México

April - June 2022
First two weeks on Isla de Mujeres Read more
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  • Day 10

    Yoga Teacher Training - Isla de Mujeres

    April 29, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ☀️ 28 °C

    Arriving in the evening at Cancun airport, I got transferred via bus and ferry directly to the Isla de mujeres where the 200hour Yoga Teacher Training started.
    We had a beautiful multi-villa housing complex were I lived with two room mates. One girl from Sweden, the other one from the US. The other students were also all girls from around the world.
    The villa is located in the middle of the very thin island, wich allowed me to watch the sunrise on the east side in the morning and the sunset on the westside in the evening. I still had the Costa Rican sleeping rythm, wich made me wake up every morning at 6, so I could visit maybe 8 out of 15 sunrises.
    The physical practice started every morning at 7:30, were we came together for meditation followed by a VERY strong 2 hour class. Surely the most intense classes I ever participated in. It felt very good afterwards though, when we got served the delicious breakfast buffet.
    After a small break were I mostly had a swim at our cute beach 2 min from the house, we had Anatomy and Yoga Philosophy class.
    Around 1:30 pm lunch was set and we had our main break until 4pm when the next classes of principals started.
    Dinner was after sunrise around 7:30pm.

    I was so impressed by the kitchen team wich created always changing super delicious dishes. The variety and creativity of vegetarian and vegan options were amazing.

    My body transformed from day to day, after one week I had clearly better balance and overall strength. Through the anatomy classes I could understand my body and the source of my pain better.
    In the mornings my back is mostly very sensitive and stiff, but together with my teacher Stephania I figured out wich moves to make to stretch the right muscles wich cause this imbalance.

    We started on hands teaching from day one in small groups of 3 and had to teach little flows wich then step by step got longer until our final flow with ~40 minutes. Also we had a written exam on the last day with all the theory wich got pumped into us.

    The graduation ceremony was lovely. We created a flower mandala with local flowers while getting our certificates handed over. Then we collected the flowers and let them swim at our favourite beach. When we came back there was a guy playing Violine for us while we had dinner. That night most of us went out and had some fun at a close by beach club.

    Overall I'm really proud of myself to have accomplished this intense training!
    Now it's on me to keep on practicing to become a good teacher. So you are all very welcome to join my class in future 😊.

    The island was soo nice! Finally some waters wich could reach close to Greece/Chalkidiki beaches 🙃. Still I didn't get to know even one single greek person on my travels... Maaany germans though.

    Some of us extended two more nights and stayed at Selinas Hostel. There I met two guys from Hannover wich had kind of the same plan as me to discover more of the state Quintana Roo. Chelsey, a Canadian girl from the training also joined and so the four of us rented a car for a 4-day roadtrip:

    -Cenotes around Cancun
    -Tulum
    -The Bacalar Lagoon
    -The great Maya temples of Calakmul
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  • Day 17

    Quintana Roo

    May 6, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ⛅ 33 °C

    Check24 made it possible that we found a nice and economic Nissan X-Trail Jeep at Cancun Airport.

    From there it was only a one hour ride to our first destination: Cenote Azul. Cenotes are natural sweet water pools wich sometimes are open and sometimes closed as caves, but kind of connected underneath.

    Absolutely cool stunning waters with many fish inside wich eat your dead skin around your feet. Fish spa for free.
    We could climb and jump from above the caves. Lots of fun.

    After this refreshment we made our way to Tulum, the city in wich we all had very high expectations in the nightlife.
    As it often is with expectations, they didn't got fulfilled.
    Our hostel (The Mayan Monkey) was dope, but the rest of the center was kind of basic and there was not so much going on. After investigating and asking 1000 people I finally found a party in the jungle were we got happy. Not that many people, but great music. So we danced there all night and met some nice guys wich took us with to the after party at their Pool Villa.
    When the sun came we made our way back home.

    The next day we checked out the hotel area at the beach. On beach club / hotel after the other and all suuuper expensive. So for the most places you had to pay 80-100€ entry + additional minimum consumption fees. Not in our budget.
    We founs a public beach were we stayed the afternoon. There was so much Seaweed though, that we didn't even wanted to get into the water.

    Some people told us about the one beach club party were If you go early enough you don't pay entry. We went there as first people, got a stamp and went out again for some Pizza. After some time we went back and the club slowly started to fill up. We had a fun night but went home early, to get up in the morning for the Bacalar Lagoon.

    3,5 hours drive to our accommodation directly placed at the lagoon. We rented 3 kayaks and 1 Stand up padel and made swum out.
    Depending on the sun stand and the water depth you can see 8 shades of blue in the lagoon. There are also 360 ° Cenotes inside of it, wich we kept on searching until the locals told us that were already in the cenote wich was directly connected.

