Viva la Vida

As I walk across the patio to my room, a ruckus starts up from somewhere deeper in the garden. Endless barking and growling begins as I enter my room and continues nonstop until I leave. Even my host family occasionally comes out to try and quiet the chihuahua down. Don't blame it all on the 15-year-old dog though, its the lizard's fault too. He should probably quiet down from his post on the outside wall of my room. He just sounds like a giant cricket gone wrong. And the actual cricket chirping in the background? Well, I can deal with that.

After lunch, our host parents took Julia and me for a ride around the city to sort of get a feel for the place and how it worked and where things were. We stopped at a few markets and at the local mall, across the road from my university. The mall was pretty amusing. It's just like our mall back home, but with different names for the shops. Jamba Juice turns into “Tangerines”, and Claire's turns into “Oops!” (more fitting I think).

We spent some time before dinner just sitting on the porch with our host dad getting to know each other. At dinner Julia and I presented the gifts we brought in thanks for hosting us. Julia started to feel really under the weather at this point. It had been a long day of little sleep and lots of stress, since she'd never been out of the country before and was experiencing major culture shock. She went to sleep early to snap out of her condition for the upcoming day.

This is much more of a car city than it is a walking city, and yet driving here is almost impossible. According to our host parents, we live 15 minutes by foot from the university, and when I look back on how we drove there, it seems about right. Our host parents have also been really helpful with Spanish, teaching us new words and helping us figure out how to speak correctly if we mess up the grammar and such. Tomorrow will be the first day the whole group meets up, so it'll be interesting to see what people's home stay experiences have been like thus far.

They have the same exact crock pot as us. It has all the vegetables drawn around the pure white that makes up its walls and the exact same knob to turn to choose how much you want the crock pot to heat the food. And the desk. I'm sitting here, writing at this desk, this same desk I've used throughout my childhood, though now its moved to the basement in my house. It has the same little shelves to the right for my books which I've already filled up and it has that same white desktop that gets dirty so easily. And some of the people I've met. A good portion of them know my friends. A couple of them know one of my friends from tennis camp a few years ago. Another whole portion of the group know a few of the people I went to Guanajuato with last year. I thought I left home, but I guess home follows you.

I haven't met the whole group that's here yet, as we all got to the airport at different times, but as a mini group, we all seemed to get along pretty well. We have a pair of twins and a set of quadruplets, who somehow managed to accidentally coordinate their outfits with dark blue shirts and tan shorts that morning. We all got bussed from the airport to the University where we will be studying to get picked up by our host families.

Julia, my roommate, had a flight that came in at about the same time as me, so we met our families together. Our dad was the one who greeted us first. He was extremely enthusiastic, insisting on carrying our luggage and just overall being excited to have us. Melissa, the oldest daughter of the family, also met us. She was genuinely interested in us, and was welcoming and willing to spend extra time explaining how the keys to the house worked once we got to home.

The mother and the other two siblings, both my age, are also extremely kind and all excited to have us. Once we got home, they toured us around the house and showed us our room. The house is small, yet big at the same time. Our room is separate from the house, and requires a walk outside to get to. We have our own bathroom (which is pretty big), which is probably 60% the size of our bedroom. Our beds are bunk beds and we have a desk in the room and a little end table with an extra chair. Needless to say, our room is pretty close quarters. I don't how though, but everything fits. My roommate, who over packed even more than I did, had no trouble finding a place for all her things, and I had no trouble finding a place for mine. Once we finished unpacking, the room felt oddly big. So the consensus I guess would be that it is big enough to fit us comfortably and yet is still very cozy.

Once we got to our beds, we found that we each have our own set of keys – a luxury I remember a lot of my peers in Guanajuato struggled without. The roommates had to constantly hang out together or if they didn't once they got home, one of them wouldn't be able to get in the house since the other had the keys. The amount of keys we have to work through is pretty impressive as well – six keys to get from the outside of the house to our rooms.

What caught my eye is that inside the house, there is a random hole in the middle. Its essentially a square area that is just cut out of the house and is open to the air. In this spot they've decorated and planted and placed a turtle inside, so now its a turtle's home. However the turtle has no name, and it is now up to Julia and me to come up with one. This would be easier if the default list of names that we come up with weren't American names...