Truth be told...

It's not all tropical gardens and sugar-coated chapulines down here. As much as we'd like to convince everyone that everything is perfect and we're having the time of our lives, we're not perfect and neither is the situation.

Truth be told, our grammar class in Spanish can be so stressful that we're at each others throats afterwards. Ruth's son doesn't like us for some reason. It's still unclear how many credits we will be receiving while we're here. We're afraid to go out at night because we don't want to get robbed. We didn't bring shorts because we wanted to fit in to the more formal Mexican culture, but now we're hot and we don't give a damn about fitting in and we know we're never going to fit in anyway. This and more, is the truth.

Do you really want to know more? I had had some sort of cold since before we even left Kentucky, but since I've been here it's translated into an inner ear problem and I've been having dizziness and ear pain on and off for days and am otherwise congested. However I've been lucky enough to avoid stomach problems so far, but David's luck ran out last night.

He was up vomiting and having diarrhea. Maybe it was the chili-flavored chapulines, the only flavor I didn't try. Otherwise we've been eating the same things. This morning he's weak and achy all over. To add to the headache he has, there is and has been pretty heavy construction on the home next door. It's pretty noisy, with hammering and sawing and workers yelling and making all kinds of noises.

There are a few other American travel abroad students here. It was nice of them to show us around town, explain how to get to the store, explain the etiquettes of a taxi ride here, tell us where to go for a coffee during the break, etc., however they are almost unbearably incessant in trying to get us to go out and party with them.

What I mean by party is, stay up until 2am, get trashed and hungover and then hate yourself the next day during school. This is the mission of American students studying abroad in Mexico, you see. Well, while we do enjoy going out occasionally and having a few drinks, enjoying some live music, etc., we just don't know this 2am they speak of, and I think I have a backlog of hangovers from my early twenties that will last me well into my golden years. Bluntly stated, we're just too 'old' for them. They have been very kind enough to point this out to us every single day.

One girl, that is staying here at the same house as us, is particularly good at laying on the guilt. This was her last week here (whew!) and Wednesday was her birthday, so she really felt the need to have a good time and make us have a good time too. We had bailed on her on 3 occasions this week, so we finally relented last night and went out (It was Friday after all).

It was awful. They took us to this tiny bar that had bad live music and bad recorded music playing at the same time. The door was open and a bus was idling outside filling up the place with exhaust. We couldn't hear anything that she or her friend was saying to us. It was at this same time also, that David's stomach turned sour, so we left and had our first experience with Oaxaca's taxi service.

The traffic here is a like a race to see who will get the worst gas mileage. I thought it was bad as a pedestrian (They don't stop or slow for you, you just have to bolt across) but last night we learned it's even scarier when you're in the car. I think if the driver could have driven the car into the tailpipe of the car in front of us, he would have, just to get a little bit closer to being ahead.

All that being said, we're still glad we're here and we're committed to staying out the semester. Don't worry, we'll have something fluffy and cute and warm to share next time!

It's not always sunny in paradise folks!