Best of the Blog, Personal Ramblings, Stories from the Road

Second Week Cheer

Ah the second week cheer, it’s a wonderful thing. The first week in a new place is always a bit awkward, getting lost, not being understood, etc. but the second week is brilliant. Everything is still exciting and relatively new, but you have a general idea of where you are and you are starting to feel like you could make this place home for a while. My first week in Xela was filled with getting lost (I tried to find the sports complex, complejo, three times before I actually made it there) and broken Spanish.

As of today I found yoga this morning, which is a big deal considering it’s in a part of Xela where they have deemed street signs superfluous, and had a conversation I actually found interesting with my teacher. So far my conversations in Spanish have been the boring interview kind, where are you from, what do you study, etc, but today we ended up talking about sea otters. Strange yes, but fun and we ended up there because we were talking about my work during college at the barn, then where I grew up, then other cities up the coast, eventually Monterey, and finally we got to the almost 30 minute long debate of how to say sea otter in Spanish. We finally got to la nutria, but not until I had learned many other marine mammals’ names in Spanish. If you need to talk about beavers, otters, seals, or sea lions in Spanish I’m your girl.

Aside from finding my footing in Xela today is very exciting because I have my first interview for graduate school! This afternoon I will be skyping with the University of California at San Francisco for a place in their Masters of Sciences in Global Health program. I’m getting very excited and talked to Amanda for a long time about tips, etc. Amanda is one of the coordinators of the program who has actually completed the UCSF MS GH program. Here’s to hoping it all goes well!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *