The days are beginning to run together. Every so often, someone from our team will try to figure out how long we've been here. I'm tempted to not believe it has only been 2 1/2 weeks. Time goes by so much slower here, but the days also seem so much fuller. I've never spent so much time getting to know people and just talking.
Today will be the fourth day my house hasn't had water. We have plenty to drink and cook with, because my parents have to buy purified water for Dennisse and I so we don't get sick. But we can't do our laundry and we've been having to take bucket showers with about two gallons of water/person. I'm realizing just how much water I waste in the U.S.
One of the hardest things to get used to the very first week was throwing my used toilet paper in the trashcan, not the toilet. It's second hand now. I'm wondering how easy it will be to go back to flushing it down the toilet?
Friday evening, everyone from Bethel plus Josh and Vicki (our student directors from SI) went out for pizza. I've never enjoyed pizza so much in my life.
On Saturday, all of the students went to Santiago. We visited Centro Leon (an art museum) and Santiago's historical monument. It was kind of humorous to listen to our tour guides try to give us tours in English. They all did really well, but it made me realize how funny I probably sound to Dominican's when I speak Spanish.


I was able to move up to level three in my Spanish class. I was originally in level two, but things were moving really, really slowly and I was pretty bored the second day in. Level three overlaps level two a bit, so I didn't miss anything by jumping ahead. The biggest bonus is that level three moves a lot faster. I'm definitely being challenged a lot more.
I had my first Dominican style taxi experience Sunday on the way to church. We stuffed eight people into a five person car. And when we almost got there, we came to a road the was completely torn up and blocked off by some guys pouring concrete. So, we walked the rest of the way to church. I love that when things like that happen here, it isn't a big deal. People don't get stressed out, they just roll with the punches.
Yesterday, skipped class and took a field trip to a book fair in La Vega. It poured most of the time we were there, so we really couldn't look at too many books. My class ended up standing in a booth for about 45 minutes, talking to the vendors and waiting for the rain to stop. It was still a good experience, just not exactly what I was expecting.