well i hope you had a nice break for your eyes i assure you i did as well, if you cant remember the post that you read just before you started this one you should go to a doctor to check your memory, if you didnt read the one before, learn spanish and know that when someone says part two it implies that there usually is a part one previous to it and you should read that one before this one if you so please (really its not necessary cuz this one has nothing to do with the first part but if you like reading in chronological order it would be preferable).
well the month of january.... where to begin... i was still in vacaciones (did that on purpose), i pretty much just hung out with the other foreign exchange students and my fam as much as i could. oh so i finally had my thanksgiving dinner which put the world back on track. you may think that im joking about this but its for real my holiday internal clock was way out of wack because i didnt have a thanksgiving dinner, christmas didnt feel like christmas and therefore there shouldnt have been a new years oh i should probably tell you of new years after this, but ya all this because there was no turkey dinner. in the end there still was no turkey cause its super expensive but we had chicken with turkey gravy so it was fine. thanks again aunt lisa for the food it really made the world catch up to its real time. unfortunately our green bean cassarole didnt turn out well, its that our cream of mushroom soup was literally a soup and no so much cream so we couldnt bake it but we just had soup and green beans that we could dip in it. we didnt eat all those delicious little french´s fried onions thing so it became my snack when i was watching bones. if you dont believe me that theyre a good snack talk to ryan. all in all it was a delicious dinner that all of us foreign exchange students loved.
Now back to new years i cant believe i forgot, maybe because in the shadow of thanksgiving it disappeared ( i like thanksgiving if you couldnt tell). well new years was another different experience for me. United states-party with friends and family watch the countdown in new york time wait three hours watch it in our time eat and drink and go home. Colombia-eat, drink, drink some more, maybe a bit more, dance, using a cell phone scream the countdown, 3 2 1... stand on your chair to get a girlfriend or wife, put lentels in your pocket for prosperity, eat 12 grapes a wish for each one, wear yellow underwear, grab a suitcase and passport and run around the neighborhood, light a scarecrow on fire symbolizing all the bad that will happen in the next year, and then eat drink and dance once again. it was different. but fun.
to be honest i kind of forgot what happened in between vacation and when school started back up so im just gonna go to when school started up. so school was to start up on jan 11 a wednesday and so i was very lazy with the entire thing but nevertheless i woke up at my usual 5 15 to get ready my host mom was kind of lazy about it too, but we left at 6 05 for our schools (shes a teacher) and were goin to my school and were passing the gate for all the buses and all the buses were still inside which was kinda weird because it was 6 30 and usually they would be going to pick students up. at this my mother turns to me and asks me if i was sure that i had school today i said i was positive and we continued on to the front gate and only the guard guy was there so that was a bad sign so i asked the guard when all the students come back and he told me tomorrow. shoot. but by this time my mom couldnt drive me all the way back home so she dropped me off at the bus station and asked if i knew how to get home. sure i said and i did kind of know but this was first time doin it alone so she left me and went on to her school so i was standing there fat backpack, uniform, and a lost look on my face. unluckly for me the window where you buy the ticket didnt have a hole in it so i could hardly hear the women asking what i wanted it was just a lot of que´s and como´s on my part. but eventually i got back home and i a good quiet reading time and then i slept until like 11 it was nice. but wait it gets better (gameshow voice) my sister wanted to take me to the finca with her friends on thursday, the next day, so i would be able to miss school. so we asked my mom she said claro que si and it was on. but wait it gets better i was all ready to go on thursday but when i woke up my sister told me that it would have to be on fri, so i unnecessarily missed a day of school. good. and now i could invite the other foreign exchange students with me because honestly i didnt want to chillin with a bunch of people i could have only a half conversation with, so i got two out of three others to come the other one had to go to school, but we still had a lot of fun. something that i learned from that weekend was that colombian marshmallows suck and are even worse over a fire. i missed jet puffed marshmallows for sure. and then school started the next week which was fine, boring but fine, and then i bounced to go on a trip with the exchangers for a week in the capital and the tiny little pueblos in the surrounding mountains.
