Well, I haven't posted anything for a while because I was out of my training town for a few days last week vistiting another TEFL volunteer in his site. It was nice to have a break from training, but I was definitely happy to get back "home". The town I went to was very rural and about a nine hour journey by bus. It was four hours from the city of Matagalpa and that portion of the trip was hellatious (Is that a real word or just something my dad says?) It was super bumpy and I could actually feel my internal organs being jostled around. Not fun. On the up side, I can now say with certainty that I do not want to live out in the campo. Fortunately there are a few people who really want to live out in the boonies, so I am hoping that it will all work out. I had not really given much thought to where I want to be. I have been afraid to really research because I don't want to get my heart set on anything and then be disappointed, but after seeing this place I realized that it is going to be important for me to express my needs. For example, I need to live somewhere that I can purchase fruits and vegetables. I am starting to think I would prefer a city but I don't know. There are drawbacks to living in the city I think in terms of the job. Bigger schools mean bigger classes. Also it may be harder to connect to the community in a big city. I don't know. I just know that I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere. I am trying not to think about it too much because it is really out of my hands in a lot of ways. We have a general info session coming up this next weekend and then we will get more site specific in the next couple weeks. From what I hear, we get to give our top choices and also the places we definitely would not want to go. I have only heard one case of a person being placed in one of her bottom three, so I think they really try to work with us. Other than that, there hasn't been anything too exciting going on. We got to go to a volcano today and see the trainees in small business for the first time in six weeks and that was pretty cool. I really want to go to a beach. The two swimsuits I brought still have the tags on them. It is sad. I am missing Portland right now. It's Rose Festival and as much as I complain about it, I still like to go down to the waterfront every year and eat elephant ears. A snow cone sounds really good right now too. Anybody? But seriously, Portland is definitely best in the summer. I never actually realized how much state pride I have until I got here. I love my city. I was thumbing through the latest issue of Newsweek that Peace Corps gives us and there was a big picture of Elliot Smith and an article about posthumous record releases. For a minute I was back home reading the Mercury.
But Nicaragua is pretty rad too.
Well, I would love to post some more pictures but I left my USB cable at the internet cafe and I don't know where to buy one here so I think one is in the mail. More pictures soon I promise!