Okay, so I know I’m a little late on posting. I’m actually post dating this one a few days late. For the record it’s not my fault. The internet has been acting up here. Well, not really the internet but the trick I use on the internet to write on my blog. There is no such thing as free speech here so things like blogs are blocked and, unless you know a trick or two, you can’t access them. So other than having internet issues, it has been a pretty good week out here. I’ve been working with my language tutor a lot over the past week. I have a new tutor and I think that we are making good progress on things. For the first eight weeks that I was out here I was doing a language sprint where I spent 4-5 hours a day working on language. Most of the language study was vocabulary based, so I was learning a lot of words but not really how to communicate. This past week I’ve switched to my language book that I will use at school and it is a lot more conversational based. It has helped out a lot. There have been a lot of ‘ah ha’ moments this past week with language, which is always encouraging. My tutor is a local taxi driver and he speaks a little bit of English. He is very good about pronouncing things and, after I tell him to slow down a few times, he says things slowly. The local language out here is just going to take time to learn. I mean, there are maybe only ten westerners who have ever learned this language and the only one that I know said it took her a year and a half before she became conversational. There are some big payoffs with learning the local language though. The big one is that everyone wants to talk to you. I’ve gotten into a lot of conversations because of language and, once I learn how to speak more and tell some stories, I think this will help out a lot. It is just getting to that point that is going to be hard.
Other than language this week has been about the same as always. It has been a busy week though. In less than a week I’m going to have a new roommate living with me and we will have a lot of people coming out to visit over the next month. I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to get things set up for him and getting things together for his time here. I’ve gotten to do a few fun things though. This last weekend I went out on a bike ride to a small village with a couple of local friends. The village is supposedly where the people here originated and it is right by the mountain. The village wasn’t anything to write home about. It was small and most everything was just a tourist trap. The view of the mountain was great though. It was fun just to get out in the mountains for a while.
One other thing this past week. On Friday I went out with 'A' to eat lunch. There is this restaurant in town that has amazing cheeseburgers. I don't know why it took me three months to finally eat there, but that burger was amazing. I think it would even be really good by American standards. So after lunch she had to go and try to set up some things for a group coming out in a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd go with her so she didn't have to go out to the village alone. The village is sort of in town but not really. It is still in the valley but it is about a fifteen to twenty minute drive out of town. The trip out there is great because there are green mountains all around. We got out to the village and basically found out what we were working on was a dead end, but we decided to go and talk to a lady she knows that runs a small restaurant. And by small restaurant, I mean a hut with an open fire pit and a bunch of tables. So we sat around in there for a little while talking to the lady who runs it and got to set up a few things with her. While we were there it started raining and so we were basically stuck there for another hour until the rain died down. When the rain finally stopped we walked back to the main road, about a mile away, and then tried to find a ride back to town. We stood around trying to get a taxi or hitch hike for about twenty minutes and finally decided to start walking back. After a little ways a cargo truck finally pulled over and let us ride back into town in the back. It was good because it was starting to rain again. So yeah, my free Friday ended up getting pretty full by spending my afternoon stranded out in a small village.
The other big thing this past week is that on Saturday a couple of college guys arrived in town. They are going to be spending the next six months out here. They will be living out in a village for their first month, so please be remembering them. They seem to fit in really well and seem like the kind of guys who are laid back and willing to do anything (after all they did eat pig heart the other night for dinner). It is good to have a couple of other guys around and just more people to hang out with in general. Okay, I’m going to keep this one kind of short because it is going to be a busy week and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to write next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment