whats better than two weeks of vacation?

technically ive only had one week of vacation which im currently enjoying at the moment, but last week was close enough to a vacation for me. so here we go ill set up the scene for you.

i just finished my spanish lesson with one of the english teachers at my school and as i was about to leave he stops me and tells me if he could ask a favor of me. of course i said i would love to. ok good cuz now this isnt certain yet but im going to ask the english coordinator if you could help us english teachers out. - now i was getting excited because it dealt with english- ok cool ya i would love to help you guys. cool well heres the thing we do this week called immersion week where we go to our farm and we only speak english are you interested?- is this guy serious?- ya sure ill help out- in a calm tone but really on the inside im screaming because im so happy- ok cool ill let you know.

so as it turned out i was able to go so i went to school on monday as usual dressed in full uniform and every thing we didnt really do too much that day which was nice, but the next day was the day i was really looking forward to. so i wake up tuesday at 5 10 as usual and then i take my shower im not taking as many cold showers as i once did but i assure you even still i would never take a shower as cold as these back in the states. and then now is where things switch up a bit, i put on a v neck pants and my toms. No uniform for me anymore! do you realize how liberating that was for me? no belt no real shoes no socks no polo, i finally felt like i had individuality again. it was amazing and then i picked up a small bag put some fruit and my swimsuit in it- cuz it was water polo day after school- and then ate some b fast and was on my way to school. when i arrived at school i took my daily morning nap because i arrive at 630 but school doesnt start until 7 so i just sleep or read my bible. and then at seven i said hi to my homeroom teacher and then i peaced out of there and went to the auditorium and i left my spanish behind. we then watched a video, in english, about all these different countries, because that was the theme of the week, it started of with this guy from ireland playing bagpipes and then giving a tour of the county where he lived. i felt like i was listening to Mr. McKeon so it was a very nostalgic way to start off the day, and then we went on to other countries. but then we arrived at the farm and pause- a thats right my school owns a farm here in the next city over what the heck thats crazy right or is it just me whos blown away by this? anyway play- then it was pretty much the same every day in this schedule: listen to presentations, teach a ridiculous game in english- one time i had to have everyone in this one team yodel for 30 secs. now that was hilarious, then eat all the delicious food the kids made according to their country typical food, then listen to them talk about their day. now if thats not as relaxing as a vacation i dont know what is. all the while my classmates were toiling over math, chem, english, spanish work... suckers. and the best part is that i had absolutely no work to make up i asked my homeroom teacher if i need to ask my teachers for any of the work we were doing this week and she told me her phrase that she tells me every week ¨no te preocupes¨ dont worry about it. fantastic. so that was my first week of vacation.

second week:

this week was an actual week for vacation in school which was nice, why did we have it? i dont really know which made it all the better because it was like a unexpected gift and those are always good. so i went for that week we went to lago calima which is a lake and it was amazing. so that tuesday we are getting ready to leave and my host cousin and his friend show up because theyre coming with us, and we start to pack everything up and i realize that were packing everything into one car. i was thinking that since there are two families going we would use two cars... i thought wrong. turns out my aunt and uncle were coming the next day so all 4 of us good sized teenagers had to cram ourselves into the back seat. as you can imagine it was not the most comfy ride. but finally we arrive at this club right on the beach of this lake and pretty much they said ¨go¨ so this whole place is pretty much open to us there was a huge kitchen, ping pong table (which i made much use of), couches facing the water and a trail to walk. and later on we had a boat. so as you might imagine i had a really good time there because it was pretty much a place where you can pretty much read wherever you go. unfortunately i was without LOTR so i had to settle with a thinking book: miracles by CS Lewis. and wow it really requires a lot of brain power i was literally tired when i finished a chapter. But on the good side i read a lot of my bible so i read pretty much all of ecclesiasties which i discovered is one of the coolest books ive read in the OT it was super fun to read all this wisdom stuff because i figured that this is stuff that non christians cant write off just because its in the bible, who can argue with ¨there is nothing better for a person that that he should est and drink and find enjoyment in his toil,¨ or ¨the more words the more vanity and what is the advantage to man¨ all of it is legit stuff. and as i said before i made good use of the ping pong table. you see there wasnt much to do there to entertain yourself for a long time, except for of course the ping pong table. so my host bro and i literally played for hours each day, except for the day when we broke the ball that was sad, because then we had to find other things to do, namely sleeping. so we finally went out on the boat to go water skiing, (thank you aunt caren and uncle john for teaching me because i would have looked like a fool), and first i happy just to be doing something really physical, and then i was even more happy when i found out that it didnt bother my knee. i had a lot of fun with it. and i didnt fall too many times though i did have some pretty bad ones. hmmm what else from that vacation... i dont know but it was nice to relax and get away from the city, its really loud here...

