Inferma

So my stomach hadn´t been feeling normal all week, but it wasn´t until today that it really started feeling ¨bad.¨The other student in the house isn´t feeling well either so it must have been something we ate at home...that didn´t stop me from cleaning my plate at lunch though! But two people with bad stomachs in one house with one bathroom isn´t the best...I am looking forward to not having to worry about that in Ecuador. I have not really been sick while traveling except for one afternoon in Munich I vividly remember. I felt terrible, about an hour after boasting to my new friends that I had an iron stomach when they marveled at my ability to polish off a platter of pork and veal knuckle, a German specialty (at least one of the guys had ordered the same thing and hadn´t finished his plate...). but it was only for an afternoon. After lunch I lay down for a while - of course I couldn´t fall asleep since I sleep 9 hours a night - and since then I have felt much better. This afternoon I went to a strange little natural history museum with many stuffed animals, including that exotic species the chow chow (a dog breed similar to Cinny, but of course Cinny´s breed is much cuter), stuffed siamese pig twins, and many animal fetuses in large Mason jars. It was amusing for about half an hour.

Yesterday afternoon was boring and made me glad to be leaving, because it doesn´t feel worth the effort to find a place here to volunteer in the afternoons since I won´t be here that long. It would take a week just to figure out what to be doing, and by then I´d be gone...so I´m glad to go although at least here I knew I liked the school. I think that living with a host family of just one person could get tiresome, especially if I was the only student there some weeks...I hope the family in Ecuador will all eat together and it won´t be just me and one person, but I´ll just have to wait and see.

I´ve been acumulating books that I´m not really interested in reading. Yesterday I got a copy of a James Mitchner book missing both the front and back cover, so it was 2 quetzals. I´ve read Hawaii and Caribbean, and I think this one is about the Rocky Mountains (it is called Centennial) ...it will come in handy when I go on a long bus trip and don´t want to carry a lot of books with me - it weighs in at over 1000 pages. I always find his books hard to get in to at first but then enjoyable, although I admit the history of tropical locales is always more interesting to me than more temperate climates. They also had a book of his on South Africa, but at 24 quetzals it was a little too steep. For anyone who hasn´t heard of him, his books are fiction but I think he does a lot of research on the parts of the world he writes about first, so many facts are real even if the interactions between characters aren´t. For me its a good mix of learning a little but still being fiction, which I find more enjoyable than most non-fiction...

Tonight is a dinner party at school plus the talent show. I´m not holding my breath for too much excitement, but we will see.

I may not have a new blog until I´m in Ecuador (!!!), but you never know. I don´t leave Xela tomorrow until the afternoon.

I hope the auction was a great success and everyone had fun!