Hello, my name is Diego. I’m from Mexico and today I’m going to introduce six interesting things about my culture. First of all, the one that you are most probably familiar with is tacos. Tacos is a dish made of corn flour tortillas, which is a round circle and stuffed with mincemeat or chicken or anything really. You can have tacos made of anything with some vegetable and hot salsa.

Second, I want to introduce two holidays for second and third. The first holiday that I want to talk about is the Day of the Dead. And the Day of the Dead is a just a day that we acknowledge the role that death has to play in our lives – or the life cycle. And we celebrate those people that are no longer with us. And we build altars and remember their lives and celebrate them.

The second holiday that I want to talk about is Mexican Independence Day. And the reason why I want to talk about it is because this year is Mexico’s two hundred year anniversary from independence. And this holiday is September sixteenth and you usually burn fireworks or a castle made of fireworks and just wear a sombrero and scream at night because it’s called the day of screaming when one of our revolutionary leaders screamed for independence.

The fourth thing that I want to introduce about my country is tequila. Tequila is an alcohol beverage made from agave, which looks like a cactus, but it’s not a cactus. It’s more like a huge pineapple. And the process is quite interesting. You boil the “pineapple” and let it ferment (or get rotten) for a bit of time, like two or three months. And then you process it and put some chemicals into it and store it in wooden canvases.

Next I want to talk about Aztec and Mayan and the Spanish. Before the Spanish came to Mexico, we had a lot of indigenous civilizations and the two most outstanding are the Aztecs and the Mayans. They actually didn’t live at the same period of time. And the Aztecs where in what is nowadays Mexico City. And the Mayans where actually located in what is nowadays Cancun or Southern Mexico. An interesting fact about these Pre-Hispanic civilizations is that Mexico has sixty-three official languages, which was a government decision to try to salvage or protect these languages from Spanish influence.

Last, I want to talk about Mexico City. Mexico City is the largest city in the world and it has a population of twenty four million. It’s larger than Tokyo or sometimes about the same. It really depends how you count the people or where you draw the boundaries. Mexico City was built on a lake and the interesting thing about Mexico City is that it was built there because of a prophecy, which was delivered by a god to the Aztecs, and they were supposed to walk through the country and they were going to find a cactus with an eagle eating a snake. And when they saw this, they were going to build a city and they saw that in Mexico City. So that’s why Mexico City is there.