A Little More Rain, Some Jade, and Lots of Spanish

Classes continue to go well. Although the rain has continued it isn’t as fierce; I think we’ve had the worst of (now) Hurricane Alex and will fall into a more typical summer pattern with nice mornings and possible rain in the afternoons or at night. Next week we’ll have classes from 4 to 7pm in order to take advantage of that.

Some of us have private lessons (including me) and others are in a group; we switch teachers half way through the morning. The photo below shows Sandee, Andrea, and Andrea (yes, 2 Andreas) with their 2nd session teacher Jorge who is my teacher the 1st session.


Here's a birthday message to my husband Mike from my other teacher, Rosalena. I'm missing him more than ever today.


Family matters are going well, too. I really love my family, pictured below: Isabel, Hector, me, Elena with Dubi, and Susana. The girls are from a Maya village and live here part of the year to help with cleaning and the family business, a tortilla and hamburger shop; it’s run by Hector and a grown daughter.


I’m getting a feel for the town which is a bit confusing because the streets are named after people with unusual names and the names change as you move along, sometimes 3 different names for one street over a dozen blocks. There are trendy areas and local areas with narrow streets, bright colored paint, and lots of graffiti.


We’ve continued to explore despite the rain. The man below is wearing the typical attire of men in the village of Chamula which we’ll visit next week; up close the tunic looks like bear fur.


He’s walking by the church pictured near the top of the blog and the next photo was taken of the ornate gold altar inside.


We’ve done some shopping but not a lot of buying yet, though Jan scored a beautiful new scarf today.


We also visited a really nicely done jade museum and associated store. HAPPY TRAILS!