Nathan Hoffman

 

My Semester at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City

Buenos dias,

This is a short essay about how my time in Mexico City, Mexico went. In this essay I’ll tell you a little about Tec de Monterrey, my stay at Casa Azul (The blue house), what kind of activities are available in the area, safety, and finally my overall experience.

I arrived in Mexico City on the 30^th of July just a few days before the school’s orientation process began. The orientation process began on August 4^thand it was kind of a mix between an MT, a procedural meeting, and advice about health and safety in the area. There was a huge meal with a mixture of Mexican and European food that followed all the meetings. That same week, we took a trip to visit the pyramids at Teotihuacan, which was a completely amazing, but exhausting trip. Tec de Monterrey is the best or second best university in Mexico, depending on who you ask and offers an extremely wide variety of class offerings in both English and Spanish. The classes I took were about economics, and business Spanish and etiquette. I found the teachers to be extremely confident and helpful with any questions or concerns that we had with the class. The course work itself was demanding. It required a lot of homework and a lot of reading so if you want to have a fun vacation in Mexico while studying, maybe Tec is not the right college for you. I thought it was extremely instructive and useful in my understanding of Latin American development and economics.

My stay at Casa Azul was equally amazing. I was contacted by a student at Tec before I arrived and offered a room in a large house. My personal room had a bathroom with a shower and large closets. Not all the rooms had bathrooms, but I paid a little bit more for the convenience and privacy.  I had 13 roommates total in the house who numbered, 5 Swedes, 4 French, 1 German, 1 Australian and 2 Koreans. Most are in the picture below. I lived on the top floor of the house with one French and two Koreans housemates. The Koreans are in the picture below. We took a lot trips and had a lot of parties in the house together and for the most part, everybody in the house got along very well for the 5 months that we all lived together.

My overall experience in Mexico was very fun, but I would advise anybody who goes there to be very careful and exercise caution. Several of my friends and few of my roommates had cell phones or money stolen from them in the streets at night and even on the way to school. Don’t ever walk anywhere by yourself, especially at night. Always be aware of your surroundings and stay off of you smart phone when walking in public. Always take a certified taxi to bars and clubs and don’t go anyplace with somebody you don’t know very well. Another piece of advice I’d give would be expect to get sick because almost everybody does so be careful about eating street food.

There are a lot of fun things to do which make it hard to focus on your studies, but be careful because Tec de Monterrey is not an easy school and your professors will give you a ton of responsibility to balance with your social life. All this being said, I would love to go back and visit again sometime soon. Mexico is a huge country with a beautiful geography amazing people. 5 months is actually not long enough to do everything you want to do, and go everywhere you want to go, but you can try.

Tec de Monterrey

The picture above is of the majority of my housemates and I in Acapulco. This was a group trip organized by a friend of our landlord. The ocean was beautiful and clean and we had a great time dancing and swimming at the hotel we rented out.

This picture and the picture below were taken in Oaxaca, Mexico during Dia de Los Muertos. (The Day of the Dead) These are roommates and other students who lived nearby.

These are roommates and friends getting ready to go to dinner for a birthday party.

These are all the roomates having a mojito party on the roof of our house.

This is me at the Frida Kahlo Museum.