so after we got home on that friday i pretty much did nothing my bro went on a date, my parents went on a date... till three in the morning! craziness! they love to dance just like everyone else here, and the party life here goes laaatte. so i stayed home relaxed my super sore muscules from the water skiing and watched some bourne identity with choco milk. good night by my standards. the next day was when the fun really started to happen because we picked up some of the other foreign exchange students from colombia. so that night some of the guys met at my house and we all just hung out telling jokes and making fun of one anothers country. it was a good bonding time for all of us dudes. i got a lot of crap for liking root beer that night. you see root beer doesnt exist in europe like it does in the states. for europeans they just drink beer, , and at my house were some students that were proud of their nations beer so when they got on the topic of root beer i was all alone because i said that i liked it. they all got angry because they thought root beer was trying to be a beer, so after hours of me trying to explain to them that it isnt a beer whatsoever and that it just has the word beer in the name, we came to a mutual agreement disagreeing on our opinions: i will love rootbeer, they will hate it because of the name. later that night we were seranaded by a guitar player and a dude from denmark asked a lot of pretty girls to take a picture with us, now that man has guts... or no shame in being a foreigner. the next day we woke up early and got ready for a tour of cali, it was fun fitting all of us in a van, and unsurprisingly we naturally separated into boys and girl sections. so heres the run down of the demographic of our group: 2 american woop, 3 danes (denmark), 1 austrian (not australlian), 1 taiwanese, 1 belguim...ite?, 5 germans holy crap, and 1 estonian. -Pause estonian? wheres estonia? no one knows and we gave him a hard time everywhere we went, we would of felt bad if he didnt agree with us. and after the tour we went to my g pas ecological reserve, that place with a water fall. so we get there and the first activity we want to do is go to the water fall so we start off and it was a lovely hike, and we had a good time, and then we arrive at the waterfall and i was funny because our guide told us to go into the waterfall but of course we all forgot our swim suits so a danish guy and I said screw it and threw off our shoes and shirts and made our way to the water, thankfully others followed so i wasnt just me and this other guy. and we climb up on this rock and were chillin in the water for a while and then i felt like i should leave so i start heading down the rock, now is where things got interesting, so because we were in the presence of water and rock you can imagine that there was some algae build up on some of the rock so im heading down and im almost and the bottom when suddenly i notice that im looking at my foot, and then i notice that im not touching the ground anymore... poop. so i hit the ground hard and then i start to slide down the rocks. this would have been really fun if wat follows didnt happen. as i was sliding down these rocks the was another rock planted at a 90 degree angle on the path where my hand was sliding... it did not end well. my hand caught on this rock that was jutting out but i continued to slide when i finally came to a halt. i was happy to see i reached the end however something didnt feel too right. i look down at my right hand and i have my answer. i jump up screaming ¨oh! oh! oh my goodness! shoot! goodness gracious!¨ i think my lack of swearing made everyone believe that i thought that my slide down was cool, but their opinions were quickly changed when i raise my hand and they saw that my right index finger was at a100 degree angle... not good. i was half thinking of just pulling on it right there like they do in the movies, but then i realized that the people who do that are action heroes, and i am obviously not an action heroe, so i settled with elevating my finger above my head and high-tailing it back to the building. so this 35 min hike was cut down to a 10 min trek back home. when i arrived my fam knew that something wasnt good and i showed them my finger and some of the rotarians at the table gave a gag so i had to do my best to hide it. and then i went to the hospital where they basically tortured me in the x ray room, gave me an IV for the pain, but turned it of and forgot to put it back on before they fixed my finger, and they fixed it by warning me quickly in spanish and then yanking on it, didnt really warn me at all, and then turned the IV back on and put a splint of my finger that is very dirty at the moment. i returned to the reserve and chilled with all the other students, even risked playing a little ping pong. and we hung out late that night, by american standards not colombian. the next day we went to meet the rotary president OF THE WORLD - i thought that needed some emphasis- so ya this was quite the honor and the students at my table enjoyed this time... by making napkin art. and then we all said goodbye and parted for our rightful cities, and started school the next day.

