Land of Contrast

Ok...it's been a while but I'm still here. Things are actually great! Language school is so fantastic. It is 5 hours of one on one language study and there is absolutely no English! I mean, I guess I can look up words in a dictionary that has English in it, but no speaking English. I am amazed at how little and how much I know. I am picking up the vocabulary pretty well, but I still can only talk in present tense with regular verbs. None of that future subjunctive cr*p, whatever that is.

Anyway I want to talk a bit about this amazing country. It is certainly a land of contrast! (see picture) Like...you can get free high-speed internet at the McDonald's, but you can't find pasturized milk!

The water is basically poison, but you can buy bleach at the Hiper (Wal-mart) a few miles away.

You can't flush the scented toilet paper, but at least it smells pretty (the TP that is.)

A bag of chips is like 7 cents, but pepto costs a fortune!

at 9 a.m. you need a sweatshirt and hat, at 1 p.m. you are sweating in a t-shirt, and at 4 pm you need your winter hat again.

You can get prescription drugs at the pharmacy with out a prescription but you can't buy baking soda or corn meal at the grocery store. (no sage that I can find, either...and I need it for Thanksgiving dinner!)

We bathe deacon in bottled water so that he won't die from parasites (possibly an overstatement, but maybe not)

He-He... All that to say, every day is an adventure. We like it here. We are making it our home. Deacon is making friends "Que LINDO!" (literally "it's nice" but it loses something in the translation because it means..."he is so cute!")