School Stuff

So I’m a little late on this week’s post. I have good reasons, mainly because I was out on my bike for about ten hours yesterday. So this past week has been a little different. I rolled my ankle landing on a guy’s foot on Monday and haven’t really been able to play basketball all week. It isn’t too bad but it is one of those things that I need to make sure and not play for a couple weeks. So hopefully I’ll be back out on the court sometime next week. Also, monsoon season is picking up even more this past week. It has rained pretty much every evening so a lot of people haven’t been out. So I’ve had a down week of just getting to finish up some language and have spent a few days out at my tutor’s house. I finished up my eight-week language sprint this past week and now I am just doing some review until I find another tutor. I have a few guys that I think can do it, but since it has been raining so much I haven’t been able to track them down. I’m thinking I’ll try and get the new language stuff started back up again around Monday of next week.

I spent my day yesterday getting everything ready to become registered at the school and get my student visa. It is a big process. I spent most of the morning up at the school getting things filled out and then in the afternoon I went to the police station to answer questions and get registered and then made the trip out to the health clinic to make sure I don’t have AIDS. The police station was a little bit of an experience. We went to three different stations until we finally found the right one. Every one we went to told us to go to another, then that one told us to go to another, and then finally we found the right place. That happens a lot here. I spent about an hour at the station; 10 minutes answer questions and 50 minutes waiting (apparently some things here work very similarly to back in the states). Then I rode my bike all the way across town to the health clinic. About out way out there it started to rain and my friend who went with me assured me that it wasn’t much further, and twenty minutes later we were still riding on our bikes. The health clinic was pretty sketchy. Not nearly as sketchy as the hospital but still was a little weird. I only had to have a couple blood tests so it was pretty painless for me. The lady opened up a clean needle and, except for the open vials of blood sitting on the table my arm was on and the fact that her gloves were reused who-knows-how-many-times, it was pretty sanitary.

Today has been another errand day and I also fit in a little language. Tonight I went over to a friend’s house for some homemade Mexican food. I decided to invite one of the guys who speaks English and so both of us, her and her roommate all made some tortillas, salsa, fajitas and then we had some brownies and ice cream for desert. Afterwards we all sat around and played a game of Risk. It was a fun night. I’ve got a pretty full rest of the week too. Tomorrow I’m going to turn in all of my forms for school and then go out with a friend to visit a few people and then on Thursday I’m taking a road trip with a few others to a village on the other side of town. Hopefully on Friday or Saturday another friend and I can make it back to visit the family I got to talk to last week. So there should be enough going on to keep me out of trouble for a while.