Why I hate sharing a kitchen with strangers

My apartment is pretty cool...I mean, it's not awesome, it's pretty basic, but it's right in the center of the city which is great for taking the bus to and from work and also great for going out at night (I don't have to take a taxi home). There are, however, some things that drive me crazy about my apartment. The building's acoustics are really good, which means that every sound from the street comes right up the stairs and into my room, plus every sound from the kitchen goes down the hall and into my room....but it's not so bad, I'm pretty used to it now and I can sleep through anything (for those of you who have ever shared a room with me, you already know this about me). The lighting in my room is not so great; there are three lights on my ceiling and there are usually only two that work, but sometimes only one is working and it's a pretty high ceiling so at night it gets a little dim in my room sometimes. The whole lighting thing sucks for when I'm trying to skype with people because I always look like I'm in the dark...but that's not even the worst of my skyping problems: the internet here sucks!! Sometimes it works fine and I can skype for 5 hours with minimal interruptions, but usually it's more like 15 minutes and then the call is dropped, 3 more minutes and the call is dropped again, and after doing this for about half an hour it just stops working. It makes keeping up with people back home pretty difficult.
But all of these things, though annoying, are livable. I'm a pretty easy-going person, so I can roll with the quirks....but sharing a kitchen with strangers is killing me!! Maybe working in the kitchen at camp has ruined me for using all future kitchens because my expectations are now quite high (ok, maybe it's not a maybe, I'm pretty sure it's true. Ask Rory, we're kitchen snobs because of camp.....sorry kitchen at Gleanings!). But really, is it so hard to clean up after yourself?

This is what I wake up to almost every morning. And keep in mind that I usually work early so I'm in there at around 5:45AM trying to make breakfast as quietly as possible for the poor guy who has a room closer to the kitchen than I do. Making breakfast quietly is really hard when I have to first dig out the dirty dishes that I need to use and then wash them. And who wants to wash their dishes before and after using them? Because there's one lady who lives here who is apparently always calling the dueño (manager) and telling him that I'm leaving a bunch of dirty dishes, so there's no way I can wash the dishes, use them, and then leave them dirty.

But sometimes there are no dirty dishes in the sink and as I walk into the kitchen ready to make my dinner because I'm super hungry from a long day of work, I get really excited that maybe it'll all be clean. But no. All the pots and pans are on the stove....full of food that has been cooked, served, and the people who made it are in their rooms eating. At this point I don't even have the option of washing the dirty dish before and after use because they're all full of other peoples' food...and you can't just throw their food into a Tupperware and put it in the fridge because you have no idea whose food it is and everyone has a designated spot in the fridge. Speaking of which.....

There's never room in the fridge because there's 5 of everything. Everyone has their own little area. I have the bottom drawer. There's always so much crap in the fridge and I just don't get it!! And in a family fridge there's no "my food" and "your food," but I'm positive that someone took half of a lime that I had in my drawer and I was instantly really upset when I realized it...over half of a lime. Plus people put dumb stuff in the freezer! A few weeks ago some of my neighbors threw a huge party on our terrace before a soccer match and I guess they thought it was a really good idea to put 3 liters of beer in the freezer and then they left them there. The next day I went grocery shopping and opened the freezer to put my chicken in there and the instant that I opened the freezer a bunch of beer-slush fell out onto me...not to mention chunks of the shattered bottle. Genius. 

 And there are rules:
1. After you cook, leave that area clean.
2. Wash your dishes after using them.
3. Don't take dishes to your room, we need all of them.
4. Make sure all your trash is thrown in the trash can.
5. Take care of the appliances, don't get the stove dirty, or the microwave.
6. Don't spill liquids on the stove.

Remember that the cleanliness starts for each one the same. Take very good care of the things that we                                                                                  offer you! Thank you for your help and understanding!

So really, it's not like there are no guidelines here. The only one that I really don't follow is the not taking dishes to your room. The kitchen is a terrible place to eat, it's really uncomfortable. So I eat in my room and then take my dishes back to the kitchen and wash them within an hour of finishing my food. Some other people, however, I swear have a stockpile of dishes in their rooms! We recently acquired more silverware, but when I first moved in there were maybe 7 forks, 2 spoons, and 1 butter knife...and 1 sharp knife. More often than not there were no silverware in the kitchen. It makes eating a little hard. And preparing food is hard too when there's nothing to cut stuff with. So when I went home for a week in March I made sure to bring back a set of silverware and I've bought a couple knives here....I try to keep all of the dishes that I've bought in my room because otherwise they disappear. In fact, just the other day I had a knock on my door from the lady who keeps calling the manager to complain about stuff and she was telling me that I took her container and she wanted it back. Here's the thing: it was my container and it had disappeared a week or two earlier and I later found it in the fridge. Empty. Who leaves an empty container in the fridge?! But sometimes it's not just plates and silverware that people take to their rooms. The other morning I wanted to make a cup of tea, but the kettle was nowhere to be found. Who takes a kettle to their room?! And there have been countless times when I wanted to make pasta or something and the pot that I needed to use was nowhere in the kitchen. I'm starting to fear that I'll go into the kitchen one day to make toast and the toaster will be gone because someone wanted to make toast from the comfort of their room. 

