¡Agua fresca!

I´m really enjoying life in San Cristobal at this point. I´m in the routine of getting up at eight, having a shower while my host mother makes me a breakfast with fresh-squeezed orange juice, sweet coffee, scrambled ham-and-eggs with beans, and hot tortillas (I can´t get enough of these tortillas)... then walking to school in the sunshine to spend the morning in classes. It´s only a very small school, and it´s a pretty cosy atmosphere amongst teachers and students. Very nice really. On Tuesday we went to Na-Balom, which is a museum that preserves indigenous culture and also regularly hosts artists (including Frida and Diego in the past) and does lots of other good stuff. It was very interesting. Tuesday night was a birthday party. It was mostly Mexicans. There was much dancing, much beer and tequila. The latter went straight to my head - it was a particularly cheap bottle with a worm in the bottom of it. Fortunately I had enough self-control to refrain from dancing. There were many amazing salsa dancers tearing up the loungeroom floor. I got talking to a Mexican girl who had even less English than I have Spanish, and ended up with a phone number. So I called her on Wednesday night from a telefono publico and arranged to meet again - so as to practice each other´s language... Wednesday afternoon I saw a movie on the Zapatista movement. It´s fascinating stuff. Thursday night I met the Mexican girl at Bar Revolution - a place almost exclusively for tourists, but the only place I knew to suggest. We had dinner somewhere else (hamburguesa for me, papas for her), and it was a funny experience with lots of laughing and apologising. Later we shared a table at Bar Revolution with her friends and my fellow students, with very little communication between the two groups. Everyone drank. The Mexicans left around midnight and the tourists went on to the nightclub next door, where we sat and yelled and smoked and danced until 3am, to horrible horrible music. Then, of course, I was up at 8am again this morning for school. Much fun to be had in San Cristobal.