as you could guess from my two weeks of all of this i was not willing to go back to school in the least, but i did with much reluctancy, and was greeted with much boredom... nothing really happened this last week except for the fact the TTT arrived from my bro back home so i can finally read again - TTT= the two towers- so im very happy about that unfortunately im reading it too fast ill be done with it soon enough.

ok so sorry that i wrote so much and that it was put off for a long time im going to blame it on my broken finger when it really was my procrastination sorry. until later.

hace dos semanas lo siento

its been two weeks sorry.

so when i dont write for two weeks i start to forget all the minor happenings that take place during the week so i dont really know where to start. all i can say is that a lot has happened. so lets start off with one major thing i finished FOTR so now im deprived of an awesome adventure through middle earth and everything seems a little more bland. i found that i really wanted to inside the book and take part in the adventure. this is really embarrassing but whatever its not like im going to be seeing you guys face to face anytime soon. ok so i went on a hike through this ecological reserve that belongs to host grandpa and it was like a jungle so i really enjoyed it but anyway thoughts of FOTR kept on coming into my mind and i actually wanted to see if i could walk and make almost no noise... like a hobbit. anyway i miss the book and i want to read the other two which i dont have. but since i havent been reading FOTR i read The Merchant of Venice which is a fantastic story and play i really enjoyed it but then i finished that in like 4 days so now i need to move on to another book. i think ill start miracles by cs lewis . The bottom line with this is that since there arent very many people to speak english with i find comfort in reading in english so im going to need to pace myself or else im gonna be stuck here without a book.

oh and ive made really good friends with the other foreign exchange student from taiwan we spent like a good 6 1/2 hours hanging around a mall. it was pretty cool because we had to order everything in spanish like icecream hamburgers movie tickets it was pretty exhilerating (dont think i spelt that right. i guess it runs in the family ryan) to only be able to speak in spanish with all the food people. we watched inception fortunately it was in english with spanish subtitles so we could still understand. the malls here are absolutely amazing they totally put the galleria and arden to shame. the one we went to had like 5 fountains, a climbing rock wall, rollercoaster, that funny thing where you put these kids in clear ball and put them in water and you can just laugh at them because they hardly stand for 3 sec. and the fall hard. its like watching a hampster wheel but with kids instead. and they have a legit food court. it was a super fun night and when we got into the cab jenny (other foreign exchange student) realized that she forgot her address, so we had to stop by my house wake up my host bro, it was midnight, and have him look it up online and then we went back to the cab i dropped her off and then i went back to my house. i barely had enough money to pay the cab driver i was about 50 cents away from having to make him wait again while i got more money from my room. it was a close one.

the next day i hung out with Mrs.McKeons cousin which was super fun we went to another mall and hung out there and had dinner. she brought her husband Ricardo i believe and her other cousin Orlando and we just hung out at the table doing our best to to communicate because neither of them spoke much english. they asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up and i said i wanted to be a missionary then a pastor... theyre all christians so that was good but they started asking all these questions about my church, why i wanted to be a missionary, questions about denominations, so basically questions that i have no idea how to answer. but i did my best to answer them and i think i did well enough. were gonna meet up again sometime soon theyre all very cool people Ricardo looked like pastor Ramon from vino nuevo it kept on tripping me out. also that friday my host bro got so sick that he couldnt drive so then i didnt need to go to school upon request from my host mom. so that was awesome. i chilled and walked down to our nearest juan valdez where i chilled, read, and drank delicious coffee. on that sunday i went to my host g-pa´s finca as i said before and chilled there all day i did this ridiculous -walk-across-this-skinny-rope-thats-hanging-over-dirty-water-and-try-to-make-it-across- thing and i got wet, first because i weigh a lot so the rope sagged into the water up to my knees, and second because i have horrible balance so i was swaying to and fro if you want the actual visual go onto my facebook and watch the video. we also went on a hike through the jungle to a sick waterfall that we stood in and relaxed. it was amazing i loved it.

