Lessons in local cuture

As I am writing this, I am sitting on our balcony, looking out over the mountains, waiting for the rain to start. The mornings here are beautiful. Clear skies, warm temparatures, a certain glow to the mountains and the city. Unfortunately, that's also the time we're in Spanish class. We've commiserated with our fellow students that perhaps we scheduled our classes for the wrong part of the day. In the afternoons, the clouds inevitably roll in, and even those days where we thought there was no chance it was going to rain, it begins to rain. It happened to us again--we left our laundry out, and it got soaked while we were gone. We've also been caught a few times without our raincoats when we thought we would be bold and travel without them. Hopefully we're learning our Spanish better than we our our lessons about the rain. Last week, we noticed that workers were installing three sets of speed bumps on the main road down the mountain. It's a fairly curvy road, so it's not really possible to go too fast anyway, but there they were--installing speed bumps. We noticed our taxi drivers complain as they had to stop and inch over them, and then, on Saturday night, on our way to the birthday party of a friend we met here, we discovered a large gathering of men at the top of the hill, blocking the road. They had dragged large rocks across the road, and all the traffic was being diverted to side streets and other routes. The crowd seemed a little restless, so we carefully stayed to the side and made our way down a side road to the party. By the time we returned, the crowd had dispersed. On Monday, though, as we took a taxi home from our class, we were startled to discover that all of the new speed bumps had disappeared. They were gone and they have yet to be replaced. In another cultural lesson, we were planning to go to a church with an 11 o'clock service on Sunday, but we received a text from our friend at about 9:45 saying that the service had been cancelled and we were free to find a different church. We scrambled to get ready and headed to the main Presbyterian church with a service at 10. We arrived at 10:20, worried that we had missed most of the service. There was a person up front giving what seemed at first to be the sermon, but then we realized we came in the middle of Sunday School. Three hours later, we snuck out of the service just before it finished up. There had been no need to worry about missing the service! We've also helped with some English classes for local children and visited the main park in San Cristobal (the slides here are taller and seemingly more dangerous than the norm in the United States--and that is a bit of a problem when you have a 2 year old with no fear...). We continue to enjoy the views, the people, and the local cuisine and seem to have settled into a bit more of a routine. The girls seem to be having a grand time, but Peter still doesn't like to be left behind in the mornings when it seems like the rest of us are heading off on adventures. We've met a family from London who are also taking Spanish classes and have been traveling around the world for the past year. They have a little over two months left and then head home. They have three children who match up fairly well with ours, and the girls are excited every time they see them, and they've been a real blessing. Elizabeth is scheduled to preach this coming Sunday at a church in Tuxtla Guttierrez--the capital of Chiapas about an hour away. She'll be preaching in English and it will be translated, but still, this is pretty intimidating for us, so your prayers are appreciated. On a funny note, Elizabeth keeps mixing up the words for onion and hair. As her teacher pointed out, while they do sometimes use onion to help the hair grow, they never brush the onion. We also used the local bus system today for the first time--there essentially a slightly larger version of the old VW vans. We got on and realized we had no idea how to tell the driver to stop to let us off...thankfully the row of ladies across the way from us took pity on us and sorted things out for us.