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June 9th, 2008
 | 01:43 pm - ¡Hola amigos!
Estoy en Guanajuato. I just got out of 3 hrs of class, with a short break to run down the street for a ¨sandwich of leg¨. Tomorrow it will be 4 hrs bcs Mondays it takes them a while to sort out the schedules. Classes only have 2-5 students apiece, so there are a zillion little sections and possible class levels. New people start every Monday, and stay anything from 2 weeks to, um, I can´ty find the question mark on this keyboard. Funny thing, it´s got a whole lot of unfamiliar characters.
I flew to Mexico last Friday, got settled in my ¨homestay¨ Saturday, and explored the town. Never been to Mexico before. Gto. is a town of staircases -- la casa isn´t far from the school but it´s straight up, seriously, 5 minutes to come down and 20 to go up. La señora (hey, there´s a dedicated key for ñ!) says it will get much better. Doesn´t help that we are at 6000 ft, I´m 100 lbs overweight, and have been anemic lately. ¨-)
I have already eaten things I don´t know what they are -- came across a street market Saturday. At one stall there were 4 women in aprons around a huge round griddle like a Mongolian grill. There were three benches full of people eating so I felt confident joining in! Had something that looked like a tamale, but there was nothing inside, not until la señora split it open and spooned in crumbly white queso and some salsa. Mmmm.
The house where I´m staying is weird. Also strange, and occasionally eerie, especially Saturday night when the wind howled fiercely. We´re on the side of a hill --- everything in Gto. is on the side of a hill -- the roof is at street level and there are at least 3 ¨floors¨ but seriously it changes level whenever it feels like it. There are 21 steps between my room and the kitchen, up and down and down and up again. The floor throughout is a faux-parquet vinyl and the walls are a pale coral. My toilet seat has orange and green ruffles, and a bow. The ceiling in this bedroom is three parallel vaults of brick. That part is cool.
Next to my room is a HUGE sala. It contains stacks of folding charis, a foosball table, a stack of construction debris and the rest empty space. We could hold a respectable square dance fly-in in there. On the garden level somewhere, but extending up through the house like an airshaft, is, no shit, a concrete handball court. The landing near the TV (it´s all stairs, remember) looks out onto it -- laugh loudly at the movie and you get echoes. The route to my room goes through a space with two freezers and a parrot (sounds like the intro to a joke) and then up another dozen stairs to a room with washer, dryer, empty commercial food display case, and a defunct pizza oven. I´m through there and at the end of the hall.
There are 3 students here from Ohio who weren´t even born when I last studied Spanish. Another person in the same program as me came yesterday, and her room is next to mine. A neighbor! Yay! And she´s 38, and we hit it off. I mean, she brought 4 seasons of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. I feel SO much better. We haven´t been prohibited the use of the living room/library that I get glimpses of, but we haven´t been invited to make ourselves at home there either. There´s nowhere at all to sit outside, unless you like the roof/carport, or the company of the two VERY pent-up dogs in the walled back yard. so there´s my room, or there´s the kitchen. (One big round table down, one big round table up four steps.) Whee. I haven´t figured out where the 3 Ohio girls are, or where the family´s bedrooms are, or whether any of the hired help lives in. We get fed breakfast during the week, and the big meal at 3pm every day.
More later -- I may try to come in here every day after class. But right now I want to go read what my sweetie is up to.
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Comments:
¡Hola! yourself! (We'll see if the upside-down exclamation point survives.) Glad to hear you are surviving. I'm recovering from altitude sickness and... well, I'll be blogging about it momentarily.
::kisses kisses kisses::
Cuando yo era cocinera, hace yo trabajè con dos primos Pedro y Marìa. Ellos nacieron en Guanejuato.
K.
Ha, damn. I got the accents backwards. French attack.
K.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/45511023/271124) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cjsmith |
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| Date: | June 10th, 2008 04:41 pm (UTC) |
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PICS PLZ! :-)
Seriously, I hope you have a fabulous time there and learn a lot. |
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