Siiiiiiiiick

First stomach bug has (tentatively) been survived. After nearly three days of urrrgh I was so close to giving in and delving into my stash of Cipro... but antibiotics are for the weak, and I managed to pull through and drag myself to class for the first time since Monday. My wimp of a stomach plus an un-fun head cold, traceable to the looong bus ride home from Atacames, kept me home Monday morning and all of Tuesday. My goal is to go to at least one of each class this week, achievable if I don´t die before tomorrow.

In the meantime, I´m catching up on a bit of schoolwork, some serious NAIMUN crunch work (hi Nora and Lopes, hope you´re reading!!), and blog posts about the past two weekends. Checking email for the first time since Monday brought some really sweet emails from friends that I didn´t know I needed so much until I read them. I´m going to share some wise words on language immersion from my dear friend Will that certainly inspired me:

"We've got two options: look a bit like a dork and do our best to use Spanish even if we're self conscious OR, herd around with English speakers and communicate perfectly well. We're sacrificing the ability to be understood, so that we can understand a new language...

...which is so true, and definitely something I´m going to try to keep in mind in the coming weeks. Making local friends has definitely been the biggest challenge for me. Granted, USFQers have as a general rule gone to school and grown up together, and breaking into their little microcosms is about as tough as it would be in a high school setting (read: really freaking tough). However, that´s no excuse for giving up and hanging out with Americans all the time, especially when it´s your language acquisition at stake. For a number of reasons my catchphrase here has already become "Awkward is my life," so I guess I´m just going to have to embrace that as I try to, awkwardly, make myself some friends.