sorry this took forever but i have no wireless at home

6 January 2008

            First night in the homestay.

            My host mom is a nice little lady named Delia, she’s either 60 or 70 years old, I forgot which word she’d said at the time, but she’s a grandma and she’s adorable. She speaks a tiny bit of English, and between myself and Cindy we’ve got a tiny bit of Spanish to go along with. Her and her daughter picked us up at CIS, which is cute too, but I’ll talk more about that in a bit. Anyway, Delia has a bad knee and a bad shoulder so she doesn’t drive (or climb stairs) She also found me and Cindy to be amusing it seemed. We laughed a lot over our lack of language and it seems we’ve got a system going. She speaks to us together and then to me, since I seem to understand more easily. Then I translate over to Cindy and together, we find an appropriate response to give back to Delia. It’s pretty entertaining to tell you the truth… Our house is a split level with two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a kitchen, living/dining room, bedroom on the first floor. It’s beautiful here. Everything has metal grates and the front door is an old Spanish wooden number straight out of the conquistador images I’d dreamt up on my flight here. Our room is about the size of a BPS dorm, and get this – we have our own little balcony! It’s got four chairs on it for entertaining and it connects to the roof of the neighboring building. It’s really quite nice. I took some pictures, but they really don’t do it justice… I guess this place isn’t beautiful in the American sense of the word, but it is absolutely stunning to me. I’ve only been in this country for 7 hours and I’m already in love with it.

            We have a tourguide for this trip as well, his name is Hugo (pronounced OO-go) and he’s a pretty funny guy. He lives in Merida, and he speaks Mayan as well as all the European languages and wants us to be “amigos” J He’s really sweet as well. We went to a place in Cancun for lunch; it was buffet style and full of deliciousness. Phil and I kept talking about how we love Mexican food and Caitlin was afraid to eat the grapes. It’s funny really, to what extreme everyone takes the “don’t eat this don’t drink that” advice. Speaking of that advice, Cindy just brushed her teeth with the tap water. Wonderful.

            And… her hard drive just crashed.

            So this is me signing off for the evening. I hope you all are enjoying your comfortable life in the States, and I wish you all a very warm January. Oh wait, that’s my January. My bad ;)

            Adios!

            Dana

8 January 2008

            I realized I didn’t blog about yesterday. So here goes:

            We have a housekeeper, se llama Raquel. Ella es muy nice and helpful. She made us breakfast, which was papaya, pineapple, guava (!!!) and banana with coffee and pan (bread). It was muy bueno. Then she took us to school with Danielle and Caitlin, who live nearby and who’s host mom is best friends with ours. Pretty sweet isn’t it? The ride to school wasn’t long at all, and the main road that we take looks a lot like France. In fact, it was influence by the French and was modeled after Le Champs Elysees J That made me pretty happy.

School was very laid back. It’s in this cute little language institute called CIS; it’s a bunch of scattered buildings that have classrooms set up inside a beautiful courtyard. The pictures I have just don’t do it justice, but believe me, it’s more than “two forty foot trailers” as someone back home described it to me. Perfectamente, seriously. My first teacher was named Adrian, but he was the intermediate teacher and we all know, je parle francias, pas espanol haha So I moved down a level and now my teacher is Valentina (pronounced: “Balentina”, no one believes in the letter “v” on this continent). She’s really very patient, which is a good thing because most of us are pretty hopeless with the Spanish language.. at least I know I keep switching back to French, especially with the accent and when stalling for time to think… .all well. There are two girls from Holland in my class, one of which looks like Liz, which is strange to me. Anyway, I love listening to them speak; Dutch is such an interesting language! They’re names are Linsey and Patty and they’re both really friendly. Apparantly they live with Aakash and Shoji.

            Speaking of Aakash and Shoji, they live about 3 blocks away from me and Cindy, AND Danielle and Caitlin (who are in a mansion of a house with an English speaking grandson and a POOL) are three blocks in the opposite direction. Then Phil and Jon live 15 minutes one way and in between us and them there’s Emily and Megan. So basically, it’s pretty sweet that we all live really close together. In fact we all met up to go buy our cell phones last night, but low and behold the store only had 3 and there were 7 of us. So Cindy and myself don’t have phones, but that’s fine because we’re going today once we finish our blog entries for the day.

Oh! We had a breakthrough last night at dinner! I was able to hold a conversation with Delia (host mom) and we bonded over Gilmore Girls and Men In Trees. I  cannot tell you how great it felt to finally be able to communicate with her. So after dinner me and Cindy looked up how to say “We’re going out for coffee with friends, what time should we be home?” in spanish and did just that. She looked SO happy to understand us finally J It was mucho cute-o. Moving on… we went out with Danielle and her host brother to a coffee bar called “Segas”. It was actually pretty American for a Mexican place, but it was still a really good time. We sad around and drank our drinks and talked about cultural things and stuff we like and it was just a really nice time. Like we actually had a friend in the city, you know? Someone who knows the area and what’s good to do and where to go and what to eat and isn’t afraid to speak English to tell you all of it. He’s 21 and in law school down here and has been to more cities in America than I have. Crazy. We stayed out until about 10:30 at Segas and then he drove us around showing us the sites on the main boulevard. All in all, an amazing time.

Today was una dia tres interesante. Primo, nosotros (Cindy y Yo) vamos a escuela con Danielle y Caity. Vosotros estayez (?) tarde y almost missed it. Then we went the wrong direction to school for a block and realized we were being tres stupido. So, we walked to school fine and took our examen de reptiles y amphibians. I’m pretty sure I aced it, Cindy and I studied really well all afternoon yesterday. Anyway, escuela estoy bueno. Nosotros aprendamos vocabulario de comida y salas de la casa! That’s about the only things I can say en espanol, but I’m getting there slowly.

So we got off at the wrong bus stop and ended up walking for 10 blocks back to our quarter with Danielle and Caitlin. Why Aakash and Shoji didn’t tell us that we were wrong I’ll never know. But it was such a fun time getting to see the rest of our area. It’s really nice here; not at all what I expected to find in Mexico. This city is so beautiful, but in a very strange way. I can’t find the right words to say about it, but even though it’s a very primitive city, and seems very poor, it’s just absolutely stunning when you walk around it. Colors are everywhere and people are friendly and the water is clean and the sidewalks are terrible; but past all of that is a sense of perfection and tranquility that you just don’t find in American cities. Like, walking around New York you feel excited and alive but at the same time you’re really watching your back and wondering if this is a good neighborhood and who’s going to scam you and harass you and I mean, I LOVE New York, but Merida just has such a great feel to it. I really can’t explain. I guess it’s one of those “you have to be here” kind of things….

            Anyway, when we got home finally, Raquel had lunch all ready for us. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day here and we had rice, salad and a kind of Mexican manicotti which she called comodades, or something like that. Esta muy delicioso. So me and Cindy ate and now we’re here. Today is Aakash’s birthday actually, and we had cake for him at CIS during one of our breaks. It was so cute. And tonight we’re all going out to the festival in Centro (downtown area, muy historico) which is a kind of outdoor fair thing. All the restaurants move the tables into the streets and you can eat there and there’s music playing and it sounds like a lot of fun. I’ll be sure to update afterwards on how tonight goes.

Nos vamos!
Dana (pronounced DAH-nah en Merida, they can’t make the long A sound easily)