Weekend Rambling

I'm at the internet cafe around the corner from my house, and it is possible that the radio is playing a Spanish pop version of U2's "Running to Stand Still" and if that is the case, it makes today one of the greatest days ever.

I apologize if I wasn't clear in my last post about why I am transferring schools. As you all know, the homestay situation was not ideal. It really is luck of the draw here. One of the students at our school is living with a family who has a private, separate apartment with two bedrooms and a living room and dining room and that is where he lives. I am the only student in my school to have gotten as sick as I did, as well as the only student who is living with a family as poor as mine is, ie. no way to safely prepare and store food. Thus, I was eating out for every meal. Besides being expensive and lonely and annoying, it was also a slap in the face to my family, whose hospitality is their livelihood. I discussed the situation with anyone who would listen, and was encouraged to change families, but that felt incredibly uncomfortable to me. I adore them. They are the nicest people on the planet, but I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to eat at home for the next 11 weeks. Cooking for myself would have been fine, but that would have been even more of an insult.

And because I didn't want to insult them, or threaten their livelihood in any way by complaining to the school and asking to change families, I had decided to leave Xela altogether, and pursue studies at the Lake. And then I was strongly requested not to do that for safety reasons. And so that is where I found myself last weekend in Antigua. While I was there, feeling I had no choice but to leave Xela, and not wanting to move to the place I had been asked not to, I began to look for a school in Antigua. Found one, paid a deposit, and got on the bus to Xela thinking I was moving in 2 weeks.

You all know what happened at that point. I realized that I didn't want to leave Xela. That I had unfinished business here. And so I spent last week touring new schools and interviewing students and trying to find a good fit for me. I ended up finding two schools, more on the second one to come. The school I am transferring to on Sunday is much larger than my current school. It is located in a gorgeously restored Colonial house and the classes are held around the tropical garden in the center of it. It looks like the school I had pictured in my mind so many months ago.

So beginning Monday, I will be taking classes in a beautiful garden, sipping fair trade Guatemalan coffee. But it was more than the coffee and the garden that drew me in. The school operates an internet cafe that students have access to, as well as two libraries on campus and numerous quiet and pretty places to study. I have done very little studying so far, and longed for a quiet and comfortable spot I could go that didn't cost money. There are plenty of cafes here, but there was nowhere to study at my current school, and the desk and chair and lamp that was supposedly guaranteed in my homestay never materialized. At the new school, you take a survey each week about your teacher and your homestay family, which I appreciate. In addition, their libraries were incredible, and included a copy of the abridged OED, and I will go ahead and admit that that went a long way in helping me make a decision. The second school I found had "Amores Perros" in their library and is located across the street from a pupuseria and that made me really happy as well.

While I am excited to move, it was an incredibly bittersweet final day of class. I have been on the verge of tears all week at the thought of losing Joaquin as my teacher. You meet some people and know immediately that there is something different about them, and they become instantly dear to you, and that is how I felt about Joaquin. He felt like a sibling to me almost immediately. We have had so much fun together these past two weeks. We work really hard and my brain is exhausted at the end of each day, but we have a blast as well. Today we sang ABBA and Queen most of the day and took our lessons on the road and went in search of americanos and empanadas and parfaits. And because I actually studied for this week's exam, there was much less red pen all over it today. Yay. But for the past three days, I have felt on the verge of tears constantly. I teared up when I told my family I was leaving, and teared up when I told Joaquin I was leaving, and almost teared up again today when our final lesson ended. But I must keep moving forward. And I believe I have made the right decision for me, no matter how dear these people have become to me these past three weeks.

Tomorrow night I am taking my family and Joaquin out to dinner by way of thanks. Eating out is something that people so very rarely do here. So it is something of a big deal. I will try to get pictures uploaded sometime in the near future.

In other news, it is raining here. Because Mother Nature must have thought, "You know what Guatemala really needs right now? More torrential rain." On our way home from the coffee shop, Erin and I were walking through the local river, also know as our street. I don't even want to think about what is in the water that I slosh through each day.

Tomorrow the big agenda is to head up to Zone 3 for an ATM for me, a bus ticket out of here for Erin, and La Democracia, which is a huge 8 city block outdoor and indoor market that sells everything from fresh Mayan produce to dancing goats. Well, maybe not goats. But it is huge and bustling and fun. We are also going to swing by one of the used bookstores in town, to look for a grammar book for me, because it took me way too long yesterday to figure out the difference between direct and indirect objects in Spanish, and which one precedes a verb and which one precedes an adverb. This is the same bookstore that keeps loading me up with kombucha. The guy who brews it was so happy to have found a "true" kombucha lover in me that he gives me several bottles for free every time I stop by to return my empty bottles.

This morning, one of those bottles fell off my table and sprayed the entire room in kombucha, which smells like apple cider vinegar. I was really upset about it until I came home for lunch today and almost passed out from the smell. My house mother was frying fish, only it smelled the same way animals do that have died on the beach and are half way dried out. I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it was really bony. And I have an irrational fear of choking on fish bones. So lunch was an exercise in meditative eating in which I tried not to have a panic attack at the thought of dying in Xela from a fish skeleton. Following lunch was a conversation with A.'s father. He loves talking to me and gets really animated and the only thing I have really understood out of his mouth is that he thinks I need to drink more whiskey. I haven't had any whiskey at all in this county, and that is my problem, according to him. In today's conversation I recognized the words for "how many?" "baby" and "bones" and I thought he was asking how many bones humans have at birth vs. adulthood. But he kept saying, "no, no, pequeño" and holding his fingers up with an inch width between them. So I looked up the word for fetus and that still wasn't what he was after. I never did figure it out, but this went on for a while with him gesturing and me alternately nodding and looking very confused.

Very often I feel like the only people I will ever understand in Spanish are the teachers who talk to me so slowly and who are so animated. I know my family slows down their speech for me, but I still am having such a hard time understanding them. And speaking of not understanding people, Joaquin and I have had some hilarious misunderstandings, the worst of which happened today. He asked me what I had for breakfast and then I asked him what he had and he said he had two chicken sandwiches and I asked him why not eggs or something more breakfast-y and he said that eggs are more often eaten for dinner here. So I asked him how he fixes them, and as he was telling me, I thought they sounded really delicious, and so I tried to communicate that, except what I said translates colloquially to "I want your balls." He was laughing so hard he could barely breathe and kept saying, "No, chica, no you don't." It was rather embarrassing.

Last week he had said to me "You want to play hymen?" and my eyes got really big and I said, "COMO?!" He put both hands around his neck by way of an answer and then it clicked, Hangman. Today we were talking about the States and then Las Vegas and he kept talking about a "game over" which I couldn't understand in the context of our conversation until I realized he meant a hangover.

My goodness, this has been a rambling post. Sorry about that. Hope all of you are enjoying a lovely Friday night. I must get home now. I have a date with Harry Potter.