A few more pictures

As promised, a few pictures!

 

Outlet in the tree: for now I think that the guy who fries things for the kids in the mornings uses this the most. My favorite fried item from his is a "dedito," which means "little finger." They're basically mini croissants filled with cheese.

The outside of my house/my abuela's store. The awning says "fotocopias," and it's basically open all day and night whenever my abuelos are home. Even at 9:00 people will knock on the door  and ask for photocopies or pencils or candy, but it's mostly busy during the school day from 6:30am on.

 Inside of the tienda. The grating goes away in the mornings, but whenever they don't want to man the store they just shut the grate and people call out, "Buenos!" and my abuelos come answer.

 

Nifty looking bug-thing

View from the top....of the official peace corps office. It's complete open so there's a beautiful 360-degree view of the city and the Magdalena River.

Outside Colombo America's central campus. Turns out that  a lot of English speakers work here...two current volunteers will start working here when their service is up as well, teaching English to children and adults from all over Barranqulla and Colombia.

Rockstars

It’s bilingualism month in Barranquilla. What does that mean? It means that here in Barranquilla, the government, teachers, and students are celebrating their process of becoming a bilingual city. What does that mean to the Peace Corps volunteers, who have come here to teach English? It means we became total rockstars for a day. (And yes, Epic people, my use of rockstar is tongue-in-cheek :))

But actually, we sort of did (become rockstars, I mean). As a result of their high English scores and/or evaluations in general, ten “smaller” schools were awarded the right to have real live Americans, aka us Peace Corps volunteers, visit their schools for half a day this week. The catch, however, was that they then had to complete an application to get us, which only four did. Overall, this meant that on Thursday, groups of 5-7 of us were shipped out to four schools throughout the city to ostensibly visit and do English activities. In reality, this meant we showed up and were given basically a royal welcome.

My school, El Campito, was a primary and secondary school of approximately 1000 students. We walked in the doors of the complex and were immediately welcomed by smiling, singing children with signs and flags. Older students gave brief English introductions for some of the administration, and then we toured each classroom, where all children young and old sang us a resounding edition of a song made up predominantly of the phrase, “Good afternoon to you.”

In the schools, I was shocked to see that not only did many of the classrooms have numerous, strategically placed wall mounted fans, but air conditioning, too! They had a computer lab with internet, and in one room had a SmartBoard, which is an electronic sort of white board that costs thousands of dollars. School funding for anything beyond the basics is apparently predominantly driven by the individual principals of the schools, so this one must be fairly incredible. We heard later that next year a volunteer will be placed in this school…and let me tell you, that would not be an incredibly rough life!

After our tour, it was time to get down to business. We were told to do about an hour of activities with the students, so after being ceremoniously served agua de coco (see previous post for a descriptions), we introduced ourselves and where we were from and taught them songs. I may or may not have attempted to teach them the “Hook ‘em horns” sign but I’m not sure that it stuck…

Our part over, we retired to our places of honor at a banquet table, and the show commenced. I’m not sure where they got this talent, but everything we saw was literally X-factor or whatever TV-show-you-like caliber. A little girl sang us a BackStreet boys song in a sultry voice. A little boy sang the most adorable rendition of  Train’s “Soul Sister” I’ve ever heard…and then came the dancing. 

You may or may not know this, but Colombians are incredible dancers. We’re talking, everyone I’ve seen, even those who claim they “don’t dance,” has moves that pretty much anyone would kill for. 

During our visit, we saw this is a skill that comes, well, perhaps indecently early. 

The first dancer who performed for us was this tiny little girl, maybe eight. She was wearing a black and purple lycra outfit and with her gorgeous long hair and her face painted like a doll’s, she was one of the most beautiful little girls I’ve ever seen. After walking out to the middle of the floor and giving us an angelic smile, she proceeded to plant her legs and bend down so that her rear, covered in a little ruffled bunch of crepe, was pointed provocatively up at our table. The male volunteer in our group was more than a little astounded. This, however, was soon to be the least of his discomforts; when the music started, the girl proceeded to dance using professional-seeming music-video-esque moves to incredibly sexy American songs. We’re talking everything from Brittney Spears to a remix of “I’m Too Sexy” to Rihanna to who knows what else. For a good 15 minutes at least, she ground and shimmied and shook and tossed her hair in front of not only us, but a roomful of high school students, male and female, who all watched avidly. And she did this all with the most beatific smile on her face. I have nooo idea what those choreography sessions are like, but I’m not sure they would be more disturbing if it were a male or a woman teaching her those moves!

