Befy Update #7

Sounds like she's doing pretty well! We're hoping to see her by mid-June....4 more months.

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My Fifth Month in Venezuela, more school, more vacations

8:20pm Tuesday, Feb 5

Ok, so this month went by blindingly fast, a lot of happenings and miss-happenings that I will now fill all of you in on.

I left of last month with starting school again, school itself hasn´t much changed, except I´ve started hanging out with a different group of people, mainly the girls, and I´ve met and talked to some people that I hadn´t before. We also started to ride the public busses after school, which has given me a lot more freedom to be with my friends after school. I´ve also gotten really lazy with my school work, and I basically only try in math, chemistry, and physics, which are the fun classes here, and the classes in which I´m better than everyone else (Mrs. Tyson will laugh at that!).

I´ve also been able to skip a lot of school. A couple of weeks ago I skipped Thursday and Friday to take a trip with two of my host aunt´s to Maturin to visit my host cousin. Maturin is on the eastern side of Venezuela close to Guyana. The drive was really interesting, watching the country turn from mountains, to jungle, to beach, to desert, and I also got to see all the oil fields, and the tiny little towns that all seem to have some sort of food specialty that they sell by the roadside.

My host cousin is young, about 28, so we had a lot of fun in Maturin going out at night with her friends, and I got to go to a disco for the first time, which was awesome, I hadn´t been able to dance since New Year´s Eve.

Maturin was just a regular Venezuelan city, very dirty and run down, with a lot of pro-Chavez grafitti, but at least I got to spend some time with my host aunts and cousins and skip school for a few days.

Recently we traveled again to Barquisimeto during the wondeful holiday of Carnaval, where basically everyone goes crazy, dresses up, and throws water balloons, eggs, and worse things at perfect strangers. Luckily I was only the victim of a water balloon.

We also had a huge party at our school, complete with lots of fun, disgusting games (peeling an onion with your teeth? Rolling around in the mud?). And I had to ride the bus home muddy with my face painted blue and in sweatpants, and men STILL yelled things at me (that´s Venezuela for you, folks!)

After the party we got Friday, the next Monday and today off from school and the whole family went to Barquisimeto to visit the grandparents. We went to the movies, visited the Misión, where I got to do a zipline through the giant trees, and to a antique flea market, and I also got to ride a horse way up in to the mountains! All in all it was really fun, and I´m looking forward to the next month!