Host Family

Sunday afternoon:

Here I am in the house of Delfina and Cornelio.  They are so sweet.  Cornelio answered the door when I first arrived.  He must be at least sixty years old.  We entered the house, I met Delfina, and he showed me my bedroom.  There he beckoned for me to sit down and we chatted for a minute.  He asked me about my travels to Mexico City and Queretaro, and about my previous study abroad in Santander, then he told me about his job and how he’s a lawyer and also a professor.  Then Delfina entered the room and sat down to chat with us.  She explained that she had her knee operated on two weeks ago, and that’s why she walks with a limp.  Poor thing!  Delfina must be around sixty years old as well.  Both are very sweet with warm smiles.  As we were chatting in the room, Delfina said that she hopes that I am happy living with them, with a hopeful smile on her face.  So sweet.  I told her I think I will.

For lunch, I first got a bowl of spaghetti with a few little chunks of egg, then chicken and a salad.  The chicken had a sauce made from pumpkin flowers and a certain type of cheese (so yummy) and I ate the salad with tomato and a dressing Delfina made from mustard and lemon.  She apologized that the dressing was a little sour because her friend told her to use two lemons but the lemons she had used were really juicy.  Haha.

Delfina and Cornelio have one daughter, Katia.  Beto, who I thought was their son because of my family info sheet, is actually Katia’s husband.  They have a little boy named Mateo Nicolas who will turn one in October.  Katia and Beto live upstairs in the same household.

Which brings me to the layout of the house.  The front area, which is enclosed in a tall gate, is where the cars are parked.  Upon entering the front door, the first door on the left is Katia’s salon, where she does nails for four hours Monday-Friday.  The next room is the kitchen, which has food on shelves on each wall.  On the right is Cornelio’s office, then the staircase to Katia and Beto's apartment, and then the small living room.  From both the kitchen and the living room there is a door to the backyard, and the rest of the house is in a building in the backyard.  In this part of the house you'll find two bedrooms - mine and the one belonging to Delfina and Cornelio, with a bathroom in between.

My room is really nice.  There are two beds; a twin-sized bed facing the door and a full-sized one perpendicular to the smaller one.  From my bed (the bigger one, obvi) the entire right wall is a closet/dresser and the left side has a sliding glass door, perfect for letting in the breeze.  There are two TVs in the room, one mounted on the wall for me to see, and one on the shelf along the wall for the other bed.

Oh, and they have two small dogs.  Niel(?) and Paris.  They’re both black Scottish terriers, and she said they don’t like to be petted.  She also warned me that they like to bite people’s legs.  I think Paris is much more likely to attack me than the other one.

Katia and Beto come home tonight from being on vacation in Mazatlan.  I told them that I had gone to Mazatlan once and that it was beautiful.  As I understand it, they went with the family of one of Katia’s cousins as well.

I have a wonderful first impression of my host parents.  They seem very welcoming and warm, and I love that they ask me questions about myself, and don’t talk too much or over my head.  When I told Cornelio that I loved the Mexican Spanish compared to that of Spain, he said that only Columbia had a more beautiful way of speaking Spanish than Mexico.  Cornelio said that he was going to show me later on a book he wrote himself.  Cornelio has a great big softness about him, like a warm grandpa, and he keeps telling people how I'm from Oregon, my parents have a farm, and how they have 14 miniature donkeys.  It just delights him.

(later that evening:)

After going to the school and having our little orientation with Gabi, the coordinator, Cornelio dropped Delfina and I off in Cañada, where we went to mass.  After mass, I met a niece and nephew of Delfina’s and we ate flan sold right by the church where people were mingling.  Delfina’s niece, Delia, offered to take us home, and on the way got a call from her older brother, who had just gone on vacation with Katia in Mazatlan, and we joined them for hamburgers.  I can now proudly say that the United States have much better burgers.  Sorry guys.  There I got to meet Katia, Beto, Mateo, and Delia’s brother’s family, whose names I don’t remember.  They had two kids, a girl of about 20 and a boy of about 13, I would guess.  During the meal I spent most of my time watching Toy Story II on the TV screens in Spanish… AWESOME!

Monday:

Whew!  Gonna keep this short so I can get some rest.  Went to all my classes this morning and the professors seem really cool.  The work load will be pretty heavy, but that's okay.  At 2:30 (lunch time), all the students and their senoras (host mothers) were invited to go to a restaurant in town called Las Monjas for a "Welcome" lunch.  It was delicious.  Since Delfina took a taxi to the restaurant, we squished into a car with two other students and their senoras, and we all came back to our house, where the other students and senoras came in and chatted for a while.  I love how social and welcoming everyone is in this culture.

Today is Katia's birthday, and Delfina had told me that we were going to have a little birthday party to celebrate.  Little did I know that that means that a group of about 25-30 people with food and cake and everything.  I met a lady named Marianna who's 25 and we chatted it up during the whole party.  We ended up exchanging info and we're going to hang out later this week to practice speaking English/Spanish.  Score! =)

Two more things: Mosquitos and cockroaches.

Hasta luego!