Well its been a few days since I got back from Tijuana,Mexico now and I think its about time for my massive post Mexico post. I will try to present this all in a some what logical manner. Cut for all who don’t care.
Saturday(7/5/03): I did not sleep all night because I had to be ready to leave with all my stuff at 3AM when andrea’s family picked me up and drove me to church. I was pretty excited at that point. Excited that I would be going to Mexico(another country where I have not visited yet) and also because it was going to be a unique time to spend with Andrea. So we land at church and things rush around and we load a seemingly infinite number of boxes and pieces of luggage on to the plane. The airport was easy just a bunch of waiting. Andrea and I tried to get seats next to each other but when she read her seat number off her ticket she read the gate number and read that backwards. So she felt bad about that and I really didnt want her to feel too bad since I knew we’d sit next to each other one way or another. It all worked out in the end and someone switched with me and it was all good. We landed down in san diego and hopped in to 19 different vehicles. It was a really impressive caravan of big V10 vans and F250′s. Then we all went to In n’ Out Burger and I got a double-double, fries, coke, and a shake. It was with out a doubt the most unhealthly but amazingly great burger I’ve ever eaten. After that it was off to over the border. Getting in to mexico is a joke. Its just like driving through the ez pass lanes on the turnpike. So we landed at the orphanage maybe 30 minutes later and unpacked the stuff and did some stuff and went to sleep around 11.
Sunday(7/6/03): This was our first day of working. We had to level the ground and at first look we thought it would easy but it turned out that it would take all day and then some. It was an uneventful day for the most part. We leveled the ground pretty good and then put out a few piles of mixed cement for the next day.
Monday(7/7/03): Cement day. A rough day. Its just like that. Its a long day of turning the cement by hand to mix it, lifiting 110Lb. bags of the cement mix, and spreading the cement out. We worked till around 7:30 this day. That night when we got back we ate dinner and then I played the djembe during worship. Then before I went to sleep me and andrea we had our prayer time, this was our nightly routine for the rest of the trip pretty much and it was really good for us.
Tuesday(7/8/03): Framing day. This was the day I thought would be quick and easy and that we would get a leading edge on the next days work. But! instead it went slow and felt like it was forever and we didnt get as much work done as I thought we would. The exciting event of the day was kung foo skillz, a hammer fell from the roof of the house and for a moment God gave me good reflexes and I caught it before it hit someone. I had no part in the catching business, ask anyone, I cant catch, i suck at it. It was another long day but a little more satisfying because when we left there was a shell of a house standing.
Wednesday(7/9/03): Random day. This day we were supposed to finish framing, and do the siding on the house, and then do roofing. We did a little of everything and finished none of it. We had a lot of trouble getting the siding to fit right because our house was not perfectly level or square which made everything not fit right. In the end we tweaked everything to work one way or another. Today is a good day to mention the food, the food was good everyday but by this point dinner was something to look forward to when we got back from working. The cooks that came with on the trip did an amazing job every night. I wish that NJIT would hire them and replace GDS with them.
Thursday(7/10/03): Finish up day. We basically finished the roofing on this day and then put up our trim and we were done. We figured we would be one of the last groups to finish but we turned out to be the first. It was nice concidering we were the group of five and every other group had around eight people. We packed our stuff up slowly and around 11pm we start to drive back to California. It took around an hour to get across the border(unlike mexico america does not want everyone to come in). We then went to the marriot courtyard hotel we stayed it was pretty nice except that they didnt give out the rollout beds so some of the students were on the floor and thats just not cool because they had just spent a week sleeping on the floor. I had a bed which made me happy, it was not as comfortable as I like but it was a heck of a lot better than the floor. The best thing about being in cali was that I didnt have to be careful with what I ate or drank. I didnt have to worry about the water or washing my hands every 30 seconds anymore.
Friday(7/11/03): BEACH!! I went to the san diego beach with Andrea and Dave and some other people. Its definately the nicest beach I’ve ever visited. I had fun, I got to get my legs a little tan which was good concidering I was working a pretty major farmer tan from working in mexico. Later that night back at the hotel I really wanted to go in the hot tub but some kid took a dump in the pool and contaminated both so they were closed. It was ok cuz I spent some really good time with andrea instead. 
Saturday(7/12/03): We had to wake up at 6:30! That was bad. The airport annoyed me majorly. They wouldnt let me hand carry my djembe to the plane. They harrassed andrea’s little sister. Philly was much nicer to me. I’ll live though. We left on the second flight back and got in around 8:30PM. By the time the buses got back to church it was around 10:45. I got my stuff together and went home and said hi to my parents and then went out to seville with andrea’s family. I got chicken fingers(of course).
And thats about all. There are lots of mini details I cut out but for a birds eye view of my trip thats not too shabby. To sum it up. Mexico was good, it exhausted me, I learned alot from it, and I would do it again.
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