well thats a special talent....

a few updates from a crazy week:

- monday i felt my first legit earthquake ever. it was mas o menos 5pm and my friend Karina and i were sitting in the living room chatting when all of a sudden my chair started to shake a bit. my first thoughts were...who is playing loud music with heavy bass...but then i realized that i didnt hear music and the floor and house were also moving and it kept increasing. karina kind of yelped and we looked at each other like...what the hell do we do? bahhhhh, no thoughts, earthquake, no thoughts, bahhhh was pretty much the irrational sequence of thoughts running through my head and i even started laughing a bit cuz i was so thrown off and then she grabbed my hand and we headed for the door to go to the backyard but by the time we got there it had passed but it was pretty nuts. no damage was done, thankfully. it was pretty sweet. (ps i also heard that St. Louis had an earthquake this week...what? thats just crazy talk...so sorry i missed it)

- friday we had a talent show which we have been saying that we were going to do for the last like 2 months but of course no one started preparing until this week. ill give you a quick overview of the various acts we were graced with: marybeth and emory did an indigo girls duet (because they secretly...not so secretly...want to be the indigo girls), casa ita did 2 skits where one person would lay flat on their back on the ground and the other person would sit on top of them with their legs covered by a sheet so it looked like the persons legs laying down were the person sittings legs, felipe and austin did a scene from anchorman (the one where will ferrel is playing the flute in the bar, "totally unprepared"), 6 of the casa romero girls did an irish dance (2 of them, who taught the other 4, did irish dancing for like 10 years), casa silvia (my house) did the dance scene from little miss sunshine (which we first started practicing 45 minutes before the show started and Andy played Olive, the little girl...we were pretty much peeing our pants), a few people did "the cup game" but they added other sweet steps to it, i actually sang "stand by me," acapella which was supposed to be a duet with my friend matt but he wasnt feeling well so i did it solo with Tam and Andy doing the beat in the background (i was so scared i thought i was gonna hurl before hand, haha, i very very rarely sing in front of people and even more rarely do i sing solo...pretty much almost never. i have a ton of pena(nervousness/embarrassment) but i got through it!), and casa romero did a dance extravaganza to the song "lady marmalade" for the finale. basically it was a sweet show, wildly entertaining and my abs hurt afterward from laughing so much.

- yesterday we climbed a volcano which was definitely one of the most intense things i've ever done in my life. i knew i was out of shape but damn, i thought i was gonna die by the end. the hard thing was that we didnt just climb up and down the volcano...oh no, we had to climb a hour down a mountainside to get to the bottom of the volcano, then climb up the volcano which was so steep i literally was on my hands and knees crawling at some points, then climb back down (which was definitely my favorite part because it wasnt really climbing so much as sliding down the side of the volcano along with the volcanic rocks hoping to god you didnt slip and fall forward) and then climb back up the mountainside to where we started from. i was tired but doing fine until we had to climb the last leg back up the mountain. by then everyone's legs were feelin a bit like jello, it was super tough. standing at the top of the volcano though was so incredible, we could see for miles and miles! definitely worth all the hardwork. want an intense workout too. when we got to the top of the mountain we all scarfed down lunch. i ate so fast my tummy hurt...oops. we had apples, juice, and sandwiches with white bread rolls and molidos (delicious salvadoran refried beans), avocados, and cheese. a sandwich that in most other parts of the world would not fly, but here they eat beans with everything and im not gonna lie, it was like the best tasting sandwich ever...probably partially due to the fact that my stomach was eating itself after the vigorous workout i had just pushed it through...im fairly confident that had i eaten tree bark at that time it probably would have tasted like a delicious granola bar or something. nevertheless, i would definitely try making the sandwich again (maybe with the addition of tomatoes...) and the hike up the volcano/mountain was more excellent than i ever expected.