    The next day we drove 3 hours further into the country to see the Mayan temples of Calakmul.
    It is only 35 kilometres from the Guatemalan border. Calakmul was one of the largest and most powerful ancient cities ever uncovered in the Maya lowlands.
    It was estimated to have had a population of 50,000 people. The largest building of which is the great pyramid at the site is over 45 metres high, making it one of the tallest of the Maya pyramids

    We have been there almost alone because it's so far away from any civilization or tourist point.

    From there we made the decision to drive all the way back to Cancun (8hours) and chill there one more day until my flight to Puerto Escondido takes place.

    There I found a workaway at a eco hostel were I could stay for the next weeks to safe some money.

    Chelsey also wanted to join but she lost her Passport at the airport, so unfortunately she's stuck in Cancun...
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  • Day 23

    Puerto Escondido

    May 12, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ 🌙 29 °C

    With a short layover in Mexico city I arrived at Puerto Escondido in the late evening. A place a lot of people on my travels told me to go to.

    My workaway host wasnt answering my calls so I had to book a hostel in last minute.
    I picked a random one ("Casa Punta") wich was close to the beach and it turned out that it was an absolute lucky choice.
    The people there integrated me right away, so I left my luggage at my bed and joined them to the local salsa club.

    That night I connected to the hostel manager of Casa Punta wich provides me the possibility of teaching yoga classes on their rooftop on a daily base! Couldn't have asked for more!

    I am preparing a 5x per week programm and giving it away for free. It's really challenging to create 5 different Flows. For the first one I extended the one I had in my practical exam to 50min and the second one o orientated on the Sun Salutations. You will get to know these hopefully :) There are different options given so every level can participate.
    The two classes until now went very well and the people were super relaxed afterwards 🤗
    Tomorrow is gonna be the third one, always after sunset around 8:30 pm.

    Nevertheless I went the next day to my workaway place wich is 30min walking distance from the center of "La Punta", the surf & gastronomy hotspot where also Casa Punta is.
    It is a Eco Community initiated by a Belgium guy named Alec. With me there live 9 other people from all over the globe.
    Everyone of us gets is daily tasks and when they are absolved we are free. The tasks don't take much time, maybe 1 hour. So for example you help cooking, clean the house or feed the animals. It's a pretty solid system wich allows the place to run by itself. I only pay 80 Pesos (4€) per day for food and am living in a big room with double bed and one roommate from UK.
    There's always more stuff that can be done and I mostly help around 2 or 3 hours per day in construction work until it gets too hot.

    Right now I am preparing my yoga class and watching the sun go down (-> last pic).
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  • Day 33

    Ecstatic Mazunte

    May 22, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C

    David, a german guy I met at Casa Punta Hostel booked a 4bedroom apartment in Mazunte for 5 days and asked me if I wanted to join for a few nights. I already visited Mazunte once, loved it + there was an Event ongoing "ecstatic dance Sunday" wich a friend recommended strongly.

    Kasper and Vitalij i met in Palomino, Colombia where also in Oaxaca so they also joined for the Mazunte trip. Kasper and me where in contact, when he decided to join our community living in Puerto Escondido.
    Vitalij who also was part of the Palomino crew was per accident also in Puerto, what we realized when David and me sent him a selfie as we found out he's our one common friend on Instagram.

    We had this sweet apartment right in the middle of the center, wich is exactly one very cute street with restaurants and street souvenirs.

    The ecstatic dance Sunday was soo good. No phones were allowed, no Alkohol, no talking on the dance floor.
    Imagine everybody (~100 people) dancing like nobody's watching or judging.
    The dancefloor was under palmtrees and the DJ booth had a water sprinkler on top wich randomly spreaded water where everybody came together to cool down from the 32 degrees.
    There was a pool were water therapies were given. A twerk workshop in the beginning to brake all restraint. Kids running around, many people were just naked... A complete different vibe.
    We danced, from 2 to 7 pm with some food or cacao breaks, when the the singing mediation rounded up the whole day.
    All the people were sitting in a circle around a guy wich lead the mediation with singing different tones and connecting ourselves to ourselves, our parents and ancestors. Pure magic.

    We highjacked the next day to a nudist beach were we were laying all day under palmtrees and skinny dipped into the water.
    Mangotrees with sweet fruits everywhere. Breathtaking sunsets, soccer and yoga on the beach, bumpy busrides and sweet returning to the "Limbo community" in Puerto where Vitalij also could join.

