Holy Week

I don't have too much to report, but I'm fighting the urge to be lazy about this blog. I can't believe I've been in site for nearly five weeks already. I'm getting into a good routine, working at the school and spending my free time getting to know people in the community. I'm getting more and more comfortable with Spanish and I'm having fewer and fewer "bad days" with the language. I'm still far from understanding everything everyone says, but I think I'm just more optimistic about it. I'm downright chatty with the people I'm the most comfortable with, which is weird since I spent so long being quiet and only answering questions directed at me. I'm becoming good friends with Isabela, one of the English teachers that I work with. (Even though she teaches English, she doesn't speak it very well, so our conversations are in Spanish.) She's one of the few teachers that actually live in my community (the majority commute from Chorrera, the city that's 45 minutes away) and she's also my age - she's 25. We have a lot in common, get along really well, and in her I've found the only person that I can really tell anything. It's nice to have a friend here. She also helps when I don't understand somebody, she'll say it in Spanish but in a way that I'll understand.

Last weekend I went to visit my friend Emma, another Peace Corps volunteer from my group. She lives near Las Tablas, a really cute city/town on the Azuero Peninsula, about four hours from Panama City. It was great to see her and to see a part of Panama I hadn't seen before. The beach there is absurdly warm and the town is as quaint as a postcard. It was Easter weekend, which is done a little differently here. (I figured all that talk about "Holy Week" couldn't have meant Passover.) They celebrate with processions in the streets. Large floats are covered in flowers, angels, and Jesus on the cross. Crowds of people follow the floats down the streets in total silence. Emma and I watched and joined the procession for a little bit. We prefer to look at things like that as cultural experiences rather than religious ones, seeing as she's a minister's-daughter-turned-adamant-atheist and I'm Jewish. I love experiencing new cultures, even if it does entail following Jesus down the street.

The weekend was great until I tried to get home on Easter Sunday. It was just one of those days. Everyone travels to visit relatives that weekend, and my 3 hour bus ride turned into an 8 hour bus ride due to all the traffic. When I finally got home, I was going to hang out with my family like I usually do, but they were watching Passion of the Christ. Enough said there. So I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and dropped the enormous glass jug on the floor, breaking it into a million pieces and flooding the kitchen. Those kinds of days the only options are to laugh or to cry. So I laughed, cleaned up the mess, and went to bed early before I could wreak and more havoc.