Day 2: Las Hamacas

I'm LOVING México! I mostly love the opportunity to speak so much Spanish.  I've already improved in the last day.  Actually, I think I've just returned to the level I was at last summer after living in the Spanish House since I've lost a lot of that progress throughout the past year of not speaking the language very much.  I'm really excited to continue speaking!

I love my roommates!  Lyndy is a roommate from BYU and we've been living together for the past 2 years.  Kaitlin is someone we just met, but she's awesome!  We all have the same goals with this program as well.  We're all taking a minor in Spanish and are here to gain fluency.  For that reason, we're basically always speaking Spanish even when some of the other students aren't.  

Speaking Spanish so much has proved to be quite useful in bartering, too.  We went to El Centro (the center of town) tonight and walked around and bought some things.  A coin purse for my pesos and HAMMOCKS!!  That's the one thing everyone said you had to buy here.  People had apprehensions about buying them so early in the trip because we could be ripped off especially as foreigners who don't know what is good quality or a fair price.  Well, there were some men selling hammocks on the street and I talked to them for about 20 minutes in Spanish trying to lower the price and find out if the hammocks were of good quality.  I think the men really needed the money, but I did get the price down from 500 pesos to 300 pesos (about 30 dollars in American currency) and since we had seen our host mom's hammock earlier today, we thought they were comparable and bought some!  We brought the hammocks home and our host mom said they were good hammocks and that we got them super cheap!  We're awesome.  This bartering in Spanish skill will be quite useful I think.  I feel so much more confident in my Spanish already because I think it took this day just to get back into the swing of speaking it so much.  The pronunciation is coming more easily and the vocabulary is coming back into my brain.  Our plan is to go back to El Centro a lot just to talk with the locals to practice.  Hopefully this won't result in spending a lot of money . . . 

The men actually swinging Lyndy to show how strong they are . . . they being
the hammocks, not the men.

y nuestras hamacas!!  Many of the locals sleep in these to help with the heat I think.  We're super excited to sleep in our new hammocks tonight!