Spring Break with the Gators

This past week has been Spring Break. Having Spring Break the week before my last week of student teaching has been really hard to be motivated to finish out. This week has been really nice relaxing, getting homework done, packing, eating Popeyes, and going to an alligator farm! The owners of this farm were on the first season of Swamp People, so it was really neat to talk to some of the members of the family. Here is picture overload of the alligator farm! But first.... 

Here's the best fried chicken ever!

Holding a baby alligator!

 The Swamp People family. I met the brother that's in the back of the group

 All their turtles

 The alligator that keeps escaping but seems to like it in this part of the farm. Can you imagine this girl in your yard?

This fella is hanging out right by the gate entrance, but don't worry, our tour guide still went in and just shoved the alligator over. 

 Giant swamp area that has many alligators and so many herons nesting in the trees

 Tour guide making the alligator snap

 He's in there with them in the same spot where he lost his hand in August to one of these big boys.

 Catching a 2-3 year old for the kids to sit on

 I sat on this guy to get a picture and he started walking around. It really caught me off guard.

He finally stopped moving and ate long enough to get a good picture.

It rained the rest of the break. Here's another really good down pour

Real Life Lock Down and Mausoleums

Last Sunday they had an art festival in the more artsy area of Baton Rouge. Elizabeth and I decided it would be a nice Sunday walk to go look around. They had music playing and many art vendors.

I had some more interesting food experiences and took pictures of them as well

 Cheese grits...I could not get the guts to eat them

And these people are obsessed with pickles and pralines. I'm kind of obsessed too.

Thursday was our early out day to start spring break. Since this area is heavily influenced by the Catholic religion, they observe Good Friday, so they use that as our first day of spring break. When it’s time to load the students on the bus, we all walk from the middle school/high school and walk through the back of the PE building to the front of it where all the charter buses are to load the kids.

We had gotten about half of the kids on the bus and we still had quite a few older boys and very young children with us. We were walking them to the bus from the building when all the adults who were outside helping load started yelling, “Get back in the building! Get back in there now! Run back in the building now!” We starting picking up kids, grabbing kids, and running and dragging them back in. We got loaded up into the coaches office, all sat down, locked up and lights off. I was sitting with the babies and trying to help hold them to keep them as calm as possible. They kept signing, “scared scared” over and over. We finally got them to settle down while Coach G is standing with the older boys instructing them about the trophies up on the wall to use them to protect themselves if it became necessary. She was telling them they didn't have to be heroes if they didn't want to be, but they should try to work together and not let one person fight alone if they were. I honestly thought she was scaring them.

A few minutes of sitting in there, we heard someone bang on the door and yell what we thought was, “Help! Help!” (we found out later it was one of the teachers yelling the name of one of the teachers in the room with us). After about 10 minutes we finally heard a voice that we recognized yelling, “everything is good, run these kids out to the buses now! We need to get the buses off campus now!” So we picked up all the ones we could and ran them to the different buses and went back to the middle school/high school for our meeting that we always have at the end of the week.

We later found out that there was a burglary happening in the apartment complex that shares a fence with us. The man was trying to evade the cops and climbed our fence on to our campus. We also found out the man was armed, even though he hadn't used it. It was a very interesting ordeal to say the least. 
Since we had had a crazy day at the school, we decided to go out to a free music in the park night. It was so much fun seeing a full jazz band do covers of different songs and watching the older couples dance. I love that part of the culture here. Everyone seems to be so happy go lucky and free. There is always something happening and there is always good music involved.

Today we went back into New Orleans to go check out this really big, pretty mausoleum. Mausoleums are very necessary here and everywhere because of how wet the ground is here. Some are quite extravagant. 

When we were finished we went and visited the Bayou. It has a strange beauty to it

 The gecko

 Mr. Frog

 A turtle

and a snake

We were hoping to see alligators. That was the whole point of going. It was a really neat park. It felt like walking through a swampy version of Yellowstone. I had this song stuck in my head the whole time

After a long, hot day, nothing says awesome like a $5 gigantic smoothie! Happy first day of spring break to me! 2 more weeks down in da bayou