Cierra tus ojos

Today it was once again Gabriel who made up a game and enlisted me as his opponent. He crafted an airplane out of a sheet of paper which we then threw back and forth, the object being to get it past the other person. The only other rule was that any time you succeeded you had to yell the word "GOAAAAAL!" as loud as possible. He acted as quite the MC, taking way too much pleasure in saying things like "¡OHHH... Y Ella perdió la oportunidad que tenía!" [OHHH.. And she lost the chance she had!] every time I missed a shot. The video down at the bottom is a clip from the game.

Later we went to the park again. This time they gave me 3 of the girls--the babies and the six year old--to take too. Solamon had to stay home since he didn't finish his homework, so I ended up taking eight kids in total. That was scary. Every few minutes or so I´d freak out a little bit and frantically look around the park counting "Uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho!" I must have counted to eight eighty times from the time we got there to the time we left. Two 1-year olds, a 3-year old, a 6-year old, an 8-year-old, a 10-year old, an 11-year old, and a 13-year old...that´s a lot of ducklings to keep in tow.

Each day so far, the boys have picked out flowers for me on the way to the park. Yesterday they just handed them to me, but today they said "¡Cierra tus ojos!" [Close your eyes!], and when I did they tucked flowers into my jacket pockets. They are so adorable. The only "vase" I had was a roll of toilet paper [which El Señor gave me to "clean up any messes"...?] So, I set it on a swing and put my new flowers inside and Voila! My new header.

I'm trying to be patient with my Spanish. It's hard not to just expect to be able to understand everything after only a couple of days here, or at least to want to. I am definitely improving... When the boys want to tease me they talk really fast, knowing I won't understand. Today though, there was a small victory. I asked Zacharia where his shoes were as we were leaving the park and he said [¡Se fue en un viaje!] just about as fast as he could. I wish I had my camera ready to capture his expression when I replied "No, no se fue en un viaje" [No they did not go on vacation]. If looks could talk, his would have said "Crap! She understood me?!!" The rest of the kids found it all pretty hilarious.

I walked them to school at around 1 and then found the closest bus stop. It wasn´t the stop nor the bus number that Veronica had shown me how to take, but as far as I could tell it was going the same general direction and I was feeling adventurous. I live in "el centro" or "downtown" (that´s what they call it, but there aren´t any buildings taller than two stories). El centro is set up like a grid, so though the streets actually have names and it isn´t quite as easy to navigate as St. Petersburg or NYC, it isn´t very hard either. I got off the bus when I saw streets I recognized and walked the rest of the way home, stopping at a store on the way. I asked today if there was anything they needed and they said that they were all out of diapers and almost out of soap. 3 packages of diapers, 4 bars of cute bright green soap with alligators on it, and a bottle each of shampoo and conditioner for me all came out to less than 9 dollars. Dealing with pesos with a budget in dollars is much more fun than Euros were last month.

Once again looking forward to tomorrow!

And now, as promised:

"El Avión de Papel"