Weekend Exploring

Gorgeous butterfly sitting on the intake pipe for the hydro generation station powered by the falls.
View from a little ways off... The pictures can never do it justice. It's so high!!!

Me swimming in the waist-deep water at the bottom of the falls. It was SO refreshing!! :)
Can you find the iguana in this picture??

Well, I had yesterday afternoon and today off, so I looked at snowmobile stuff and then went adventuring. It's nice to rest a bit.

Yesterday I swam in the morning, then had class until noon. After playing looking at stuff on Greenland with the snowmobile and such, my friend Noldan was about to leave after having been on a computer here. He took me on a bit of a tour of Merida, and that was my little walk for the day. I was going to go to the waterfall, but I got out of class too late/ vegged around too much after class. It was cool. It was funny, though, because they have a saying here that says if you eat the red fish (the native red fish here), you will never leave. We walked around for a bit, then we went to his house and I met Mom, Dad, his 5 month old baby sister, a younger sister Maria Jose, and saw my two other students Yasir Antonio and Maria Eugenia.

I was telling the parents what awesome students they have given me for class. :) Maria Eugenia said she may want to be a doctor, so I said 'sweet, let's give you homework, then..." LOL. They gave me mangoes and cookies, and I was already full from before, but I ate the cookies because they would be hard to carry and they were yummy. :) I brought the mangoes back with me to eat later. We chatted for awhile, and I was trying to figure out what to teach to the advanced students like Noldan next.

Haha, then they asked me if I wanted to try fish soup. I was still really really full, but I wanted to see what it tasted like because they make it often on the island, and I hadn't tried it yet. I asked for a tiiiiny bit un poquito, but they still gave me a decent amount. They also gave me a whole red fish! As full as I was, it was so good I couldn't do anything but eat an entire half of it, and a decent amount of the yummy fish soup. On both the way there and the way back we were practicing new words. It was sweet.

This morning I went with a couple of people from near San Francisco, CA to the waterfalls. We hired a guide, Roberto, to take us there. We had a great time learning English and Spanish words. He said he may come to my class this week, too. I learned the word for hollow, which is hueco, for when the matapalos (strangler fig trees) have killed their host trees. We had a lovely yet tiring hike, and by the time we got to the waterfall I was REALLY happy to just go jump in the 2-3 feet of water under the falls. They're reeeaaalllyy high! I had a good time. I've been finding a lot of people to hang out with at the Hacienda, which is cool. There are lots of travelers from all kinds of places. I went kayaking with a Canadian dude the other day to the smaller of the Monkey Islands, too.