A lot has happened since I last updated our blog. First of all, two of our dear female American friends have left our city. Our group has now worked its way down to just 3 people, and L is the only female among us. She has been quite desperate for girl talk lately, and poor K has been the recipient of it. So give her an e-mail, she will probably reply very quickly.
We started back to school in the second week of September. School is a bit of a challenge for us. The teaching styles are incredibly different here, and the teachers use criticism as a teaching method. L has gotten pretty mad at a couple of our teachers before for trying to put us as a husband and wife against each other, saying one is smarter than the other. Also she probably shouldn't have, but she called out a teacher for talking bad about another student's pronunciation when the student was not even in class that day. This teacher would have probably been fired in the States for what she said about him. Furthermore, we feel that of our 5 teachers, only 2 are really qualified to teach international students. Every career advancement here is done through connections, and we think that is the only way 3 of our teachers even have a job. Anyways, basically school is a test of our will and patience.
Fortunately though, L has started her 3rd trimester, so she will not be attending school any longer. She has begun tutoring at home. We selected her teacher, and it seems to be a great fit for her. L was getting pretty exhausted going to school each day, and I think the people continually smoking around her would have eventually erupted into a bad situation with L telling them what she thought of them for smoking around a pregnant woman. We have been told that the attitude towards smoking here is about like it was in the U.S. during the 1950's. It is not socially accepted for the women to smoke, just the rude men.
L is doing good. She at 27 weeks and has gained 8-12 pounds. She did not consistently weight herself before she got pregnant, so we are not exactly sure of how much she has gained. Our last sonogram showed that the baby's head is facing down and is very healthy. However so far we have not been able to learn the gender of the baby. The baby's room is coming along. L's mom and sister are practically decorating the entire room and shipping it to us. A baby's room is a strange concept to the people here and what they do have is pretty ugly. Also this side of the world has poor safety regulations (think lead paint on kids toys), so most of the baby's stuff will be from the U.S.
Last weekend we left our dirty little city went to a more modern city about 4 hours from here. We stayed in a nice hotel, ate western food, and bought imported stuff to bring back here. We spent a little over $50 buying just tortillas (1 bag of 6 cost $3.50). They must have thought we were crazy. L knows how to make tortillas, but it is exhausting, messy, and it is quite a process. So, our freezer is full of tortillas now.
The weather started cooling off a couple of weeks ago, and we have not had to run our air conditioner during the day since then. It has been nice. In our country, how much water and electricity one uses is public knowledge. They post our usage on a bulletin board by the apartment offices. We use more electricity than anyone in our building. Embarrassing huh? Our landlord told us we should use less. Let me put it in perspective though, they don't run their air conditioners much at all. It can be 100 degrees outside and they won't run their air conditioner. Maybe we should take a lesson from them. Nevertheless we rationalize that we have to use the air conditioner because if we open the windows L's allergies go nuts.
Look for photos soon!
K & L
No comments:
Post a Comment