Back at TEC!

I’m back at TEC! It’s been another interesting day. I left the hotel at noon. As you can see above, my accommodations are quite a bit different. The taxi driver who has been driving me is super nice and very safety conscious. He gets really upset about bad driving and people doing stupid stuff in general but especially on the road. He speaks very fast Spanish that I have a lot of trouble understanding him. Generally, I do pretty well here, but I have trouble with this guy.

My hotel is only about 45 minutes from the university. Google told me it was 1.5 hours. It’s really a short trip over, which is nice since I’m leaving for the hotel again tomorrow afternoon. My accommodations here at TEC are fine now. When I got here this afternoon, the AC wasn’t working. TEC evidently ended its contract with the AC repair company and didn’t hire anyone new. The AC in the building my contact works in is also broken. The university was able to give me a different room, but there is no hot water in my new room. I’m currently using the bathroom in one room and sleeping in another.

I just took a shower and that was also an experience. The shower has a switch to turn on the hot water but there is no way to regulate the temperature. It’s either scalding hot or cold. If I touch the side of the shower head when I turn the switch, I get a mild electrical shock. If I flip the switch back and forth, I get a few seconds of reasonable temperature water so it’s still better than nothing.

I met both of my co-professors today. They seem very nice. They asked me to get supper with them tonight but by the time they came by at 7:20 pm, I was sweaty and wiped out and didn’t feel like I could do an evening of Spanish. It’s much harder to speak Spanish like that. I FaceTimed Bill instead. He speaks English so it didn’t take up nearly as much energy.

Yesterday was Marlon’s (my contact here) birthday, so his colleagues had a small party for him with cake. I got to join. I understand pretty well when people talk to me, but I miss a lot when conversation is going on around me.

Since I bailed on dinner with colleagues, I ate at the student cafeteria. I had beans and rice with stewed pork and salsa, crunchy tortillas, and fruit juice. I’m always impressed by how healthy the food is. The fruit juice is real juice. It’s not flavored water with fake sugar.

I teach tomorrow morning at 8:50am and again at 1:30pm. The first class has 9 students and the second has 28. I hope it goes okay and I’m prepared enough. I’m leaving TEC tomorrow afternoon as soon as my class is over to go back to the nice hotel where I’ve been staying. I’ll be fine in my cabin here at TEC next week, but for the weekend, I’m taking the better option and going back to the hot springs!