My host family is great though. I can't think of one thing I could complain about. They take me everywhere! Everyone else in my program walks to school in the morning, but my mom keeps offering me a ride so I keep taking it! Actually, she doesn't even offer it to me, it's just assumed. She pops her head into my room after breakfast & says "listo?" (ready?) and we go. It's great. Even on the weekends when I'm meeting up with my friends somewhere they offer me rides and tell me if I need a ride home, just call. So I do! It saves a lot of time, effort, and money on taxis. Plus, my host mom does all my laundry each weekend & last time she even hung up my clothes for me. I make my bed each morning, but I haven't had much practice & don't do the best job, so the housekeeper lady who comes re-makes my bed for me. My host mom serves me food & clears my dishes, which is actually really awkward for me. She doesn't seem to mind but it feels like I'm at a restaurant or something. Whenever I try to take my dishes to the counter she always protests but I've just started doing it anyway. The whole situation is great, plus they have the cutest granddaughter ever. I'm not sure if I think she's extra cute just because she speaks in Spanish & I can't ever really tell when she's whining or complaining but everything she says kills me. I'm starting to get to the point where I understand pretty much everything she says now too, which is good because it was kind of frustrating to have taken Spanish for 6 years or so & not be able to understand a 3 year old who is still learning how to talk!
I can't say if my Spanish is really improving yet or not but I'm definitely getting more comfortable using what I do know which is good. I can easily tell a taxi driver where I need to go, plus small talk, and order at restaurants, etc, and I can generally talk to people without too much trouble. Some people don't have enough patience to wait for me to conjugate verbs in my head but I've gotten better at shortening the pauses between words.
There are political advertisements on the television all the time because it's almost election time and they brought up an interesting conversation at lunch the other day. My host mother asked me if there were as many political ads in the U.S. so I told her last year there were because of the presidential election but now there isn't much politically to advertise for. So that got them talking about the U.S. presidential election & I told them it was the first time I was able to vote so it was really exciting for me. They were very interested in who I voted for & when I told them Obama it was obvious that was the answer they were hoping for. My host mother & my sister both exclaimed, "Oh! We just love him!" and my host mother told me she thought Obama was "muy guapo" and my host sister thought he was "muy intelligente." This led into a discussion about race in America because they were curious if a lot of people didn't like Obama because of his skin color. I explained that I knew a lot of people who didn't like Obama, but it was because I was from a super conservative state & they thought his ideas were "loco." I tried to explain racism in the U.S. to them the way that I saw it: that it was a very big deal to have an African American president but most people around my age weren't very concerned with race & didn't pay it much attention, but there were still some people from an older generation that held racist ideas because that's how they were raised, and a few of these people had passed their beliefs onto their children, but for the most part racism wasn't as prevalent as it might seem to people who only get a glimpse of life in the U.S. through tv & movies. The housekeeper saw the U.S. in black & white, literally, and was surprised to learn that there were races from all over the world living in the states. She started naming off countries asking if there were people in the U.S. from each country & when my house mom said there were people from "todo el mundo" she couldn't seem to believe it! Then they told me there wasn't really a problem with racism in Mexico but they had a big problem with discriminating against lower social & economic classes.
I wanted to say it's hard to have a racism problem when you only really have one race! I know that's not completely true, but it sure feels that way when I walk home from school & get such confused looks from people. I feel like I should have a third arm growing out of the center of my chest the way people look at me. It's like they can't figure me out! My friend Eric, from Minnesota, is really tall & sticks out like a sore thumb. People frequently ask to take pictures with him, along with another girl in one of my classes who's Japanese. The best is my friend Ally, who's from North Carolina & African American, was walking down the street when two girls told her she had pretty hair (it's braided) then asked to take a picture with her. She was kind of confused but said yes, then they took one of her braids, held it up & pointed to it with huge open mouthed grins of excitement! I don't know what I would have done! But for the most part, even the amateur paparazzi of Mexico have all been very friendly & welcoming once they get over their shock, curiosity, excitement, or whatever feeling it is that drives someone to ask to take a picture with a complete stranger.
and some more recent pictures for your viewing pleasure:
^ one of the cabezas colasales from the Museum of Anthropology here in Xalapa. Xalapa is full of culture & history (not to mention museums!) and this museum is full of sculptures & artifacts from all the different cultures in Mexico & Veracruz before the Spanish invasion. ^
^this tiny little bug eyed guy is the God of the Dead. He was my favorite.^
^ I don't know this lady's official name, but she's the God of childbirth & they believed that if a woman died during childbirth she became a God. So there was a bunch of different Gods like these, like 10 sculptures in the museum alone. But I thought she was pretty neat. ^
^ picture of an ultrasound office for my mom ^
^ two of the girls in my program at one of the many parks in Xalapa, Los Lagos. It's beautiful ^
^ picture of an ultrasound office for my mom ^
^ two of the girls in my program at one of the many parks in Xalapa, Los Lagos. It's beautiful ^
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