The finale was a large dance group of middle-high school girls (and just a few guys). The girls were dressed in sparkly bras and red lycra and did an incredible dance that, in addition to everything else, included a more than generous amount of booty shaking and pre-pubescent breast shimmying approximately two inches away from our vantage point. And, to top the day off, we were pulled into this swirling crowd of dancers to show off how truly terrible gringas are at dancing.

That night we walked an hour and a half home through city streets while heat lightening played to the south and children shot marbles by the sidewalks. We are, of course, not rockstars. And these children who welcomed us so enthusiastically will most likely not beam when we present them with homework. But to see how our presence is valued by the country, by the schools, by the teachers and students as well…well, maybe in the next few years we’ll have a chance to earn the welcome we received this week.

Sound

When I signed up for the Peace Corps, I prepared myself for lots of “hardships.” Things like cold showers, living out of a backpack, having close to no income, gastric difficulties, etc. My situation in Barranquilla promises most, if not all of these things. What I certainly did not expect, however, was the issue of crazy, ridiculous sound.

All throughout the city, my barrio included, corner stores of all different types play music at huge decibels, often competing with stores directly across from them who are playing some other music. (My personal favorite is the stores who offer phones on which you can pay to make international calls. They chain these phones to tables…which are stationed DIRECTLY in front of blaring speakers. Needless to say, I’ve never seen anyone actually using them). I’ve seen mothers drinking a beer while breastfeeding small children next to these speakers on the weekends (So for any scientists out there, might be a great case study of nature versus nurture…?). But anyway. This music is usually a source of amusement, or at least bemusement, especially on weekends. 

However, on a fairly regular basis we get the mobile speaker treatment.

I checked and there is no special word for these people in Spanish (besides idiotas, or other such names,) but in this city there are some people here whose favorite pastime is to outfit cars with the most powerful sound systems I’ve ever seen/heard up close. We’re talking, they fill an entire car trunk with speaker equipment, and then cruise the neighborhoods with the music turned up, literally setting off car alarms in their wake. 

One night this week a car pulled up on our block and parked. Keeping to the norm of the city humor here, the car was labeled “Policia.” The occupants proceeded to play on repeat some song whose reverberating bass and high pitched electronic squeals made the corner store speakers seem entirely reasonable—discreet, if you will. Meanwhile, the dishes were rattling on the shelves and the entire house vibrated!

In keeping with true grandparent style, my abuela proceeded to call the police, during which conversation my favorite line included “Es una scandalosa horrible!!”

Of course, the best part is that the police can’t actually do anything about this. If they come, they can simply ask the people to move…no citations, fines, etc. So without exception the people stay, in our case playing this song for TWO HOURS STRAIGHT. During the second hour of this Yo Me Llama came on (the show reminiscent of American Idol), which, though still fuming about the outside noise situation, my host-grandparents eagerly watched…at full volume…

Needless to say, my head was rattling by the time I retired for the night.

Misconceptions

So, as the days go by it’s clear that my lack of Spanish is causing a few very obvious misconceptions in my life. One of the biggest is that for some reason I haven’t been able to discern, in my house I’m not allowed to drink plain water.

Now, I’m not talking tap water—my family boils their water as do most families here and puts it in pitchers in the fridge. I mean water without any flavoring. One morning instead of milk with coffee I filled my glass with water. Senora Ana Margarita came in and saw this travesty and after lots of Spanish I didn’t understand, got out a packet of something like instant tea and turned my crystal clear, cold delicious water into a sweetened brown liquid. When I tried to repeat the offense that night, she caught me walking out of the kitchen with the glass (and just for point of reference, my glass, the only one I’m supposed to use and is reserved only for me, is basically a giant glass beer stein) and says to me “No!”, takes it, pours the water back into its pitcher and replaces it with some sort of delicious cherry-like juice.

I could certainly tell her that I just really like water, but her description of why I shouldn’t drink it is way over my Spanish comprehension level, so that battle is one already lost…or one doomed to be won by way of insulting her rather than by comprehension. I look forward to the day maybe a month from now when we can talk about this in my (hopefully) vastly improved Spanish and laugh about the days when I wasn’t allowed to drink water…

Less misconception than misunderstanding happened at a birthday party I went to with my host mother. The “party” was a circle of about 12 women fifty and older sharing in food that was passed around, and laughing at jokes from their lives. I understood maybe 2 percent of what was going on. A few hours in, after an exchange I didn’t quite catch, one of the women asked me something. I’ve been getting by in most conversations by reading facial expressions, and when it seems appropriate, nodding and smiling and saying “Oh, si!”  So I nod and smile and do my routine for this woman, and as soon as I did, the group broke into peals of laughter…in the next minute I realized I’d told this entire group of women that I was quite sure they were very old, twice in a row….oops?!