I'm sure the people I live with are great people in real life, but for sharing a kitchen they're making me crazy! Sometimes the dish soap runs out (by that, I mean that it runs out about every 2 weeks) and people just stop washing their dishes. After a day or two of no soap there are no longer any clean dishes. Makes cooking and eating a bit difficult. After I get sick of both sinks overflowing with dirty dishes and not a clean dish in sight, I got downstairs to the Q.3 store and buy some dish soap. Seriously, there's a little Q.3 store just downstairs yet no one else can seem to manage to go buy some soap. Q.3 is less than 50cents USD....it's not like we have to have the fancy stuff. 

Ok, I'm done complaining now. I've been incredibly blessed here in Guatemala with everything from a great Spanish school, great friends, a great place to live, and a great job. If an annoying kitchen is all I have to complain about I think I've got it pretty good. But seriously, if you share a kitchen with someone who's worked in a commercial kitchen for 8 years (or really, even if they haven't!), pretty pretty pretty please clean up after yourself and keep in mind that other people need to use all the stuff in the kitchen too.

Malacatan, San Marcos, Guatemala

This month I've started traveling to a city called Malacatan on the weekends to teach English classes. If you're looking at the above map, point B is Malacatan and the solid white line just to the left of it is the Mexican border. Malacatan is a little city in the department of San Marcos (Guatemala has departments, not states) and when I go there I'm pretty sure I am the only white person those people have ever seen (with the exception of the teacher who went before me). In the academy that I work at we change teachers every two weeks for weekday classes and every month for weekend classes, but the previous teacher who'd been going to Malacatan had been going for the last 7 months....so I could potentially be going over there every weekend until I head back to the states.
I love the city; it's small and fairly easy to navigate, the majority of the traffic is due to the many tuk-tuks they have running from place to place (see the photo below if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say tuk-tuk), and the people I've met there have been really nice and really helpful if I've had questions about anything.

My students over there are also pretty cool. I have a class with 3 kids (two boys and a girl, 13-14 years old) and then another class with a boy who I think is about 8. Normally, I don't like teaching kids because they don't really want to learn, and that's kind of true of these kids too, but we have a good time. They all love playing soccer so whenever we take a break from class that's what they wanna do (both classes are 4 hours each, so we take a lot of breaks to play games). The class with 3 kids also likes to play spoons...but the kind where you put the spoons in random spots around the room so even if you're the one who got the set of 4 you might not get a spoon. Haha! 

The only thing I really don't like about Malacatan is that it is so hot all the time. It's humid and just straight-up hot, so when I play soccer with my students I get wiped out really quickly from the heat. I learned very quickly that the only way to survive over there is to wear a skirt instead of jeans and to wear an airy shirt instead of my thick work polo....and I also need to drink way more water than here in Xela. Really, if it weren't so hot over there I'd be totally fine with going every weekend until I leave Guatemala, but it is so hot and only getting hotter as summer/the rainy season is starting to kick-in. Oh yeah, I love the rain here! I mean, I like the rain in Tacoma, but I've always loved thunderstorm rain way more...there's intense thunderstorm rain here with thunder and lightning and everything, plus it's not freezing cold here when it rains!! 

The city is 3.5-4 hours away from Xela by bus, and I have to take two buses to get there. So yeah, I spend about 8 hours on a bus so that I can give 8 hours of classes, but I stay the night over there and it's way more relaxing than getting up at 3:30AM on Saturdays to travel to Huehue to teach (that's what I was doing all last month). Plus it's conveniently located right by the Mexican border so that when I need to border-hop to renew my visa I'll already be right there. (Actually, I need to do that in the next few weeks...I'll let y'all know how it goes)

Funny/super gross Malacatan story #1 (ok, fine, there's only one so far...but I'm hoping for more in the future): My Saturday morning class is with the 8-year-old boy and he has a little wiener dog that doesn't understand the meaning of personal space/seriously, don't jump up on me. So I was playing soccer with my student and all of a sudden the maid starts calling his name, telling him to come quick because the dog ate a mouse. The dog's running around with a little tail hanging out of its mouth and then it spits out the mouse on the floor....this mouse is just a little baby and it would've been so cute if it weren't a mouse and if it hadn't just come out of the dog's mouth. Well the mouse is still alive and it's kinda wiggling around so the dog eats it again and we're running after the dog trying to make sure he doesn't spit the mouse out somewhere we can't find it. The dog spits out the mouse again and this time it's dead. So we block the dog from being able to eat it again while the maid sweeps up the poor little mouse to throw it away. We're all super grossed out by this and my student is running around the house yelling "Que asco!!! Que aaasssssccccoooooo!!!!!" (basically it means, so gross!) I mentioned already that the dog is really an up-in-your-grill kind of dog, right? Well the dog keeps trying to lick me, but I know what's been in that mouth and I don't want that all over my legs....so we were pretty grossed out by that, but life went on. We continued with our class and started working in the book again, but then the dog jumped up on the couch and started making sounds like it was going to throw up. Sure enough, it threw up on the couch. "Aaaahhhhhh!!! Que asco!!!!!!!!!" But it gets worse....the dog jumped back up onto the couch and ate all of its barf. So we jump up and start running around the house being super grossed out, my student is yelling "Que asco!!! Que asco!!" and I'm trying really hard to think about something else so that I too don't barf and watch the dog eat that too. Of course, we had a great laugh about it, but still. So. Gross. I never want to have a little dog like that because I'm pretty sure I'd be reminded of what happened last Saturday every time I'd see the dog. 

Anyways, yeah, so I'm going to Malacatan every weekend and it's a pretty great place (minus the suffocating heat). If you've tried to reach me during the weekend and I haven't responded it's because I don't bring my computer with me...I already have enough stuff to take with me, there's no space for my computer, also I don't want it to get jacked.