The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Unexpected

We have now been in Mexico for 5 weeks! Crazy, right?!? I never knew just how much a person could experience in such a short time. Let’s start with

The Good…

1.      We got to go take a history tour in the mountains and learn all about Mexico’s history. It was pretty fascinating to learn more about the culture and the way certain things are the way they are. 

Catholic cathedral in Tututapec

Murals depicting Mexican history

2.      We are sleeping at night! Despite the animals’ efforts to keep us up at night, our brains have learned to tone out the dog fights, goats, and rosters. 
3.      Walking home from school, a person (who we knew) came up to us and said, “You have to come and release sea turtles with us!” So we did and it was AMAZING! 

Sea turtles!

4.      We (in theory) can now talk in the past tense! After 4 weeks of asking our host family only things in present tense, we now have 2 past tenses in our minds (this will, however, later lead to the ugly…).

The Bad…

1.      Drinking your body weight in water EVERYDAY is much harder to do than you would think, haha! 
2.      Bugs…  no need to say more. 
3.      And more bugs!

The Ugly…

1.      I (Natasha) had my first real big mental break down last weekend. In three days we learned two past tenses and when I went to translate them in class, I missed literally almost every single one of them! My brain snapped and I thought, “What are you doing? You can’t learn Spanish! Spanish is dumb, it doesn’t even make sense. Why would a language have 14 tenses!!!!” and so on. Then, after our 5 hours of classes, we were reading our homework and literally my brain just stopped being able to make sounds… I might have broken down and cried just a little… then Levi decided we were done with Spanish for the night. It was ugly. The next day we went to a friend’s house to watch the Superbowl in English. By Monday my brain was back up and running! 
2.      Levi had a melt down too… it sounded quite a bit like mine, so I won’t retell it ;)

The Unexpected…

1.      We knew we would be learning Spanish but I don’t think we expected to learn as much about ourselves as we have. Being so far out of our comfort zone has been so hard but really good for us.

Keep us in your thoughts and prayers! Session 1 is almost over and we will be testing most of next week. Things will be a little crazy, but it will soon be over…

…only to start all over again, ha ha!