Thursday, June 09, 2005

The town of bathrooms

Banos: where we are now, is famous for it´s water. This water comes in all sorts of varieties. There is the hot springs water where one can bathe with the locals and your skin can absorb the minerals in the water, especially the minerals from the little kiddies when they get excited.
Then there is the swimming pool water. For some unknown reason there are hundreds of pools, most complete with water slides which makes absolutely no sense because it rains here every day. Then there are waterfalls which seem to spring from every hole in the wall. In addition, there are the showers in your hotel, which are usually freezing and hence no one uses. I guess what I´m trying to say is that there is a lot of water here. Which is actually a good thing because 4ooo metres above is a god almighty volcano that is smouldering away. But rest assured, with all this water here I am absolutely safe. I´m more worried about the 10 long period earthquakes that according to the University of North Dakota´s web site occur here everyday. (not quite sure what that means but it sounds exciting)
So anyway, We are here to learn some more Spanish. 4 hours a day one on one instruction with my teacher Christina who comes up to my waist. We have also adopted for the live with the family option. This time our family own a hotel, actually a Jewish hotel( even though our hosts are in no way Jewish). We sleep in the hotel room and have all meals, soccer matches, basketball games and religious movies with our family. They have an interesting custom of serving a huge dinner at lunchtime. A small breakfast at dinner and very unusual concoction of hot juice and oats for breakfast. The latter I must admit is absolutley foul and am currently dreaming up ways of secretly disposing of it when my hosts arent looking. We are also sharing our family with a half blind swiss girl who has managed to learn more spanish than me in 3 weeks than I have in 8 weeks of study. In fact I have got to the stage of my Spanish where I am going backwards and most of my lesson is spent daydreaming of murdering my spanish teacher who is torturing me by correcting pretty much every palabra that passes my lips. Whoever said Learning another language was empowering. It just makes me feel like I´m the world´s stupidest man. No comments please.

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