March 23, 2009 Settled In

Well, it’s been just over three weeks since we’ve moved on to this plateau of paradise. In the past week or so I feel like I’ve really come to recognize how far away we are from everything we’ve ever known. Like maybe I was in culture shock, and now that it’s wearing off, there’s nothing left but noticing the distance and the differences.
My Spanish isn’t going along so swimmingly. I freeze up when people talk to me, like my brain says, “Oh, they’re speaking Spanish, don’t bother listening because you don’t know Spanish.” But I’ve been fighting that. Numbers were really hard for some reason, even though I learned counting and whatnot in my Spanish 1A class. I have some language lessons on my old iPod, and I really like them. But I haven’t done enough of those tapes to make a difference. I should do them everyday, but instead I spend a lot of my day loafing and slowly starting my rewrite (there’s so much I don’t want to change….).
The bugs are much less frequent now. Spiders anyway. There’re these funny fuzzy black caterpillars that supposedly sting if you touch them, one of those was en la cocina recently and when Sal scooped it up with a piece of paper he excreted all this yellow goo that stuck to the floor. And I found one tiny scorpion in the kitchen and we found another last night, coming in through the bedroom door. Shivers. If Sal hadn’t of smashed that sucker he might’ve come inside! Scorpion stings aren’t super dangerous around here, our welcome packet of useful information from the house’s owner suggests you eat a spoonful of sugar and lie down if a scorpion stings. But I don’t want to give those assholes a chance!
I feel much less afraid of the big black spiders now, and when I see them on the outside walls, I kind of like it (as much as I can like a spider, which isn’t much). I know they eat mosquitoes, and the sight of them probably keeps away lots of other tiny annoyances. There’re still some little brown spiders that bite, and I keep finding them near our bed! No bites yet, that I know of. I just might have all my mosquito bites and spider bites mixed up. Whenever I go out at night, like walking home along narrow paths from the moya, my ankles and legs become bug food. I have bites all over, plus I stopped shaving to enjoy how no one cares or even notices around here, and so my legs look kind of like a monkey’s. How about that?
And my skin is drier than it’s ever been. A few weeks before we moved out here, I decided to shake my dependency on lotion. Like most women in the U.S.A., I somehow got in the habit of smearing fancy-smelling and vitamin-enriched lotion all over myself after every shower, every time my hands felt a little crackly. Sure, it’ll make my skin nice and soft, kind of shiny, but I just don’t have the time or money to be in need of lotion all the time. So I decided to shake it. Still, since we’ve gotten here my skin has really been drying up. It’s itchy and painful, but I’m pretty sure if I endure it and eat plenty of vitamin E, I’ll be stronger for it. Now if only I could get my hair to dread up….
I’m definitely happy here, and proud of us for coming. It’s strange: it’ll be awhile before I’m comfortable conversing en español and I still get those scary creepy crawly feelings that make me kind of paranoid and uncomfortable. But here we are perched on a mountainous pedestal way up in the sky. When we look across the lake to San Pedro, it’s like that mountain is in the sky and the clouds come crashing up behind it. There are birds singing beautiful songs all the time, Sal took movies of them yesterday. And at night the stars spread across the sky so close you think maybe I could just pluck one out and keep it in my pocket, for luck.
Also, I finally got some helado! mmm!