Week 2 done!

So the soccer game yesterday was actually pretty fun. Somehow the other team ended up having 4 Guatemalans and my team only had one, so that pretty much set us up for failure. We lost 4 to 12. On the walk back to the school afterwards we saw a dog eating some kind of meat and when we got closer, we realized that is was actually the head of a dead puppy! It was the saddest thing ever! My friend said well it´s a dog eat dog world, which would´ve been funny if it wasn´t so gross. For those of you who have never been to Guatemala, there are tons of stray dogs everywhere. They just run around the streets barking and looking for food and they´re dirty and gross. Some are cute and I want to bring them home and feed them but most of them aren´t. My teacher was telling me that the government doesn´t care enough to do anything about the problem and the most they´ve ever done is try to kill them. She said sometimes they´ll put poison out in the streets at night!

Today during class, my teacher and I walked to this bake shop that´s only open two days a week. It´s run by an American Mennonite family, which seems kind of random for Guatemala. They had huge fresh donuts and bagels, tons of cookies, breads, cupcakes, pies, yogurts, and granola. I got a pineapple filled powdered donut and it was so good. I asked my teacher if there were a lot of Mennonites in Guatemala and she said that there was actually a pretty big congregation here in Xela, so there´s an interesting fact for you :)

I also had my test today and  I really haven´t been doing that much studying this week. I studied in the morning today and during the break. I did okay on it but not as good as I would have hoped. They don´t actually give you a grade on it, they just correct it and show you what you got wrong. I mostly just messed up on conjugating irregular verbs in the past tense- there´s so much to memorize! I´m going to switch teachers again next week. I really liked my teacher this week but I feel like she moved too fast for me. I didn´t have enough opportunities to review and practice what she was teaching me. So hopefully next week, I´ll get a teacher that goes a little but slower through the material.

After lunch today Tim and I went for a walk to Zona 3 of Xela to the bigger market there to buy fruit for the fruit salad we´re bringing to the dinner tonight. I got three big mangos and a watermelon for 10Q! I can´t beleive how cheap fruits and vegetables are here. Last week for my salad, I bought like 8 tomatoes, 2 cucumbers, an onion and a lime all for $1. I was kind of dissappointed though because none of the mangos I bought today were good enough to put in the salad. They were either rotten on the inside or not ripe yet. I don´t know, I´ve never bought mangos before haha. Hopefully the salad tastes good with out them.

To Haley, my neice, I watched iCarly in Spanish today! Analy said it´s one of her favorite TV shows too :)

I learned some pretty interesting things about Guatemala and Xela this week from my teacher. One thing is that the reason that the streets aren´t paved and theres not many stop signs or traffic lights in this area of the city is because it´s considered a historical part of the city and the government wants to try to preserve the history. The streets are really narrow and made of stones like old fashioned cobble stone streets and apparently they´ve been that way ever since people used to ride around them on horses. The people that own the houses and businesses on the streets in this area can´t remodel their houses to be a more modern style and they can only paint their houses certain colors. They also can´t have certain kinds of advertising like bright neon lights. Another thing is that most people here do not use their refridgerators or their ovens. My host family has an oven but they just use it to store left over foods and pots and pans, never to cook in. My teacher said it´s because they can´t hook their ovens up to the wall like we do in the states, they have to buy little tanks of gas like you would for a grill and I guess that gets to be really expensive. I still don´t understand why they don´t use their refridgerators but my host family leaves out mayonaisse, eggs, fruits, vegetables, leftovers, and even milk sometimes. We also hardly ever eat fruits and vegetables, which is weird because they´re so cheap. My teacher told me that a family that eats a lot of fruits and vegetables is seen as having a diet of poor people, which seems kind of strange. My teacher was asking me if I like to cook and bake. She asked me how to make chocolate cookies and I told her about break and bake cookies and she was saying how food in the US is so much easier to cook because we have pre-prepared foods and frozen foods and everything. I´m pretty thankful for that :)

I helped Ana (my host mom) cook again earlier this week. She had shredded up a ton of carrots and then she put in a block of this soft, crumbly cheese (which is wrapped up in a huge leaf when you buy it), an egg, salt, sugar, flour, and some seasoning stuff. She had me mix it all together with my hand and then she made it into these little patties and fried them in a pan. They tasted okay but I don´t think I´ll be making them at home haha. We also had this weird soup the other day. The broth was basically just water and it had huge chunks of vegetables in it. I had like a whole carrot stick, a whole potato, a quarter or this pumpkin squash thing, and like a half of corn on the cobb all in my bowl. I don´t understand why it just wasn´t cut up haha. It was kind of difficult to eat. There was also a chunk of meat in there attached to this huge bone that looked like a lumbar vertebrae which made me not really want to eat it. I said something to Tim about it afterwards and he was like yeah that definitely was a vertebrae! haha- I love that the majority of students at this school are in some sort of medical field and can understand the way I think :)

Anyways, I think I´ve gotten used to the weird meal times and foods here by now. If at home my main food groups are pasta, chicken, and veggies, here they´re eggs, beans, and tortillas. And I´ve actually began to prefer the repetetive eggs and beans to some of the other things we eat.