First things first: My sister loves me so much that my brand new nephew was born on my birthday, June 21st.  I'm probably more tickled about that than I should be.  A lot of my family is in June (father, three brothers, uncle, and an odd aunt or two) and I was in fact supposed to be born on my father's birthday.  Now someone finally got it right.  This means I get to steal his cake when he gets older.  :)

I've been hungry for some American food for quite a while now.  This is technically the beginning of my 8th week out of the country, though only my 5th week here in Mexico.  I want steak!  So after much researching on the internet I came across a place here in Guadalajara called "Santo Coyote", so we hit it for my birthday.  My pictures didn't do it justice, so go here to see what it looks like.  It's like faux Arizona adobe with waterfalls, artwork, mariachis and dancers at night.  Even lanterns in the trees!  So beautiful and colorful, plus they have something in their store that might make the perfect wedding gift for Sean's brother...  Earlier in the day we went to see a ballet at the Teatro Degollado, which is old and gorgeous with a main floor and then four balconies.  I had a lot of fun, but have decided ballet is not really my thing.  It was neat to watch, but I'm not going to spend $200 in the U.S. to go see Swan Lake or anything.  But $20 here?  Easy deal.

Last week was pretty much "Work, work" for us.  We keep coming across interesting problems and solving them.  I'm constantly worried that our lack of knowledge is going to slow us down, but we seem to be keeping up with the goals that we have been setting for ourselves.  Almost every night after work slows down and people begin heading home it starts to rain.  Now that Sean and I are downstairs we've pretty much taken over responsibility for getting all the windows/doors/etc closed before the Great Flood comes to take us away.  Sometimes it makes it anyways, but luckily everything stays out in the hall and doesn't make it into the bed rooms.  Poor Camilo is getting rained on now that he has our old room!  ;)

Campus as always is wonderful, and I think this is my favorite place so far:

We've also visited downtown a few times, and it really does remind me of Spain.  All old buildings and stretching plazas.  They do something here like I also saw in China but never really see in the US: Many of these large, looming buildings are actually not as large as they seem, because the inside contains a large courtyard.  It really feels quite cozy.

A few weeks ago we had made a trip to the zoo over the weekend, and it's actually quite nice.  They have tons of animals I had never gotten the chance to see before live, like white lions (Timbavati) and striped hyenas.  It had rained right before we we went so some of the ground was quite muddy, but all the animals seemed to be in good condition.  They had the best herpetarium I've ever been in, including some of the deadliest snakes in the world.  The best one though was a python that had to have been about twenty feet stretched out.  It was curled up in the corner and the space it took up was like the size of a kiddie pool.  You know those plastic yellow and/or blue pools in heavy plastic with cartoon characters on them and are about a foot deep?  Those things.  It was huge.  Unfortunately the lighting was so poor I couldn't get any non-blurry shots of it.

They also had some rather familiar animals...

More than anything, though, it was just nice to see people having a good time.