Karaoke and Cumbia

Flori, the cook at my school wants to move to Spain. She wants to leave her two teenage children at home with her brother so she can go off and make more money. She asked me today if I knew how much a plane ticket would cost to Madrid. Of course, I had no idea, but I looked it up on the Internet. At least a thousand bucks. I don't think she'll go. I hope she doesn't go. I don't think a mother should leave her children like that, even if she is doing it for them, so they can have a better future. Then again, maybe she should go, so they can have a better future. I don't know.

Flori and three others from my school -- Alejandra, Felix and Karen -- invited me to go out with them last night. We all (including Luis, the 9-year-old son of Alejandra) piled into Alejandra's Geo Tracker and bounced our way more than an hour up a rocky, narrow road to some bar way out in the middle of the nowhere. She kept saying that it was a great place to go even if it was a bit out of the way. I wasn't so sure. We just kept going and going and going, and my body was starting to hurt from all the bouncing. Finally we pulled up to some bar that looked pretty much like all the other bars we had passed along the way, only it had a swimming pool. The swimming pool didn't have any water in it, but still it was a swimming pool. We were the only ones there (because we were the only ones anywhere for miles), so we got free reign over karaoke, but alas, there was only one song in English – My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion. I sang it.

It turned out to be a really fun night, and the ride home didn't seem nearly as long as the ride there. The most exciting part was that my colleagues called me Jennifer instead of Teacher, like I'm a real person. That was nice. And I learned to dance Cumbia finally. Flori, the one who wants to go to Spain, was patient and taught me, and pretty soon we were Cumbia-ing all over the dance floor. I wasn't very good at it, but it was fun.