Ah yes, I was waiting for that.

So I finally lost it here today, for the first time. I know this may be hard to believe, but before today, I had yet to cry here. I cried when I left my house and said bye to my parents, but after that I was all business. Got to get to the right gate, gotta make sure I have my tickets, gotta find my seat, gotta get some sleep while possible, gotta wait in the airport for 7 hours (my arrival was kind of anti-climatic in a way, since so much of my first day was just spent in the airport), gotta catch my next plane...I was slightly apprehensive when landing in Bucaramanga because it occurred to me that if the people who were supposed to pick me up did not in fact do so, I had no idea where to go. Yet I didn't shed a tear, not a single nervous tear. There was no time to cry, I had to make sure everything was in order.

Even after settling in here (it's now been a month and a half) I had yet to be driven to tears by homesickness or frustration. Today, though, I started to lose it on the bus on the way home from school. A combination of things had built up and finally needed a release. One of the major factors was the stress of figuring out everything that was required of me to register with DAS (which is basically like the police) that I am living/working here.

I forgot to mention that I did get my visa (a process that involved less headaches than expected--but I guess the gods were just saving the headaches for me at DAS) so I am legal to work here. The catch is that you have to register with DAS within 15 days of getting your visa so you can be issued a foreigner ID. The AIESECers charmingly failed to mention this to us until a week before our time was up (actually without them I don't know how we would have known we had to do it at all) so we were rushing to get copies and photocopies of all the various documents necessary. This included my passport, my visa, a copy of my blood type (goes on all IDs here--they find it odd we don't do it in the US, but good thing I randomly had my Red Cross Blood Donor Card in my wallet), proof of affiliation with AIESEC, photos of various sizes that were mate not glossy (had to find the one place in town that does that), the receipt that I paid the roughly $60 this thing is costing me at a specific bank and a copy of the application for the cedula.

I did in fact manage to gather all these things and get them to DAS the very last day I had to get them in. Miraculously, I had all the necessary papers and just had to wait for the DAS people to sort everything out, take no less than four sets of my fingerprints which they put on papers of various sizes that will be used for unknown purposes, fill out a form telling them where they should deliver my cedula, and I was issued the temporary one. How long it will take for the real one to arrive I don't know and I don't care because I'm not going to be deported (and I totally bonded with the DAS lady, she was calling me Teresita before all this was through)!!

So that all ended up working out fine I guess, but was really quite stressful. The AIESECers that were supposed to be helping us were rather MIA and as typical of here everything happened late.

I also got upset today about my Saturday class. Not only am I extremely frustrated with Level 1 and the amount of time I have to do the impossible, I am mad because my class is on a different schedule than everyone else's. My session started 2 weeks after the other one, so while everyone else was doing final exams today I was still teaching and will be next week and then the following week will be the exams.

This means literally every other teacher gets next Saturday off, as well as next Monday before the new weekly session starts too. This makes an extremely rare 3-day weekend that some friends are going to use to travel to Bogota, that I do not get because my class is still going on. Besides learning Spanish, my other main goal in coming here was to see as much of Colombia and South America as possible, but working 6 days a week is rendering this nearly impossible. Also, a familiar face would be a godsend right about now.

I also am experiencing frustration yet again over the language barrier. I have come to love everyone in my house and really enjoy being around them, minus the fact that 75% of the time I have no idea what's going on. I have realized that the AIESECers and other friends of mine talk sloooooow so that I can understand. But when I am just trying to observe normal conversation, most goes over my head. I feel like I have no personality here because I can't communicate effectively and say the things I mean in the right tone so they mean what I what them to. I'm afraid I come off rude and ungrateful when actually I'm just clueless. And it is rather lonely to be sitting at a table of people roaring at a joke you have no hope in understanding, so you just smile slightly into your soup and continue eating, feeling like a fool.

I could really use a hug. And a bear.