Comfort (+ Zumba, chismes, and impromtu art class)

I can tell I am getting more comfortable in this place and in my home because I am thoroughly enjoying the downtime I have had toward the end of this week. Yesterday I had three beautiful blocks of free time:

• The first, right after I woke up, I spent moving my hips in whacked out ways as I sweated away a Zumba class and remembered how much I like dancing to Latin pop music. How could I forget?

• The second was after my Spanish school, in the sleepiest part of the afternoon. With the mission of buying an avocado for lunch Stephanie and I ended up spending almost two hours with the teenager and the little girl who work at "Lidia's" tienda (grocery shop). Stephanie and Nancy spend a lot of time here making up chismes (gossip) about people, mostly each other, with Litzia, the older girl. She's hilarious, but even funnier was the little girl, who must have just gotten out of school and was incredibly hyper. She kept pulling herself up onto the counter and laying back and laughing so loud and making animal noises whenever we tried to talk. It made the low season even more obvious to me because the whole time we were there no customers came in. Though this may have had more to do with the squealing little girl on the countertop. Luckily, the longer Stephanie and I hung around, the more we bought... First a little bag of lime chips. Then one chocolate covered marshmallow each. Then I bought a mango, for later, and finally a single pen. Stephanie bought a blingalicious white ring with rhinestones and a flower on top that spins when you blow on it. Despite my description of this episode, I spend a surprisingly tiny amount of money here.

• The third seemed to begin when I walked down to the Centro Educatif for the drop-in art class at four. The teacher didn't show, so I took a kid's bike and ran back to the house to get Stephanie's key so they could at least make something in the hour. Sometimes my Spanish flows better than others, but trying to run an impromtu art class for 12 energized kids killed it altogether. So, I let them use all of our supplies to draw/paint/glitter glue whatever the hell they wanted, under the guise of father's day cards. And I taught them to make continuous chains of paper dolls, which I thought was cooler than they did. This wasn't downtime, but it felt like it, and I think it was because I felt, for the first time, alone and comfortable in my own head. After class, I went swimming for a bit, and read on the beach for a long time. It has been very breezy lately, but the water was warm. And it's probably not the best idea to read The Time-Traveler's Wife, a book about separation and deep longing, when you are thousands of miles away from your lover and everything you know well, but it is entertaining and interesting enough to get into my head in a way that I need.
  

So, my Friday (and my Thursday), has felt appropriately relaxing. Though, after yesterday, observing more than talking in the tienda, and trying but failing to productively direct my art class, I was frustrated with my Spanish. But, along came encouragement, this afternoon, when I had David over for our first intercambio, or language exchange. From the start, he said "I really want to be a good teacher for you," and I said "Yo tambien," followed by whatever he said in Spanish. We talked comfortably, with a lot of laughing and butchered repetitions of each other's corrections. He was less into practicing his English than in helping me with my Spanish, but I think he will become less shy with it next time. It made me realize I can actually hold a conversation in Spanish, and after he left I was aglow with this realization (and also with how much fun our learning/teaching/talking was. David seems like a solidly good and giving person).