Mas desde Xela

Things have been going really well here. I´ve been really busy this week with some good social activities and adventures. I´m meeting so many interesting gringoes (foreigners) through the school and other spanish schools that it is hurting my spanish learning. (-; However I´m enjoying it. There are a lot of college students from the states who are here for a few weeks to study spanish. We went out salsa dancing a couple times last week. I have fallen in love with dancing salsa and merengue and regatone. I was fortunate to get paired up wednesday night with a girl who is a dance major who helped me with the steps and really made me look good dancing. I hope to keep learning more pasos de salsa.

I am starting to find a pretty good rhythm here. I want to start spending more time studying. I just need to find a little more quiet space for it. Fortunately this morning I was able to find a quiet restaurant to study with some good tacos too.

There is plenty of noise in the house where I live. There are a bunch of us in the family, and I´m happy to have connected really well with my host family. I really enjoy being with them. There is the mother Yudith, her sister Myra, Myra´s son Diego of 2 years, Yudith´s son Gorge and his wife Rita. They have two sons around 8 or ten years Hector and Gorge. There are now three of us gringos from the U.S. studying spanish, and five guatemalan high school students. The guatemalan students are wild with adolescent energy, and I enjoy joking around with them. Our house is something like a hotel with so many people but with much more camaraderie. I had some trouble adjusting to the noise in the house, but I´m getting more used to it. There are also lots of roosters crowing in the morning, dogs barking at night, and motorcycles, music, and trucks blaring through the day. I like to say the dogs rule the night and the roosters rule the morning. Xela is definitely a busy place, but I am really grateful for my family here.

The food is pretty tasty overall, but for my appetite the portions at meals are little too small. We eat a lot of corn tortillas and tamalitos and lots of sweet bread along with black beans usually pureed like soup, some rice, a tiny bit of chicken or meat, soups, a few potatoes and carrots and cilantro, eggs for breakfast sometimes, cornflakes other times. We don´t get a whole lot of protein though. Over my first weekend I felt like I was starving all weekend and didn´t feel too good because of it. Now I´m supplementing with extra bread and a bowl of imported all fiber kelloggs cereal before lunch, so I´m not talking about food during the whole 5 hours of my class in the afternoon. (-;

Of course part of my rhythm is finding time to stretch. I have a good rhyme for it with my teacher (though I found out it isn´t quite correct in spanish it´s still amusing). ¡Un techo por estrecho! I am doing that a lot during my classes because we are sitting so much.

For my first four days in Xela I wasn´t feeling too great because of the noise, lack of food, a broken and cold shower, and I needed to exercise, but finally some of those things started to change with a fixed and warm shower, and a good 20 minute run for exercise on Tuesday last week (sucking air like a dog at 8000 feet). I´m adjusting to the noise in the mornings by going to bed early the night before, getting a little extra food outside of meals, and finding time to dance salsa. Also the weather has gotten warmer and dryer since the rain over the weekend when I first arrived. A storm from a hurricane had been dumping on us. It now rains regularly in the afternoon for a short time, but not all day.

Soon I will post a little about the Fuentes Georginas hot baths, visiting Momostenango with some of the Guatemalan students, and climbing the nearby Santa Maria Volcán with some great pictures too!

Hasta Luego, Joe