mastatal

vocab of the week: while in english a llama is a large furry horse-like animal, in spanish it in fact means fire, resulting in the tv news headline "en llama" set over a house ablaze

things are slow as ever here, and its safe to say spanish is squarely kickin my ass. while i have all of the grammatical and structural information needed in conversation, it has been quite hard for me to transfer it into actually talking. i know i just need to talk to people, thats what everyone and their mother tells me. i feel like kina an inconvenience when i try tho. and its unbelievable to me that anyone here understands each other, they all talk so fast and slur all of the words together so much. i like to think that in english there are spaces between words, although i don´t know how it sounds to a foreigner, but this is just like one long endless river of noise that somehow has meaning. on the bug front i have seen 3 extremely strange ones and have pics to prove it. the first was this bizarre beatle with weird clumps of red stuff all over it and a really big nose. the second i guess was a locust but was bigger than i imagined locusts to be and an irridescant green. the third and most exciting flew directly at me last night. aside from its legs its body was extraordinarily flat and bright green and it had a head kinda like a hammer head shark. i got my camera and started taking pictures and then i looked at the one id taken from the front and realized it had arms and was in fact a preying (praying?) mantis at which point i got kinda scared cuz i have no clue if they can hurt people. so i went back to my chair but it was pointed and looking directly at me so i moved to another chair, and it angled itself with me so that it was still looking right at me, which creeped me out even more, like it was stalking me or something. so i went and brushed my teeth and when i got back it was on the wall above my bedroom door haha so i ran in and shut the door and went to bed. it hasn´t been as rainy lately, but still in the mid-eighties during the day. ill write again soon, my times up.

gus