I know of some people who have gone out to bars with their professors before, or some who have at least seen their professors out drinking. How many of you have gone out drinking AND merengue AND salsa dancing with your professors before? And seen them get really drunk? And have them call you a loser for going home at 2:30 in the morning because they weren't going home and they had to teach at 9 in the morning? Well, that was my night last night. These venezolanos are quite the partiers. Thank goodness I'll have classes to go to next week otherwise I don't think I`d survive.

Two days and four planes later, I´m finally here in Merida, at an internet cafe just down the street from `my` apartment. (Some of the punctuation keys on this keyboard are a little switched around so you'll have to bear with me.) It's really beautiful here and it seems unreal that this is where I'll be for the next three months. I keep thinking that I can just take a bus over the mountains and there Minnesota will be, waiting for me. Not that I want to go home, at least not yet.

My host family is really just a host mom. Rosalba is a very sweet woman with two adult sons who both live in the U.S. So it´s just my ´mom`, my roommate Stephanie, and me in a nice little apartment. Stephanie is from Mound, of all places, and knows Tyler and Mike and the Mound boys! Craziness. We have our own rooms, which I wasn´t expecting, but it´s nice. Except for the damn turkey that lives in a courtyard beneath the apartment. And the cats that like to chase the turkey. And the roosters somewhere nearby. The roosters crow at dawn, as most good roosters do. Then the turkey begins his gobbling which doesn't really cease until the sun goes down. Then the frogs start singing until the sun comes up. Oh, and the car alarm... I'm pretty sure it´s the exact same car alarm that went off all the time in the Goldfine parking lot!! Except this one goes off even more than that one did, and for those of you who lived in Goldfine C, you know that's a lot.

Well, that's all I have for now. I have to be back to the apartment for lunch soon and I'm just hoping we don't end up wandering around La Parroquia forever.