Sunday, January 28, 2018

"Homeless" in Guadalajara

Between my junior and senior years in high school, I traveled with the Spanish club to Mexico.  We planned a week in Guadalajara, where we would attend an institute to learn more of the Mexican culture.  During this time we would stay with a host family in Guadalajara.  We were each assigned a room mate who would stay at the same home with us.  My partner was Gordon from Brigham City. 
We arrived at Guadalajara later in the day. 

We went to the institute where we were going to received instruction during the day for the next week.  From there we were loaded into taxi cabs.  The drivers had the address of the home where we were going to stay.  This was all good, but when the taxi driver arrived at ours, he couldn't find the home from the address given.  He looked up and down the street, but nobody knew of us or the family we were seeking.  He finally asked us what we wanted to do, and in our broken Spanish, asked him to take us back to the place where we started.
We got our stuff out of the taxi, to discover that there was no one at the institute and it was all locked up.  We found a patch of grass where I guess we figured we would spend the night, or at least wait for someone to return and figure out what to do with us. 
Within a half hour of our being there someone stopped and asked us what we were doing.  This was a family with a car who were missionaries from the United States serving in Guadalajara.  We explained our predicament.  At this point they invited us to their home for dinner, and to figure things out from there.

While we were eating, the father of the family called the institute and actually got ahold of someone.  They people at the institute had heard of us not arriving as the host family had also called them.  Arrangements were made for us to spend the night where we were, and then the next day after breakfast they would return us to the institute.  The family had a son a close to our age, so we had a place to stay and were fed well; and returned to the institute the next day, no harm done.
The next day when we arrived out the correct address, we realized we were close the day before.  We were only a few blocks away, but a wide highway separated was between where we had been, and the actual address.  We had been close to the Catholic Church, Church of the Cross. 

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