Exhalamos, perro

Breathe, downward dog. If you want a Spanish lesson in body parts, go to a yoga class. I went to a class at the Xela yoga house and found it interesting enough to write a whole blog post about. Where to start, well the instructor is a Guatemalan woman who has braces, a sweaty/oily face and is working on growing a mustache. To top it off she was wearing Richard Simmons-esque fluorescent teal track pants. A week of yoga classes costs 35Q, which is around $5. The class was held in a tiny room with green walls and almost everyone there was a foreigner. Not surprisingly, some of them seemed pretty hipster…especially the unshaven tattooed girl beside me. The class was really good though, and I got to laugh inside a little bit every time the instructor said Chatarunga because it sounded so funny.

Afterwards I struck up a conversation with a girl named Whitney, who seemed pretty close to my age. But alas, no, she is 24 and a grad student at UNC. It seems like most of the other people working here are around that age; I haven’t met any other undergrads besides the ones that come on teams with AMA. We agreed to meet up at a café in the park called el cuartito…which actually turned out to be awesome because Warren and a bunch of other Uva students showed up. Dorothy, another rising second year from Uva that I know, is actually here in Xela as well. I got lots of phone numbers    : ) and now have hopes of having a social life. However, my night quickly became terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE.

I don’t know what time exactly, but at some point during the night I woke up shivering, with a stomach ache and headache that literally made me want to cry. I basically spent the next 12 hours throwing up (so I’m not sorry for telling you that) and sleeping. I have NEVER been this sick. I slept on and off (between throwing up) until 4 or 5 in the evening. The AMA ladies were really nice and went and bought me coca-cola, Gatorade, some magic electrolyte drink that tastes like pineapple, and antibiotics (that’s right Natalie, Guatemalan not Mexican antibiotics haha). The culprit of these 12 hours of pure torture? Probably the street food I ate yesterday. It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to more cheap street food. Regardless, I also had a Mojito last night and since that’s the last thing I had before getting sick I never want to look at one again (I’m sorry Sarah, I know they’re your favorite). The moral of this story- don’t eat street food.