Happy Thanksgiving!

Escuela Mayatan honors the traditional US holiday by making us a (mostly) traditional Thanksgiving dinner (pumpkin pie with icing?) and giving us the traditional 4 day weekend. We had 2 really nice dinners with some of our new friends. Last night's dinner included some Hondurans who enjoyed their 1st Thanksgiving feast. Luis commented on how much he liked all the food, especially the 4 slivers of pie he tried.

The town, despite moving into hot & sweaty weather, is preparing for Christmas. Fake Christmas trees are popping up in living rooms (visible through doors propped open to let a breeze in) and on rooftops. Christmas decorations have appeared in stores, although, thankfully, not in the mass abundance as in US stores. Christmas turkeys have appeared in the streets. There is a particularly large and fearsome one on the road to Escuela Mayatan that is very cocky and chased Alex on Wednesday morning. He was hoping it would and I am more than happy to let him play the decoy so I can make my hurried escape.

As our 3rd week here comes to a close, I (Amy, this time) am thankful for the following things:
-I have learned how to unlock my classroom door mostly on the 1st try.
-I have learned how to turn on the shower so it is mostly warm most of the time.
-We now own 4 candles so we're more prepared the next time the power goes out.
-I am grateful that I brought my gray sweater - the first 2 weeks were a little on the chilly side.

The newest teacher, Hallie, who arrived one week after us, asked us last night, "Things get better after 3 weeks, right?" (She's actually getting along well, but we're all in the adjustment period of living in a new country.) I told her that I think that there are so many basic things that we have to learn how to do again that we take for granted in the US that of course there is an adjustment period. Opening doors, using the shower, using the toilet, buying groceries - where to find the food, what it looks like, how it's packaged (or not packaged) and how to ask for it, new food, food that is cheap here but expensive in the US (pineapples, papayas, platanos), food that is expensive here but cheap in the US (apples), where to use the Internet, doing the laundry by hand either in our shower or on the pila....

For those of you who have snow already, Alex and I celebrated our Thanksgiving holiday today by going for a hike in the jungle and adjusting to sweating. Sweating! We haven't done that for years.

Happy Turkey Day to all!