And then, last one for the night—tonight I asked my abuela if she wanted help folding the hundreds of sheets of tissue paper she was folding one by one to make them easier to sell in her store. She said yes…and then she left! So Emily’s task of the night, now complete, was folding over a hundred sheets of tissue paper. Kinda like origami but not as much fun?

Moral of the story—Emily super needs to learn how to speak better Spanish!

So Much Food!

This post began as part of the main post, but it quickly grew vastly out of proportion. Since food here is definitely not allocated in similar ways as what we were used to in the US, we spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing the food we are given by our host families.  And since I’m a little obsessed with food…well, here comes all you’d ever want to know (and more!) regarding my general food situation in Barranquilla!

In general, meals here are made up of a variety of different sorts of starches with various preparations. While it’s safe to say that the main component of most of our meals are starch, the kind of starch and what’s been done with it seems to vary quite a bit. For instance, some of the families give their peace corps volunteers given mountains of rice (plain or prepared in different ways) as a side dish. Others of us get bread, or plantains in different ways. I seem to be getting more bollos than others as well as boiled potatoes, but more on that later.

In addition there being different kinds of food here, the other big meal variation is that lunch is the large meal of the day. The portion sizes of the lunches I’ve been served rival most American dinners; dinner here is much more like a traditional American lunch both in the time it takes to prepare and portion sizes.

It’s been years since I was served a plate of food that I was expected to finish, so this transition has been a bit rocky. The Peace Corps told the host families that we are used to eating big dinners, but apparently neglected to inform them that the lunches they serve us at school are ginormous so at first I was receiving large portions for dinner as well as lunch. I’ve since trained my family that I certainly can’t eat a giant sandwich, a quarter of a watermelon (literally), boiled potatoes AND saltines for dinner, as well as a huge cup of a juice and/or smoothie…but even now that I’m getting slightly more normal-sized portions, my host mom is convinced I’m going to waste away. (Now I get my meal served on a child-sized plate, it’s pretty hilarious)

Also, as some of you may or may not be aware, I spent the majority of this past year as an extremely happy vegetarian/light pescatarian. Okay, okay, I ate a little bacon occasionally…but that’s beside the point. The main point is that I thought it would be super easy to switch to eating meat here. I’m still trying, but this assumption was certainly incorrect! Could be that the first real helping of meat I ate was  a pungent slice of ham on a roll with cheese and butter, and then the next night, some sort of meat that can only be classified as “ground.” My stomach was still making resentful noises when I awoke the next morning after each of these meals. I also haven’t had full helpings of milk since my parents stopped forcing it on me sometime after elementary school. Here, however, morning liquid in my house is served in the form of a cupful of warm milk with some sort of flavoring—aka café con leche, but really more accurately “leche con café”.  In the mornings, sugar and Nescafe (instant coffee) is generally placed beside my brimming cup of warm milk. So I’m drinking something resembling a warm mocha. Needless to say, my stomach had long since stopped producing enough lactaid for that sort of consumption level…

That being said, everything else is tasty enough, although the tasty balance of salt portioning doesn’t seem to exist (most things are either extremely salty or entirely bland). During the week, Peace Corps is having a restaurant cater lunch for us at the school. We get huge helpings of rice, veggies, meat, soup, and a little dessert as well. A traditional lunch is usually rice and chicken, the chicken diced up and served in the rice with lots of salt and oil, or roasted meat of some kind with meat and plantains, or other sorts of fried things. And juice. Lots and lots of juice of all sorts of different fruits with tons of added sugar. We convinced the restaurant to do veggie meals as well, so I usually get to eat lentils or beans or sautéed veggies for my main dish along with the requisite rice, fried plantains and iceberg lettuce.

For breakfast I’ve had everything from hardboiled eggs (the first hardboiled eggs I’ve ever had!) to a ham and cheese sandwich to boiled potatoes to bollos to fruit to cornflakes to saltines and/or bread…never only one thing, and usually three or four different components. Other breakfast options I’ve heard of include granola, raisin bran, sandwiches of all kinds, and/or Aveno, which is apparently some super sweet sort of grits/oatmeal concoction.

