Frustration

Wow, thank God for the revision process. After school today I wrote the angriest blog ever. I knew it was pretty ugly, so I decided to save it rather than post it. I´m glad I did that, or some of you might have been disappointed to find out that I´m not always the happy-go-lucky person you think I am...lol

The last few days, in general, have been frustrating. Not just with school, but with life here in general. Spending just a few weeks forces you to go through the stages of culture shock at a very rapid pace. The honeymoon period has definitely ended...now I´m pretty regularly finding things that annoy me, and annoy me they certainly do.

I thought this past weekend would make things better, you know, take a trip to Antigua and see a ¨UNESCO World Heritage Site.¨ Take it all in and bask in its glory, but no, it was crap. Well, I guess that´s a bit of an exaggeration...it wasn´t terrible, but it was certainly disappointing. Although beautiful, it was completely overrun with tourists and was incredibly tacky. Street performers. Gringos EVERYWHERE. Overpriced food, drinks, hotels, etc. The list goes on. On the flipside, Antigua really is a beautiful place. Right next to the city lies the ¨Volcan de Agua,¨a massive volcano that completely dominates the landscape. Not to mention the beautiful mountains, valleys, and stunning architecture. Antigua definitely has some things going for it!

When I got there, I immediately signed myself up for a trip to the recently erupted Pacaya Volcano...come to find out that ¨private bus¨meant nothing more than a shitty microbus with hellishly uncomfortable seats and an asshole driver that couldn´t seem to grasp the concept of braking smoothly. Also, come to find out that ¨private guide¨ means nothing more than a mute 14-year-old local boy. Oh, and we can´t forget that ¨short trip¨ and ¨small amount of walking¨means a two-hour drive each way and a one-mile walk to see the lava beds that certainly did not live up to their descriptions. On the way back down, it started raining torrentially, soaking everyone and everything. Did I mention that I was wearing shorts and the one pair of shoes and socks that I brought? Yeah, going sockless in wet shoes for the rest of the day/night...good times. The only redeeming part of that trip was the incredible 12-ounce filet mignon and cuba libres. That TOTALLY redeemed the trip (think ¨Dumb & Dumber¨here, and if you don´t ¨get it,¨ I don´t know how we´re friends in the first place...lol).

I went to sleep early and slept like a champ that night. I awoke early the next morning because I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to get home. Lucky for me, there´s no direct route between Xela and Antigua, so on the way back, and after getting dropped off as far as the first bus went, I was stranded in a local town, left to figure out how I was going to get back to Xela. It´s times like that that provide the perfect opportunity for mild panic attacks...not knowing where the hell you are, sticking out like a gangrenous sore thumb, and wondering if you´ll ever be able to find your way home. Luckily, I asked enough people to find my way to the central highway and rode a ¨chicken bus¨all the way back. Now, you´d think I would have been annoyed by the chicken bus (AKA ¨death cruiser¨), but I was actually pretty delighted by driver´s complete disregard for his life and the lives of his passengers. I figured if this was going to be how I died in the end, what a hell of a way to go...careening off of a cliff in a tricked-out school bus, or going head-on with a Mac truck because my driver needed to pass the guy delivering fried chicken on a moped (on a blind curve, uphill, seriously) to save five seconds...hey, I would have died ¨doing what I love,¨right? I grabbed the ¨oh shit¨handles, and braced myself for the four-hour trip. In the end, it was actually a pretty fun ride!

I got back last night, and went to take a shower. Here, since they don´t have gas, they have these little water heaters that attach directly to the shower head. You have to flip the circuit breaker (yeah, while standing in water) to get it to turn on, which is the perfect recipe for more death. I hadn´t had a problem with it in the past, but yesterday had to be the day. Since I apparently turned on the water too far (just beyond a slight sprinkle), it stopped working. So, I tried to reset it. Still didn´t work. Then I tried again. Nothing. Now, Carmen is practically yelling at me about something having to do with the switch. I´m standing there in the shower, thoroughly irritated by the whole situation, with shampoo burning my eyes. I decided then and there that shower time was over and got out. After I opened the bathroom door, in comes Carmen to verbally reprimand me for hitting the switch multiple times. She tells me that I´m doing it wrong and proceeds to do the EXACT same thing I´ve been doing the whole time..the only difference being that it worked for her. She continues ¨teaching me¨ how to use the shower while my anger level continues to rise. At that point, I imagined myself lunging at her, but decided to just walk away. She later confronted me at dinner about me getting mad at her...I just laughed it off. I guess you could say I had my first ¨fight¨with my Guatemalan mom. My real mom knows that this can be a frequent occurrence, and should feel somewhat relieved to know that I do this with everyone :)

I was prepared for today to be a tough day at school, but wasn´t prepared for how truly horrible it ended up being. The things this woman has me doing are often beyond my capability, and she doesn´t seem to understand the concept of things being at the ¨instructional level.¨ What makes this problem worse is the fact that I´m nearly ¨done¨ (verb tenses and grammar). Now I just need lots of ¨practice¨(or so she says). Whenever I try to explain that something is too hard, she replies that it´s not. I love that. SHE tells ME what is too easy or too hard for me. Wow. And in the end, her answer is always that I need to ¨practice more.¨ I´ve been halfway tempted to pull the move I did last summer, which is tell the professor what they are doing is wrong (sorry again for that ugliness Daniel, if you´re reading this...lol) and proceed to tell them what is ¨right.¨ At one point, towards the end of class, I actually told her I needed to leave the room for five minutes to cool down. I was getting seriously pissed. She had me translating this children´s story (I don´t know many ¨children¨who could read it), and I was failing pretty miserably. The problem here was that I had to keep switching the verb tenses back and forth and I was getting super confused. Not to mention the fact that I didn´t know a lot of the vocabulary. I mean seriously, how am I supposed to know how to say ¨scaffold¨in Spanish?! WTF even uses that word in English?! Let´s just say that I now know, and DESPISE Diego Rivera.

Again, I´m reminded of how tough it is to learn a foreign language. Often in class, I think about my own students and how short I can be with them at times. I guess, in a sense, this is karma. It makes me laugh to think of how delighted my own students would be to see me struggle the way I do. It´d definitely bring smiles to their little faces!

In the end, I decided to take today off from the ¨orphanage¨ (which, it turns out, is not a real orphanage...it´s just temporary housing for kids who have been taken from their families). Instead, I decided to do some homework in the hopes that tomorrow is not as terrible. Blogging is a nice distraction because when I´m done here, I get to go home and write a story. Yippee Ki Yay!

Thanks for reading, I feel better now.