Not too long ago I was sitting on a gorgeous, white-sand beach on the Caribbean at midnight listening to the waves rock the fishing boats that were tied up for the night nearby and watching the reflection of the moon on the water. For some reason I thought back to that night when I woke up this morning. I really need to go do that again before I leave Mexico in a month.

I'll be catching a bus at 5:30 tomorrow morning to take me to Cancun to pick up Ashley and her friend Caitlin from the airport and then hopping back on the bus back to Merida. I have a lot of bus riding to do this weekend (16 hours to be exact as I will be making the trip to and from Cancun twice) but I'm so excited. The pain will be well worth it. Who knows what could be in store for the weekend...

My time here in Merida is drawing to a close. Granted, I don't technically get back home until late on Dec. 20th, but classes are ending and I can see the sign in the distance that reads "Dallas 953 miles". There is the part of me that is sad to see my time abroad coming to a close. It's the adventuresome side of me that realizes every morning in Mexico that I have no idea what I am going to be doing today. Will the bus come? Will my professors show up for class?(not as uncommon as you might think) Will I decide to skip everything I have to do and go to the beach? It's kinda nice living this way for a while. But there is also the side of me that has been secretly waiting for the day that I fly into DFW, partly because it will be nice to see friends and family again. It will be nice to sit in front of my TV and watch football. And it will definitely be nice living in the Flowerplex for a semester working to pay off debt, save a little money, and be close to my girlfriend and flomo network of people for once. There is something about having a rigid, definite schedule that helps me stay disciplined and on task in other aspects of life, and I look forward to having one. Needless to say the 35 remaining days I have in Mexico are packed with excitement and fun. My oh so cute girlfriend is coming to visit in 3 days and then a week later may parents are coming to visit. After these two weeks I'm off to Mexico City for a week and then back to Merida to pack up my things. It's the home stretch and I don't know how to feel.

Yesterday I played in a basketball tournament at my university here in Merida. I arrived at about 9:30 because I was told everything started at 10 and I wanted to shoot around a bit beforehand. I have no idea what I was thinking because a 10 o'clock start time in Mexico means 11, and a 10 o'clock start time in Mexico at an event run by college students means 12. Well sure enough, I played my first round at 12:30. We won the game, in fact we won all of our games and my team won a 500 peso grand prize. Which is really only about $10 a person when it is divided among 5 people. But hey free money is free money. But what I found most amusing yesterday was that in the final game of the tournament, my team played the school's team. By that I mean the team that represents the Anthropology campus in competition within the entire University, and they lost to us. They lost to 5 guys (of whom all but one were shorter than 5'7) who hadn't really ever played organized basketball before. They were all about 6' or taller too...it was kind of interesting.

This morning I woke up and met some Mexican friends for church. It was a Presbyterian church about a 40 minute bus ride from my house, one of the only protestant churches I've run into down here. I really enjoyed both the service and the college group class afterward. It was a really refreshing experience and I made some great new Christian friends. I'm looking forward to grabbing some coffee with one of them this week. Good Christian fellowship can be hard to come by down here.

I've started to notice that I am beginning to make fewer and fewer grammatical errors while writing in Spanish, but my errors in my English writings have increased from zero to many. I only write in English when I'm writing emails and blogs etc..but if I don't proof read first then my English writings are full of scattered spanish words and weird phrases like "i played in a tournament of basketball" due to the positioning of the adjective after the noun in Spanish.

O well...lo que sea