some more details

My second day here has been quite nice so far, despite some oddities. I think I forgot to mention that on my first night here, I was at Carol´s to shower and Cathy had said that she provides towels for us, so we´ll pick one up there when I´m ready to shower after dinner. Of course we forgot, and I ended up dripping wet in someone else´s house with no towel. Thankfully, I had brought new clothes to change into, so I used the old clothes to mop myself up as best I could.

And that was just the beginning of my resourcefulness. It rained yesterday while we were at the gym - the veranito sees to be over. There had been many leaks in our roof from the last few weeks which had been fixed, but never tested out becauase it hadn´t been raining. The repairs worked, except of course for the leak right over my bed. I had a bunch of stuff laid out on the bed, but fortunately, it was all in plastic ziploc bags and was safe. My bed, however, was soaked. In the end, Jonno slept on his box-spring and sleeping bag and I slept on his mattress on the floor of the living room. With the rain in the hallway (remember how there´s no ceiling there) I was worried, but I was totally dry and slept like a baby. Someone´s coming to fix the roof today, and no matter what tomorrow night I move into Cathy´s old room because she´s leaving on Thursday.

I ended up getting here at the perfect time b/c I´ve got these 3 days at school to get the hang of things before I have to teach for real on Friday. It´s pretty chill, I can´t see any need to plan out lessons in advance because it´s all based off the book. In the 40 minutes or so there´s really only time to go over one or two learning activities and then play a quick game. I´m a little nervous about knowing the vocabulary, because the 5th graders are learning art words like impression and element and realism, but it turns out those translate to impressio, elemento, and realistico, so I won´t really need to prepare. Plus, it seems that lessons often get interrupted, for example for Cathy´s party tomorrow and the hora civica on Friday, so that planning a lot could just lead to frustration. So it´s nice not to have to worry too much about lesson planning.

Some other random things .... A volunteer in the school a few years back was from Boston, so the kids are all Red Sox fans and asked me what it was like when they won last year!! In terms of the music part of teaching, it´s not at all what I thought. I had practiced the words to Row Row Row Your Boat and such, but today we taught the 4th and 5th graders ´Video Killed the Radio Star,´ a favorite 80s rock song. Next week I get to choose, and you know those kids will be learning some Madonna!!

We´re having dinner tonight with the Peace Corps guys, tomorrow´s Cathy´s goodbye party, and Jonno and I are trying to figure out what to do for the weekend. They seem to get away almost every weekend, but we don´t want to do any of the really fun things yet (like go to the famous Copan ruins) because when Kelly comes in 2 weeks she´ll want to do that. So tonight we´ll talk with the guys and come up with some ideas.

The gym last night was great - literally in someone´s house, but lots of weights and a few sketchy bikes and some sit-up mats and a treadmill that´s so old you can´t really run on it. They all seem to jump rope a lot, because those can´t break. They all go from 6-7pm every day, which will be great. It cost 250 lempiras for the month, which should be about $14, and we talked to the lady about getting a discount for next month. Well, I wasn´t the one talking because I´m still pretty lost, but you get the idea.