so this last week was my first day of water polo practice it was awesome but shoot im out of shape. by the end of practice my arms were shaking. oh and as it turns out here you dont really need to egg beater so all these guys are just jumping their way around the pool and it takes all the fun out of game to be honest. and they dont play rough here i would hold a guys arm and he would get angry with me on my second day of practice i pulled a guy back by pulling on his suit and he told on me to the coach i mean come on really. anyway i guess ill just have to water myself down so i dont get in trouble. but it was great to be in the water again ive already started to get back my speedo tan. oh and thats another thing here they dont wear speedos its either jammers or suits. during the second day of practice i went to go get a drink of water and everyone was staring and smirking at me, but the cool thing about being an exchange student is that i dont have to care what they think so i just continued walking right in front of them. something really cool this week was that we have these cool days called interclases and its basically a full day dedicated to having sport competitions between the other 3 classes in our grade. and you dont even need to participate so you could just be a lazy bum all day and do nothing. this was my original plan because i am a lazy bum but then i realized if im going to be here for a year might as well participate in school so i played volleyball. at first i was worried about my knee but then i starting hitting a ball around with some other people and it didnt hurt so i was super excited. it was our turn to play so i went out onto the court and we start to play its been a good three years since i actually played a game so i was a little rusty to start but as soon as i got into a rhythm i was rocking those tenth graders. we ended up winning too so that was great and the best news was that my knee didnt bother me in the least so thank you physical therapy for the hell that you put me through two times a week it really helped. oh and i changed buses which was a surprise for me but this bus is primarily older kids so thats cool in which my other bus was all elementary school kids. i wont have any long debates on justin beiber or how many seasons of avatar last airbender there are but thats not necessarily a bad change. and this bus is much more comfortable because it has head rests. it doesnt sound like a big deal but i assure you when youre trying to sleep and you dont have a head rest and you hit a pothole (which are everywhere here) and you smack your head on those two little plastic circles where the head rest is suppose to be, a head rest makes all the difference.

so today i wake up and i have to have a physical for my insurance policy deal so i cant drink water i cant eat and i cant go pee... what a horrible way to start the day. anyway we get the physical started and he´s asking me all these questions which surprisingly i could answer and then he starts to take my blood pressure and my weight and height. and then he starts to leave i was confused because i was supposed to be taking a urine test and blood test as well. but as it turns out i dont because the only reason why i needed to take them was because he read my weight from a report a long time ago with my height info so he thought i was fat, but then he saw that im just a big dude so he called it off. good and bad came out of this good: im not a fat guy who needs a blood and urine test; bad: i didnt drink water, go pee or eat all for nothing... i hate physicals. also today while i was writing this blog my mom comes up the stairs and then calls me and signals me cutting my hair... ok cool lets go. so we go to this hair place and after waiting a while the guy calls me up so i start to head over to the seat. and then he starts to ask me what i want i immediately turn to my mom with a face of both panic and amusement. panic because i have no idea what he´s saying amusement because i already told my mom that i didnt care about my hair so the guy could do whatever he wanted. then the guy and my mom started talking i caught the words Juanes (rockstar here) and moderna and then the guy turned back to me and started saying stuff so i just said si and nodded and let the guy work. i figured if im gonna live here might as well look like i live here, and this guy could make that happen. his first order of business was to thin out my hair cuz i have a mop for a head, then he grabs a buzzer and then angles out my sideburns, at this i had to try my hardest not to laugh. and then he just starts to clip wildly at my hair. then he grabs a lot of gel and spikes up the back of my head and the back of the top of my head leaving the front flat... and then my mom said moderna. she then proceeded to call me a papacito (translated-hot stuff) and we left my maid said that i look like teenager for once (good? bad?) and my fam likes it so i guess its fine ill need a couple days to get used to it but it really doesnt look that bad and im sure i can make it my own i dont think ill spike up the back though. and ya i just got back from youth group so that was fun i feel like a punk because they translate for me but they say they like it so they can increase their vocab im looking forward to the day when i wont need one.

so yup thats about it. until later