School and Mountains

School and mountains, that pretty much sums up my week. This past week was our first week of class out here. I have two different classes, both of which are teaching me the local language. One meets on Monday and Wednesday mornings, and the other meets on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Both classes have been very good for my language and I'm starting to be able to put together a little more complex sentences. It is pretty strange to finally start to understand this language. The sentence structure is completely different than English (and most any other language on the planet). All of the practice that I've been doing over the summer with learning vocabulary is finally starting to pay off because I can focus on sentence structure instead of trying to understand the actual word meaning. Well, most of the time anyway. It is a little harder in my Tuesday/Thursday class because my teacher doesn't speak English. So basically I'm trying to translate from a language that I haven't formally studied, into English and then back into the local language. Needless to say I'm a little slower with my answers than a lot of the others in the class. But I'm doing really well in my Monday/Wednesday class where the teacher speaks some English.

In more exciting news, I'm heading out of town tomorrow and will be gone for about five days. I have two friends flying in today and then we are heading out, along with my roommate, to go and climb a mountain. There is one big benefit to living out here and it is the mountains. I can get on my bike and ride for about forty-five minutes and be at the base of mountains that are taller than any in the continental U.S. So some friends and I are going to take advantage of this and go and climb one that is a few hours away. This is one of the tallest mountains in the world that is still 'easy' to climb. By easy I mean that it isn't technically hard, but at the same time it is over 17,700 feet and there is a large glacier that we have to climb. So hopefully we'll make it to the top. Two of the guys that are going live at much lower elevation so we are going to take a few extra days to do some lower hiking before we get up too high. I'm a little concerned about someone getting altitude sick or having bad weather, but we're going to take a run at the mountain anyway and see what happens.

In other, and even more exciting, news my local friend who's parents are staying with her (whom I told you about last week) had her mother believe this weekend. Today she will go out 'swimming'. So over all it has been an exciting week out here. Okay, I've got to run and finish packing. I'll post more next week, assuming we make it back from the mountain.