I’ve heard of some truly amazing dinners that other people receive, like sautéed veggies over mashed plantains and cheese, or vegetable salads and roast meat. My host family, however, prefers a simple approach. In addition to the ham, butter and cheese sandwiches they’re particularly fond of, I’ve had some Colombian version of spaghetti and meat, and lots of bollas. Bollas are corn based. They’re made of cornmeal or corn flour, not sure which, mixed with water into something like a paste, or really a gelatinous mass. It’s shaped into a tube, wrapped in corn husks, tied with a string and cooked in the oven. The most common form is plain white, and when on the plate looks sort of like a small log of boiled potato, except more gelatinous. They have no real taste…almost like a mix between rice or potato. They can also be made with cheese, with coconut milk slightly sweeter, or with a yellow, slightly sweeter corn. My host mom doesn’t make these, she buys them from the little store on the corner but they’re super common everywhere and used as a side dish for just about anything at breakfast or dinner.

Some other noteworthy foods include Queso Costeño—a strong, tangy cheese made locally here on the coast that’s stiffer than feta but comes in blocks reminiscent of it (my host mother loves it, so we have it at almost every meal), mangos for the fact that the streets are lined with mango trees and in the spring you can apparently just walk around and pick them up off the street and eat them, and plantain fritters, which have a name I don’t know right now, which are the side dishes to most meals and are fried to the point of having no taste or unique texture. 

Foods which I haven’t had yet but am looking forward to include empanadas—the delicious version of hot pockets, made mostly with a ground meat or chicken mixture (meat other than chicken here isn’t named, it’s simply called “carne”), and arrepas, which are dense, fried corn patties between which you put cheese or fried eggs or meat or butter (or any and all of the above). I’ll keep you posted!

Everything is super healthy here, as you can see, and with the heat and the general culture which includes walking no faster than an amble at best, and sitting everywhere you end up for prolonged periods of time…well, we’ll see how long it takes until I grow out of my clothes. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that there are no drying machines here. (We have a washing machine though, as a side note!) Maybe I’ll sneak some pictures of these at some point as well…but for now, that’s all I got.

Week One

Woohoo, today is the official last day of our first week!

Andddd, in an interesting turn of events, I definitely don’t have ready internet access. I’ll hope to post once a week or so.  So much for internet cafes with wifi! Instead there are lots of internet “cafes,” which are tiny buildings that have computers connected to an internet—and by computers I mean one or two—and a phone that is capable of making international calls that you can pay by the minute for. Oh well. I’m hoping to use the internet at another Peace Corps member’s house to do most of my real internet usage, which is where I am now…although it gets a little awkward since it’s sort of hard to walk in and tell them I just want to use their internet. At least at this point. Maybe later, but really right now I’m making do without. So instead of normal sized, decently-spaced entries, you’re getting this ginormous one! And a then another one as well. It's been a big week! So here we go—

A typical day:

Days here are starting to fall into a rhythm. We have classes Monday-Friday from 8 :00-5:00 at Colombo Americano, which is a private English school that has a few locations throughout the city. There are a few other Peace Corps volunteers living with families nearby. We have to catch a bus for classes at 7am. A few of us (as well as one of our host dad’s) have been “running” in the mornings – we meet at my house at 5:45 and go run laps on the sidewalk around a nearby park (the park is too small to run inside it, but the streets aren’t navigable enough to run through them). Then there’s the 45 minute bus ride on a crowded bus that winds through the city and has no designated stops, so you just push a button or yell when you want to get off.

In the days we basically have Spanish classes in the morning and Peace Corps classes (on teaching and Peace Corps policies, etc) in the afternoons. We have an hour for lunch. Lunch is catered by a nearby restaurant that has finally gotten the idea that “vegetarian” entrees don’t mean iceberg lettuce and rice, so that’s been great since it’s my only guaranteed vegetarian entrée of the day (there’s a whole separate post on food…so I’ll go into lots more detail there!)

After class, we have another hour bus ride on an even more crowded bus, and we get back a little after 6:00. When I get home, my host family is usually watching some sort of tv, which often is a terrible dubbed American movie (who knew Will Smith did so many incredibly awful movies…). Dinner is around 7. This is a short, no-frills affair and then my family settles in for some more TV…news, more movies, or “Yo Me Llamo” are staples. (Yo Me Llamo, which means “My Name Is” is reminiscent of American Idol, except that the contestants are impersonators. It is on 3 days a week for 2 hours at a time and everyone goes crazy for it here. As in, the day Quaddafi was killed, we only saw 5 minutes of this on the news because it was Yo Me Llamo time…ridiculous!)

