Suzi 08/09/06

Another week over and our Spanish is improving, albeit at a slow rate. I´d forgotten what it was like to have homework in the evenings (over 10 years since I last had that delight!) and that´s been an experience training ourselves to sit down and do that and avoid the pub!! Thorsten even used the old "the cat ate my homework" excuse this morning as we had a pizza evening with his house yesterday and he didn´t have time to do it. We have truly regressed to naughty pupil stage!

We´ve a had a nice week activity wise too! We went on a really interesting tour of the Hermano Pedro hospital, which is a charity residential and out-patient hospital for the underprivileged in Antigua. It was very sad in some parts as very often children with physical or mental problems are simply left at the hospital as they are "no use" to the poor families if they cannot work and they then spend their lives in the hospital. There were though also many stories of hope and it was really interesting to how a simple operation (in western terms) alters peoples lives.

I had my palm read! My housemate is a psychic back home in California and she kindly gave me a free reading. Was really accurate and those of you who worry about my love of fire can now relax, there is a reason, I was a caveman cook in a previous life (hence the desire to go on all those cooking courses too!). Lots of positive stuff and really enjoyed the experience. We also managed to watch our first Spanish film (with English subtitles!!), Como agua para chocolate, and was really good so we were pleasantly surprised and could even understand the odd sentence without the help of subtitles!!

Other than that we´ve been drinking a lot of coffee and trying desperately to learn more verbs form the list that has now increased to over 200! Hopefully off to Guatemala City tomorrow. LOL xx