It gets better

So- Christmas Day was hard. It kind of came out of no where. I mean, I was expecting it to be hard, but the 24th went so well/fun/easy that I was expecting Christmas Day to be the same. But it just wasn´t.

For one thing, there were some unforseen "Host Family Conflicts" that I´m just going to attribute to that fact that they miss their real son right now as much as I miss my family. I really don´t think it was my fault, and I´m not going to go into detail here, but it made Christmas morning less than enjoyable for everyone. So that made me feel really sad. You know when you are in a bad mood and you just feeling like moping around in self-pity? I think being in another country on Christmas makes it WAY worse. As exchange students, we just don´t have the option of being angsty. (ROTARY SMILE)

It´s like on Christmas Eve I had my perky "I am a cultural amabassador and I love EVERYTHING new you can throw at me" face on, but by Christmas Day I just felt really, really, icky.

So this is how I felt as we piled into the car to go to "Grandma´s House". Not great. But as we were driving, my host dad was just like: "HOLY &%#! THERE´S A RAINBOW!!" And I was like: "What? It´s not even raining." It wasn´t raining. It hadn´t rained all day. The sky was blue. NOT rainbow wheather. But there it was!

This was the most beautiful rainbow I have ever seen in my life. It streched across the entire sky, ending in a puffy white cloud. It had six distinct shades. It looked like something out of an overly cartoony "Noah´s Ark" children´s book. Really, I couldn´t make this stuff up. I just sat there thinking: "This is SO exchange".

It´s the biggest cliche out there, but this is always how it happens. You feel overwhelmed by cultural differences but then you watch "iCarly" with your host siblings and realize that there are some things everyone finds funny. You feel apathetic and stupid, but then you learn some new words and are engaged and excited again. You get sick from the water, but then you eat some papaya and feel fine again. And sometimes, you think you are having the worst day of your life, and a literal rainbow appears. Welcome to Exchange.










IN OTHER NEWS: Today some family is visiting from Jalapas. My 6 year old cousin told me that I talk like a "Vaquera": a cow-herder. Now, I could take this to mean that I have bad grammar, a funny accent, and use weird "country" vocabulary. But she didn´t say I sounded "gringa". I can live with cow-herder.Score.