Although we just sit all day and night, the days are long and sort of exhausting…I try and learn some Spanish or do my homework while the TV is on and often fall asleep in my rocking chair watching TV, and go to bed sometime between 9 and 11. Rinse and repeat!

Host Families:

We were given our host families this past Sunday. Peace Corps members sat behind our giant mound of luggage in the hotel lobby while families arrived and we watched as our comrades departed in the arms of their new parents. Aside from a small mixup when one of us went home with the wrong family (And yes, it fulfilled all awkwardness potential on that note), it wasn’t long before we’d all been spirited away!

My host family turned out to be closer to host “grandparents,” and unlike many of the families who have extra family members and such running around, it’s simply myself, Ana Marguerita, and her husband Gregorio. Ana Margarita is 69 and her husband is 72. Gregorio seems to have early Alzheimer’s, which makes for a slightly unique dynamic. He speaks some English from childhood classes and loves to use it when possible…and I get extra practice with vocab and such since we get to have the same conversations with him multiple times every night!

Ana Margarita is amazing—the house we live in is directly in front of the entrance to a primary and secondary school of 2000 or so children. Thirteen years ago she started a small photocopy shop primarily used by the students and teachers of the school. She sells small school supplies and some candy and such, but the biggest attraction is the homework. The way the schools work here is that the teachers bring Ana Margarita their books and she keeps them at the store. When the teachers assign homework, the students come to Ana and ask for copies of their homework and she’ll copy it for them, page by page, on old photocopy machines and charge 50 centavos or so a sheet. Starting at 6:30 in the morning when she opens, her store is hopping! 

Outside the store is a large, ancient tree and in the tree is an outlet and a lightbulb. The outlet is generally used by a man who fries things and sells them to the students at the school across the street, and apparently for music sometimes as well but I have yet to see that happen.

As for the house I’m living in, it’s fairly small. There’s one living room/dining room area, with some formal burnt orange velour furniture that isn’t ever used, three wicker rockers placed strategically in front of a tv, and the dining room table. Everything is tiled. I have a small bedroom that used to belong to Ana’s daughter (she has two children, both doctors now living in a town 4-6 hours away by bus). I have a twin bed, a fairly large closet/armoire, a little white plastic table and chair, and a fan. Also an unusable air conditioner, randomly…but with all the rain it’s actually been fairly cool and I haven’t needed a fan at night at all! I have a few pictures of this all below. As a side note, I don’t have internet, which was expected. What I didn’t expect was that I’m actually in the minority in this regard. Also, instead of having Skype in the internet cafes, they have phones you pay to use to call the states, so I’m still working on figuring out where I’ll be able to Skype for the next three months. Frustrating. Then again, I have my own bathroom with a mirror(!). And since I can check email on my kindle (although it’s a pain in the butt and writing emails is potentially more cumbersome than texting), it is legitimately a toss up whether I would prefer to have internet access from my computer or my own bathroom…ahh well. 

My barrio:

Colombia is divided into “departments” which are very similar to the states in the US. In each department there is a “capital” city, and the city is divided into barrios, or neighborhoods. (So Barranquilla is the capital of the department of Atlantico). My barrio is named “Los Andes.” Like the other barrios nearby, we’re in a strata “3” which translates to lower middle class—more on stratas later. There are many small stores selling vegetables and dry goods, beauty shops, little restaurants, etc. It’s not uncommon to see men with carts and donkeys riding along either selling fruit or trying to collect old scrap metal from the streets or inhabitants. 

Many of the sidewalks are tiled with what could be adobe, and look to be extensions of each house’s patio. While these are pleasing to the eye, the smoothness of these tiles makes the sidewalks extremely tricky in the rain!

Apart from footing, the barrios are safe in the daylight as long as you don’t do anything dumb. There are three other Peace Corps families who live with families on my same street. Our families are fairly protective and don’t let any of us walk alone after dark, especially after eight or so (Because we’re so close to the equator, it gets light and dark at 6 in the morning/night every single day year round). I actually don’t have any pictures of the barrio right now because one of the extremely protective mothers made us not take our cameras out on Monday (which was a holiday—Colombian Colombus Day, celebrated a week later because they made it permanently on Monday so there would be a long weekend). She said that there were too many people around and the cameras would get stolen. Other people we met up with for lunch in the same area had taken pictures with no problem, so we’re still unsure if the families are being way overprotective because we’re Americans, etc, or if these security threats are real. We're thinking it's a little bit of each, but they're definitely being very protective

However, that being said, my “abuela” seems to be a little less strict than the others. I’m allowed to go to the park alone in the morning if I want to run (in circles around the park on the sidewalk, not in the park itself since there’s no space in there to run), and when I came back at 10:30 on Friday night after getting a couple beers at a local place with some other volunteers, she said “Oh, you’re back so early!” Perfecto.

