Cumbiaaaaaaaaa!

Yes I'm learning Cumbia. I love it so much! It makes me So happy. It's a great work out and I have a blast doing. Hopefully I'll get to upload a video tomorrow. This picture is the view from the dance studio.

Hard Work and Green Jungles

Us on our way home, buying some fresh pineapple and the view out of my cabin window.

This teaching thing sure is hard work. As forewarned, the angel students are turning into devils, and the once demonic kids are now becoming our favorite sweethearts. Weird huh? Teaching is really cool. I love gaining insight to the lives of all the teachers I've had before, and reflecting on what kind of a student I may have been for them. The "babies," or the 4 year olds, are really smart. They know that if they don't feel like speaking English one day they can just run up to you and hug you all during class. 1) The teacher's heart is expected to melt instantly 2) They don't have to speak English because the teacher is too busy oogling over their cute squinchy-ness 3) Group hugs around the teacher tend to leave the teacher quite immobile and defenseless. Yessir these kids have it down.

New topic, this weekend was a three day vacation, so 10 teachers and I headed out of town. We visited temples both old (ruins) and new (with a lovely Moroni on top). We spent a night in the van, a night in a hostle (I hope I spelled that right, it's like a house converted into a hotel), and one last night in the jungle. I stayed in the jungle with 3 other teachers and the rest stayed in a hostle and met up with us the next day. It was absolutely amazing. I loved it! I saw waterfalls, heard some crazy sounding animals and got majorly drenched each day for one reason or another. It was a blast! I'll be uploading pictures very soon.

The jungle had crocodiles and monkeys. A quick story about those, I never saw the crocodiles but I did sleep in a cabin that was sitting a little above a swamp, and the swamp led out into a massive body of water. I don't know if it was a lake or the ocean or what. We were a little concerned that if our cabin fell into the water we would get eaten. But alas, we slept very carefully and that cabin still stands to this day. Also, there was a little island out in the water called Monkey Island. 3 girls and I were rowing our kayaks when we happened to see a tiny island. We figured we'd row over to it and check it out. Turns out it was a very long, and narrow island. We realized this after rowing around it. There were two men fishing and we had them watch our boats. They said something about not going too far. We walked to the top of a hill, took some pictures, and headed back down. Now, there was a Lot of poop on this island. It was the size of my head, but flat. I didn't understand. There were no animals to be seen or heard. Surely those men couldn't eat That much in a day.... Anyway we didn't really think anything of it and headed back to our cabin for some mud baths and massages. We ran out of time to visit Monkey Island before leaving the resort, but the other ILP teachers who went told us about it. Turns out these monkeys are very territorial and dangerous, and you do not want to cross into their land. Guess which island we happened to choose to walk around on. Yes mom, we were having the time of our silly lives on Monkey Island. And continued to have an even better time after we got off, in one piece. Not a single monkey! We didn't see any and I'm very glad we didn't. We would have been in So much trouble. That definitely explained the massive feces all over the place though. Anyway, time to get back to the grind stone. I'll share more about the weekend later.