    In the meantime Chelsey from the yoga training also arrived at Limbo 😃
    She was supposed to fly with me from Cancun when she lost her Passport AFTER security control and therefore couldn't enter the plane.

    Kasper showed me the HUJI App wich shoots analog-like pictures and brought back my passion pure shooting fotos.
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  • Day 35

    Puerto Escondido pt.2

    May 24, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ⛅ 28 °C

    Arriving back home at Limbo community we were again 10 people living there. The next day Juan and two girls from Germany would leave though, why we made a little farewell party.

    From next day on my beloved routine returned: Working in the morning till noon, preparing lunch, siesta, taking the collectivo bus down to the beach side where I always first check into la Punta Hostel to see if people are attending for the 8:30pm yoga class. From 5pm the more competitive 2vs2 "king of the court" start on the beach volley ground until 6:30 when more people would come and 2 more courts would be set up for the 4vs4 games.
    You would get to know so many people there because teams would always be switched.

    After playing until the sun went down I would come back to la Punta Hostel to do the class wich by time got better and better. In the second week I even earned my first money through yoga by doing the class donation based 🤑 With that I could feed myself easily and had almost 0 expenses.

    There were different events during the week like open mic night where I met all of the yoga and beach volley people again. Such a sweet community!

    At some point the rainy season started and it would rain in the evenings why I couldnt give any classes on the rooftop anymore. We did our private flows with Chelsey and the Limbo Family at home though.

    On the 30th of Mai we got the Info that a hurricane would hit Oaxaca. We didn't know what to expect so we bought food for several days and saved everything on the outside.
    There were only 5 of us left: Lito the one in charge, Kasper, Chelsey, Lærke from Denmark and me.
    It was literally the quiet before the storm. You could feel the changes of the air from warm to cold in very short periods, but still no big storm. We made it very cozy, cooked spaghetti al olio, played X-Box on a huge projector screen, had pancakes and just waited for it to begin.
    Nothing happened as we went to bed.
    At 4:30 in the morning I woke up by wind howling, the dogs barkin and the cocks crowing. All the animals got nervous and so did I... I stood up tried to calm the dogs and myself and went back to sleep. Next morning around 8 I woke up again went out and saw that nothing big happened. There was just a lot of rain, wich also dripped through the roof into our room. Ok first wave survived 😅

    Kasper had a bus ticket for Mexico city, but all the public transportation was shut down he realised. Even the internet didn't work in the whole area. So he came back and had to change his flight.
    To the evening the weather got rougher and the streets got flood, when we curled back into storm mode.

    Nothing happened!
    The next morning was super calm when I got onto the roof and sang R.Kelly's - The storm is over 🌪️🎶

    I brought Kasper to the Bus Terminal and got myself a night ticket to Oaxaca.

    The 21 day stay at my happy place were over and I was ready to start my last month of travelling. I am looking so much forward to see all of you guys again 💚

    But first 10 hours Bus to Oaxaca city then 5 hours to Puebla (where I meet Miguel, the person who did a language exchange programme with my cousin Tim when we were maybe 12? Caro please correct me 😋.

    From there I will drive to Mexico city where I am meeting old friends: Cesar, who did Erasmus with me in Istanbul. Silvana wich I met partying in Berlin. Alice a friend of friends wich I also met in Berlin. And Nico a fellow student of Mario.

    On the 7th of June I will fly out to Miami to stay at my old class and roommate Slotty, who lives in West Palm beach for the last 3-4 years and works as a soccer coach there.
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  • Day 42

    Oaxaca city

    May 31, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ⛅ 31 °C

    With a little night snack stop somewhere in the mountains I slept almost the complete 10 hour night ride to Oaxaca city.

    I decided not to stay there a night, but continue the same day to Puebla. I still had half the day to discover the city wich was actually one of the most beautiful ones I've seen on this trip.
    It was not too big so you could walk everywhere by foot. I saw 3 different neighborhoods with these beautiful coloured and painted houses everywhere. Also I visited a huge market where I finally got myself a Mexico national team jersey. Now I got one from every country I've been to, except Costa Rica.

    Not so much more I can tell here. Let's move on to Puebla city where I spent two nights at Miguel and his family.
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  • Day 43

    Puebla

    June 1, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C

    After a nice 5h ride through the Mountains and desert of central Mexico, Miguel and his girlfriend picked me up from the bus station.

    So funny to see him after all these years, he had so many nice memories from back then.
    The family wich also knew my family welcomed me warmly. Miguel and his mother still are fluent in German, but I also could understand and speak Spanish with the father.

