How I found myself packing up my stuff exactly a month after I did the first time, or, Sometimes you get a crazy host mom

From the first week we had some worries about living with our host mom, as she had a lot of rules for us. Some of her rules that were just cultural - like that she wanted us wearing shoes and/or socks inside all the time. Most of the host families don't really go for the whole barefoot look inside, so that was normal. Other things were a little weirder and were clearly just our mom's personal preferences and idiosyncracies - like she yelled at Steph one day after Steph didn't come home for lunch. Sometimes she wouldn't make dinner for us if we came home after a certain time (a certain time that varied each time) and once she made dinner for herself and not us, even though we asked. She told us that we had come home too late. She also wouldn't let us make food for ourselves if she wasn't there. She had a housepainter come and didn't tell us, and he got paint all over Steph's stuff. Steph took a lot of blame for things that our mom thought we were doing wrong, and we felt like we were walking around on eggshells half the time. All my friends told us about their families and how they would have good talks with them or their moms would just let them help themselves to food.

I'll skip over some of the details, but the main thing is that Steph and I talked to Astrid, the study abroad director, on Thursday and she took care of it all. On Friday we hauled all our stuff (packed rather hapzardly into our suitcases last minute) to school and met our new "mom" - and I love my new family! I live in a house now with a mom and two of her daughters, who are both in their late 20s, and one of their daughters, who is 8 years old. I've already had more fun with my new family and gotten to know them better in the past few days than I did with my old mom in a month. It's also nice having a little kid in the house. I played "El Juego de la Vieja" a.k.a. Tic Tac Toe with Mariana today and she is really cute and smart. Our house is also in a really nice neighborhood (the mayor lives down the street!) and it's only a couple blocks from a shopping center with a movie theater. Anyway, having to pack up all my stuff after only a month (two and a half months sooner than I expected) was frustrating but I'm really glad because it's turned out well.

Speakin of families, here's a Venezuelan Fun Fact!:

Family is very important to Venezuelans. Children will live with their parents well into their 20s or 30s, or until they get married (hence my two "sisters" still living at home) and all the people who live in a household try to make it home for lunch, the biggest meal of the day. And their lunch is usually bigger than any meal I ever eat at home - meat, rice, soup, salad, potatoes, plantains, fresh fruit juice, etc. It's a good thing that dinner is always light - maybe a tortilla (not like a Mexican tortilla; it's more like an omelette) or bread and tea.

On Saturday I went on the teleferico, the world's highest and longest cable car, and on top of the mountain I met a middle-aged Venezuelan guy who studied abroad at University of Wisconsin-Superior and lived in Duluth for a year! Of all the crazy things. But more on that later, I've got to go. Adios!