Life as usual

I’ve been in G-mala now for almost a week and it’s pretty fantastic! The food is great, the city is beautiful, the people at my school are great, and I even understand most of what people are saying when they talk to me in Spanish. I got a great deal on a cell phone here (Q89, which is about $11.50) and it came with Q200 of free credit (which is like 275 minutes) plus 2000 free texts (but they all expire in a month) and free internet for a month (but it’s the worst internet ever so I don’t use it). So now if I get lost I can call someone to help me find my way instead of just staring at my map hoping something I see on the street will match what I see on my map. But I’m getting pretty used to the area between where I live and where I go to school, which is great because I can find my school, the book store (with the American owner), the post office, and a couple other shops/restaurants on my first try!

With the purchase of my cell phone I got a free picture with Santa! And the guy with me is Gio, one of the school's coordinators.

I went to church Sunday at a church with an English service (some missionaries who I was in contact with before coming said it was the only one with an English service that they knew of), and it was super tiny, and the sermon was (I’m not kidding) 7 minutes long. It’s an Episcopalian church so it’s super liturgical, which is a little different than I’m used to, but I was surprised at how many of the things we do at First Pres the same way (like the same[ish] prayer of confession and after finishing a scripture the reader says “This is the Word of the Lord” and everyone says “Thanks be to God”), so it wasn’t totally strange to me. And I thought the church was a lot further from my house than it actually is so I was a little early…which means I was really early since most of the people at the church are on Guatemalan time (which means everything starts 15ish minutes later than it is supposed to). It was pretty funny, when I walked into the church the pastor introduced himself and then he said, “We start every week precisely at 9AM. That is, if you’re using a Guatemalan clock.” Hahaha! Good times.

Spanish class is going well. It’s so much information at once that I’m really tired all the time, but I’m learning a ton! I love practicing my Spanish with people who work at the school because they’re really good at explaining things to me in a different way if I don’t understand a word, and they’re really patient with my slowness at conjugating verbs in my head or stumbling through words that always mess me up (like caricaturas, amplificador, and anaranjado [cartoons, amplifier, and the color orange]). The family that I live with is really great about it too, but I don’t feel quite as comfortable practicing with them.

Every day there is an activity that the school facilitates and I guess Monday nights are almost always salsa class because there’s a local studio that has classes Monday nights, so that’s something easy to plan since all they have to do is take us to the studio. Well, I decided to go to salsa class last night because I figured, even though I don’t really like dancing, I’m in Guatemala, I had nothing else to do (besides study a million irregular verbs that my teacher taught me…), and I’m pretty sure some part of my tuition goes toward organizing the events, so I went. Never again. It wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I’m pretty sure they had me dancing with a 15 year old who probably weighs 30lbs less than me, didn’t really talk and didn’t seem like he knew what he was doing much more than I did. Plus it was in a pretty small building with too many people in it, so I kept bumping into people. Now I can say I’ve taken a salsa class (as in: been there, done that).

There’s a big market here which is made even bigger because people have set up booths to sell Christmas stuff and it’s super fun to walk through and see all the stuff that people are selling. There are tons of nativity sets, but it’s kinda weird because the most common is just Mary and Joseph together….like, not with Jesus. And then most of the little baby Jesus’ have the ugliest faces, like their faces got squished so they’re long and thin. But there’s also tons of fruit that people are selling, so I definitely plan to go back before it’s all over and buy a bunch of star fruit and maybe some apples (the apples in the grocery stores here are from Washington). It’s pretty funny to me how you can buy pretty much anything here and it’s so much cheaper than in the states! I mean, I know most of the clothes are knock-offs and stuff, but even the apples are cheaper here than in WA and my $11 cell phone and I bought a scarf for $6 that would have been like $20 at Target or wherever. Even the McDonald’s here is cheaper than in the states…for the exact same stuff!! But gas here is expensive, it’s like $4.20 a gallon. So far that’s the only thing I’ve found here to be more expensive than it is back home.

Last night I watched the fútbol final on television. It was the two Guatemala City teams playing (Las Cremas and Los Rojos) and las cremas won. I love how important fútbol is to the people here! Pretty much every restaurant has a TV and they always have fútbol on and then after the match was over last night a bunch of people shot off fireworks in the street (including the people I live with). And I just think it’s cool how it’s not just a sport for young people to enjoy, I was watching at my house with 3 generations. Maybe it’ll be like that one day in the states…but probably not since we have all of those other “super important” sports. Haha!  

Well, I think that’s pretty much it. I love it here and I’m stoked that I get to learn tons while I’m here and……yeah. Oh! There was a little earthquake on Saturday night (well, Sunday morning…at like 4) and I wasn’t sure if it was an earthquake or just a big truck going down the road outside my window, but then lots of people were talking about it and asking me if I felt it…so I guess it was an earthquake. My teacher said it was probably due to volcanic activity, but it’s actually better to have little earthquakes with some frequency than for all the energy to get stored up until there’s a huge quake like the one about a month ago. Anyways, yeah, my life here is getting pretty normal…I mean, I’m still loving it all the time, but I can actually sleep now because I’m not crazy excited just to be here like I was the first couple nights.