Hey,
How’s everybody doing? My life is still going well... the rainy season ended, so it’s back to sunny and semi-warm for me. Not a bad climate to spend the beginning of winter in.
It’s almost 10pm now and I’m really tired, which leads me to start this note off with a complaint. I hope that’s ok with everybody... To be completely honest with you, waking up before 7am five days a week is probably one of my least favorite parts about Mexico. I really don’t understand why the program scheduled our first class at 9 when they knew that means we have to leave our house before 8. Though I am not an expert it seems counterintuitive to have a language class scheduled during a time when all the students are struggling to keep their eyes open and remember their names, much less have the mental capability to conjugate verbs in five different tenses (I just relearned both forms of the past tense so make much more sense when talking about my life, hooray!). Ok, no more ranting, promise. Thanks for listening though.
My ability to communicate is progressing; “slowly but surely” has become my new motto. It’s interesting because in my Spanish class of four we have all developed different skill sets when speaking Spanish, so though we may have trouble communicating when talking alone when the group of us go out we manage okay cause everybody helps each other out. My problem is the thing that I am good at (conjugating verbs) doesn’t really help too much when I don’t remember any other vocab. Besides the fact that conjugating verbs in a test setting is very different than when actually talking to someone. I’m working on it though.
Today our group went over to our professor's house for Comida (the early afternoon meal). We all crammed in this cute little house that the University rents for professors and talked about how our time is going here. Although I have talked to all the girls individually about how they’re doing, it was good to get everybody together and do a group check-in. In case you're wondering I feel like I am doing okay, just as I expected I would. For whatever reason I have the ability to stay positive and enjoy where I am (most of the time at least). I am not yet “at home” in Morelia, and doubt that fact will change during the next eight weeks, but I am not uncomfortable by any means. That is not the case for all of the girls, and it was interesting for me to see how different people have different problems about being in a strange country. In my limited experience there are two types of personalities that make the studying abroad process easier. One is the person who throws herself into her new situation and makes a ton of friends and spends the whole time hating the fact she has to go back home. Since I don’t speak the language well enough to fully immerse myself into the culture, I seem to fall into the second group. I love observing people; to sit back and try to figure out how people work and why they do things. Life absolutely fascinates me, and to be honest I find a lot of it a complete joke. It works for me to not take myself too seriously and to not care about what people think of me (to a certain extent). I am happy here because I am happy with myself here, and I am able to brush the rest of it off.
I have a couple things going for me here... one is that my host Mom is the least “traditional Mexican mother” of the group. She works so doesn’t have time to clean my room everyday, make me breakfast, or do my laundry. This has allowed for me to keep my American-bred independence without ruffling any Mexican feathers. The other thing that I have come to appreciate is that I look kinda Mexican. This means that I don’t stand out when I’m walking down the street like my friends do. I don’t get the whistles and the stares or get followed or get the “hey baby, you look hot” comments thrown at me on a daily basis. Although the Mexican women here get attention, it is nothing compared to the “love” than obviously American girls get. My generation’s perception of American girls is based on MTV and what happens at Mexican resorts during Spring Break... both of which aren’t too flattering to us gringas. When that does happen to me I am able to shrug it off because I realize that it is just a game they are playing, and I just ignore them and laugh to myself in my head. Things like different cultural perceptions and how they manifest themselves crack me up on a daily basis here.
While in Morelia I have loved the opportunity to examine myself in terms of my culture and how I am influenced by my upbringing. Mexicans, for example, are (in)famous for being late. So much so that one of my profs semi-secretly moved the start time of our class back by ten min so we (the AHA students) wouldn’t just sit awkwardly in class waiting for the rest of the class to get there. In class today my Prof, Bob, brought up a good point. He asked the Mexican (UNLA) students what they thought when the American (AHA) students leaned back in their chairs and put their feet up on their desks. The Mexicans said that while it didn’t make them uncomfortable when we (AHA students) did it they would never even think about it because it would be disrespectful. I thought that this was a perfect example of different cultures and the norms they possess. All the Americans are perfectly on time, if not early, but once we get to class we relax and get comfortable (though I do not wear the sweats that I would prefer to have on). The Mexicans, on the other hand, do the exact opposite. It's stuff like that I've grow to appreciate.
Sending everybody my love,
Rheana
