Day of the Dead

We went by the school and got to our host family. The host family is very nice, a mom and her college student daughter. They were both super patient with my Spanish. Even though they speak English, they stuck with Spanish.

In fact, Ana, the mom, says she loves to study English. I told her about my effortless English lessons. Anna provides three meals a day, which is great. Lunch was black beans, tortillas, salsa, boiled potatoes, and cucumber and onion salad.

Quite nice. After lunch, the school had a short tour of the local cemetery. There were five of us. The student coordinator, whose name is Kristen, showed us all around.

Yesterday was the Day of the Dead, so almost all the tombs and graves had flowers. There were a lot of families there, taking care of the graves, having picnics, kids flying kites.

The families take care of their ancestors' graves on this day. The front section of the cemetery was full of large tombs, like they have in New Orleans.

It's where the richer families are buried. They have to pay rent for the tombs. If they don't pay, the body is exhumed and cremated and the tomb is rented to someone else.

Many of the tombs had been robbed of their marble because it can be sold. Almost all the angels on the tombs were missing heads. They'd been chopped off and sold.

However, a couple of tombs had an angel of death, a scary looking angel, on top, and these were untouched because people feared being cursed if they damaged them.

P.S. I'm experimenting with video, trying to get the sound and video quality decent without creating huge files that are slow to download. Any suggestions?