The beach, mocking Francesca, the mall, and failing to take the bus

13 March 2010, Saturday

Today the weather was quite nice all day, around 63-67 degrees and sunny, with a nice cool breeze. I forced myself to sleep in today, although my body was trying to get me to wake up at 9:30. I managed to stay sleeping until past noon, which was actually a challenge. I think the healthy food is encouraging my body to do more things, I hope not though. I had lunch with my family and older sister Cecilia, but we call her Chi Chi. Francesca is out of town, along with Chris, so it was just the 4 of us. Once again, the food was delicious (I might need to stop writing that and just say that there was food, since by now it is assumed that the food is awesome). We talked about various things, and there was a lot of storytelling going on between Alberto, Chi Chi, and Cecilia. Alberto told a story about how he got lost in the middle of the sea/lake, but was rescued by two surfers. He said that he had been calmly floating in the water when he realized that he had gone too far out, and would be unable to swim back to shore, instead of panicking, he simply waited for rescue. I eventually realized that this story was prompted because the family was talking about how Francesca reacted to her hamster being chased by the dog, covering her eyes and ears with her hands and saying “no no no papa no no” or something along those lines. Apparently she did the same thing when her dad was floating out at sea, when a friend of hers hit a dog while driving, and so on. I'm glad to see that this family also makes fun of each other, although I'm sad that Francesca wasn't there for the mockery.

After lunch, I waited around for a while, trying to decide when I would be willing to make the effort to go to town and return my non-functioning gameboy charger. Julianne told me that she needed to get a cell phone, so I invited her to come along, since I needed to go to the mall anyways. She said sure, but she was waiting to see when her brothers were going to the beach, because she was supposed to go with them. After a few hours, we ended up rushing out to the beach around 4, meeting up with several other UVM students, all of whom were French. We mostly just laid out on the beach, because it was way to cold to swim (although I did go stand in the water, which was quite refreshing). After hanging around there for an hour or two, Julianne and I took a bus to the mall. We grabbed some freaking wonderful churros con manjar on the way (an awesome decision by Julianne). The mall was pretty crowded, I guess because it was Saturday. First, we went into a store that I thought was the same one where I got my cell phone, but apparently it wasn't. They also had cell phones, but they were more expensive than the one I got, so we decided to go to another store. I asked about getting a DSi charger, but they said I had to go to another store (lame). We searched around for a while, and ended up deciding to come back on Thursday, when one of the stores said that they would have the same model that I bought. This is where the fun began.

We left the mall around 9, so it had just gotten dark out. We went to wait where I thought the bus we needed to take would come, but it didn't seem like it was coming. After waiting for a few minutes, I asked some other people if our buses came here, and they said yes. After about, 30 minutes, I was getting impatient/nervous and starting to feel guilty, since Julianne had to rely on me to get us home. I called my host mom, and she told me that we were in the right spot, but that we could also take a colectivo home if it had the number 7 on it. Long story short, after asking many other people where to go, I decided that we should go to the mall and look for a map (I had forgotten mine). On the way to the mall, Julianne spotted a colectivo #7, but we missed it, so we just waited near were that one was. Eventually another one came by, so we took it and actually managed to get home, hooray! The best part, the colectivo literally only cost us a dollar each, transportation is crazy cheap here. Oh, and by the way, Julianne wanted to walk both to the mall and to walk home from the mall, because she's crazy. Once we got out of the colectivo, Julianne and I parted our separate ways to get home. In retrospect, I probably should have been a little more gentlemanly and walked her home, but instead (she later told me) she had to run home. Moral of the story, I made an ass of myself today, hooray, but at least we didn't get mugged or stabbed. Speaking of getting stabbed, Julianne obviously doesn't know me very well, because she said that she didn't bring her mace that she normally carries, because she was going to have me for protection. Haha, yeah, right. I told her that I would probably run away if someone attacked us, so I just earned a lot of manliness points today. When I got home my whole family was out, but dinner was waiting for me on the table (awesome). I went upstairs and wasted some time on the internet for a while before going to sleep pretty late, so all in all I guess the day was a success?