Estoy viviendo todavia

I´m alive. Christ, Spanish keyboards are a pain in the ass.

I arrived in Cuernavaca Friday night. Remember how much I bragged about the weather? Well, what they don´t tell you is that every night, it pours. Traffic was crawling; the drive from the airport should have taken a bit under two hours. It took nearly four. Roads were flooded out. When I arrived at my house, the power went out.

Incidentally, my house is not the one I was originally assigned. It´s much further away, barely within walking distance of the University. My family is friendly, but there aren´t any kids my age. The food has been pretty good so far, though. Nothing spicy, but it´s been a looong time since somebody cooked me three meals in a row.

Driving in Cuernavaca is mayhem no matter what the weather´s like. Almost everybody here drives a peanut - there probably aren´t this many VWs in Germany - and drives like a madman. There are very few stoplights, but also very few accidents. I haven´t seen one yet. Crazy, but obeying a set of unspoken rules that seems to work better than our spoken ones.

The cost of labor here is seemingly ridiculously low. My family has a six-day-a-week domestic helper who cooks, cleans and does yard work. They also have a gardener. Their home is well-constructed and quite beautiful. Taxis are cheap (I pay about six bucks round trip to any place I´d want to go) and buses are practically free. Bottled water is 35 cents a bottle; my lunch today, a sandwich and a Gatorade, cost about as much as an American Gatorade alone.

On the other hand, technology and anything that requires a professional´s touch is much more expensive or difficult to come by. Telephone companies still charge by the minute for local calls. Internet access is mostly restricted to universities, businesses and cafes. My family´s water heater can bear about six minutes of showering before it starts trying to freeze my balls off. The roads are okay, but it is apparently cheaper to hire cops to stand at intersections than it is to install traffic signals. Calls to the US are more expensive than calls from the US. It takes a little getting used to.

So does Spanish. I hate to break it to those of you who may have studied Spanish in school, but you don´t know shit. After four days here, I can barely have a basic conversation with someone who is conciously going slow for me. Normal Mexicans are beyond my powers of comprehension. People ask me how old I am; I don´t know if I should say 21 or 6. That´s about how good my grasp of the language is. I have, however, started dreaming in Spanglish.

Anyway, things probably aren´t as bad as they sound. Everything is so much more difficult than at home, but I feel like I´ve accomplished something significant if I remember to say ¨Buenas tardes¨ instead of ¨Buenos días." Also, I want you all to give thanks right now that you were raised on English. Spanish is hard, but not nearly as bad as our mother tongue.

There´s a great deal more, but I´ll get to it later. Se porten bien, niños (dig that ñ, don´t ya? The only advantage of the Spanish keyboard is that I don´t have to dig for the accented letters. ¡Ay!).