Secondly: If you're wondering about the earthquake that happened last night in Southwestern Mexico, Ty and I were both far, far away from it, and the tsunami advisory in Vallarta was lifted before noon today, so estamos bien. I woke up to about a dozen messages from friends and family making sure we were okay... It's a scary thing to wake up in the middle of the night and see your phone blowing up. I didn't have my glasses on, so I couldn't see what the messages said right away, but my first thought was that something terrible had happened to Ty and that people were trying to contact me. About nearly gave me a friggen heart attack. We do have friends staying in Oaxaca right now, which was heavily affected by the earthquake, but I was able to get a hold of them this morning and they're safe. Scary times right now... Mother Nature sure is pissed off lately.
But anyway...what was I gonna write about? Oh, yeah.
I survived my second week of Spanglish school!!! I couldn't be happier that it's Friday and that I get to sleep in tomorrow... my brain legit hurts as I'm typing this and I feel like Spanish words are gonna start oozing out of nose and ears. No hay más espacio en mi cabeza! I'm also getting worse at speaking and spelling in English as I get better at Spanish, so that's fun.
Today marks the halfway point of my immersion school experience. Two weeks down, two weeks to go. On Monday, I ditched the private tutor and beginner class and joined the regular intermediate class where I should have been put in the first damn place. (Insert super annoyed eye roll here.) I spent most of Monday feeling pretty butt hurt that I wasn't put in there to begin with because my whole first week felt like a waste, but also because I was a week behind the three other students in the intermediate class and I missed a lot of important stuff. I angry-studied for like 5-6 hours on Monday night in an effort to catch up.
By the end of each school day, my brain feels like a bowl of hot mush, but at least I'm being challenged and learning new vocabulary, unlike last week. Although, skimming ahead in my intermediate book also makes me feel overwhelmed by how much more there is for me to learn. It feels like I have YEARS and YEARS to go until I'm fluent... And as a crazy person, I don't know how to settle for being "just okay" at something, so I'm already trying to figure out what I'm going to do to keep learning after school is over. Oy.
A typical day for me now, since I'm sure you're just dying to know:
- My alarm goes off at 7:00am every morning (say what?!) and I schlep downstairs to the kitchen to make myself coffee... While it's brewing, I wash the dishes from the day before and make something super exciting for breakfast...like oatmeal or toast. (I miss Ty's cooking to say the least.)
- I take my giant cup of coffee upstairs and then I clean my room and (kinda) make my bed before getting ready for school. Daily housekeeping is included in my stay in the "dorms" but it's absolutely ridiculous considering I am one little person living in a massive three-story house all alone. So, my room gets unnecessarily cleaned six times per week. And as I mentioned in a recent post, housekeeping is one of the things I don't really like about living in Mexico. I hate feeling like I have to pick up something immediately, because if I don't, someone else is gonna come along and do it for me as if I'm some kind of adult baby. (Of course, I AM an adult baby...but that's something only Ty gets to experience first hand. Lucky him.)
- After I clean my room, I get ready for school... Which consists of putting on long yoga pants, two pairs of socks (not joking), a tank top (because that's all I have) and one of the four hoodies/jackets I still own. I'm constantly freezing here, and I can't wear 80% of what I packed or I'd for sure turn into a gringo popsicle. But it's not like I could have packed much better for this trip (aside from more closed-toe shoes) because I don't own warm clothes anymore! Good thing I don't care about impressing any of my classmates with my (lack of) fashion sense, because I'm the girl wearing the same Seahawks hoodie like 3 times per week. Sexy.
Side note: I know I said I was enjoying the cool weather here, but I'm seriously freezing all day long. It's been in the low 60s for the last several days (low 50s at night) and I'm constantly wearing multiple layers of clothing. Our classrooms are ice boxes because the doors and windows are kept open all day, and by the end of class my toes are stinging cold. The housekeeper insists on keeping all the doors and windows in my house cracked open, so as soon as she's done cleaning for the day I go around and close them back up. I have a wall heater in my room, but it looks like an ancient artifact and you hafta light it with an actual match...and I don't wanna be known as the girl who burned down Spanglish school, so I've just been bundling under my covers after class. I saw that it's supposed to get up into the 70s next week, so if you need me, I'll be curled up on the warm courtyard tiles like a stray dog.
