I thought you would get a kick out of my morning commute. I am the last person on the carpool (aka School Bus). I ride it with two other teachers, one high school student, 3 middle school students and 3 elementary students. It is a chill morning and only takes about 10 minutes to get to school. Plus it is free and you can't beat that. Eduardo, our driver, is amazing at navigating the city streets.

We had an exciting day yesterday for two reasons. First, some students found a scorpion in their English class. So the whole class came to the science room (that would be me) to find a container to put it in. All I could offer was a water bottle. They got it in the bottle pretty quick and then carried it around the rest of the day as their pet. All the students warned us to look into the shower before stepping in because scorpions crawl out of them all the time. Apparently I have nothing to worry about on the 7th floor, but don't think I didn't check my shower before stepping into it this morning.

The second exciting event was the rain. It was the first rain in over a month and now it is actually cold. It is a nice change from the gusting wind and heat. I'm guessing it is in the high 60's which feels like -30 south of the equator. It continued to rain overnight and there was plenty of lighting and thunder!

Oh, the last picture is from the backseat of a typical taxi in Santa Cruz. There is a huge market here for used Japanese cars, so all the taxi's have very peculiar looking passenger seats. There is a dashboard there the speedometer and other gauges, only the steering wheel is missing. It has been moved to the other side of the car. It seemed so odd at first, but now it is just normal!