Host Family Day

Ok--so this morning I was nervous beyond belief. Woke up rushed down to eat a quick fruit b.fast (I wasn't feeling the beans and rice this am), then ran back to the cabin where I found there was no running water to be had and therefore went sans shower...boo. Packed all of my stuff up, as Anibal was going to bring it over to the institute, and headed back to make myself a sandwich for lunch before jumping into the busito and heading to Spanish class. All of this by 8am!

Spanish was great. I really like the professor, Cristina, who is from Spain. She's really enthusiastic and our class is kind of a free-for-all since all of us speak Spanish. We worked a bit on the past tense today with the Juanes song, Historia de Juan, which is really depressing. I love Juanes, though, so it's all good. Fernando is finally (we hope) going to get his missing bag delivered to the institute today.

After class we had a good deal of time to just relax...which ended up being much easier said than done. I managed to get on facebook, but because of the skype rule I couldn't call home or anything and I was too nervous to do anything legit, like writing the blog or taking care of bills or anything.

I think Anibal picked up on everyone's nervousness and suggested a walk to the neighboring property (shhh--private land = illegal trespassing). We were all in awe. We just, you know, wandered up the mountain behind studio into the rainforest and stuff...no big deal?! haha. He took us to a hollowed out strangler tree. This is basically a parasitic plant that starts as a vine, wraps around a well-established existing tree, "strangles" it, and basically decomposes all of the old tree that it needs to in order to take over the root system and survive on its own. Best part about the 3 or 4-story tall strangler? It's inhabitable! So I jumped on the opportunity to climb up the center of this monster. Totally incredible! It almost made me forget that we were moving in with our host families today until we had to walk back for the homestay orientation.