It's a good size building, nice and clean.
So far the food has been great. We were thinking we would miss peanut butter here, and it turns out you can go and get fresh ground peanut butter really cheap. Most things are cheap here so far.
Monica and I went to a store yesterday. It’s only a short distance, but walking was hard because there are no sidewalks and the traffic is terrible. Little children walking on this road with cars zooming by them. It scared me.
It’s not like a loud city though. They honk, but no one seems mad. They are a gentle polite people. So on the way home we took this little motorcycle thing. It has a seat attached to it. We paid 20 cents for him to bring us home, then once I got home we found out we were overcharged! It's usually 6 pesos (12 cents).

It’s a huge city, a million people. Crazy with no stop signs or lights that I have seen. The driving seems very dangerous to me, but they say there are not a lot of accidents. Lots of motorcycles, bicycles, little taxis.

When we got to the mall, Monica asks, "why is everyone staring at us" We were the only Americans in this very crowed mall. We were a spectacle I guess. They almost all speak English. We were hungry and started looking at all the food stands. The bakery's looked wonderful. We saw one stand with hamburgers. It looked like a huge white dry bun with a tiny patty in the middle. It looked awful. Most of the food looked so weird and awful we were wondering if we could find anything healthy to eat. Well we finally decided to try these little balls. We could watch the man make them so we felt better about it. He had a mold, like a tiny cast iron muffin pan. He would put some batter in it, then some red onion, then he covered it thick with chopped cabbage. then more batter. It was really a skill to watch him flip these balls as they cooked.
We got 4 balls for about 50 cents. She wanted to put mayo, fish sauce, etc on them, but we asked for them plain. They were great.
Then we gave in a got a chocolate cake. It was a big piece with thick chocolate frosting. it was 21.75 pesos. Well the coins are very confusing to me, and they can all tell I'm American! That is less then 50 cents, but how do you split a peso? centavos, are like quarter of a penny? I think , I still don't have this figured out yet. I feel like I could use a 2nd grade school book on the money lesson.
their sweets are not very sweet. The chocolate frosting was really good, not just sugar. The cake was like a sponge cake. Not from a box. I don't think they have boxed stuff here.
This mall had a grocery store in it, and lots of little stores, but Monica was thinking mall like US. It's very different.
I found a pair of burkenstaks looking shoes for $4. I'm sure they are not quite as good, but they are pretty close. I was happy because we cannot wear our street shoes into the birth center. I need more support then flip flops.

They don’t even have hot water heaters. The water just comes out luke warm. I had a shower yesterday and it felt really good. I won’t miss the warm water. Except to wash dishes. It was weird to wash in cold water.
Well I start my first shift at 6 am, and it's strange to be hungry this early, but I'm going to go eat a little something to start my day.