C'est La Vie...Oh wait that's french

so my spanish sucks. it's coming along though. little by little. the best and worst part is that the dialect here is ridiculously difficult to understand. So your learning skills are immediately kicked into high gear, but it is strenuous and very tiring. I am exhausted at the end of each day, but that's ok! that just means i can sleep through the rooster outside my window all the better.
ok i need to say 2 things: number one, sorry i havent posted yet, it's not my fault! we don't really have internet here. if you manage to actually get on at the peace corps training center not only are you incredibly lucky but you only have minutes before it shuts down on you again. which leads me to my second point: i had a huge blog post all written and ready to be uploaded yesterday, i got to the office, actually managed to get some internet going on on my ipad and...oh snap, the app on my ipad broke after i tried to save a draft locally. soooo i lost the post. bummer times.

so i have come to realize i have been incredibly lucky in my peace corps experiences so far. first of all, i got placed in the DR. i mean come on...that's pretty awesome. second, my host family is basically the best ever. My Dona (i can't figure out how to do the squiggly thing on this keyboard...) is the second best mother i've ever had. She has this huge extended family who are always in and out of the house, where the door is never closed, and she seems to cook for all of them. when they realized she wasn't gonna be cooking meat for a few weeks, she walked over to me, threw her arms around me and declared "we are vegetarian now!". everything she does just makes me feel so welcome. actually all of the women i have met here could not be more generous and genuinely happy to just spend time with people. I find myself wandering out onto the patio now because i know that soon some other family member, be it the grandson, a daughter, the great grandson, will come join me in a matter of minutes. ok another reason i'm lucky is that i have had a functional toilet my entire time here. i will spare you the details, just suffice it to say, i'm lucky.

So there are three other volunteers who live in the same area as me. a married couple lives with dona estella (the daughter of my dona) right above my casa and another volunteer lives just across parking lot from my house. hopefully i will find a way to post pictures soon. it all comes back to that no-internet thing. I am glad to be so near some other volunteers because when the spanish just becomes too much for my poor brain to cope with i can escape and play domino, tablero, and/or bananagrams with them! so we play games every night. except last night when we went to a barbeque in our barrio. There were 5 volunteers there and several Dominican families including one who had moved to miami and is here visiting their families. it was so much fun! we danced merengue, drank some cervesa, ate lots of food, and just talked well into the night. It was so relaxed and loud at the same time. although everything here is loud. apparently this is the third loudest country in the world. the rumor is that some dominicans remove the mufflers from their cars just to make them louder. i believe it.
gosh! i just feel like there is so much to write about, but i need to save some for more posts. so i will wrap up saying happy birthday to me! and that i had a nice little celebration with my neighbor volunteers over several rounds of bananagrams and now it is time for some well deserved sleep. peace out hombres.