xk'ïs ri nab'ey wuq'ij ~ End of week one

Week one of classes is almost over. It's been a bit of a slow process to get my feet off the ground again (that first written homework assignment took me way too long), but little by little I'm scraping the rust off my Kaqchikel language skills. Another intermediate student and I have been working with a couple of instructors separately from the rest of the class, and since we're all at different levels and it's difficult to hold an extended conversation on one topic, we've been telling stories - that way we get practice both listening and speaking. I learned the first day that it's easier to try to tell a story that you know - like Little Red Riding Hood - than to try to both make up a story on the fly and to try to think of how to say it in a foreign language. But at least the story was interesting, even if it did take me ten minutes to form every verb.

Wednesday was a national teacher recognition day, so the whole class went to Pollo Campero (read: Guatemalan KFC) for lunch, which was a very nice review of the very important Mayan eating customs. As you're eating, you say to random people around the table, "so-and-so, kawa' " meaning "so-and-so, eat," to which they also respond "eat" to you. The implicit fun in this is waiting until the person has a mouth full of food before you address them. After the meal, you tell everyone around the table, "matyöx chi nuwäy" ("thank you for my tortilla" metonymically meaning "thank you for my food"). The proper response to this is "ri ajaw xya'on " ("god has given it"). This is not as tedious as it sounds, since as a common custom, the whole process has a formulaic sing-songy rhythm that makes it possible to address many people efficiently yet respectfully.

As the last day of the week, tomorrow we have to turn in our project proposals, for which we're required to work with one or more of the instructors. I've talked some with an instructor I met last year about working together - trying to commit as few blunders as possible in the process and frankly not really succeeding - so I'm looking forward to an interesting five weeks.