- Classes are supposed to start at 9:00am, but the instructors are always arriving a few minutes late and the students likes to socialize (aka whine about how hard it is to learn Spanish) before the first bell, so we never start on time. From 9:00-ish to 10:45 we work in our textbooks and learn technical grammar-y things... How to form accurate sentences, questions, responses, different tenses of verbs, etc. "Real" school stuff. This is where my brain starts going gooey. Sometimes I find myself just rolling my eyes and thinking, "Ugh. Seriously?" Like...when I confuse crap like this:
- él jugó = he played / el jugo = the juice
- yo siento = I sit / yo siento = I feel (yes, they're exactly the same)
- cuarto = bedroom / cuarto = fourth / cuatro = four
- que = who, that / qué = what, how
- porque = because / por qué = why
- solo = alone / sólo = only
- las compras = the purchases / tú compras = you buy (So.. Tú compras las compras = You buy the purchases.)
- como = I eat / como = like, as / cómo = how
- You get my point....
- We take our "tea break" from about 10:45-11:15, which is just basically more complaining except with warm beverages in hand.
- From 11:15 to noon we do the "conversation" portion of the day with a different teacher... I assume they rotate teachers for this portion to make the students feel more relaxed. I'm sure some of the struggling students (who are constantly getting corrected by their usual teacher) might feel nervous to have to "perform" for someone they are nervous around... But maybe I'm just making that up. Our normal teacher can be fun, but he's also very technical. Our maestra de conversación is a cute, animated grandma-type who you just wanna hug goodbye at the end of each day. She goes around the room and asks us each the same question (like...what our plans are for the weekend or what our family is like, etc.), to which we have to answer in full sentences...and it's usually a hot mess of bad accents and stumbling through incorrect verb conjugations, but we have fun with it...
- For the last hour of the day, we do a vocabulary segment with our usual teacher... Which in the beginner class, it was like learning the names of vegetables and the months of the year, etc. In intermediate, it's more in-depth stuff like characteristics (adjectives), popular sayings/expressions that don't translate into English, professions and a million other words I'm never gonna remember. This is where my brain reaches full goo status, so it's a good thing it's the last class of the day.
- Classes end at 1:00pm and I usually make myself some more toast or eat an apple for lunch (Seriously, why didn't I bring Ty with me?) and then I go upstairs to lie down for a while and try to recuperate from all the learning.
- My evenings are usually spent reading, studying, doing homework, cooking dinner, whining at Ty on the phone about how much I miss him (aka Bloo), hanging out in a big, quiet house all alone and going to bed early. So, I'm basically a Spanglish monk now. Its okay to be jealous.
I haven't done much socializing outside of the school yet, but I got invited to go to a bull fight tomorrow night and a concert/lunch thing on Sunday afternoon. I thought the bull fight sounded like an "interesting" cultural experience and was considering going until I realized that the bull actually gets killed...so, that's a hard pass for yours truly. I'm the girl who rescues crabs from getting squished in the road, so there's no way I could watch a helpless animal be forced to fight in a rigged battle while a thousand people cheer. I don't think I'm going to the concert on Sunday either, because, duh, the Seahawks are playing!!! I found myself a sports bar about a 20 minute walk from school, so I guess I'm being anti-social again this weekend too. Oh well.
Things back home seem pretty monk-ish for Ty too... There have been lots of big storms and heavy rains in the Bay the last few weeks, so he's been going several days at a time without his precious WiFi and as soon as it gets fixed another storm knocks it back out...and, to top it off, he hasn't been able to golf either because the course has been closed on account of it being a mushy swamp. So, we're both living super exciting lives at the moment... He's been invited over to friends' houses for dinners a few times since I've been gone too...because people must assume he's helpless without me, which is ironic since he takes care of me more than I take care of him. Either that, or they just don't like me...which is impossible, because have you met me? Duh.
Next weekend is Mexican Independence Day and there are going to be tons of parties and festivals and fireworks, so I'll for sure be venturing out to enjoy the festivities, hopefully with some classmates. Stay tuned for photos!
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