Fight the Urge to Drink the Tap Water (Plz)

Despite my unusually exciting entrance into México, the rest of my trip to my host family was pretty uneventful. I walked with my group (all girls but me) a couple blocks to a plaza to wait for some taxis to take us all to our host families. After only a mild amount of confusion, I got in a taxi with 2 of the other girls and we set off with only a printed google map of where our houses were. Having never seen the houses before, we were up for a bit of a challenge. First house was pretty easy to find, but that still left the other two of us. Using our flawless Spanish we were able to get pretty close to one of the houses, and we both got dropped off in front of the one that wasn't mine. In theory mine was super close though. Just to clarify, when I say house I'm not talking about the thing with a yard driveway and a neat little walkway. No, here, at least the specific here in which I currently live, a house is a door among many 2 feet from the road, and honestly it's still kinda crazy to me.  From the outside, at least from someone who's used to comparatively large houses, you'd never know entire houses existed where they did. Each block is like one giant building, divided by walls and doors on the inside. I guess think like the house in The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis but different. . .

Anyways, by an uninteresting turn of events I made it to my own house, and I met the whole family. It was Father's Day, so there were a ton of people over. In the moment I had no idea who anybody was. Now that I'm removed from that time though, I for the most part have been able to figure out who all the people were. In no particular order: the grandma, the dad, two daughters, the two people that live upstairs, the couple that rents a room from the grandma, someone from next door, and two chihuahuas. Everybody wanted a hug and got a couple of unexpected kisses on the cheek. It was quite the event. We ate a ton and I tried to get in on the conversation as much as I could, but I was pretty exhausted from everything I'd already been through so I didn't have a whole lot of success. In the end though, it was really a great time. I was immediately made a part of the family, something that isn't always the easiest to do with someone that came from another country and showed up at your door. I'm super thankful they did though, because being somewhere that's not your home for an extended period of time is hard! Every day I get to eat a meal with at least one of the parts of the family, and it's been a really great opportunity to practice Spanish.

Back in the past tense, after we ate dinner and everybody who didn't live here left, I got settled into my room. I've never actually had my own room so in some ways this is kinda a step up. . .  It's got everything. A bed. A dresser. A window. A pillow. Not much else that I need. Kinda warm at night but other than that it's a good little spot. Has a singular wall outlet with one socket, so that's a little bit a bummer but you make due you know? It was around 10 P.M. when I finally got settled down to go to sleep, only to realize I had to wake up at 6 the next morning to meet people to catch a bus to get to school the next day. Disappointed by this revelation, I read my Bible a little bit and then turned off the lights to find that my bed was not exactly the same quality of the one back home. I was too tired to care much then though. I was desperately in need of sleep and even more in need of a shower but that would just have to wait for the morning when someone showed me how to work it. Other people's showers are hard enough to figure out how to work in the U.S. I wasn't about to fiddle with a Mexican shower for 15 minutes if I could do anything about it. Even though they said mosquitos would come in if I did, I opened the window so it would cool down a bit and fell asleep, kinda sweaty, pretty tired, but super ready to see what the next day held. (It held a lot)