Language challenges

Today I (in theory) learned the last of Spanish grammar (Jay). The trouble is, I can't remember the supposedly "simple" things I learned the first couple of days here. It's all a bit of a blur. I can form most any sentence I want in Spanish--as long as I have a dictionary in hand--but it takes about five minutes to progress through all of the various verb endings in my mind to find the right one. Needless to say, having a conversation on the street is still a bit of a problem. Hopefully in the just-under-three-weeks we have left in Mexico, the repitition and practice will help cement these endings and also expand my Spanish vocabulary. I'm fairly afraid that I'll have just started feeling comfortable with the language at the moment when we return, and I'll instantly lose it all. It's been very good to study again and to use a different part of my brain. Even though I've studied a number of different languages in the past, I've never been conversational with a different language than English, so this has been a real challenge for me. I'm hopeful the last three weeks will bring remarkable progress... We've managed to see a bit more of the surrounding area in the last week or so. On Saturday we took a boat road on a river through a narrow canyon with cliff walls 2000 meters high. The day was perfect and the scenery was spectacular. We saw six crocodiles, a couple of monkeys and a variety of waterfowl, including storks and pelicans. It was much hotter than San Cristobal because it was at the base of the mountains instead of nestled high up in the midst of them. On Sunday we went to another nearby community of indigenous people. This one, San Lorenzo Zinacantan, was strikingly different than San Juan Chamula, which we visited two weeks ago. The Mayan influence in the religious practicies seemed less extreme, the people were generally friendlier to outsiders, and the entire village seemed to grow flowers (and thus the church was filled with flowers).

The flowers from Zinacantan are shipped all over the world and there are rows upon rows of greenhouses nestled in the hills through the approach to the village. The local clothes are covered with carefully-stitched flowers, so simply watching the people walk by is a delight to the eyes. We continue to learn many things about local culture and habits, the person who has been watching Peter for us in the morning has begun to give us cooking lessons because the food we cook otherwise is too bland, and we've stumbled upon a number of community-based political rallies. There was even one almost right outside our door that featured clowns. It was a great connection with the kids (even transcending language barriers), but I'm not quite sure if the organizers thought through the irony involved in clowns leading a political rally. Each neighborhood here has its own church and the name of the neighborhood is the name of the local church. It also seems like each church has a sort of plaza out  in front of it, often with either a basketball/soccer court or some play equipment, and it has struck us that the churches function as gathering points for the community. It's where people play and also where the political rallies happen. Our kids continue to deepen friendships with other kids at the local plaza as well as with the kids of the English family here also studying Spanish. We are very thankful for these connections. Elizabeth and I, meanwhile, take heart that each time we watch Pride and Prejudice in Spanish, we seem to understand a bit more of what they are saying. As they say here, "Poco a poco."