My second day

Well it rained throughout the night - not as much as the previous night but we woke up to blue skies and sunshine :-) There was a lot of lightning that we can see from their house, which Marcela and Dieter say is common, at night but without any thunder.

Marcela and Dieter teach English classes to the local children twice a week - Fridays and Mondays with one class in the am and one in the afternoon. Each class has 6 children - the morning class is all boys and the pm class is mostly girls with one boy. I got to attend both classes and help out. The children are anyway between 6 - 20 years and they were really cute and shy at first. They had to use English to introduce themselves, ask me my name and say nice to meet you. The boys were incredibly shy and did not want to at first but warmed up by the end of class where one of the boys even wanted to take my picture. The girls class was hilarious - very rambunctious with lots of laughter. It was a lot of fun. They got to help me with my Spanish and I helped them with their pronunciations. I look forward to Monday's class.

We walked down to the village again to do some shopping. There are really no sidewalks so one has to be very careful with all the speeding cars, mini buses and motorbikes - which seem to be the most commonly used by the people here. There is this narrow space between where the blacktop ends and the where the curb and grass are where we typically walk to get out of the way of the vehicles.

They have an open market down in the plaza every day (during the week there are only a few vendors). The supermarket was a trip because I did not recognize many foods - only the cereals from Nestle and Kellogs (Corn Flakes, Fruit Loops, Cocao Krispies etc) and the beauty products like toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner etc. Wild. I am going to have to adjust to a life without nuts and peanut butter. The fruits here have been very good. Marcela and Dieter (I will use M&D from now on) have banana bushes and mandarin trees on their property. They get eggs, pork, meat and asandos (sp?) from their neighbors here. The asandos (I wiill ask Marcela for the correct spelling) are similar to thick tortillas. Since we were pressured for time, we took a collectivo (public taxi) back to the house. Again I am amazed at the personal space - the collectivo is probably the size, if not smaller, than my VW wagon. It has a seat in the front, open space in the back with 2 benches facing each other for 4 people on either side. We got in and were the first ones there, so we had to wait for 6 other people. At one point, one of the passengers is trying to recruit people they know to get in. Quite hilarious to me! When we were full, we took off. The collectivo and the mini buses drop people off when they say they want to get off. There are no bus stops. A couple of times, a person gets off and then not 100 yards away another person gets off. Interesting

The money here is both in bills and coins. The coins are in the hundreds of pesos and the bills are in 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000 denominations. One US dollar is approximately 2,300 pesos. The bills are beautiful and I love the back of the 1000 mil peso on which it has a quote "yo no soy un hombre, soy un pueblo. El pueblo es superior a sus dirigentes" A quote from Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a leader who was assasinated before ever coming into the presidency. The quote translates into "You are not a man, you are a village. A village is superior to the leaders" If only all people could embrace this thought throughout the world.....