Classes:

So, for the next three months we’ll be spending most days in “Colombo Americano,” which is a country-wide institution that teaches English to people of many ages. They’ve volunteered to let us use their classrooms. The most bizarre thing about our days there is that when the air conditioner is on, the rooms get incredibly cold. Like, winter coat and hat cold. But of course we all have Colombian-coast-appropriate gear…which means that on the rainy days we have to turn off the air conditioner so we don’t spend the hours huddling in our small plastic chair-desk contraptions in rain jackets and shivering. 

In terms of content, the Spanish classes are, as predicted, the most interesting. However, the curriculum doesn’t seem extremely advanced. I’m sure it will get harder, but they’re using the same curriculum for basically all levels, and adjusting the “depth” of what they teach to skill level. We’ll see if it works. We’ve done greetings, physical descriptions, and family members in my class, as did basically everyone else, regardless of skill level.

In the afternoons we learn Peace Corps-y things. Like more security and policy information, but also information specific to  Barranquilla. These classes basically consist of one director or another reading out a Power Point to us and then explaining themselves again, while the other directors sitting in the room qualify those explanations with further explanations. For the next few weeks we also have a woman from DC doing teaching seminars with us, which are sometimes interesting. The powerpoint situation makes the afternoons stretch long and slow but I calm myself by reminding myself that I really have no better place to be right now…it works most of the time.

Arroyos:

Arroyos have quickly become an integral part of our lives here. Arroyos are the flash floods that happen, especially on certain streets, almost every time it rains. It rains every day. The reason these happen is that Barranquilla has no storm or sewage anything. The streets are completely paved over. So when it rains—again, it rains every day during the rainy season…tons…--the streets turn into raging rivers. The water soaks into the ground and softens it so much that trees topple—into houses, cars, the street, wherever. The water, even water just a few inches deep, has a riptide so strong it can topple buses. So when it rains, the city stops. No one leaves their houses, many of the buses stop running, the taxis pause, and everyone waits for the rain to stop. So for our first day of class, we were literally all two hours late because of the rain. Arroyos typically only last for an hour or so before they go down, the water running into the Magdalena River apparently although how it gets there I still don’t know, since the river is not on significantly lower ground than Barranquilla. They cause quite a bit of damage around the city—houses get completely flooded, roads washed out, etc. Why sewers weren’t built/aren’t being built is still a bit of a mystery.

Anyway, this seems to be good enough for now. Overall, life is a little surreal because although we’re in this new culture and living with host families, etc, our day to day life is vastly removed from the community. And since it gets dark at 6 and our hour long bus ride means it’s dark before we get home, we don’t even get to explore the neighborhoods at all during the week. My Spanish ebbs and flows...sometimes I think I'm understanding a fair amount, and then other times my host mother tries to explain simple things and I have no idea what's going on. Other than that, obviously life is different right now but not all that different from the states, objectively (minus the lack of internet). Waiting for the other shoe to drop…aka when our actual work begins. I think then the real shell shock may hit!

Various pictures below:

                                          Waiting to be adopted

                                          Group lunch in barrio Los Andes

                                          My bed and non-functioning air conditioner

                                          My "desk"...beach furniture is pretty much the norm around here

                                           Classroom at Colombo Americano

                                          View from our classroom in Colombo Americano (it's like a motel,     
                                          the hallways are outside)

                                           Cafeteria at Colombo Americano

                                           Giant iguana! They're all over the grounds at Colombo

                                          Our teacher bought us coconut water (as in, you buy a coconut
                                        and the guy  machetes off the top of it and you drink out the water) on our
                                         class field trip today!

                                                    Eating an avocado for lunch in order to escape yet another ham
                                                    sandwich

                                         View from the corner by my house

                                          Hanging out with Heidi (and Katie, she's invisible) at the Paneria on the
                                           corner.

I'll get some pics of my house, my abuela's store, and the outlet in the tree soon :)