Jess and Stacey’s Travels

After four weeks of four hours of Spanish class a day, we decided to take a break from the classroom. Both of our heads hurt a bit after two weeks but then got better with a couple of mojitos.  My (Stacey) knowledge of French really does come in handy learning Spanish, but also gets in the way when I try to speak.  I tend to speak Franspagnol.  I now know enough to know when I am suposed to use things like the subjunctive, but am not good enough to actually use it on the fly when talking.  I blame some of that also on my poor command of the English language.  I can hardly recognize verb tenses in English so although  I try to translate in my head, I often don’t know the tense that I am thinking in English.  Unfortunately for us, it also seems that most of what we need to say involves an irregular verb.  We have decided that now we need to practice more in day to day life.  We are planning on going back to the classroom again at some point while we are here.

To celebrate the end of classes and our one month anniversary here, we went to the same Laguna de Apoyo that we talked about in a previous blog entry.  This time, we stayed at the water’s edge at the hostel, Monkey Hut.  There are a [read on]

This week took us away from our normal routine of sleeping, eating, and learning Spanish.  On Tuesday afternoon, we took a little tour of a nearby town with a volunteer organization called Esperanza.  The organization was founded about 8 or 9 years ago to help in the schools.  They provide both monetary and volunteer assistance.  For example, they pay a local nurse to do weekly rounds at the schools in the poorer communities, they sponsor some kids to go to high school, they work in the schools themselves tutoring children, teaching hygiene, providing physical therapy, setting up libraries etc.  Esperanza requires volunteers be here at least two months.  They have a few volunteer houses where the volunteers live.  I think there are about 35-40 people volunteering right now.  We’re thinking about volunteering here or somewhere at some point.  We walked back to Granada from the little village and were sweaty, dirty and tired, but it was a great change of pace.

On Saturday, we joined up with Femke (Dutch student) and rented a car and head out of Granada to some neighboring towns, known as los Pueblos Blancos.  They used to be strikingly white from the materials they were made of, but now [read on]