Finally at School

It has been a very hectic couple of days. we got up on sunday morning and went to the bus station in guatemala city. we took a taxi and at some point while we were driving around down town approaching the bus station a whole bunch of guys ran over the the cab and started pulling the doors open and asking the driver a bunch of questions. he was pretty unphased but seemingly told them to go away. while i understood nothing of what they were saying, i don´t think it was anything threatening or anything, more like they though we were stopping there and wanted to carry our bags for tips or something. it was strange and kind of unnerving though. when we got to the bus station, the woman at the desk, who spoke no english, told me that they did not run buses to xela, despite the fact that the schedule i had listed about six each day. so i managed to ask here where to go to get a bus to xela and she gave me directions in spanish to another bus station. so cj and i got to walk a few blocks through downtown guatemala city to another bus station on sketchy directions. luckily when we got there they did indeed have buses to xela. unfortunately it was ten in the morning at the next bus was at three o´clock. so we had a nice long wait at the bus station to say the least. while we were there we met a woman named mina who was guatemalan but who had lived in minnesota since she was a girl, i believe, and who was also taking the bus to xela because her daughter is studying spanish here and doing volunteer work. so we hung out with her which was nice because she knew a tiny bit about guatemala city and spoke fluent spanish. we went to mcdonalds and had fries. mcdonalds is pretty much the same everywhere, of course. we almost had our bags left in guatemala city because we didn´t know that after we checked them and got claim checks we still had to go behind the locked door and load them onto the bus ourselves (who wouldn´t assume that, right) the rest of the bus ride was fortuantley uneventful though i was worried because you´re not supposed to travel between cities at night here and i was afraid that our bus would break down as it did in peru and as it does here pretty routinely. but we got to xela in one piece. unforutnately we did not get here during office hours for the school so we had to check into a hotel for the night. of course at this point it was about eight oclock and we´d had nothing to eat or drink but a bottle of water and some fries. so we went to a really cute coffee place across from our hotel where we had some kind of chick pea vegetarian dish, bread and hummus and i had an iced coffee. oddly, i wasn´t even hungry and frankly am still not. interstingly mina and her daughter were at the same hotel, though we did not get to chat. we went to bed early, and got up this morning at seven and wandered all over xela with our luggage looking for the school. fortunatley, we only had to get directions three times and got there at approximatley the right time. we had our orientation and cj did very well in an hour long discussion about the history of guatemala and the program, discussing the civil war, the role of the cia and united fruit in everything, etc. i´m sure she was captivated by every word.
then we had our first classes. my teacher is very nice. she doesn´t speak tons of english which at times makes things interesting. we´ve had to look things up. i think today i´ve pretty much covered what i covered in my two years of high school spanish, though i certainly wouldn´t say i have it all down cold or anything. mostly, we focused on the verbs estar and ser which are forms of ´to be´. i´m still having trouble simultaniously remebering when to use which verb and which conjugation. cj has been working on colors. we both have homework.
when we finished classes at 1 o´clock we were taken to our host family by the mother of our host mother who lives next door and who is hosting some students also. our host family is very nice and both parents speak a lot of english. there is a girl who is about five who cj played with a bit this afternoon. it was cute because they were speaking to each other in languages that the other didn´t undrstand a word of but acting as though they did. and of course, cj is still being cj and trying to see how much she can get away with. so we´ll see how that goes. right now she is working on homework, both her spanish homework and her reading, journaling and math. we went into the town center today to pick up some things from the store and to get money at the atm. as we were walking down the street we ran into someone else from our school, maggie, with her host sister and nephew who were showing her where to go to the store and the atm. that was nice because it meant we could tag along and her host sister was able to show us some conventions we didn´t know like using a locker at the store for cj´s backpack. maggie speaks even less spanish than i do, which is kind of comforting because most people here seem to be far more advanced that we are, at least at an intermediate level. cj is the only kid here right now, which is probably good for her because he means she´s on better behavior, at least so far. they have excellent coffee here, unsurprisingly and i´ve had several cups today at school. it´s pouring rain now, and i don´t know if we´re going to go to go get some coffees and hit the atm again (we used the other money to pay for our classes this week) of if we´ll go back home or just hang out here for a while longer. since it´s raining right now, we´ll probably just hang out here. i can get another cup of the great coffee they have. we had dinner with our host family probably around 730 and then we´ll probably go to bed early because we´re both quite tired.
sorry that this is long and kind of stream of consciousness and not entirely chronological but everything is a bit blurred together right now. also, the keyboards here are bizarre so that´s why there are no capitals and some other punctuation things are kind of funky. it´s just faster to write it this way so i am. i´m just grateful that my weird alt 6 4 thing is working well enough to get the little at symbols to pop up on every 10th try or so. i´ll try to write more tomorrow and perhaps post pictures. there is a usb thing in here, so perhaps i can get some pictures uploaded if i remember to bring the correct cord. we´ll see.