Day 9 (6/10/11)

Today was the first day of language learning from our tutor, Elli. She is a Mexican woman who teaches Spanish in the MCCA (Mexico City Christian Academy). In the session she taught us about the present tense in Spanish and I felt pretty dumb because she corrected me many times due to my poor pronunciation of some words. I know it’s not my fault, but it’s still frustrating to know that I have a long way to go with learning the language. My prayer to God is for patience and flexibility for myself as I continue to learn. We had this tutoring session for about 3 hours and then we left to go eat lunch with the Carpenters.

At this lunch time we stopped by a nicer taco place that looked like a chain of restaurants. We were pretty hungry so we started stuffing food in our mouths. The food tasted great and I enjoyed it all, and then afterward we went to get some ice cream. I got some butter pecan ice cream and it tasted great as well. Once we got back to the house though, I got sick. I won’t go into any details about that, but it wasn’t fun during that time. The missionary hosts were very understanding throughout the process and even gave me some papaya enzyme pills that supposedly help with digestion. I took two of these pills and they helped somewhat.
Then Casey (our actual host missionary) arrived and asked if I was ok to ride in the car. I said yes and we then headed out on the bumpy roads of Mexico. I realize I haven’t said much about where I’m living now and so I’ll give a brief description of Mexico City and what it’s like to live here. Mexico City’s altitude is over a mile high (around 7500ft.) and the metropolitan area around the city contains about 22 million people. So if you can imagine, this city is packed with people and has a lot of big hills that we have to drive up and down. In addition to multiple hills, everywhere in the city they have what they call “topes” or speed bumps. To get from one place to another you must aggressively maneuver your vehicle (so as to make it through the heavy traffic) around the city while slowing down frequently to get over the large topes. As this maneuvering and stopping was happening while my stomach was churning. Needless to say I didn’t enjoy the trip we took today.



Once we arrived at the Hancock’s place I was feeling slightly better, but didn’t want to do much of anything too active. The Hancock’s have 3 kids; Libby, Corbin, and Ian. Corbin likes to play video games so Andrew and I played with him for a while until dinner was ready. Tonight we ate burgers and Doritos for dinner and it was an excellent treat as we had a small taste of home. Following this not much happened except sleep. Andrew and I are pretty tired today and are still adjusting to the high altitude here. I’m hoping that this stomach ache will pass soon so I can get back to 100%.