Monday - Day Seventeen
Well it is Monday again and I am not happy about my classes. I really liked last week’s schedule. It was hard for me, but I learned a lot and I enjoyed the classes. This week I am back in a basic vocabulary and audio-lingual style grammar conference. I’m still in Citlali’s Spanish class, which is fine, but I cannot handle more grammar than that in one day. It was so much more useful to be speaking Spanish is the conversation classes and to be inundated with it in the cultural class. I am going to go and talk to the Spanish department about this when I have a longer break today. I just need to stand up for myself and do it.
Later........
Well after one hour of vocabulary class, I decided that I didn´t want to do the next two and I went off to the computer lab. I spent the next 2-3 hours just updating LJ, responding to emails, and doing various other things that I just don't have time to do on an average day without staying late at school. Dee soon joined me and we both worked until about 5:30 when we decided that we needed to go get some food. We went back to La Gringa because the food is good, cheap and fast. It was tasty again and then it was time to return home.
One of our housemates, Doug, is going home early so that he can be home for his sister's graduation and our host family decided to throw a party for all of us. We thought that it was going to start around seven, but time is pretty fluid down here so we had time to rest for a bit before everything got started. I wasn't sure how enjoyable this was going to be. I am just not much of a partier, but we really did have a good time. For the first little bit it was just us (meaning us, the family, and our housemates) and a couple of girls that we didn't know. We used this time to take lots of pictures of eachother with the half dozen or so cameras that were there. Then we had a large dinner (I wonder if comida during the day was small so that everyone would have room) and chatted for a bit.
Martha was telling Quita that she needed to take down some pictures that she had taken in Alcapulco of Martha in her swimming suit, and turned to us for support. All the gals said that we would have to see them, so off we all went to the apartment above the garage (where Real World Mexico happens according to Quita) to take a look. We all thought Martha looked fine and that they were cute pictures, but I know how it is to be overweight and not want to see yourself in pictures. I am more comfortable with this, however, than Martha is.
From that we got off topic chatting about the best way to open a fresh coconut that had been brought back from Acapulco, and Melinda terrified Brittany with tales about the size of kokiburi (cochroaches) in Japan and how there were definitely some cucaraches in our house too. Between that, the story of the bugs that were seen in the kitchen, and the scorpian that had been in our bathroom the first day that we arrived, Brittany avowed that she would not be eating or sleeping again during the rest of her stay.
This chat apparently took longer than we all thought and several people came upstairs to tell us that we were being asocial. So we dutifully went back downstairs to find that Javier (our papa here) had come home with members of his band and one of them was really showing off the dance moves with Laura, our hosts' daughter. I have often heard from people form Mexico that Americans just don't know how to really dance, and this demonstration was proving this to be true. They were both awesome dancers and the guy was particularly amazing. He stated showing Javito (the son) some moves along with some of the more dance prone members of the household. It was quite fun to watch. Almost everyone had had a turn when Javito (Javo to all of us) said that Dee and I needed to dance too. I put it all on Dee and she finally agreed to get up and try it. Neither of us know anything about Salsa, Mambo, or whatever, but she did pretty well with Javo, who is a real gentleman for being only 20. After that the dancer started showing everyone the advanced moves and we all (including me) tried to follow along with varying levels of success. Amanda insisted on dancing with myself and Dee in turn to try to help us figure out what we should do, which actually helped a bit. I think that Dee could do it with some classes, but I need some more work before I am ready to really dance. Still it was fun.
At 1AM we finally had to bow out and go to bed. It was a school night after all, and we needed to get some sleep. But is sounded like some stayed longer, especially our two hard partiers, Brad and Amanda. We will see how they feel tomorrow.
That is all for now!