Oh to be a student again

I just finished my second week of Spanish school and I must say that learning another language is more challenging than I thought.  Good though.  I go to the institute every morning around 10:00 via bus.

This 20 minute ride is riveting.  First of all, there is no schedule or bus stop.  I was told to take the white bus with blue or green or a combo of blue and green all around.  You must stand anywhere on the route and flag it down when it comes by or it will keep going.  If you are the only person getting on the bus (and you are not elderly) it will not come to a complete stop, so hurry up as the attendant who stands at the ever open entrance of the bus orders you in Spanish "get on get on get on".  The driver is a speed racer competing against a bunch of other speed racers (tons of taxis and buses).  And if you think he's going to slow down for the speed bumps, think again.  Ouch.  Ouch again.  Apparently if they don't complete a route by a certain time, they get less pay.  My favorite part is when we fly up and down the freeway overpass.  It's pretty much like riding a roller coaster.  You can get off anywhere you want by yelling "baja".  And you can guess that they'll make a California stop at best for that too as the attendant chants "get off get off get off". 

The fee for this adventure is always just 70 centimos, no matter where you are going. 

Moving on.  I love the instituto. Turns out my host father is the administrator and his son and daughter both teach there.  I have been meeting students from Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Danmark, Korea and I can't think of where else at the moment, but most of them will go on to do mission work somewhere in Peru also.

We've had a blast talking about our different cultures and customs, history and politics, and of course food.  The teachers here love what they do which makes going to school for 3 hours, five days a week something to look forward to, even if I didn't understand the homework.  I have one teacher for grammatica (pictured above) and another teacher for practica, which is one on one conversational practice.  We laugh a lot.