School Starts

Since my last entry, Jade has given me my Korean name: Tagunse Sutajanghee (that's purely phonetic) which means "Petite Bird and He Who Talks Alot" which should tell you about how chatty I am... that should come as no surprise to anyone. Most of the food has been great, bland, but good food. Prices of things are very different here, transportation and food are cheaper, but regular goods run the whole gambit of cheap and expensive with anything made in Uruguay being wonderfully cheap and everything imported being more expensive than in the United States (in most cases). An example is that in one day I spent $.60 on bus fair across town, $4 on lunch, and then $17 on the 1st Harry Potter book in Spanish...

Yesterday, Sunday, we went to La Chana church for the first time. We share the building with them, so the walk was not far. We went with the Walkers, our sort of parents away from home, and greeted everyone in the small church. One Uruguayan custom I forgot to list earlier is that they really do greet everyone with a kiss. The custom is to press your right cheeks together and make the kissing sound without really kissing them. EVERYONE does it when they meet friends, guys and girls, guys and guys... everyone. The worship was fine because I can read the Spanish, but I found myself building a headache during the sermon and hiding behind the pew in front of me when he asked students to answer a question because I didn't even know he was asking one until he said, "¿Estudiantes?" and started looking around. The youth group is small, but they invited us to one of their favorite past-times: walking La Rambla. La Rambla is the winding road along the coast that in some places is a side-walk and, in others, a boardwalk. It runs along the coast from the Old City to somewhere outside Montevideo and we walked probably 15 min to get there and we walked for probably 30 min on La Rambla itself. When the sun started setting we took some great pictues and then got off the beaches because night isn't the best time to be there. We went to Punta Carretas, an upscale mall, and had dinner and, even though I promised myself I wouldn't, I ate BurgerKing... ahhhhh! I know, but hear me out: we agreed to pay for the Uruguayan's dinners because they had spent all day with us and were infinately patient as we tried to converse, and they wanted McDonalds and BurgerKing because that's a pretty good meal here! It's more middle class here and the price is like you just ran a currency converter from dollars to pesos ($1USD=$20UYU). We rode the bus back, and I think we covered maybe 10miles on foot easy.
One thing I am loving is the sense of community. There are only 15 of us and that means that either all, or half of everyone goes everywhere together. We have only one fluent Spanish speaker, and that means that EVERYONE gets to try and buy/barter/communicate everywhere we go. Sunday night is Worship night with just the Study Abroad kids, we sang together, and got our schedules for today, Monday el Primero de Septiembre and it is absolutely the most wonderful schedule I have ever had! I'll post a picture on my Flickr account, but today I had 4 hours of Spanish class: 2 hours of instruction by our Uruguay professor who is amazing and crazy, her name is Amelia; and 2 hours of language lab by another Uruguay mother/daughter team. I'm just starting to get a grasp on what Soccer really means to the other 90% of humanity because there is a World Cup Qualifier coming up in a week and we are getting tickets!!
As a side note, the dialect is funny... really funny... the "ll" is usually pronounced with a soft "y" sound like in "yard". Here it is pronounced "j" as in "jump", only the letter "y" is also the same way. Because of this they are not Uruguayans, but Uruguajans (that's phonetic) and you don't go to the beach or playa, you go to the plaja. In the same way, a bombilla is pronounced a bombija. It's wierd.

PS I didn't get a flickr account in the end because they wouldn't hold all my pictures, I got a shutterfly account and I'll put the link here shortly.