Staying alive

Comparing this experience to my experience last year in Ecuador, I'm not sure which is better. As difficult a time as I had during my stay in El Paraiso, by the end, I truly appreciated the immersion experience and the friendliness of the people living on the ridge of a small hill in the middle of nowhere. Whenever you approached a group of people, you would greet them and shake every single person's hand. Despite my difficulty understanding my family's thick accent, they did everything for me, cooked, cleaned, tried to make me feel as much at home as possible.

Contrast that to my current conditions. The city of Xela is a city. People are generally inpersonable because they've been conditioned to having tourists throughout the city. The air pollution here is horrible, as in most Latin American cities. My host mom is fantastic, helps me with my Spanish, and is truly interested in us, but the hosting is definitely run as a little side business, not that there's anything wrong with that. Then again, it's nice to have other people who speak English here, and I've met plenty of people here through various connections, and we've traveled, gone out to dinner, went to sketchy bars (the toilet was in the corner of the room, with only a 3 ft. high partition between the room and the toilet), gone salsa dancing, all things that I never got the chance to do much in Ecuador.

As for the Spanish, things are definitely falling into place more this summer, and it's hard to say if it's the environment or just my experience. I don't think speaking English half the time is too beneficial for my Spanish, but then again, it's easier to learn when you can actually ask someone what something means in Spanish, and they can tell you in English. I think I've improved well enough to the point where I don't need classes anymore and just need to practice, so I cut back my hours to 2 per day, and next week I'm just going to try and find some volunteer work to keep me occupied.

So that's where I am now. As for a recap of the past week's events, mostly just classes last week and hanging out at gringofied bars. On Saturday, we went to the Fuentas Georginas, a hot water spring, where we almost got crushed by several hundred pound boulders that tumbled onto our path as we hiked up. Sunday was a little more relaxed with some studying and watching the finals of the Gold Cup. The past two days, we've celebrated the birthday of Steven, one of my housemates who is also an Emory med student. All's good in Xela, and it's confirmed, my buddy Amit is on his way down, so we'll be sure to have an adventure when he makes it down here.