    Next morning Chari (the mother) made us some scrambled eggs and a fresh mango smoothie before we started our tour to the city. First we drove to the formerly biggest (surface) pirámide of Mexico, where now a church was build on.
    Most churches I saw during this trip got me feeling angry and sad because I know that underneath each of them lie the walls and dead bodies of the former cultures (Aztecs, Mayans, Incas etc.) wich got slaughtered by old white European colonisers.
    I always was to lazy to cancel my church membership in Germany. I also thought that some parts are good because they SOMETIMES also support socially, but actually I have to get the fuck out of this weird ass merger.

    Anyways, we went on to see the beautiful old town of Puebla when we arrived at the oldest bar in town where we ordered this classic shot called "Pasita", wich has a piece of cheese and a raisin on a toothpick in it.
    Chari kept on ordering, so we ended at having 4 in a row 🥴.

    Mexico city was now only 2.5 hours away and Cesar my fellow student from Istanbul provided me a place to sleep.
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  • Day 45

    Mexico City

    June 3, 2022 in Mexico ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C

    During the Aztec period, Mexico City was initially built over a lake, the Lago de Texcoco. Aztecs built an artificial island by dumping soil into the lagoon. Later, the Spaniards erected a second Mexico City on top the ruins of Tenochtitlán. Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 A.D. by the Mexicas.

    Because of its construction on that lake, Mexico City is constantly sinking slowly. Some areas of the city have dropped more than nine meters in the last 100 years.

    I didn't feel the city's sinking, though the high altitude, since its elevation is on ~2.200m wich made it harder for me to breath.
    Cesar picked me up from the gigantic bus station and showed me around the city center.
    He is professionally organising hiking and climbing trips, so he asked me if I wanted to go on this trip to the highest volcano in the region. Porqué no, I said to myself and even asked my friend Silvana to join us.
    In the end we were 5 people driving 3 hours to Nevado de Toluca.
    The special was that we hiked the Vulcano at night to see the sun rising from the top (~4.400m). We wore warm jackets, helmets, headlamps, sticks, gloves and good shoes (wich I bought in the afternoon at decathlon for ~20€), so the adventure could begin.
    We walked in a constant tempo up and made breaks every now and then. It became harder and harder to breath since we came up higher. The sky was full of thousands of stars and you could see the milky way very clearly.
    At 4 in the morning and after around 3 hours of hike I started questioning myself: "Why do I do this? I always hated these walks! Can we please return..."
    Somehow I managed to fight my lack of willpower and kept on fighting. At some point we came to path were it was a more climbing than walking what I liked more and from there it was only a half more hour to the top.
    We made it right on time and found ourselves a windproof cave in the rocks. We unpacked our sandwiches and watched the sun rise.
    An undescribable feeling, being there on top of the world. We could enjoy the view for half an hour until it got too cold. It was under 0* C and the wind was whipping our faces, so we started our way down, wich aswell wasn't very easy.
    It was amazing though seeing the landscape around us for the first time after the complete darkness.
    After 4 hours up and three down we made it to our car and drove back to finally get some sleep 🥱

    The next day Silvana took me with her and her dog Lobo to see the beautiful districts of Coyoacan and Roma Sur/Norte.
    We strolled all day around had all the different kinds of street food.

    On Monday, my last day in Latino America, I met my friend Melody wich was one of my first yoga students in Puerto Escondido and we did a session in a park in La Condesa.
    In the evening Cesar, Silvana and me went out for dinner and had RICO Mexican cuisine.
    When we brought Silvana home, I had to pee strongly so I facilitated myself next to a tree, when Cesar suddenly screamed: "NINO, STOP! STOP!"
    I stopped, but it was too late and a police car saw me there....
    Two cops came out, searched all our stuff, mumbled something from a fee of 3.500 Pesos (175€) and that I had to come with to the police station.
    It was already late 1:30am and I had to be at 4:00 at the airport to catch my flight to Miami, so definitely no time for a police station visit.
    Silvana tried to convince them with all she got, when Cesar noticed that they smell like alcohol. He told us in a Quiet moment and when one cop requested me for the 5th time to now get into the car, Silvana turned up and told them: "Either you take us to the station and I will tell your supervisor that you drank in your shift or you take these 500 Pesos (25€) and get the fuck out of here!"
    After short consideration they reluctantly took the money and drove off. 😅😅😅😅😅
    We couldnt believe our luck and drove home happy af.
    I packed my stuff, took an UBER to the airport and got safe and sound into the plane were I had a hole line of seats for myself. So I slept the three hours like a baby until I wake up in the United States of America 🇺🇸
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