the peak!

the halloween party

school trip in santo domingo ' the ocean!!!

on the bus

the bus

ramona and a friend with his dog

my host fam´s dog!

Wow! It´s been so long since my last post! I left off in the week that i switched to my new host family. So lots of stuff has happened...in summary: Felix went home to Germany (ah, i was about to write Allemania..Germany in Spanish) I went to a crazy school movie, I went on a crazy school trip to Santo Domingo, I went to the campo (the country), i went to a crazy Halloween party, I went to the highest peak in the Carribbean, I joined a softball team, I went to Santo Domingo (the capital) with Ramona, and I´m learning alot of Spanish, and school has been good.

Ok, so I´m not sure exactly why Felix went home.. I was in Caribe Tours one day waiting for my friends (haha, waiting as always..no just kidding) and Felix and Till were there, Felix with all of his stuff packed up, and he was waiting to get on the bus to Santo Domingo because AFS had called him and told him to go, so he thought he was going to change cities or families or something, and he was happy and everything..but when he got to Santo Domingo they told him he would go home the next tuesday. Agh. So that sucks.

The school movie was reallllly different from movies here...The seniors in my school were hosting it, and it was in this old cinema..and it was a horror movie, i dont remember what it was called, something about mirrors being able to kill people..and every time something even remotely scary happened, EVeryone in the theatre would start to scream and yell and whistle and stuff like that...for a long time..and it was extremely loud! But fun none the less...i just had to get used to it. But then the projector broke, and everyone went outside and was listening to music and dancing, and another part of the culture here is that theres no drinking age..so of course there were people drinking. Whenever theres a party or movie or something that goes late here on the weekends, my host parents let me stay the night at Ramona´s house because its alot closer, which is cool...my house is really far from where most of my friends live.

Ok, so on the school trip to Santo Domingo, we had to get up at three in the morning to be at the school at four to get on the bus, and the bus ride was intense...people were loud and crazy and yelling out the windows at random stuff and having fun..much different than a bus ride at four in the morning in homer..haha.. in santo domingo we went to a college for computers and we got a tour..then we went to a computer-informatica fair that was huge but kinda boring because it was all stuff about computers and technology and in spanish..the bus ride on the way back was just as crazy and we got back to san juan at about 8.30.

One sunday i went to the country with Nini, the girl who lives in my house, to visit her boyfriend´s family. we rode a motoconcho out and visited and ate and went to a river for a few minutes, and everything was really pretty, then we went out to the real country and drank fresh coconut milk right out of a coconut that one of the people with us had climbed a tree and picked..i dont like coconut but i do like coconut milk! haha. then we went back to san juan in this taxi bus thing. so that was pretty fun.

haha, so people here dont usually celebrate halloween, but they did have a school party..not many people dressed up, but they decorated the place all right...it was in this basement of this rented house place...so it got really hot..but it was fun. yes i danced. agh people dance crazy here. haha.

ok, so the pico duarte trip for afs was amazing! ahhh. i left on a wednesday morning in the bus at 6 in the morning, got to santo domingo and rode a taxi to the house where everyone was meeting, and unfortunately left my cell phone in the taxi, the we went in three buses to the mountains and got to this little town where we ate and slept for the night, then woke up at four thirty in the morning to start walking! and we walked and walked and walked (well some people rode mules and they got to leave earlier) and walked until three in the afternoon where we stayed in this cam,ping spot for the rest of the day, and we ate soup and food and had a campfire, but had to go to bed at 8 because we got up at 4:30 again, to walk more, and on that day we went to the peak, and it was so beautiful! we were also really lucky because usually it rains alot allll the time in pico duarte, but for us it only rained once in the afternoon after we had finished hiking...and i have sooo many awesome pics of the peak. but unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries when we got to the valley where we stayed for three nights and swam in a river and jumped off high rocks into the river and played frisbee and hung out..and on the second to last day they were cooking pigs, but not in an oven...you know in movies when people get captured by native tribes and the tribes tie them to a stick and cook them over a fire? it was like that..we woke up in the morning and there were four raw pigs skewered on sticks roasting over the fires..and they were there alll day, it was really strange for me and other people but thats the common way to do it. ah, so i´m about to run out of time on the computer so i´ll have to finish another day.