Holy [insert expletive here], I can't believe I've been here for a month already. Where has time gone, and how can I catch up to it? This semester is flying by at lightning speed. Now I'm going to get all midlife-crisis on you and start complaining about the progress I should have made and haven't made. Maybe I shouldn't be so goal-oriented about this experience, but I can't help it. I want to speak Spanish, dammit, and I want to do it well. I know the international experience is about more than language fluency, but that's still really important to me. Of course, I still have two and a half months, and I'm sure I've made progress and just can't see it. I'm jealous of Tasos, in a good way. He can speak three languages perfectly; I would love to be able to talk to our host mother with the ease that he does.

Okay, the cutest thing just happened. I'm sitting here in a crowded Internet cafe, typing my blog, and a little girl came up to me and just started talking! She was so adorable, I almost died. She looked to be about four or five years old, and she and her pigtails just came right over and started chatting as if we were old friends. Now for the humiliating part: I could barely understand her. I can't even converse with a five-year-old! I mean, I got some of it. She was asking me what I was writing (how do you say "blog" in Spanish?) and who it was for. I started to feel very self-conscious about the people sitting on either side of me, who were listening to me explain to this little girl that I don't know much Spanish. When her father called her away, she waved back at me and said "Adios!" in the sweetest little voice, as if we had known each other forever. I wish I could have talked to her.