Settling in

Well it´s saturday, so I have half a day off from classes. Time for a brief update. Things are starting to settle into a routine here; Guaraní class, lunch, bee class, dinner, sleep. We have a half day saturday and nothing on sundays. Luckily so far my family is always doing something fun un sunday. Last sunday we went to a birthday party for my brother (who lives in san antonio, paraguay). This sunday we´re going to a belated Karai Octubre party and then after that to an eight year olds birthday party. For those of you no in the know Karai Octubre (or Mister October) is a big lunch held oct. 1st for to ward off Mr. October and his month of bad or no harvest. People eat a jopara (mix) soup. We didn´t actually do anything on the first, so I hope we make up for lost time.

For those of you intersted here´s a bit more cultural education. Some gestures. My personal fave is the emongaru, which has the same heart as our ´high five´. For emongaru you put all your fingers (including thumb) together and touch tips with your buddy. one person goes from above and the other below. After contact you point your fingers towards yourself. When inniciating the emongaru it is important to take the top position, so that nobody thinks your telling them to fuck off, which your fingers together pointing up means. Another new one is the ´moto´, which is making a gesture like you were reving a motorcycle. THis is to indicate your desire to have sex with a girl. There are others, but those are all I can remember right now.

We also had our first bee work this week. It went good. The bees are definatly more aggressive (a lot of veil ´pinging´), so i´ll always be working in full gear. I´m trying to upload some pics right now, so I´ll make another post with them and some captions. Its gonna have a castration I saw today.