Saturdays

My title is plural, though this post is only about today, because the weekends here have taken up a trend of being a time for walking arroyos, going to the beach, planning, reading, napping, ect. They also bring up little quarrels in my head about what one should do when "living" in a place, but not having the constant bustle of the last place one called home. I suppose I'm going through the phase that I do at the beginning of each summer when I feel strangely guilty for laying in bed reading in the afternoon or browsing food blogs, getting excited about recipes I don't have the ingredients for. This is doubled, too, due to the pressure of living in such a beautiful new place. Shouldn't I be at the beach all the time and constantly practicing my Spanish?

The pressure passes, though, thanks to the reminders that I am browsing the net while breaking from work (most of the time), staying in at night because I truly enjoy my home here, and reading in bed because I have the time to do so. This internship has also been a little trial in "working from home," as I spend a good portion of my time editing docs for the website, planning lessons, and planning the July summer camp (and writing my blog which I sneakily think of as a "to do"). It's turning out quite productively, given the fact that I have spent the last 4 years working out of an ultra-silent library.

Because we are planning projects on our own time, I would think that "weekend" wouldn't mean too much, but, it does. It enables us to wake up early and exhaust ourselves within the first four hours of the day, eat, nap, work for a couple of hours, and then walk on the beach. This morning, Nancy swung by with Kaio around 8:30 and we met her bf, Jose, at his little house on the other end of town. The house is a simple square, but the yard is kept-up, like a porch. Many people here treat the space in front of their houses, whether it be a couple feet to roadside or in the middle of a field, just like that, sweeping them clean with a broom, spraying them down to wet the dust, arranging hammocks or chairs, and growing beautifully colorful flowers. Jose had two hammocks with an arbor of these viney flowers here that are either deep magenta, yellow, or rice-paper white. Pleasant, to say the least.

I wanted to share this adorable picture of Kaio, but credit goes 100% to Stephanie. It was taken before I even got here, haha.

So, we took off from his house, hiking up a riverbed, stepping from rock to rock, following him as he choose paths when the stream split. It was a nice feeling of being just-out-of-bed tired and following someone who knew where they were going down trails that didn't seem like trails. On our way back we heard rumbles and shouting behind us, and next thing we know it, a horse pulling a large log lumbers down the path, edged on by a few of our students and their dogs. There was a whole pack of horses, and it was impressive but unsettling watching them barrel through the rocky creek bed, as fast as possible to keep the switch of their backs and the logs from gaining enough momentum to click them in the hooves.

On the way to the beach after our walk we stopped at a field to pick mangoes. I now have about twenty sitting, washed and ready to eat, in my drying rack. We then drove to a part of the beach I had never swum. We parked next to the cemetery, where white stone gravemarkers and elaborate shrine-like structures sit, laden with plastic and crepe-paper flowers, flags, and candles. The colorful cemetery butts right up against the beach. The waves were big today, and once we got out far enough we let them throw us gently us and down and lost track of time.

When we got back home it was only 11:30. I really do love living here.