So now i can talk about the trip so we went to bogota the capital of colombia and to be honest it was just like a more crowded and little dirtier spanish speaking LA oh wait LA is pretty much spanish speaking so never mind about that part. it was kinda cool though we went to a money printing museum which was ok but we got bored after a while and it turned into just a conversation about why the west of the united states is different than the east. so that was kinda cool. oh and we went to one of the highest mountains in bogota called montesurrate that veiwed the entire city. which was cool but like i said it was like LA so although you could see the city it had this dirty cloud hanging over it. oh and i got food poisoning here with a friend. it was kind of funny because we were on the same schedule of diarrhea for a while which i realize sounds a bit awkward now that i write it down but im gonna keep it in here. we both woke up that night after lunch at around the same time running to the bathroom, unfortunately his stomach was 15 min ahead of mine so i got stuck with the stinky bathroom, but yes the next 2 and a half days sucked... especially the time in the bus. we also had a sort of food fight in an italian resturant earlier that night. my austrian friend was trying to make me eat sugar from a spoon so she was trying to force feed me it so i blew it in her face, kinda mean yes but what follows is worse. so she was upset as well as my other austrian friend next to her who was caught in the overspray so they put a ball of butter in a spoon and prepared to catapult it at me. naturally my hands go up to protect my face and i was trying to talk her down because we were in a nice resturant and we were representing rotary club, and other crap like that. and then my german friend, at least who i thought was friend (this is my diarrhea friend) grabbed my arm to pull it down i fought him off but in that split second while my arm was down my friend took her chance a flung the butter. and it was in slow motion for real but the unfortunate thing about slowmotion is that youre stuck in it as well so you cant move out of the way and soon i found myself with the butter stuck in my mouth which was good aim on her part, but still a little disgusting. in the end i was the ¨bigger man¨and i didnt react. will i react at sometime in the future? probably but for now i will remain quiet. the next day we embarked for the other surrounding towns. im sorry to say i cant remember all the names of the towns but ill tell you the all the cool things we did. well i already told you of montesurrate, and the italian food fight, so we went to la catedral de sal. and its a cathedral in a salt mine basically, and let me tell you this place was crazy cool and the walls tasted like salt. yes we all licked the walls, in secret of course because we didnt want to disrespect the cathedral. but ya it was beautiful. outside of the cathedral in like a courtyard there was an intense climbing rock wall which of course we had to do i was kind of pressured past my inhibition of my finger and knee to do it. so i went up barefoot which was new, wat i forgot was my fear of hieghts so as soon as i got half way up and realized how high i was i kinda freaked out and with this extra burst of adrenaline i raced to the top. the bad part was that i couldnt use my arms for like a half an hour. but it was nice to know that i can do it. we also went to a nice little town where pretty much every building was shop and i bought some cool pants. im sorry ryan i didnt get you some like you got me so everyone can make fun of your wierd foreign pants but i did get you that tunic shirt you wanted. so we went to two sun temples in this trip. one of them was really cool the other was just kinda weird so ill start with the weird one. this one had penis sculptures. yes. it looked liked an immature highschooler who had a knack for rock sculpting had a feild day in this place. what made it more awkward was that our adult rotary leaders were the first to take pictures hugging them. now the second one was really cool it was in our last day and our guide was estatic with it. our guide is in love with native american cultures and he just loves the mythologies and philosophies behind it so he somehow got us the chance to enter into the sacred holy temple of the sun god of a tribe and we were able to go in and sit there and take it all in. we were asked to meditate on all of nature and the magnificence of it all and the connections weve been making with people from around the world so i made it into a time of prayer and worship to my God. it was really kinda cool and afterwards on the bus almost nobody was talking, it was kinda weird but cool at the same time. later that night in our hotel there was a group of english teachers and students at our hotel for an english retreat and it was their last night too and they were having a party and they invited us so we went and talked to these people in english some of us danced with them but what was originally just a group of us going to get water turned into our own little dance party out in front of the hotel. mainly a dance course for the americans because apparently every other country in the world knows at least some kind of dance really well. theres a girl from namibia africa with us and we became friends and we were on the dance floor and we were dancing the chacha but she was in flats and i was in my dusty toms and the floor was super slippery so we were basically just slidding everywhere with style and rhythm it was great. so ya those were my highlights of the trip for me and now were in feb and so ill leave the rest for a later post. hopefully it wont be too late. ok well until later guys.
