This Is Just To Say

I have added two new gadgets on the right sidebar!

One is called "Want to Subscribe?" and allows you to subscribe to posts on this blog so you don´t have to check to see if it´s been updated-- you´ll just know.

The other is called "Want More TBB Blogs?" and will link to the blogs of other TBB students. Right now it only links to one, but I´ll work on that. Promise. I don´t have time to read them, but hey, I get to hang out with these people all the time. They´re pretty awesome and we all have different experiences to share so you might want to check their blogs out. I know that right now, for example, my friend Alexandra, whose blog is the only one I currently link to, is writing about her experience getting cleansed by a shaman last night. I don´t live anywhere near her or the shaman so I wasn´t there, but I´ve heard about it and it´s probably an interesting and entertaining read.

Beyond that, I don´t have too many exciting stories to share from the past few days.

Sua was a tourist beach town in its off season and probably isn´t a place I´d head back to even when it was warm and sunny, but for a weekend away as a group with showers (icy, but oh so good), toilets, pillows (we don´t have those in Bua either) and some time to bond and relax it was lovely. And they had really good batidos de coco (coconut) and mango (a batido is a fruit juice mixed with milk kind of like a smoothie except so much better).

Sunday night we returned to Bua. The bus ride was three hours -- two hours shorter than the ride there. We didn´t make stops, but that doesn´t account for the whole two hours. I think we time warped. Sunday night for dinner we had soup with pieces of something unidentifiable floating in it. First I thought it was really gristly chicken, but our host mother insisted that it wasn´t meat. What was it? Well, it was something they use to put with peanuts and make another dish. Obviously. Duh, sorry. So I tried a bite...and tried TO bite, but I couldn´t. It was like solid rubber. It´s sort of how I imagine the inside of an intestine, with all the villi and what not. I swallowed as much of it as I could, but I must confess I left some in the bowl.

After dinner, I walked over to visit our closest TBB neighbors, Liz and Noah. We had nice visit and I walked home about 40 minutes later, expecting Isabel to be in bed (since she hadn´t come with me because she was tired). Nope. She was standing in our doorway talking to six moderately drunk Bua natives. I permiso-ed my way through them and stood next to here in the doorway where she quickly explained that they had come to talk to her when she watched me walk over to Liz and Noah´s (it was dark, so just to be safe) and hadn´t left since. They thought she was my translator, but once they realized I could speak Spanish they were pretty excited. Their leader, who introduced himself as Lider (which translates to leader), said he was proud to talk to me. I was the first foreigner he´d met. I guess Isabel didn´t count. She said he´d told her he thought I was beautiful. She also previously told me that when she lived in Guatemala they thought all blonde people were immediately more attractive and that all people who had not brown eyes and not black hair were considered blonde. So hey, I´m blonde! Anyway, I told him politely that our light would be turned out in 5 minutes (true) and that we had to get in our pajamas because we had to get up early to work. He asked if he could give me a kiss on the cheek goodbye. Sure. My second kiss on the cheek this weekend (a guy trying to convince me to go whale watching in Sua also demanded a kiss goodbye...and I turned my head...note that there are no whales in Sua this time of year).

Anyway, I´ve got to go...Sorry about the abrupt ending...But Liz just showed up so I´ll also add a link to her blog!

Bye for now,
Becca