Es tranquilo

I've only had one class today so I just got back from the beach and am getting a chance to relax more this afternoon. Tomorrow night we're going to a championship fútbol game between one of Uruguay's biggest teams, Nacional, and a Brazilian team. Fútbol here is an unbelievably big deal--the two biggest Uruguayan rival teams are Nacional and Peñarol, and people here are serious fans. The other day a man was standing at a bus stop wearing a Peñarol jersey and a man walked up and shot him. At the games, everyone paints their bodies and make all kinds of signs, and at the rival games people can get pretty violent. (Don't worry, mom and dad...the game we're going to isn't Nacional vs. Peñarol, so it'll be really safe!) But we're all really excited that we have tickets to a championship game tomorrow...it'll definitely be a cultural experience.

Speaking of cultural experiences, I tried mate (pronounced mah-tay) for the first time the other day. Mate is a drink sort of like tea...you have ground herbs that you pour into a mate gourd, then you pour hot water over the top and use a special straw with a filter called a bombilla to drink it. It's a social drink, meant to be shared--everyone here does it and it's a part of the culture to sit around with friends and family and pass around a mate and talk for hours. It has a pretty bitter taste so I've been trying to get used to it so that I can carry my mate around everywhere I go, like all of the locals.

I'm finally getting all settled in to Montevideo and I absolutely love it here. I love walking around the city with my friends, hanging out at the beach, meeting Uruguayans, and experiencing this totally different culture. Things here are so much more laid back than in the United States. People aren't rushing everywhere and even though this is the capital city, there's not tons of traffic. Life isn't in a hurry here and the people really have a sense of enjoying life--Uruguayans call it tranquilo. I could definitely get used to it.

Even my classes here are great. My Spanish teacher is a precious Uruguayan lady named Amelia. She was the Spanish teacher for the U.S./Uruguayan ambassador here and now she's teaching my friends and I, so I feel very honored to be learning from her. I've never had a teacher like her--even though she knows English, she speaks to us almost only in Spanish and in less than a week I think I've learned more Spanish than in the whole year that I took of it in high school. She's planning trips for us to go out to places here in the city to practice our Spanish on actual people and she really makes learning this language seem not only fun, but attainable. In my World Literature class, there are only four other people--and living with our professor is a lot of fun. We have class on the couches in our living room and it's definitely a different experience than being in a traditional classroom. I think I'll be spoiled when this semester's over and I have to go back to sitting in desks in a classroom and listening to lectures.