time

We’re starting to feel guilty about moving out of our host family’s place because we’re starting to really like them and it definitely improves your Spanish when you have to communicate with native speakers. We’re also starting to doubt that it’s financial smarter. The $300 per month at la casa Ordonez includes food — cooked for us by a wonderful cook. But it’s far away. The bus ride to our schools is 20- 40 minutes each way. We’d be spending two hours a day on a bus if we stayed there. Versus 40 minutes if we moved. And the air’s worse at our current location. I mean it’s horrible. I feel like we’re going to shed years from our life spans by inhaling all this pollution

We have a week left of orientation, and I’m becoming aware of the impending shock: we will no longer have a full schedule; 28 of our American friends will be gone; we’ll be moving from our present location; and Eileen’s lesson planning panic attacks will increase in strength and frequency.

There’s also this issue of our internal clocks being messed with. Back home, it’s mid-September. Fall is coming soon. Sunsets will come earlier and earlier until the days are just twelve hours of sunlight. Here, there’s currently 12 hours of sunlight everyday. And no real seasons. Soon, our Wisconsin-calibrated circadian rhythms will tell us that something is wrong, that we’re in the wrong part of the world. Right now, it feels like we’re pretty much on vacation, even though we’re really busy. And so, I think we, or at least I, have this subconscious feeling that when we come home, everything will be more or less the same, that everything will have been more or less frozen in time for us. Of course, since I’m articulating this feeling right now, it’s not altogether subconscious. But . . . see, now I’m speechless, cuz the rest of what I’m trying to say is truly subconscious knowledge.